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Snow White is one of the most popular fairy tales worldwide. Therefore, it is not surprising that the story has been reconsidered multiple times during the current trend of producing fairy tale adaptations. Especially the Evil Queen has become an object of further examination in many recent instalments of the story. In this chapter, I analyse the revision of Snow White's stepmother in the book series The Lunar Chronicles (2012–2016), the films Mirror Mirror (2012), Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) and The Huntsman: Winter's War (2016), as well as the TV-series Once Upon a Time (2011–2018). Compared to other villains in recent fairy tale adaptations, who are, like Maleficent, redeemed, the queen remains an embodiment of evil and terror in most adaptations. I outline the depiction of the Evil Queen in present-day US-American fairy tale narratives, assessing what makes her the most villainous woman in all the fairy tale realms and questioning why many of these stories try to understand but do not forgive her. The focus of this investigation is on the backstory that she is equipped with, her crimes, and her ultimate fate. Although she has been abused, traumatized, and betrayed, she seems to remain an uber villain, not only attempting to kill her stepdaughter but also destroying nature, starving her people, and spreading a deadly virus. This kind of representation might result from the fact that her opponent is by the very name the purest fairy tale princess ever known.

This chapter aims to make sense of the growing research that examines the role of culture in mergers and acquisitions. We provide a detailed review of the many related but distinct constructs that have been introduced to the literature. While each construct has contributed to our understanding of the role of culture, the lack of connections made among constructs has limited the consolidation of contributions. The review shows what these constructs mean for mergers and acquisitions, what major findings have been discovered, and, most importantly, how constructs interrelate. Our discussion provides several opportunities to foster the needed consolidation of this research.

Firms operate in a market for their corporate assets, wherein important assets being bought and sold are business units. This market is therefore a primary mechanism for firm reconfiguration, and offers the opportunity for firms to gain performance advantage as they prepare for and engage in their boundary-changing moves. This paper focuses on resource reconfiguration between firms, and examines internally and externally driven sources of performance heterogeneity in firms’ use of the market for firm reconfiguration. Viewing between-firm resource reconfiguration through three theoretical lenses surfaces several potential avenues for firm differentiation. For one, the necessity of firms’ possessing capabilities to execute both sides of the external resource reconfiguration transaction – acquisition and divestiture capabilities – is revealed. For another, the institutional prerequisites that are needed in the operating environment for a firm to build a sustainable resource reconfiguration strategy are brought to the fore, and are well illustrated by the private equity industry. Lastly, the potential benefits of using the transactional view of firm scope to animate the study of external resource reconfiguration are raised. Taken together, these elements lead to a research agenda around resource reconfiguration across firm boundaries.

One area in which strategy and organizational ecology converge is organizational change. This essay weaves together salient themes in my (and my co-authors’) various writings on organizational change, and is anchored in the research literature of the last twenty years. Among other ideas developed here, I point out that there is now a convergence of agendas in strategy and ecology, with an important role being played by intraorganizational ecology. I develop the distinction between strong and weak selection approaches to organizational ecology. While the strong selection view does not find empirical support, there is stronger support for the weak selection view. I lay out some key features of an emerging evolutionary synthesis for the study of strategy and organization, and develop an evolutionary approach to organizational change.

A motif, as defined by Jean-Charles Seigneuret (1988, p. 17), is an ‘essential part of a contemporary academic discipline known as thematology or thematics’ and that ‘two factors may explain the rise of the thematological method: its interpretive potentialities and its intrinsic congruency with the history of ideas’.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm first introduced the story of Snow White and her evil stepmother the Queen in 1812. Decades later, the character of the Queen, who later becomes the Evil Queen, is depicted in copious narratives and several different mediums. A central parallel in most of the representations of this character is that she is presented as evil. As such, how the Evil Queen character is represented in media sees a congruence of specific aesthetical characteristics, which combines to symbolize a rhetorical motif for evil.

The study this chapter reports focuses on how network theory contributes to the understanding of the internationalization process of SMEs and measures the effect of network capability on performance in international trade and has three research objectives.

The first objective of the study relates to providing new insights into the international market development activities through the application of a network perspective. The chapter reviews the international business literature to ascertain the development of thought, the research gaps, and the shortcomings. This review shows that the network perspective is a useful and popular theoretical domain that researchers can use to understand international activities, particularly of small, high technology, resource-constrained firms.

The second research objective is to gain a deeper understanding of network capability. This chapter presents a model for the impact of network capability on international performance by building on the emerging literature on the dynamic capabilities view of the firm. The model conceptualizes network capability in terms of network characteristics, network operation, and network resources. Network characteristics comprise strong and weak ties (operationalized as foreign-market entry modes), relational capability, and the level of trust between partners. Network operation focuses on network initiation, network coordination, and network learning capabilities. Network resources comprise network human-capital resources, synergy-sensitive resources (resource combinations within the network), and information sharing within the network.

The third research objective is to determine the impact of networking capability on the international performance of SMEs. The study analyzes 11 hypotheses through structural equations modeling using LISREL. The hypotheses relate to strong and weak ties, the relative strength of strong ties over weak ties, and each of the eight remaining constructs of networking capability in the study. The research conducts a cross-sectional study by using a sample of SMEs drawn from the telecommunications industry in Ireland.

The study supports the hypothesis that strong ties are more influential on international performance than weak ties. Similarly, network coordination and human-capital resources have a positive and significant association with international performance. Strong ties, weak ties, trust, network initiation, synergy-sensitive resources, relational capability, network learning, and information sharing do not have a significant association with international performance. The results of this study are strong (R2=0.63 for performance as the outcome) and provide a number of interesting insights into the relations between collaboration or networking capability and performance.

This study provides managers and policy makers with an improved understanding of the contingent effects of networks to highlight situations where networks might have limited, zero, or even negative effects on business outcomes. The study cautions against the tendency to interpret networks as universally beneficial to business development and performance outcomes.

Women Empowerment means boosting the social, economic, political, and legal strength of women to secure equal right and make them confident to claim their rights. India has focused on women's empowerment to reduce domestic abuse and gender violence in recent decades. The study analyzes the relationship between women's empowerment and gender-based violence, employing a non-linear regression model using the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 5, 2019–20 data. In the present study gender-based violence is measured on the basis of spousal violence and women's empowerment is represented by women who are currently married and usually take part in three household decisions, women who worked in the past year and were paid in cash, women who own a house or land (alone or with others), women who use their own bank or savings account, and women who use their own cell phone for each state. Analysis of the result shows a link between women's empowerment and gender-based violence and a large disparity among states.