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To facilitate innovative software development, more and more software development teams (SDTs) turn to agile methods. Such agile methods develop both extensive and efficient software responses to a client’s requirement change. However, the antecedents of successful agile software development are poorly understood. The authors goal is to propose a model of how power asymmetry and paradoxical leadership interact and affect agility in SDTs, which in turn affect their capacity to innovate. By leveraging insights from research on individuals’ cognition, the authors argue that developers with relatively higher power evaluate their contributions to their teams more ambivalently, which increases their delay or postponement of their contributions to their teams’ tasks. As a result, power asymmetry is negatively related to software teams’ response extensiveness and efficiency. Second, and drawing on leadership studies on behavioral complexity, the authors consider the moderating role of paradoxical leadership that a team receives as an important moderating factor to this effect. The authors argue that, when team leaders exhibit paradoxical leadership behaviors, high-power individuals’ ambivalence is less likely to emerge; hence, transforming power asymmetry to an asset for the enhancement of agility in the SDT.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between labour market integration and family satisfaction in a cross-country comparison perspective and takes important intervening factors into consideration such as the social policy and flexibility strategy as well as the cultural context of 27 European countries.

The authors rely on data from the European Quality of Life Survey 2012 and conduct multi-level analyses using both the one-step random intercept Model with cross-level interactions as well as a two-step hierarchical model. The country-specific framework is addressed with indicators for the level of social security, for external flexibility labour market characteristics, and for the predominant family solidarity norm of a country.

The paper provides empirical support for the thesis of social disruption according to insecure labour market attachment. This link is weakened in countries where flexible labour market conditions are accompanied by strong efforts on state-provided social security. High family support norms can only partially compensate a lack of social protection covered by the state.

The paper reveals the increasing social vulnerability of people who are not or not completely integrated into the labour market. These risks cannot be convincingly weakened by social security measures. To know more about these mechanisms, the link between labour market integration and the quality of family life should be studied in more detail in a cross-country comparative perspective to develop ideas and give advice on reducing the potential insecurity of flexible employment.

The paper complements previous research by providing empirical findings about the link between insecure labour market attachment and the integration into family networks in a cross-country comparison perspective.

The presence of Latin in heavy metal music ranges from full texts, intros, song and album titles to band names, pseudonyms, and literary quotations. This chapter sheds light on heavy metal's fascination with the history and ‘arcane’ sound of Latin, and investigates its patterns of use in lyrics with the help of Natural Language Processing tools and digitally-available linguistic resources. First, the authors collected a corpus of lyrics containing differing amounts of Latin and enhanced it with descriptive metadata. Next, the authors calculated the richness of the vocabulary and the distribution of content words. The authors processed the corpus with a morphological analyser and performed both a manual and a computational search for intertextuality, including allusions, paraphrase and verbatim quotations of literary sources. The authors show that, despite it being a dead language, Latin is very frequently used in metal. Its historical status appears to fascinate bands and lends itself well to those religious, epic and mysterious themes so characteristic of the heavy metal world. The widespread use of Latin in metal lyrics, however, sees many bands simply reusing Latin texts – mostly from the Bible – or even misspelling literary quotations.

This study aims to investigate the joint effect of foreign directors (FDs) and firm performance on the corporate strategic change.

A theoretical framework linking foreign directors, firm performance and strategic change is proposed and tested. This study uses a sample of longitudinal data from 958 US listed firms over the period 2010–2018. The basic model of study first tests whether there is a direct relationship between FDs and level of strategic change. It then incorporates firm performance as a moderating variable, testing its effect on the relationship between foreign director and strategic change.

Consistent with the study’s expectations, the empirical findings indicate that FDs rich in appropriate experience are associated with superior strategic change, measured both in terms of variation in firm strategy over time and deviation from industry norms. The findings confirm that FDs are a salient driver of strategic change. The strength of the effect, however, depends on the firm performance.

This paper has implications for effective global leadership development based on international appointments. First, directors can benefit from being assigned to work in foreign countries so that they are exposed to a wide range of experiences and can learn to overcome culture shock. Second, posting directors to foreign countries can improve their international knowledge and enhance various competencies related to creativity, leadership and problem-solving. By demonstrating that the board’s characteristics can play a role in corporate strategy development, the current study thus has implications for both study and practice with regard to board composition. The number of seats on any given board is finite, and each individual director is thus expected to not only monitor top management but also to apply their knowledge and relevant experience in service to the company’s ambitions. Except in cases where high firm performance leads to strategic persistence, the results suggest that greater levels of FDs correlate positively with strategic change.

The practical implications of this paper pertain to director recruitment and selection. First, the findings echo support for the inclusion of members with greater levels of international experience on boards and top management teams. It seems that, despite the importance of this characteristic, directors at US companies often lack substantial experience abroad (Carpenter and Westphal, 2001). A possible reason for this could be that internationally experienced employees otherwise lack the social capital necessary for promotion to directorships because of time spent stationed away from the firm’s headquarters. It is thus essential for companies to create networking opportunities for directors assigned to foreign offices.

Although previous research has provided some insight into how chief executive officer international experience can manifest in strategic change, this understanding remains far from complete for the members of board of directors. Furthermore, the topic of firm performance as a potential moderating influence remains underexplored. The aim of this study, therefore, is to assess the impact of FDs among directors on corporate strategic change while taking into account the possible confounding role of firm performance in this relationship.

Corporate governance is regarded as a major issue during the post-financial crisis period in Asia. These countries have implemented corporate governance reforms to enhance the protection of shareholders and stakeholders interests. Such reforms have affected the conduct of business of all corporations in the region as it allows for greater monitoring especially by the shareholders. Unlike earlier studies which focused on non-financial firms, this study analyzes the corporate governance of listed banking firms in nine Asian emerging markets. Corporate governance mechanisms that serve to monitor the banking firms can be classified into Ownership Monitoring Mechanism, Internal Control Monitoring Mechanism, Regulatory Monitoring Mechanism, and Disclosure Monitoring Mechanism. This paper suggests that there are differences in the monitoring mechanisms of banking firms and non-bank firms.

This study aims to share experiences of an easy to adapt service-learning approach in a graduate course on life cycle assessment (LCA). Specifically, it reports on how students helped the university’s cafeteria to assess meals by conducting an LCA for 25 meals and identifying environmental hotspots.

A descriptive case study of a graduate course at Ulm University is presented. The course included lectures and problem-based exercises, both theoretical and software assisted. A course evaluation was conducted during the course and one year after completion to poll improvement potentials, as well as its impacts on students’ everyday life.

It was found that although it was the first LCA for all students, the resulting LCA information of 25 different meals were homogeneous, comparable to the scientific literature and beneficial to the cafeteria’s sustainable development strategy. The concept of service-learning had a higher impact on students’ motivation than a good grade and active-learning is explicitly requested by students. The course design sensitized students to the real-life problems of LCA and made their consumption patterns more elaborate and ecological. Furthermore, this digitization of higher education could be carried out with only minor changes in the present COVID-19 pandemic situation.

As the subject of service-learning in natural sciences is still expandable, this study presents an easy to adapt case study on how to integrate such an approach into university curricula dominated by traditional learning. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this case study presents the first published LCA university course explicitly describing and evaluating a service-learning approach. The topic touches the everyday lives of students, allows comparisons between different student groups, is easily scalable to different group sizes and credits, and supports learning both how to study in small groups and cooperation between groups to ensure comparability of LCA results.