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This article describes the quality leadership style of a Russian woman entrepreneur who started a successful software operation under a licensing agreement with an American company. A cornerstone of her business philosophy was that quality should be its hallmark Her style reflected many similarities with American entrepreneurship, while other features were unique to the Russian environment, and to herself. Much of her approach can be explained by her bicultural Russian and American background; her leadership style, values, and behavior exhibited a blend of both cultures. These characteristics are analyzed using an integrative framework that recognizes the importance of a quality orientation in all aspects of leadership. The analysis of Olga Kirova's leadership style also takes into account bicultural influences upon her values, ethics, and managerial behavior, and notes a number of similarities and differences from the more traditional Russian leadership style. Conclusions and recommendations are presented about the utility of the framework in a Russian setting, and its value in evaluating leadership styles of potential Russian business partners.

We explore the simultaneous influence of activist organizations and corporations on institutional change. Focusing on protests, campaign contributions, and lobbyists as the strategies used by activist organizations and corporations to influence institutional change, we study the dynamics between movements and counter-movements and their influence on the probability of institutional change. In the context of the US tobacco industry, the results shed light on the effectiveness of these strategies and uncover potential moderators of this relationship. Overall, we demonstrate the simultaneous and asymmetric effects of activist organizations and corporations that use conspicuous and inconspicuous strategies to change institutions.

Given the growing interest in social movements as policy agenda setters, this paper investigates the contexts within which movement groups and actors work with political elites to promote their common goals for policy change. In asking how and why so-called outsiders gain access to elites and to the policymaking process, I address several contemporary theoretical and empirical concerns associated with policy change as a social movement goal. I examine the claim that movements use a multipronged, long-term strategy by working with and targeting policymakers and political institutions on the one hand, while shaping public preferences – hearts and minds – on the other; that these efforts are not mutually exclusive. In addition, I look at how social movement organizations and actors are critical in expanding issue conflict outside narrow policy networks, often encouraged to do so by political elites with similar policy objectives. And, I discuss actors’ mobility in transitioning from institutional activists to movement and organizational leaders, and even to protesters, and vice versa. The interchangeability of roles among actors promoting social change in strategic action fields points to the porous and fluid boundaries between state and nonstate actors and organizations.

Scholarship on the state control of social movements has predominately focused on overt repression, resulting in comparatively less attention to more covert forms of control. Researchers have suggested that government surveillance of social movement organizations (SMOs) has become increasingly widespread and routinized in the post-September 11, 2001 era, but this hypothesis has remained untested. Since contemporary surveillance is grounded in a logic of information gathering that has diffused across law enforcement agencies since the September 11 attacks, government actors now cast a wide net and monitor a large variety of groups. This study shows that a result, traditional factors predicting surveillance, such as contentious behavior, have less explanatory power. Using a database of 409 SMOs active in Philadelphia between January 1996 and October 2009, the research asked who and why particular groups are monitored by the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security (PA-OHS) between November 2009 and September 2010. Bayesian logistic regression analysis is used to examine the variables predicting surveillance. Findings show that 23% of the SMOs in the sample were targets of surveillance. Organizational ideology was the strongest predictor and there was little evidence that history of contentious protests or previous conflict with the police influenced coming under surveillance. However, groups with less visibility in traditional media sources were more likely to be monitored.

We know a great deal about the ways in which routines of news coverage may bias newspaper content, but little about how different article retrieval practices influence newspaper data assembled by scholars. Using the New York Times as a source of data on social movement activity, we compare depictions of protest by the African-American Civil Rights movement over time produced using the two most common article retrieval methods: index versus full-story coding. Full-story coding clearly offers more depth and greater breadth in terms of the events identified. Moreover, many of the same event characteristics associated with selection bias in newspaper reporting (e.g., size and confrontational nature of a protest event, presence of counter-demonstrators or police, and event sponsorship by a recognized social movement organization) are selected upon again when stories are indexed by New York Times staff.

This paper examines how personal networks influence the internationalization process of Russian multinational corporations.

We identify and review 78 articles published in five International Business journals that address the role of networking and relationships in firm internationalization. We then use the network perspective to examine how Russian multinationals internationalize.

Combining the key conclusions of the reviewed studies with insights from the network perspective, and adding insights that we have gained both through first-hand experience and by following the Russian business media, we develop a model that links personal networking and Russian multinationals’ internationalization. We outline four functions that personal networking plays – access to information and knowledge, resource commitment, development of marketing and sales capabilities, and further network expansion.

This paper challenges established views of how firm internationalization occurs. It combines two previously unrelated streams of literature, the network model of internationalization and the role of personal networking within the Russian business environment, and argues that personal networking plays a much larger role in how Russian MNCs internationalize than has the International Business literature has acknowledged.

There is a great deal of research examining the factors that lead people to start protesting in their youth, but little work has been done on first-time protesters later in life. In this research we examine these “late bloomers,” those who protest for the first time later in life, to see if and how they differ from those who protest at different periods in life. We use data from the Youth-Parent Socialization Survey, which is a panel study of people in four waves from 1965 to 1997. We find, of the people who protested later in life, half had never protested previously. Additionally, there are significant differences between people who never protested, people who only protested early in life, people who protested repeatedly throughout life, and those who protested for the first time later in life. The latter group is more likely to attend church more, never have been married, and have lower incomes than people who protested early in life and then did not protest again. Late Bloomers are also more likely less educated and to be Independents than Democrats compared to the Repeat Protesters. This research adds to contemporary research examining differential protest participation patterns.