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In this chapter Suzanne Ross draws on her experience previously as a talent manager and now as a leadership consultant, Executive Coach and Senior Lecturer in Executive Education, and applies her research on leadership derailment to talent management. As organizations continue to invest in leadership development, research suggests up to 50 per cent of leaders derail or fail in their role. The derailment literature is, to-date, disconnected from TM although central to the definition of leadership derailment is that derailed leaders were previously successful and had potential. The chapter explores the concept of derailment, how it is defined, its scale and scope and some of the causes of derailment including a lack of organizational support during leadership transitions. The notion of the ‘accidental manager’ is used to provide an example of where literature on TM and derailment converge as a key derailer characteristic is having an overly functional orientation. This maps to the accidental manager concept and to the challenges that TM practitioners face in developing career pathways for expert/specialists beyond managerial roles. Suzanne argues that talent identification should take more account of derailment characteristics and suggests there may be gender differences in how these are perceived and in the consequences that arise when they are present. The chapter contributes to a greater understanding of how the concept of derailment can be integrated within talent management research and practice.

Various law and film scholars have noted that the judge occupies the place of a marginal figure in ‘legal cinema’ and in related scholarship. In this chapter I want to engage with the debate about the representation of the judge in film by way of an examination of a South African documentary, ‘Two Moms: A family portrait’ (2004). In the first instance this ‘family portrait’ appears to be neither an obvious candidate for inclusion in the canon of ‘legal cinema’ nor a film with a plotline dominated by a judge. But from this rather unpromising start this chapter explores how a film about an ordinary family made up of extraordinary people is an extraordinary film about law in general and about the figure of the judge in particular.

Women have been at the vanguard of transhistorical resistance against oppressive structures on the African continent. Targets of women’s struggles for social justice include colonial governments, neo-colonial states, transnational corporations and entrenched traditional institutions. These struggles have had a catalytic effect on dynamics of social change in multifarious contexts in Africa. This chapter deploys a select number of case studies to argue that the challenges posed to entrenched structures of oppression have historically put women in the crosshairs of power. Women have also sometimes pursued feminist goals using state machinery. ‘State feminism’, which is widespread on the continent, the chapter argues, enables and disenables women’s emancipation. The chapter reflects on women’s resistance movements in Africa and analyses seven major themes. These are obduracy of patriarchy, social divisions, prevalence of maternalist framing, elite women’s engagement, deferment of women’s issues and tactical divide. The contradictions immanent in women’s social positionality and challenges are explored.

In this chapter, we explore the relationship between organizational complexity and firm-level innovation. We define and operationalize a new construct, experienced complexity, which is the extent to which the organizational environment makes it challenging for decision makers to do their jobs effectively. We distinguish experienced complexity from structural complexity, which is the elements of the organization, such as the number of reporting lines or integrating mechanisms, that are deliberately put in place to help the organization deliver on its objectives, and we argue that structural complexity correlates positively with firm-level innovation, while experienced complexity correlates negatively with innovation. Using a novel dataset combining survey and objective data on 209 large firms, we find support for our arguments.

When questioning the relationship between media, development, and democracy, especially in the ill-defined “Global South,” it’s important to go beyond the commonly held meta-narratives that frame these concepts as common sense. In a quest to investigate alternative characterizations of these terms, this chapter uses Ghanaian political economist Lord Mawuko-Yevugah’s (2014) theoretical framework of “developmentality” to explain how development has been used as an ideological instrument to promote the Western liberal media model in the “Global South.” Using a case study of Malawi, which is heavily dependent on foreign aid from the same countries who have defined and promoted this liberal media model aboard, raises important questions about a media model that is characterized by high objectivity and political neutrality on one side, but subjects countries to high levels of competition and free market principles on the other. By outlining the temporal sequence of events that have unfolded since the arrival of missionary media in the 1800s, the presence of international donors and the rise in non-governmental organizations, this chapter reveals how certain ideologies and practices have been legitimized through development to preserve the unequal balance of power between the “Global South” and their former colonial powers.