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This paper aims to identify distinct motivation profiles among non-executive directors and explores the reasons why non-executive directors continue to serve on boards of directors.

The analysis is based on a multiple case study in the context of German supervisory boards. The authors develop their primary insights from semi-structured interviews with 53 non-executive directors.

The findings indicate that non-executive director motivation revolves around material incentives, reputation, meaningfulness, congruence with firm goals and enjoyment. Three distinct motivation profiles emerge from the analysis, with each profile exhibiting a set of unique reasons to continue serving on boards.

Future research needs to test for the statistical representativeness of the findings and their performance implications, preferably in a shareholder-oriented governance context.

The study introduces a psychological angle to the debate about non-executive director motivation. The contributions include going beyond a bi-polar distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and draw attention to how motivation profiles relate to non-executive director’s intention to continue serving on boards.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how information-processing mechanisms between nominating committees (NCs), incumbent executives, board chairs, and shareholders affect the comprehensiveness of executive succession processes.

The authors employ an explanatory multiple-case study that comprises eight CEO and CFO succession cases in large German publicly traded firms.

The findings reveal that comprehensiveness is determined by four key information-processing mechanisms: the effectiveness of NC’s information sharing, absorbing disagreement, and integrating heterogeneous opinions; board chair leadership (i.e. an apprentice board leadership structure in association with the board chair’s openness to ideas); the breadth and depth of information sharing between executives and NCs; and the extent and timing to which major shareholders influence succession processes.

The authors summarize the findings in a conceptual framework and develop a set of propositions to guide future research on the topic. Such studies may want to test the suggestions in a quantitative way, preferably in a multinational context.

The authors’ emerging conceptual framework contributes a set of information-processing variables by which NCs engage in comprehensive executive successions with incumbent executives, board chairs, and major shareholders and offers a multiechelon approach to study executive successions.

In this chapter, the authors aim to recontextualise the local picture of youth participation in Manchester in a wider European perspective. First, because the research framework was a comparative European research project and, second, because the relevance also of local research depends on the degree to which it provides general insight into a phenomenon. The authors share with the editors and the other authors of this book the aim of questioning dominant understandings that limit youth participation to institutionalised forms and to young people’s involvement in existing practices and processes predefined by others, in most cases adult professionals like educators, youth workers and policy-makers. Based on the identification and discussion of three aspects related to the recognition of young people’s practice as participation in formal, non-formal and informal settings, the current authors want to use their views from the outside to shed light on the tensions and ambivalences of youth participation that do not become obsolete by applying a wider notion of participation.

Institutions are collective responses to collective concerns, with the underlying link between concern and response being the purpose of the institution. With this conceptual lens, we analyze the history of the Aktiengesellschaft (AG), which emerged in Austria and Germany around 1800. While any analysis of the organizational features of the form would have diagnosed marked stability over the past two centuries, our historical study reveals significant shifts of the AG’s purpose and meaning: from a vehicle in the service of the public interest, shareholders, and employees to a persona with legitimate self-interests and the will to survive. We suggest to regard such purpose drifts as distinct variant of institutional change. In addition, we conclude that the AG’s essentially political actorhood institutionalizes the ever fragile and delicate quest for a balance between the different legitimate interests on whose behalf a corporation acts (including those of the self). Such a view, we argue, can offer a future for the corporation as organizational form.

This chapter starts with a short discussion of social work and how it interlinks educational issues with forms of support to enable people to cope with difficult situations. An example shall illustrate that a global perspective on questions of governance in social work has to consider the historical, economic, and political context in which it takes place. It will then be argued that “governance building” might be a fundamental necessity in strengthening the empowerment of people, and this means accepting the ambivalence of support and control. In this context, some distinguished authors will be identified who considered social movements as motors of governance bringing in normative aspects, which cannot be reduced to functional theory. Finally, the chapter concludes by reflecting on the role of research in defining support programs in welfare states.

Avant‐propos sous les auspices de l'Institut international de Coopération intellectuelle, paraissait en 1934 le t. I, consacré à l'Europe, du Guide international des Archives. Le questionnaire envoyé à tous les États européens comportait sous les points 4 et 6 les questions suivantes: ‘Existe‐t‐il un guide général pour les diverses catégories d'Archives ou des guides particuliers pour l'une ou l'autre d'entre elles?’ et ‘Existe‐t‐il des catalogues imprimés, des publications tant officielles que privées, susceptibles de constituer un instrument complet de référence pour tout ou partie importante des fonds d'archives?’ Les réponses des divers pays à ces questions, malgré leur caractère très inégal, ont fait du Guide international un bon instrument d'information générale sur les Archives. Malheureusement les circonstances ont empêché la publication du volume consacré aux États non européens, tandis que le temps qui s'écoulait tendait à rendre périmés les renseignements fournis sur les Archives européennes.