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First and second order learning lie at the center of an organization's ability to exploit its core competencies or explore for new opportunities. Strategic leadership lies at the center of this learning process. Strategic leaders enable organizations to learn by telling stories about what the organization is, what the organization does, and what the organization can become. They also enable competence carriers to come together to solve current and future problems by networking. These processes are explored.

Serious questions have been raised regarding the necessity to continue focusing our research on what constitutes individual, or what the authors refer to as singular leadership. Although the authors consider these questions to be important to advancing the field of leadership theory, research, and practice, they also suggest that attempts to minimize the relevance of singular leadership may hinder progress in other domains of leadership research. In this chapter, the authors explore how and why singular leaders and their leadership matter, and how they may influence follower, peer, and organizational outcomes. The authors use a paradoxical framework to present a theoretical model and propositions that allow us to clarify the influence of different forms of singular leadership within organizations. In our examination of singular leadership, the authors consider both positive and harmful modes of attributes, cognitions, and behaviors.

This chapter delves into the controversy over detention and interrogation in the war on terror carried out by American operatives. While attending to political, legal, and ethical concerns, critical attention is directed at the manner by which certain interrogation techniques have been framed as being “scientific” and therefore effective in extracting truthful disclosures from terror suspects.

Drawing on extensive legal and medical literature, the critique offers a postmodern analysis by raising serious questions over the effectiveness and legitimacy of enhanced interrogation espoused by the Bush administration. By doing so, the conceits of the war on terror are exposed and confronted.

In 2014, the report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program) was unclassified and released to the public. Among other revelations, the document clearly shows that interrogators and their psychological consultants committed torture. In doing so, they often relied on medical knowledge for harming, rather than healing. Ethical and legal remedies aimed at correcting those problems are recommended.

The chapter delivers a sophisticated critique that blends recently revealed evidence of torture with postmodern interpretation. While casting doubt on the effectiveness and legitimacy of enhanced interrogation, discussion throws critical light on incidents of human rights abuses committed by health professionals. Paradoxically, those physicians and psychologists opted to use their medical skills and expertise to inflict suffering rather than alleviating it. Those acts constitute egregious ethical and legal violations that warrant prosecution.

The literature on charismatic leadership in organizations has neglected the organizational context in which such leadership is embedded. The purpose of this article is to enrich and refine charismatic leadership theory by linking it to its organizational context. We argue that while charismatic leadership principles and processes potentially apply across a wide variety of situations, the emergence and effectiveness of such leadership may be facilitated by some contexts and inhibited by others. We develop and present a series of propositions linking contextual variable to the emergence and effectiveness of charismatic leadership. Among the contextual variable we examine are the organizational environment, life-cycle stage, technology, tasks, goals, structure, and culture, as well as the leader’s level in the organization and the circumstances surrounding his or her appointment.

To provide a theoretical explanation of why outsourcing relationships are inherently dynamic, in that the dependence of each party upon the other inevitably changes over time and thus so too will the power asymmetries between the parties.

Our approach is theoretical and draws upon insights from resource dependence theory, transaction cost economics, and the resource-based view of the firm, to focus on the power asymmetries between the focal firm undertaking the outsourcing and its suppliers. We illustrate our arguments using a longitudinal case study of the evolving relationship between Apple and the Foxconn Technology Group.

For supplier firms, the message is to upgrade, develop distinctive resources and capabilities, and diversify the customer base. Otherwise, suppliers will forever be condemned to low operating margins and the threat of being replaced by cheaper, more agile rivals. For focal firms, the message is not to rest on your laurels. The potency of isolating mechanisms may well dissipate, suppliers will no doubt strive to lessen their positions of dependence and competitors will inevitably emerge, with the result that once-profitable outsourcing arrangements may quickly erode.

We highlight the crucial role played by isolating mechanisms to underpin power asymmetries in outsourcing relationships, and thus enable focal firms to appropriate the rents from externalized value chain activities. We argue that the efficacy of many isolating mechanisms will tend to dissipate over time as competitors emerge to imitate successful strategies and products, and as resource and capability asymmetries erode.

The call to defund the police emerges globally from the voices of those who stand up to police brutality. Reallocating funds so that non-criminalising entities can meet community needs is crucial, but it does not address the problem in the system of policing. Further, the call for accountability cannot just emerge after a police-related death but must extend to the process of police work, beginning with police academy training. The author can identify and solve the most pressing issues by examining officer training as it is foundational to departmental work culture, organisational structure, and daily decision-making. Based on participant observation of academy lectures, scenario training, and informal conversations at two police academies in the Midwestern part of the United States, the author uncovers daily processes in which new recruits are socialised into their role as officers. Data reveal officers are taught a racialised decision-making logic that prioritises arrest, and perpetuates harm against its citizens. Training also devalues formal education, undermining knowledge that can expand officer thinking and critical self-reflection. Adhering to the goals of activist criminology, this chapter illuminates deeply rooted patterns of oppression and suggests reform aligned with critical social justice and anti-racist principles.

Cultural criminologists have long been interested in the politics of crime and deviance, whether that be in relation to youth subculture resistance or the social reaction to transgression evident in the media construction of folk devils and moral panics. While contemporary ‘new’ cultural criminology continues to be focused on the situated experience of deviant ‘edgeworkers’, this chapter argues cultural criminology’s concern with the crime-media nexus provides particularly fertile ground for exploring insights provided by activists, academics, professional journalists and citizen journalists around informal interventions on formal criminal justice processes using social media and digital technologies. Drawing on examples from a burgeoning body of crime-media research, the chapter makes a case for ‘cultural criminology activism’, which, like activist criminology, is consciously disengaged from mainstream criminology’s alignment with the neoliberal-carceral state and its reformist agenda.

Megachurches represent an interesting empirical and conceptual phenomenon. Empirically, megachurches (Protestant churches with average weekly attendance of greater than 2,000 members) are growing at a time when overall church participation in the United States is steady or declining. Conceptually, megachurch pastors can be viewed as institutional leaders who attempt to reconcile new technologies and large congregations within a highly institutionalized setting. While many of these megachurches have a denominational affiliation, some do not. In this essay, we describe the literature on megachurches and offer observations about the megachurch as an institution. Drawing from preliminary analysis of a sample of over 1,400 megachurches (identified from the Hartford Institute for Religious Research), we also draw tentative conclusions about the characteristics of the pastors of megachurches, and one growing institutional maintenance practice: writing texts. We propose that examining megachurches can help extend the current research on institutional leadership, institutional work, and institutional support mechanisms.