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Over the past few years Uber has experienced more controversy than any other digital platform. Looking at the case of Uber in Poland, this chapter distinguishes four arenas in which Uber has been contested: in cities, in public opinion, in the political realm, and in the legal field. Each of these arenas has a different logic and dynamic and also involves different actors and institutions. Nevertheless, the various struggles are connected with each other. Victories and defeats in one spill over into another, providing actors with resources or imposing constraints on them. The author illustrates the connection between various arenas by looking at court cases involving Uber drivers in Poland and shows how those court cases were not only legal events that determined the legality of Uber in Poland but also moral and political events that influenced struggles over legitimacy that were taking place outside the courtroom.

Purpose – Using the example of the Dene Games competition, this chapter examines the connections between contemporary sports and the games of the Dene (Athapaskan), a group of indigenous cultures inhabiting the subarctic regions of the Canadian Northwest Territories.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter is based on participant-observation and individual interviews conducted during attendance at the Dene Games gatherings over the course of several years.

Findings – I argue that the indigenous Dene Games gathering, where traditional games are organised as a contemporary sports competition, opens a space for the reconstitution of indigenous physical activity practices. The tensions that occur when participation in indigenous games articulates to the practical logic of competitive sports, identify the Dene Games as a space of active cultural contestation.

Originality/value – The chapter examines the articulation of historically disparate social practises. It views the hysteretic effects of a pre-existing indigenous physical activity practice as a point of reference for resistance to the normative constraints emanating from the organisational modality of contemporary sports, without offering up an explanation that relies on voluntaristic assumptions of agency. It adopts this perspective in order to avoid grasping the indigenous practice as the operationalised object of its own intervention, a ‘museum piece’.

The chapter is divided into two broad sections. The first addresses macro or global sources of ethics discontent. This will discuss concern about political ethics in the broad context of complex processes such as globalization, development, liberalization, and democratization. These are clearly huge subjects and there is no space to do justice to their complexities, but the aim here is to identify some key aspects, which have particularly important implications for increasing concern about political ethics. The second section is concerned with exploring the political aspects of public ethics through a consideration of political scandal, because scandals are often cited as the source of unease about ethical standards in public life and as the catalysts for institutional reform.

The purpose of this paper is to study and assess the content, functioning and impact of institutional reforms aiming to enhance collective and holistic political leadership at the level of local government.

The authors conduct a comparative case study of two Danish frontrunner municipalities drawing on relevant documents and qualitative interviews with both elected politicians and public administrators.

The authors found that institutional design is effective in promoting collective and holistic political leadership at the local level, even if no formal design options are available and the municipalities have to invent their own designs. Support both from both councilors and administrators is paramount for successful implementation of local political leadership reforms.

Due to the purposive selection of a limited number of cases, the findings cannot be generalized to the population from which the cases are drawn. However, other municipalities may learn from and become inspired by the positive impact of the new institutional designs on collective and holistic political leadership.

Whereas some institutional political leadership reforms aim to enhance the power of the mayor and other reforms aim to create a cabinet or a committee system, the reforms the authors are studying aim to create a space for local councilors to work together across party and sector lines in creating collective and holistic policy solutions. The study shows that it is crucial that local councilors are involved in cross-boundary agenda setting before developing policies in standing committees and endorsing them in the council assembly.

There is a large amount of more or less wicked problems that require the formulation and implementation of innovative policy solutions, which, in turn, call for a clear and determined political leadership. However, local politicians typically suffer from decoupling and tunnel vision. The results show that these problems can be solved through new institutional designs that promote a more collective and holistic political leadership that can take the local community forward.

Few studies have hitherto addressed the need for institutional reforms enabling collective and holistic political leadership through both theoretical and empirical analyses, but that is exactly what the authors try to accomplish.

The value of the liberal arts and humanities has increasingly been called into question on multiple fronts. Attempts to bridge the practical and liberal arts through forms of civic professionalism have been gaining traction in larger spheres of influence. This article outlines the results of a deliberative civic engagement forum (n = 42) that created a space for community members from business, education, and non-profit sectors at the National Conference on Service and Volunteerism, to consider the role civic leadership education and development has in liberal arts and humanities programs. The forum was intentionally designed to have participants consider the role of the liberal arts and humanities in redefining the purposes and process of democratic engagement through a lens of civic leadership education and development. This forum was able to gather a group of people from sectors that do not normally speak to the intersection of leadership education and the liberal arts.

This chapter examines the training of indigenous Mayan catechists by the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico, and their subsequent role in the establishment and growth of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) in the period prior to the Zapatistas' 1994 uprising. It considers the adequacy of Timothy Wickham-Crowley's model of guerrilla insurgencies in Latin America in explaining the Zapatista case. It finds, contrary to Wickham-Crowley's model of the relations between urban university leadership groups and peasant support bases, that the catechists constituted a stratum of “organic indigenous-campesino intellectuals” that radically undermined their communities’ traditional intellectual dependence on outsiders and enabled them to constitute themselves as a new collective political subject.

This contribution conceptualizes the politicization of MNCs from outside – the processes by which MNCs become confronted with demands for regulation and engage in political contestation with other non-state actors. It compares two global industries, athletic footwear and toys, to show that the dynamics of politicization follow different trajectories, which are only partially to explain with structural differences across industry fields. If politicization leads to increasing political functioning of business or to a depoliticization of criticism depends to a great extend on the agency of business and their capacity to strategically counter mobilization, but also on the difficulties for activist to construct continuing collective action across a diverse range of cultural-institutional settings.