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Discusses the process and issues involved in developing a performance measurement system for a virtual engineering team working within a high technology environment. This team consists of members from many different sites across the world with a unique role in maintaining standardized manufacturing processes at the lowest possible cost. As a result, they faced many challenges including communication barriers, culture differences, as well as different reporting structures within each individual site. To help address these issues, a performance measurement system was developed to focus the team on the key actions affecting performance instead of the issues getting in the way. A measurement system was developed that linked the team’s objectives to its mission and identified the critical actions associated with each objective.

Purpose – This chapter contributes to comparative biopolitics and reviews primatological literature, especially about our nearest relatives, the Great Apes.

Design/methodology/approach – Biopolitics in this chapter means evolutionarily informed political science, with emphasis on power relations. I review the literature on intrasexual and intersexual dominance interactions among individuals and competitive and/or agonistic interactions among groups in the Great Apes (Hominidae, formerly Pongidae): orangutan (Pongo with two species and three subspecies), gorilla (Gorilla with four subspecies), bonobo (Pan paniscus), and common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes with four subspecies). In the final section I present some (speculative) thoughts on Pan prior or the modern human ancestor.

Findings – Not only Man is a political animal.

Originality/value – Impartial, objective, and as complete as possible review of the literature for the students of (comparative) politics, ethology, and psychology.

This chapter explores the development of the dangerous, sexualized fembot archetype in science-fiction film and television, drawing a line from the robot Maria in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) to contemporary versions of the archetype.

Primarily, this chapter outlines how this historically villainous trope has been augmented and redefined in twenty-first Century posthuman science-fiction texts Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014) and Westworld (Joy et al., 2016 –). Both feature fembot characters who are central to the narrative, and can be defined as both villainous at times, but who also occupy the position of arguable sympathetic protagonists. In part, this redefinition can be argued as more a reflection of a Western hegemonic shift towards feminist values. Nevertheless, there have been criticisms of the male gaze present in both and of the emphasis on female suffering.

As oblique texts for an 18–35 audience, both Ex Machina and Westworld ask more questions than they answer. Through textual analysis and with reference to relevant scholarship, this chapter considers the impact of audience and institution on representation, the interplay between genre conventions and the presentation of the archetype as well as a considering how both offer different treatment of intersectional androids.

Despite the existence of a variety of approaches to the understanding of behavioral and managerial ethics in organizations and business relationships generally, knowledge of organizing systems for fidelity remains in its infancy. We use halakha, or Jewish law, as a model, together with the literature in sociology, economic anthropology, and economics on what it termed “middleman minorities,” and on what we have termed the Landa Problem, the problem of identifying a trustworthy economic exchange partner, to explore this issue.

The article contrasts the differing explanations for trustworthy behavior in these literatures, focusing on the widely referenced work of Avner Greif on the Jewish Maghribi merchants of the eleventh century. We challenge Greif’s argument that cheating among the Magribi was managed chiefly via a rational, self-interested reputational sanctioning system in the closed group of traders. Greif largely ignores a more compelling if potentially complementary argument, which we believe also finds support among the documentary evidence of the Cairo Geniza as reported by Goitein: that the behavior of the Maghribi reflected their deep beliefs and commitment to Jewish law, halakha.

Applying insights from this analysis, we present an explicit theory of heroic marginality, the production of extreme precautionary behaviors to ensure service to the principal.

Generalizing from the case of halakha, the article proposes the construct of a deep code, identifying five defining characteristics of such a code, and suggests that deep codes may act as facilitators of compliance. We also offer speculation on design features employing deep codes that may increase the likelihood of production of behaviors consistent with terminal values of the community.

States that the major reasons for difficulties in cross‐cultural communication stem from the fact that actors from different cultures have different understandings regarding the interaction process and different styles of dialogue. Suggests that better understanding of communication within other cultures is the key to success. Uses past literature to suggest a number of cultural variability constructs concerning preferred interaction behaviours and the common themes they share. Presents three case studies to illustrate this.