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This paper develops the concept of managerial discretion. Discretion, defined as individual empowerment to act, has received increased attention in the management literature, particularly in the policy area. This research develops an instrument to measure discretion of individual managers. Vignettes are used to measure the willingness of managers to act in response to dilemmas that have organizational policy implications. The investigation of the reliability and validity of the developed measure, the Individual Discretion Questionnaire (IDQ), reveals that it identifies variability in managerial response and correlates significantly with two other established measures: locus of control and organizational ethical culture. The results suggest that this assessment tool may provide a means to identify how willing individual managers are to take preventive action in situations that present financial and sociopolitical risks to their organization.

Identify, compare and contrast current and aspirational organisational cultures. Describe desired leadership capacities and how these contribute to building a culture and strategy. Describe ways to align culture with strategy including building an ambidextrous organisation.

Growth remained flat for Tech SA towards the end of 2016. As a subsidiary of a global information technology services firm, Tech SA was under pressure to meet its growth plan. With this in mind, a new culture and values framework to be more innovative, collaborative and responsive had been adopted. This was to match the demands of the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world the company finds itself in. While the organisation had a tradition of serving long-standing clients and contracts to high standards, it was not used to working with radical change and disruptive innovation. To achieve this, significant changes in leadership behaviours were required. The organisation had recognised the need for these changes and a leadership development programme was devised to enable 200 of its top leaders to make the required cultural and behavioural shifts to lead in these times. Although the leadership programme was well into its second year, the targets of the growth plan had not been achieved and the leadership behaviours had not yet been instilled across the business. If the growth plan was not achieved, John would need to consider cost-cutting and retrenching. This was the last thing John wanted to do as he had worked alongside his colleagues for 12 years. What else could John do and say to the leaders to make the required changes urgently needed as a matter of survival? What would it take to deliver to existing clients and explore new products and markets?

Masters, Masters of Business Administration (MBA), Executive MBA and Executive leadership.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 7: Management Science.

Using ethical considerations in strategic decision making will result in the development of the most effective long term and short term strategies. Specifically, ethical criteria must be included as part of the strategic process in before‐profit decisions rather than after‐profit decisions in order to maximize corporate profits and improve strategy development and implementation. This paper presents a system of decision making to achieve this integration which uses an “interest assessment” that involves the analysis of the ethical, social and legal obligations of an organization.

Kinship structures in Ambridge have been analysed using social network analysis (SNA) showing a network of a ‘small world’ type with 75 individual people linked by birth or marriage. Further, the network shows four major cliques: the first two centred on Aldridge and Archer matriarchies and the second where through the marriages of the third generation the Grundies, Carters, Bellamies and Snells connect together. The chapter considers the possible futures for kinship networks in the village, arguing either a version of the status quo or The Headlam Hypothesis through which Archers assume less importance and the strength of the weak ties in the network assume more prominence.

My early life was punctuated by turning points and transformations that gradually led to a surprising and late-blooming academic career – my first “real” sociology position began when I was 44. Here I trace six different trajectories of scholarly work which have compelled me: feminist women's health and technoscience studies; social worlds/arenas and the disciplinary emergence of reproductive sciences; the sociology of work and scientific practices; biomedicalization studies; grounded theory and situational analysis as qualitative research methods; and symbolic interaction-ists and -isms. I have circled back across them multiple times. Instead of seeing a beautifully folded origami of a life, it feels more like a crumpled wad of newspapers from various times. Upon opening and holding them up to the light in different ways, stories may be slowly discerned. I try to capture here some of the sweetness and fragility of these moments toward the end of an initially stuttering but later wondrously gratifying career.

Studies which assess the relationship between scanning behavior (SB) and strategic uncertainty (SU) have shown mixed results. The lack of consistency in measurement constructs and differences in underlying assumptions for SU may explain these empirical inconsistencies. Earlier studies have adopted measurement constructs which ignore the interaction effect between the two dimensions of SU – variability and complexity. Our study suggests adopting new measurement constructs for SU that sort uncertainty into four distinct categories based on the interaction of the two environmental constructs, variability and complexity, as drawn from categorizations originally proposed by Duncan. This new measurement approach will provide a means to generate consistent results in research on the relationship between SB and SU. We provide a practical example using the strategic environment in the health care industry to illustrate for managers a more precise way to assess their external environment.

The specific aims for this paper are to deal with the conflicting research findings associated with the factors that influence the success of female leaders while using race (African American) as the core variable in this paper.

A literature review was done. An empirical survey was designed and pre‐tested for face validity, relevance, clarity of items, and ease of administration and response. Two versions of the survey were pilot tested with two focus groups.

The analysis centered on racial differences between Caucasian and African American female leaders. Chi‐square test was used for the primary original data, and t‐test for the mean subgroup scores obtained in Likert‐type items. The primary finding is that while Caucasian women and African American women face similar gender obstacles, the factors that determine their paths to success differ significantly.

The present study provides an excellent starting point to infuse race into the gender equation model regarding female leaders in organizational enterprises. As the world of work becomes more gender and racially diverse, the implications are very important given the status of female leadership in a civil society.

The newness and novelty of this paper is the comparison between Caucasian and African American women leaders in the southern part of the USA. The value of this paper is the focus on the demographics of change given the history of gender and racial hostility in organizational life for this segment of the population.

Action in the 1980s to a large extent belonged to the hard, hyper-masculine physiques of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, who seemed to embody the aggressive, go-getting, testosterone-fuelled spirit of the age. Except, as this chapter argues, it would be a mistake to take these representations of masculinity at face value.

Susan Jeffords has noted the evolution of Schwarzenegger's Terminator character from hard-bodied killer to nurturing father figure, linking this to the change in perceptions of masculinity between the Reagan and Bush eras. Indeed, as Schwarzenegger moved into the 90s his films increasingly played with notions of ‘the feminine’ – from the nurturing Schwarzenegger of Kindergarten Cop (1990) to the ‘maternal’ Schwarzenegger of Junior (1994).

This chapter focuses on Schwarzenegger's Commando (1985), the first film in which he plays a contemporary, ‘normal’ (though still unusually muscular) man: a widowed ex-special forces commando and now full-time father, named John Matrix. The act of naming this supposed he-man ‘Womb’ is only the beginning of the film's surprising and subversive disquisitions on gender. In between (and sometimes during) the expertly staged fist fights, gun battles and explosions, homoeroticism, the male gaze and gender stereotyping all bubble away under the surface. Schwarzenegger's body is presented for scrutiny in a way previously reserved for female Hollywood stars, and the film's antagonist, an embittered former colleague who is obsessed with Matrix in a way that verges on the erotic, transcends butch and enters the realms of macho camp. The film questions and subverts presumptions about the masculine and the feminine, while still delivering an ostensibly macho, quintessentially 1980s action film.

Argues that stakeholder theory may be an appropriate model to describe firm behavior and replace the dominant paradigm, the economic model of the firm. However, current conceptualizations of stakeholder theory do not meet the requirements of scientific theory. Thus, looks at the historic roots of stakeholder “theory”, critiques its current form, and suggests steps that may be taken for stakeholder theory to satisfy the conceptual requirements of theory. Specifically suggests that contractual interests may underlie stakeholder relationships just as they do the agency relationship between managers and stockholders as prescribed by traditional economic theory.