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Most years, several AIB members are elected as AIB Fellows on account of their excellent international business scholarship, and/or past service as AIB President or Executive Secretary. The Fellows are in charge of electing Eminent Scholars as well as the International Executive and International Educator (formerly, Dean) of the Year, who often provide the focus for Plenary Sessions at AIB Conferences. Their history since 1975 covers over half of the span of the AIB and reflects many issues that dominated that period in terms of research themes, progresses and problems, the internationalization of business education and the role of international business in society and around the globe. Like other organizations, the Fellows Group had their ups and downs, successes and failures – and some fun too!

This paper applies a complexity-theory-based simulation to the diverse field of organizational behavior. The specific form or level of competency emerges from the involved people and resources and the interactions among them. This paper focuses on an organizational competency of being capable to change which arises from the set of individuals involved (a leader and direct reports) and their interactions. This model is a simplified version of reality that may provide insight into the complex processes of organizations. The Context-for-Learning (CFL) competency is based on the work of Black and Boal 1997. Leader behavior is based on Quinn's competing values framework (1984, 1988). In addition to complexity theory, the simulation uses social constructivism to explain the coevolution of the individual, leader, and organizational capabilities. Using the same set of individual responses for a set of subordinates and varying leader behavior, we examine the resulting level of organizational CFL. This simulation demonstrates that leader behavior impacted the level of the emerging CFL in ways that were unique to individual leaders. Even two “good” leaders had surprisingly different impacts.

The competence perspective requires deploying various organizational resources, skills, and capabilities in creating organizational-level skills. Of particular interest in organizational behavior is the effect of leaders on developing skills. This paper examines an emergent organizational capability, the Context-for-Learning, using virtual experiments and an agent-based model. In examining the developmental paths of this skill, we found that both the organization's composition and the leader's leadership style had very different effects on the developmental paths. The set of followers in an organization and the leader's leadership style are both critical in determining the developmental paths of the organizational skill, the Context-for-Learning. However, the leadership style of a highly skilled leader with a high set of followers did not matter.

Interactive media strategies and digital tools have enabled advertisers to target children with promotional offers and creative appeals.

Based on theories related to metaphors in advertisements, cognitive comprehension by children, promotional appeals, and presentation techniques, the research for this study comprised a content analysis of 1,980 online banner advertisements with reference to use of metaphors, promotional appeals, creative content, and selling techniques.

The research study concludes that online advertising to children, in contrast to traditional advertising vehicles, is characterized by (a) a vibrant visual metaphor, (b) surfeit of animated content, (c) interactive features, (d) myriad product types, and (e) creative content for a mixed audience of adults and children.

This study argues that the impact and content of the Internet as a new advertising medium are distinctly different from traditional characteristics of television and print.

The competence-based perspective shares with the resource-based view the notion of the fundamental importance of an organization's resources in its competitive outcomes.¹ In his paper “Probing into the nature of resources: Sustainable advantages and appropriable rents in the U.S. motion picture industry,” Jamal Shamsie investigates the sustainability of the competitive advantages that strategically important resources can bring to a firm, as well as the appropriability of the economic profits (rents) that can be derived from the uses of resources. To this end, the paper develops a classification of resource types based on the nature of a resource's ownership and control. Shamsie studies the U.S. motion picture industry to assess the degree of sustainable advantages and appropriable rents that can be generated by three types of resources: contracted resources, owned resources, and embedded resources. His findings suggest that in the subject industry both sustainability and appropriability are likely to be low for contracted resources such as top-rated stars and directors, while the greatest potential for sustainability and appropriability attach to embedded resources that accumulate firm-specific knowledge and learning in the development and marketing of various film genres.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.