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This chapter explores the timeline of Lieutenant Colonel Myer’s year in military command and how the culture was significantly impacted by her reign of terror and toxic leadership (Reed, 2004). A once jovial and productive organization, quickly after Myer’s assumed command the military squadron took on an appearance of disenchantment and mistrust of authority. Eventually, due to Myer’s toxic leadership practices, organizational cohesiveness and performance eroded, and new employee groups formed in an effort to feel less vulnerable and attempt to find solidarity in numbers and neutralize Myer’s destructive leadership (Konopaske, Ivancevich, & Matteson, 2018; Milosevic, Maric, & Loncar, 2019). In the end, and after several horrific events, many groups pushed upwards, broke the chain of command, and demanded that Myers be removed from command.

This chapter addresses current trends regarding how the meta-theory of critical realism (CR) frames comparative and international education research and practice. It introduces the key tenets of CR and explores how these ideas have been and can be applied in educational research. It demonstrates how CR provides a valuable alternative to the positivist, interpretivist and constructivist paradigms, and leverages elements of all three to provide new approaches to develop knowledge that is free from the dualisms embedded in their ontological assumptions. I argue that by offering a dialectical understanding of structure and agency, as well as the material and ideational dimension of social reality, CR provides an ontological framework that does not do conceptual violence to the reality we seek to research. This ontological basis is particularly valuable to the social justice agenda of educational research in general because it allows researchers to work beneath the surface of empirical research to disclose the field of possibilities for social action.

Leaders have a profound impact on the work lives of the employees they supervise. This chapter explores the experiences of employees whose leaders exhibit toxic behaviors and the impact of this toxicity on employee engagement. The authors report the findings of a qualitative study involving in-depth interviews with 13 participants. First, the authors describe the participants’ experiences before and after experiencing toxicity. Next, the authors outline three critical toxic leadership styles: the nightmare (leaders who have unbalanced emotional control and who are overly fond of power), the pretender (leaders whose authenticity and integrity seem low, who play different characters depending on the circumstances), and the runaround (leaders who change directions too often or give unclear instructions). Finally, the authors address organizational, leadership, and individual strategies to identify and remove toxic leaders from the workplace.

Over the past decades, scholars advanced foundational insights about paradox in organization theory. In this double volume, we seek to expand upon these insights through interdisciplinary theorizing. We do so for two reasons. First, we think that now is a moment to build on those foundations toward richer, more complex insights by learning from disciplines outside of organization theory. Second, as our world increasingly faces grand challenges, scholars turn to paradox theory. Yet as the challenges become more complex, authors turn to other disciplines to ensure the requisite complexity of our own theories. To advance these goals, we invited scholars with knowledge in paradox theory to explore how these ideas could be expanded by outside disciplines. This provides a both/and opportunity for paradox theory: both learning from outside disciplines beyond existing boundaries and enriching our insights in organization scholarship. The result is an impressive collection of papers about paradox theory that draws from four outside realms – the realm of belief, the realm of physical systems, the realm of social structures, and the realm of expression. In this introduction, we expand on why paradox theory is ripe for interdisciplinary theorizing, explore the benefits of doing so, and introduce the papers in this double volume.

This chapter focuses on the concept of genderwashing in the context of higher education (HE) in the United States. Using intersectionality as a framework, the authors critically examine gender-based affinity groups, which are used in HE as a common strategy to support diversity and equity efforts. The authors discuss how such efforts often fall short in facilitating meaningful organizational or systemic change and provide questions and considerations for addressing genderwashing that are informed by an intersectional lens.

The main purpose of this essay is to reflect on the nature of justification. To this end, the analysis draws on Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s De la justification. Les économies de la grandeur ¹ [On Justification: Economies of Worth ² ]. More specifically, the article aims to examine the extent to which Boltanski and Thévenot’s conceptual framework, widely known as ‘the sociology of critical capacity’, ³ permits us to demonstrate that processes of justification ⁴ are vital to the symbolically mediated construction – that is, to both the conceptual and the empirical organization ⁵ – of social life. In order to prove the validity of this contention, the inquiry explores the meaning of ‘justification’ in relation to the following dimensions: (1) existence, (2) ethics, (3) justice, (4) perspective, (5) presuppositions, (6) agreement, (7) common worlds, (8) critique, (9) practice and (10) justification itself. By way of conclusion, the article maintains that processes of justification constitute an essential ingredient of human reality.

Purpose: This chapter aims to identify and evaluate the various components of business model disclosures in an Integrated Report and ascertain how the notion of business model is perceived among practitioners.

Need for the Study: According to previous research, the International Integrated Reporting Council’s (IIRC) objective of improving corporate reporting by encouraging organisations to disclose their business model has not found the desired recognition. Therefore, the study elaborates on the various components of business model reporting and their implications on corporate reporting in general.

Methodology: A review of literature was conducted to identify and analyse research based on business models and their disclosures in integrated reporting. A narrative review was undertaken for selected literature.

Findings: The findings suggest that most large-sized organisations use integrated reporting for impression management and are not inclined to disclose too much about their business models for fear of competition. There is still a lack of clear understanding of what a business model should entail.

Practical Implication: This study adds to the research on business model disclosures in integrated reporting. Voluntary disclosure and a better understanding of such disclosures will prepare organisations of all sizes and industries for an event when Integrated Reporting becomes statutory.