Search results

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

The presence of mature masculinity is slowly reshaping contemporary action cinema in the twenty-first century. It is a phenomenon that rejects the unrealistic view that action heroes are embodiments of Apollo and Ares in human flesh. Instead, action heroes are viewed as flawed characters who cannot escape the realities of their corporeality, mortality and humanity. The following chapter is an examination of a particular type of action hero archetype that combines ageing with virtuous and mature masculinity. Here I use Tom Cruise's development and portrayal of Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible series as a lens through which to highlight the presence of the virtuous and mature hero archetype in action cinema.

Cruise's representation of heroic masculinity is significant because it achieves three separate goals. First, Cruise's mature masculinity repudiates the hardbody model by showing its deficiencies as a male archetype. Second, it introduces a version of an action hero that emphasises the benefits of ageing and mature masculinity. Lastly, Cruise's onscreen presence redoubles the idea that heroic masculinity is motivated by a deep sense of morality, duty and a desire to serve the greater good. As the model of the mature and virtuous hero becomes more prevalent, as I argue, it not only reshapes action cinema but also produces cinematic representations of heroic masculinity that are more positive in terms of showing the importance of maturity, virtue, and public service.