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Answering to calls for further contextualizing global leadership, this study investigates power dynamics and cultural identities in global leadership in an African context. We took a grounded theory approach to investigate how a specific cultural context shapes assets and liabilities of global leaders. Drawing on our data comprising semi-structured interviews of managers of multinational enterprises operating in Ghana, we identified key assets and liabilities for being local or foreign in one’s global leadership role. Furthermore, we theorize four specific styles of leadership leveraging: identity leveraging, power leveraging, juxtapositional leveraging, and temporal leveraging. Finally, we integrated the above-mentioned elements and proposed a framework of contextualized assets and liabilities which illustrates how specific cultural context affects the assets and liabilities of localness and foreignness for global leaders, and how these assets and liabilities constitute the four styles of leveraging in such context. Implications of our findings for research and practice are discussed.

The work on bridge resilience assessment includes quantitative and qualitative approaches to compare the multiple bridges based on their resilience. But still, the bridge resilience obtained by these assessment approaches is inefficient when prioritising multiple bridges to improve their resilience. Therefore, this study aims to develop a methodology for prioritising the bridges to improve their resilience.

The research methodology follows three sequential phases. In the first phase, criteria importance through intercriteria correlation (CRITIC) technique is used to compute the criteria weights. The criteria considered are age, area, design high flood level, finish road level FRL and resilience index of bridges. While 12 river-crossing bridges maintained by one bridge owner are considered as alternatives. Then, in the second phase, the prioritisation of each bridge is evaluated using five techniques, including technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution, VIKOR (in Serbian, Visekriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje), additive ratio assessment, complex proportional assessment and multi-objective optimisation method by ratio analysis. Finally, in the third phase, the results of all five techniques are integrated using CRITIC and the weighted sum method.

The result of the study enables bridge owners to deal with the particular bridge that requires resilience improvement. The study concluded that it is not enough to consider only the bridge resilience index to improve its resilience. The prioritisation exercise should consider various other criteria that are not preferred during the bridge resilience assessment process.

The proposed methodology is a novel framework based on the existing multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques for contributing knowledge in the domain of bridge resilience management. It can efficiently overcome the pitfall of decision-making when two bridges have the same resilience index score.

There are three main analytic challenges to studying kids, especially where the core focus is inequality: (1) minimizing the power imbalance between adults/researchers and kids/participants, (2) attending to the active and imaginative communication styles of young people, and (3) getting beneath the superficial rhetoric of meritocracy, colorblindness, and post-feminism. In this chapter, we draw from our own qualitative insights when studying middle school kids (grades 6–8, ages 11–14) in providing a systematic analysis of the effectiveness of distinct visual strategies and their respective strengths and limitations for producing rich, useful, and specific data. The insights gleaned are applicable to analyses of kids, understandings of inequality, and even methodological training.

This chapter argues that while Organization and Management Theory (OMT) appears in good health it stands on the precipice of a crisis of its own making. This stems from an overly self-referential and narrow focus on theoretical contribution, at the expense of a broader set of societal commitments. Paradoxically, this is particularly the case if a researcher is putatively engaging with broader societal issues. The central thesis advanced in this chapter is that researchers should be more socially reflexive about what they are researching, why they are researching it, and for whom. As a corollary, the chapter calls for researchers to interrogate the research that they are undertaking critically and to work out the broader social significance of their work. The chapter unfolds with concise analyses of two branches of OMT: the sociology of the professions and institutional theory. The chapter highlights how research into the professions runs the danger of being captured by the objects of its research: as researchers busy themselves examining pre-existing concepts, rather than exploring the power struggles that take place in particular fields. The chapter argues for a re-framing of research into the professions. The chapter highlights the rise of institutional theory to its current position of dominance within OMT. Institutional theory’s recent move to study ‘Grand Challenges’ is welcomed but also problematised. The chapter closes with reflections on a course of action for making OMT matter.

This chapter analyzes the efficiency levels of a circular economy (CE) with an emphasis on transaction costs. It examines the governance aspect of CE activities in comparison to the predominant linear value creation. Extant CE research in business studies tends to be descriptive and lacks a theoretical foundation, particularly in understanding CE management. Transaction cost theory explains efficiency in economic organizing, lending itself to the study of arrangements that maximize resource efficiency at continued economic virtue. The conceptualization proposes that CE transaction costs are greater than those within the linear economy (LE), primarily due to the uncertainties about reciprocal dependencies, looping material complexities, exchanging novel information, and increased contracting efforts. Geographically bounded and institutionally homogeneous CE initiatives may curb these rising costs. By bringing efficiency concerns into CE analysis, the chapter demonstrates the applicability of transaction cost theory and highlights CE relevance to international business by pointing out spatial choice implications.

In the design and development stage of the power converter systems, an abnormal intermittency is naturally experienced in nonautonomous system because of coupling of the interference signals. The study of identifying the possible conditions at which such an undesirable operation emerges is vital. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to explore the intermittent instabilities that evolve in the voltage-mode controlled quadratic buck converter when the sinusoidal interference signal coupled in reference voltage.

Voltage-mode controlled quadratic buck converter with the sinusoidal interference signal coupled in reference voltage manifests a symmetrical period-doubling bifurcation in intermittent periods for significant interference signal strength with the frequency near to the switching frequency or its rational multiples. The complete dynamics of the system is investigated for the various inference signal frequencies by numerical simulations.

Here, the intermittent instabilities are verified using a simple Filippov’s method with supporting evidence of Floquet multipliers (eigenvalues) movement. The analytical result obtained is found to agree well with the simulation results.

Power supplies are liable to an ambiguous complex behavior when it is seldom protected against the interference signal. The experimental study has made an attempt to explicit a detailed behavior observed in voltage-mode controlled quadratic buck converter when a sinusoidal intruding signal of different amplitude and frequency are coupled with the reference voltage. Such an analysis gives considerable focus for the power electronics engineers to meet the design requirements.

To the authors’ knowledge, all the research works on intermittent instabilities in power converters are analyzed only using conventional method of Poincare map technique which emerges to be complicated when the order of the system is higher. Alternatively, in this paper, Filippov’s technique is used for stability analysis of periodic orbit. The evolution of bifurcation point is predicted by the calculating the Floquet multipliers of monodromy matrix, and it is known to achieve the same objective as the Poincare map technique in much more straightforward way.

This paper aims to analyse how the components of the institutional context and the adoption patterns of business practices determine the approach to carbon reporting used by organisations.

Drawing on the New Institutional Sociology theory, this paper analyses, compares and interprets the results of the cases of four large Spanish companies which operate in different organisational fields and therefore they are subject to different institutional pressures. The results of these case studies illustrate the different approaches to carbon reporting used by organisations.

The theoretical proposal of this paper establishes that the components of the institutional context (regulative, normative and cognitive), along with the adoption pattern used by organisations to control their carbon emissions (substantive or symbolic), contribute to determining their approach to carbon reporting (outside-in, inside-out, twin-track and isolated).

The approaches to reporting and the adoption patterns have been considered independently in the previous literature, paying also scarce attention to the components of the institutional context that can have an influence on the approach to reporting used by organisations to share their environmental information. This paper contributes to bridge this gap, and its results can be of interest for supporting the decisions of policymakers, managers of organisations and society in general.

This paper aims to identify and analyze the factors contributing to the decision of organizations to disclose carbon information, as well as its transparency level.

The Tobit regression is used to analyze the results of the Spanish companies that were invited in 2012 to respond to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) questionnaire. The results of this study are interpreted according to the legitimacy and stakeholder theories.

The results show that the probability of carbon disclosure and its transparency level are explained by the influence of pressures from society, markets, shareholders and international interactions. In the Spanish case, the factors that have shown a stronger influence are the size of the company, financial risk, their listing in the IBEX35 and FT500 indexes and the ownership concentration.

One of the main contributions of this study to the previous literature lies in the used research method. Thus, while previous studies analyze the factors that can determine whether companies disclose carbon information, this paper has also considered the quantification and differentiation of the effect of these factors on the probability of supplying this information, as well as obtaining a higher score in the CDP questionnaire, representing a higher transparency level in the information provided. For this objective, the usefulness of the Tobit regression is to be highlighted.

The present chapter attempts to highlight the vulnerabilities of female migrants as compared to non-migrants in the unorganized urban labor market. Informal female migrants working in construction, as domestic workers, tailors/boutiques, and garment workers in the urban unorganized sector of Uttar Pradesh’s selected urban locations, are covered in this chapter. Though the fact prevails that workers in the unorganized labor markets are confronted with various livelihood crunches, still those who are migrants and swelling the urban labor markets are more prone to different vulnerabilities. There is scanty literature on the situation and condition of migrants particularly female migrant workers in India, whereas we know more about the condition of international migrants, mainly migrant workers in the Gulf and other regions. The study is based on interviews with 174 female informal workers who have migrated and 222 non-migrants from various regions of the state to the urban locations of selected cities. Our study also attempts to do an in-depth, qualitative exploration of these vulnerable women’s lives and perceptions and tries to capture layered vulnerabilities, risks, and rewards confronted due to both migration and work in the informal sector. Specifically, the findings reflect upon the fact that how strong societal norms may actually prevent women from acknowledging or articulating the true reasons for their migrations.