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Contemporary working life highlights the challenge between exploitation and exploration both on a general and a more individual level. Here, we focus on the latter, and connect the critical debate regarding self-management to March's exploitation/exploration trade-off, as this forms a useful theoretical frame to understand how employees make sense of their self-management efforts. The employee is subjected to an individual responsibility to understand and manage an exploration of the self while handling the norms of self-exploitation that a self-management culture creates. Through an empirical study of a large group of management consultants, we explore how they perform and make sense of self-exploitation and self-exploration through three specific discourses: the discourse of workload, the discourse of aspiration, and the discourse of fun. Through these, the consultants try to identify optimal amounts of work, play, and ambition, all while handling the trade-off between self-exploitation and self-exploration. We show how this keeps failing, but how it reappears as a necessary condition for avoiding future failures. In all three discourses, the trade-off therefore presents itself as the problem of as well as the solution to self-management.

Large companies are the dominant forms of wealth creation in society today. As well as providing jobs and export income, they are key influences on social cohesion. We ignore how companies are run at a peril to us all. However, today investors are increasingly concerned about the ethical behaviour of those who run companies. Regular disclosures that directors and executives have behaved unethically reflect badly on the corporate sector as a vehicle for investor funds. By comparison, Australian company directors are increasingly stating that there is already too much concentration on the mechanisms of corporate governance, indicating that they will happily tick the boxes, but do little more.

In the latter part of the 20th century, companies discovered mission. The key elements of any mission must include the major corporate participants – investors, suppliers, customers, employees and society. The role of management is to develop a structure that can operationalise the mission. Such an approach puts ethics – how we treat other people – at the core of a company's activities. Trust is a critical element in how the interests of these stakeholders are taken up in decision-making and embedded in strategy, plans and action on the ground.

In the aftermath of significant corporate collapses in the 1980s and then again at the start of this century, companies also discovered corporate governance. According to the much referenced Cadbury Committee in the U.K., corporate governance is the system by which companies are directed and controlled, i.e., a the system of checks and balances for effective resolution of conflicts and control over the exercise of managerial power.

This paper suggests that an alternative “professional” approach to governance is likely to be more effective. Today, the role of management is to “add value” and contribute to the “good” of society. This good is the collective set of stakeholder interests entrusted to the governing board to look after. A governance model that integrates the human good with the operations of ‘mind’ in terms of learning and leadership highlights eight distinctive “products,” the eighth being valued products and by-products delivered to each stakeholder. The model is structured around the person's capacity to ask four categories of questions, including those that provide orientation and direction.

The model is used to examine a contemporary governance issue experienced by the board of directors at the National Australia Bank Limited.

The chapter is an auto-ethnographic account of the self-management of a chronic illness within the context of a participatory research project on Mediterranean Diet (MD). A group of Italian women with type 2 diabetes is following a non-medical, personal interpretation of the Mediterranean-style diet. The research account is preceded by a critical appraisal of the scientific narratives of the MD.

Analysis of epidemiological research on MD examines some methodological aspects of gender blindness in its scientific approach. The ethnography concerns self-management of MD diet and redefinition of gender relations.

MD is analyzed as a case of transplantation of yesterday’s cultural and social capitals of the peasant classes, to today’s discourses on food considered as appropriate for affluent people suffering from satiety diseases. The ethnography highlights gender aspects of biographical work, examining in particular a “conversion” dietary model.

The ethnography must be amplified to include women and men from different social classes with various Mediterranean cooking habits, and family and gender patterns.

The chapter highlights cultural processes for women’s empowerment in self-managing type 2 diabetes.

This chapter may represent a seminal sociological work on chronic illness, gender and food studies in one of the “native” contexts of the Mediterranean-style diet.

To comprehend some meanings of a life, one must get close to that life. But if one gets too close, one risks violating its privacy. Personalistic researchers in education, social service, and related fields take that risk. Historians, biographers, social workers, and many others do too. These researchers negotiate access to the lives they study. They feel the ethical responsibility to avoid exposé and sometimes even to refrain from coming to know the most personal and private information. Restraint is greatly based on the researcher's personality and respect for others. But also it is a professional matter. The codes of ethics and honored practices of researchers call for restraint.

Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations in Denmark and the United States, this chapter compares discourses and experiences of young unemployed professionals engaged in networking. Common across both sites is the kind of emotional labor perceived to be required for effective networking, with workers frequently drawing on romantic dating as a key metaphor. However, engagement in such emotional labor is more intense and pervasive for American jobseekers, while Danish jobseekers express greater concern about potential exploitation of the other party, corruption, and pressure to conform to norms of marketability. The chapter discusses possible links among networking experiences, hiring practices and political-economic contexts in the United States and Denmark.

This chapter explores African indigenous wisdom and its orientation to the common good in the practices that characterise responsible leadership and entrepreneurship. Traditionally, a wise leader was grown from the community and steeped in its communitarian traditions which led the leader to apply practical wisdom in seeking the collective good. These considerations of such wise practices are central to responsible management. Based on a qualitative literature review that is complemented with a micro-study (semi-structured interviews) of African sages and on the analysis of wisdom found by chapter contributors to this volume, insights indigenous to Africa are presented and then discussed. The countries referenced across the two studies are Kenya and Uganda (Eastern Africa), Ghana and Nigeria (Western Africa), Egypt (Northern Africa) and South Africa (Southern Africa), thereby providing some geographical spread though far from being exhaustive.

The following sections will present a brief overview of theories of justice that have underpinned the development of the institutions and administration of justice in modern Western societies. It will begin with an examination of the general political–philosophical ideas and concepts in the area of justice in the modern era. It will then examine the perspectives of punishment, which are linked to these philosophical theories.

This paper explores the benefits of teaching young people about sex through a sexual debut framework.

Dominant conceptual frameworks that shape young people’s introduction to sexual intimacy are analyzed.

Sexual debut is a process by which young people are given the power to decide the who, what, when, where, why, and how of their first sexual encounters. The evolution and nuances of young people’s first sexual engagements can be understood through the interface of culture, social, and psychological contexts, language, actions, experiences, and how they transform those processes into their own conceptualization of sexual behavior and involvement with it.

This framework explains a process by which young people engage in particular sexual acts at a particular time and place with a certain partner. It allows for future data gathering and analysis to refine this model.

Benefits of teaching children they have power to influence with whom they want to become sexually active, what types of sexual activities they want to experience, when they wish to engage in those actions, and where they occur should reduce the risk of abuse, rape, and harm.

The debut model challenges abstinence approaches to sex education. The implications of this research reinforce the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to support young people’s participation to influence their lives and well-being.

It provides a realistic view of sexual experimentation and has the potential to reduce risk and increase young people’s well-being.