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The principal purposes of this paper are to provide normative advice in terms of managing the British Monarchy as a Corporate Heritage Brand and to reveal the efficacy of examining a brand's history for corporate heritage brands generally.

Taking a case history approach, the paper examines critical events in the Crown's history. It is also informed by the diverse literatures on the British Monarchy and also marshals the identity literatures and the nascent literature relating to corporate brands. Six critical incidents that have shaped the monarchy over the last millennium provide the principal data source.

In scrutinising key events from the institution's historiography it was found that the management and maintenance of the Crown as a corporate brand entail concern with issues relating to: continuity (maintaining heritage and symbolism); visibility (having a meaningful and prominent public profile); strategy (anticipating and enacting change); sensitivity (rapid response to crises); respectability (retaining public favour); and empathy (acknowledging that brand ownership resides with the public). Taking an integrationist perspective, the efficacy of adopting a corporate marketing approach/philosophy is also highlighted.

A framework for managing Corporate Heritage is outlined and is called “Chronicling the Corporate Brand”. In addition to Bagehot's dictum that the British Monarch had a constitutional obligation to encourage, advise and warn the government of the day, the author concludes that the Sovereign has a critical societal role and must be dutiful, devoted and dedicated to Her (His) subjects.

This is one of the first papers to examine the British Monarchy through a corporate branding lens. It confirms that the Crown is analogous to a corporate brand and, therefore, ought to be managed as such.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of corporate communications on behalf of the monarchy as a corporate brand.

Draws on the preliminary findings of a major study on monarchies.

Argues that corporate communications is an important aspect of corporate brand management (especially in relation to constitutional monarchies).

That monarchies are analogous to organisational brands and are amenable to being managed as such.

Draws on a unique study relating to monarchies as corporate brands.

This article scrutinises the nature and salience of corporate heritage identities via the lens of the British Monarchy. A corporate heritage identity framework is introduced. The heritage identity construct is positioned vis‐à‐vis other related constructs such as nostalgia, tradition, and custom.

An embedded case study informed by desktop research and a literature review of the British Monarchy and by an empirical‐collaborative study on the Swedish Monarchy. The paper is also informed by the literature on heritage and other historically‐related constructs.

The notion of relative invariance is introduced. The latter is important since it explains why heritage identities can remain the same and yet have changed, namely: The Relative Invariance Notion. Corporate heritage identities and brands are invested with special qualities in that they are a melding of identity continuity, identity change and are also invested with the identities of time (times past, present and future). Heritage identities are an accretion of various identities, which are variously linked to institutions, places, cultures, and to time frames. The notion of Institutional Role Identities is introduced. The study suggested that heritage identities have multiple institutional role identities. These identities can be utilised in various contexts and for a variety of purposes: this might account for their strength. One explanation of why heritage identities are powerful is because they meet customer and stakeholder needs by encapsulating and, importantly, by giving identity. Heritage identities, potentially, are an important dimension of a group's collective memory.

A revised corporate heritage identity framework relating to the British Monarchy is introduced. The model can be adapted so as to appraise our comprehension of corporate heritage identities in more general institutional contexts. The importance of bi‐lateral institutional and stakeholder trust to the framework and the need for (institution) heritage authenticity – or perceived authenticity – and stakeholder affinity are noted.

The paper focuses on heritage identities in institutional contexts and a distinction is made between corporate heritage identities and corporate heritage brands identities.

The purpose of this paper is to capture legitimising principles of recent successions to the throne through narrative time. Further, this study considers leaders’ sense-giving to succession.

This research applies a “temporal narrative analysis” to explicate legitimising principles of narrative time in three recent case studies of royal succession: the kingdoms of Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The findings show that royal successions in three modern European constitutional monarchies are legitimised through giving sense to narrative time. The legitimacy of timing succession is embedded in multiple temporal narratives, in which heirs apparent are brought forward as the new generation who will modernise the monarchy.

The paper presents an innovative conceptual framework of sense-giving to succession through narrative time. This framework will be helpful to scholars who aim to grasp legitimising principles of temporal narration in leadership succession.

This paper aims to analyse telecommunications in Morocco and the control exercised by the absolute monarch who also owns one of three mobile operators.

The single country case study provides a detailed picture of legislative, market and policy developments over a period of 15 years.

Severe conflicts of interests with the king as absolute monarch, head of the judiciary, chairman of the cabinet of ministers and owner of one of the largest operators exist. Market entry has only been possible with his sanction and only by acquiring in a stake in one of the existing operators. Investment is predominantly by domestic and Gulf Arabs. No attention has been given to competition and market bottlenecks. Expansion of the royal operator was observed.

This is a single-country case study of an absolute monarchy.

Short of ending the monarchy, it is difficult to see a means to remove the conflicts of interest.

The interests of the citizens take second place to royal profit-seeking.

This is the first critical assessment of telecommunications in Morocco. It adds to the small stock of case studies about bribery, corruption and patrimonialism in telecommunications.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the effect of royal family members on firm performance of publicly listed companies in Saudi Arabia.

Using 491 firm-year observations of non-financial publicly listed firms in Saudi Arabia’s stock market between 2009 and 2013, the study employs, besides others, the advanced econometric technique GMM-system estimator. This allows the dynamic nature and control of the endogeneity problem to be accounted for in corporate governance and firm performance.

The main result is that the attendance of royal family members at board meetings negatively influences firm performance but does not have an influence on firm value. The results also show that firms with many independent royal family members on the board of directors have better firm performance and firm value. In addition, firms with a high number of royal family members presenting on the board have better firm performance.

This study offers guidance to assist the further investigation of the SA Royal Family’s BoD membership either in SA or in other monarchy countries. It is interesting to compare these results in order to further understand the different effects that the Royal Family’s BoD membership have in such countries. This study’s results suggest that independent members of SA’s Royal Family on the BoD have some influence on firm performance in both the short and long term. Thus, policymakers should encourage the members of SA’s Royal Family to become more involved in firms’ BoDs.

This study offers guidance for further investigation of royal family members in the region or in other monarchy countries. It will be interesting to compare these results. The study suggests that royal family members on the board have a partial influence on firm performance, especially the independent ones. Thus, the policymakers should encourage more involvement of independent royal family members on the board.

Foreign and minority investors, who invest in SA’s publicly listed firms, should note that when independent members of SA’s Royal Family are on the BoD their investment will benefit from the reduced risks and uncertainty.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study undertaken to investigate empirically the influence a royal family’s presence on the board of directors has on firm performance. This study is based on both theories, namely the agency theory and resource dependence theory.

Was the October Revolution inevitable? If yes, what was its real character? If not, could it have been avoided or taken a different course? What was the role played in it by Lenin? Using the dialectical method of analysis, an attempt is made to provide answers to these questions. The following points are stressed: (1) Given the general and particular conditions of Russian life created by the First World War and the February Revolution, the break with the old democratic mixed capitalist form and the establishment of the new totalitarian state capitalist form of the social development were inevitable. (2) The fact that this process was headed by Lenin was accidental and, hence, avoidable. (3) But Lenin individualised the general and particular features of the October Revolution in terms of the names of the events associated with the revolution, of the time of its occurrence, of its participants and of their positions during and after the revolution.

The historian can provide quite a different explanation, other than the currently held views, for the emergence of the Red Terror in 1918.

An important question is whether lenders perceive politically connected firms as having less or higher default risk, and thus provide them with more or less preferential loan terms compared with non-connected firms. This paper aims to examine the relationship between political connections of corporate board members and cost of debt and loan contracting in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.

The initial sample comprises 288 GCC firm-year observations from 227 publicly listed firms in Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates for the period from 2011 to 2015. It includes all the GCC publicly listed firms, excluding those in the financial, insurance and banking sectors because these entities are subject to different regulations. The ordinary least squares, logit regression and other sensitivity tests have been used to analyse the data and enhance reliability of the results.

This study finds that politically connected firms, particularly those connected through ruling royal family members, are associated with lower cost of debt, greater amounts of loans and longer-term government loans. Therefore, these findings support the prediction that political connections benefit GCC firms in the form of access to favourable terms from both government and commercial banks.

This study contributes to the extant literature by providing insightful analysis using unique political features of the GCC, integrated with agency and resource dependency theories. In particular, this study fills the gap in understanding the nature of loan contracting offered by government and commercial banks in the presence of politically connected boards within GCC setting.

World military expenditures fell by over 20 percent in proportion to GDP from 1985 to 1990. This study examines the determinants of military expenditures in 125 countries during 1972-90 to ascertain what factors may be behind the decreases. Economic decline among developing countries in the 1980s and among industrial countries in the latter part of the decade emerges as one possible factor. A second is the move towards more democratic regimes, which could have diminished support for the military. A third factor is the improved world security situation and the concomitant decrease in military aid by the former major cold war combatants.