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Purpose – This chapter examines the foundations of community among youth with disabilities.

Methodology – Qualitative data on 52 youth with disabilities were analyzed, based on interviews with the youth and their parents. The sample included youth with intellectual, hidden, physical, and sensory disabilities. Data analysis was guided by grounded theory.

Findings – Four foundations of community were identified: geographic, disability-based, religious, and virtual. Disability-based contexts provided much of the basis of friendship for youth with disabilities. Just under half of youth had community connections within their home towns.

Research limitations – These analyses rely on the self-reported and parent-reported experiences of 52 youth with disabilities in Massachusetts and are not representative of youth with disabilities nationwide. Only youth who were still in high school just before graduation are represented; those who dropped out earlier were not included.

Practical implications – Community connections create opportunities for friendship and for sharing information. Youth enjoyed their connections, whether they were formal (designed and created by adults) or informal (just hanging out with other local youth).

Social implications – Youth's connections with other youth with disabilities may result in bonding social capital, creating friendships, but there are fewer opportunities for bridging social capital, creating connections with typically developing youth.

Originality – This chapter provides an overview of youth's perceptions of their participation in various social and recreational activities and explores and conceptualizes the contexts in which youth with disabilities experience community connections with other youth.

This chapter complements the one that appeared as “History of the AIB Fellows: 1975–2008” in Volume 14 of this series (International Business Scholarship: AIB Fellows on the First 50 Years and Beyond, Jean J. Boddewyn, Editor). It traces what happened under the deanship of Alan Rugman (2011–2014) who took many initiatives reported here while his death in July 2014 generated trenchant, funny, and loving comments from more than half of the AIB Fellows. The lives and contributions of many other major international business scholars who passed away from 2008 to 2014 are also evoked here: Endel Kolde, Lee Nehrt, Howard Perlmutter, Stefan Robock, John Ryans, Vern Terpstra, and Daniel Van Den Bulcke.

The quality of strategic decisions made at the helm of corporations matters a great deal. Predominantly, research on strategic decision-making has focused on CEOs as if they decide alone. Yet in reality, even the most powerful CEO makes strategic decisions together with an executive board. This chapter offers a theoretical explanation of strategic board decision-making through the emotional contagion between the CEO and board members.

We used both previous research and qualitative material – two case studies and interviews with several dozen CEOs of large corporations as well as the board members of one of them – to build our theoretical model.

Our inBoard Emotional Contagion Model (inBECM) specifies the following individual–collective emotional dynamics: After a strategic affective event has triggered an affective discussion within the boardroom, the emotionally intelligent CEO communicates verbally in order to – through an emotional contagion – homogenize board members’ emotional states leading to shared sense-making of the event and – potentially – to improved decision-making.

Suggestions are made for the inBECM contribution to emotion theory. Implications are stated for the key role of emotion in improving board decision-making and strategizing.

Strategy Question: How do I keep everyone on the same page?

Summary: This tool suggests a communication protocol that guarantees important areas of the company get the information they need to stay focused on the important initiatives. A suggestion is also made advocating for open communication, perhaps a sharing of previously closely held data (financial results, etc.) further into the organization. Communication is critical to both aligning employees to action and controlling the ever-present organizational grapevine. Structured formal communication is highly effective and a format is suggested. The more people are aware of the organization’s goals and targets, the higher the probability their attention will be focused on those goals. Also discussed are areas of informal communication that leadership can undertake.

Digital technologies have fundamentally changed organizations, industries, and even the society. Although institutional theory provides rich array of perspectives to both the content and dynamics of such changes, research at the intersection of institutional scholarship and digitalization has remained scarce. In this essay, I draw on the institutional logics perspective to elaborate digitalization as involving a new set of interconnected managerial beliefs and norms, organizational practices, and diverse material and social structures that together complement and challenge the established logics in organizations and institutional fields. I draw attention to two central organizing principles in the logic of digitalization: the pursuit of digital omniscience – the efforts to represent and conceive the world through digital data – and digital omnipotence – the efforts to bring activities inside and outside organizations under the control of information systems. I conclude the essay by elaborating how the institutional logics perspective can help understand organization-level efforts to leverage digitalization by incumbent corporations and new digital-native companies.

Certain elements of Hayek’s work are prominent precursors to the modern field of complex adaptive systems, including his ideas on spontaneous order, his focus on market processes, his contrast between designing and gardening, and his own framing of complex systems. Conceptually, he was well ahead of his time, prescient in his formulation of novel ways to think about economies and societies. Technically, the fact that he did not mathematically formalize most of the notions he developed makes his insights hard to incorporate unambiguously into models. However, because so much of his work is divorced from the simplistic models proffered by early mathematical economics, it stands as fertile ground for complex systems researchers today. I suggest that Austrian economists can create a progressive research program by building models of these Hayekian ideas, and thereby gain traction within the economics profession. Instead of mathematical models the suite of techniques and tools known as agent-based computing seems particularly well-suited to addressing traditional Austrian topics like money, business cycles, coordination, market processes, and so on, while staying faithful to the methodological individualism and bottom-up perspective that underpin the entire school of thought.