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In recent decades, there have been far too many examples of the world’s business being not sufficiently attentive to governance, with little foresight as to emerging consequences, such as major oil spills, chemical leaks and Enron. Many leaders do not seem to address issues beyond short‐term profitability. The emerging worldwide view is that corporations need to adopt governance models that are more holistic in their approach, pluralistic in representing varying interests, egalitarian in the treatment of stakeholders and essentially more collaborative in their mode of operation. Corporate leaders must emerge more cognitively, emotively and behaviourally reflexive. Such reflexivity comes through the application of practical wisdom to facilitate corporate change. Fully realising value from the board of directors as the guide of the organisation, and specifically from non executive directors (NEDs) is crucial to enduring sustainable change. NEDs’ abilities to span the boundary between the needs and wants of a variety of legitimate stakeholders and the survival requirements of the firm poses a unique management development challenge. NEDs who effectively provide holistic and reflexive insight into the challenges of corporate systems are likely to enhance organisational, societal and environmental wellbeing. Through reflexivity, well skilled and capable NEDs can stimulate the desire to change in the leadership of the organisation and may, as such, prevent future crisis. Towards this end, this presentation will examine how NEDs can leverage their role to promote corporate social performance.

Zech’s so-called Nachdichtung or ‘adaptation’ Die lasterhaften Lieder und Balladen des François Villon is one of the most printed books of German lyric poetry and has been widely misinterpreted as a translation of French medieval poet François Villon. The erroneous attribution of these texts has caused an immense amount of confusion and misinformation to spread in relation to the authorship of several poems due to the popularisation of these supposedly medieval texts by medieval metal bands In Extremo and Subway to Sally. Zech’s fascinating artistic fraud forms the framework for questioning how source material, which ranges from authentic historical texts through to ex nihilo pseudo-medieval writings, is situated between the related, at times conflicting, norms and traditions of medieval market music and mittelalter metal.

In this chapter, the authors situate metal medievalism in the discourse on medievalism and neomedievalism. Detangling the ways in which historicity and authenticity are perceived and negotiated in metal cultures reveals how metal medievalism’s relationship to the past illuminates perceptions of post-modernity. The disparate pieces of the Middle Ages (both ‘real’ and ‘imagined’) form a bricolage through which post-modern meanings are expressed. Metal musicians and consumers use these fragments of the past as a means of collective resistance against the post-enlightenment, capitalist and machine-mediated present. The Middle Ages represent attempts at the re-enchantment of the present with a transcendent, organic, and carnal past. The meanings which are created this way are far from uniform or absolute however, but spiral between historical and imaginary, collective and individual, and continue to spin on in ever more complex permutations with no sign of abating.

To examine an under‐researched area, namely the dynamics of chairman‐CEO interrelationship and its effect on the enterprise.

A qualitative methodology has been adopted through in‐depth interviews with chairmen, CEOs and non‐executive directors on the nature of chairman‐CEO interactions and their effects.

Four critical themes form the basis of this paper, chairman's role and contribution, nature of chairman‐CEO relationship, impact of the chairman‐CEO relationship on board effectiveness and the attributes of an effective chairman.

Enhances understanding of the determining influence of the chairman‐CEO dyad on board and organisational performance and also on the influence of formative context on this dyadic interaction.

One of the few studies that has explored through in‐depth interviews the chairman‐CEO relationship.

This chapter explores metal albums as media, and their relationship to medieval media, as well as secondary media as a resource for reception studies. Examination of metal music as media reveals broader trends in modern media representations of the medieval in respect to race, gender, and cultural identity. Albums are composite object, using different media and secondary media products. The methodology used to approach these media and which elements of an album are examined in combination have a significant effect on the results. This chapter brings together three authors to discuss and compare methodologies and make the case for a combination of contextual analogue and quantitative digital approaches.

This chapter analyses the different ways in which metal album covers draw upon medieval media. The analysis is situated within the broad theoretical frame of intermediality, and more specifically view the process where medieval media cross the borders and find their way into metal album covers as media transformation. Four different types of media transformation are analysed, and it is argued that the medievalism of album covers can be defined in terms of media transformation. Likewise, neomedievalism is defined in terms of second-order media transformation. The album cover is described as a media patchwork, and the chapter gives examples of the patches in terms of relationship and properties.

The digital humanities offer many new methods to scholars interested in metal studies. This chapter demonstrates two such methods, that is, stylometric clustering and topic modelling, by interpreting the collected lyrics of over 8,000 metal bands. This allowed the authors to identify general trends that would be hard to derive by personally reading lyrics. This analysis showed several recurring medieval topics in metal lyrics, for example, a Fight for Glory expressed with words like ‘die’, ‘glory’, ‘warriors’, and ‘victory’. The authors were also able to distinguish metal bands with medieval references from those without – a line of research that could help in categorising (new) bands – and track the stylistic development of bands over time. Such statistical methods might help scholars not only by allowing for large-scale studies, yet also by providing inter-subjective feedback for theories.