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The COVID-19 pandemic tested leadership in chaos and complexity and resulted in many lessons learnt in the process. One such opportunity was the cruise ship Ruby Princess “mishap” in Australia which resulted in the failure to quarantine the virus onboard the cruise ship thus allowing transmission into the Australian community. The purpose of this paper is to use the Ruby Princess as a case study and apply a systems thinking analysis to it.

Whilst many inquiries and commissions have documented the failings of the agencies or “systems” involved in the Ruby Princess, the Ruby Princess case study provides a suitable example for the application of systems thinking analysis. The paper proceeds by identifying the various agencies either directly or indirectly involved in the Ruby Princess disaster and groups them based on the system they represented (state; federal; international or cruise-based system). These systems were mapped providing a visual representation of the complexity of the landscape in which police and public safety agencies had to operate in to respond to the Ruby Princess.

Over 30 agencies were found to be either directly or indirectly involved in the Ruby Princess. Following the application of systems thinking analysis, it was clear that the various systems were operating in silos, thus failing to fully exploit the interconnections between and within all the systems which ultimately resulted in the Ruby Princess.

The results of this analysis have informed a series of recommendations for leadership development within similar contexts, including embracing a systems thinking approach.

Using the Ruby Princess as a case study, this article presents a novel approach through the application of systems thinking and how it can enhance a leader’s ability to navigate the current “new normal” operating environment. It highlights the importance of public safety leadership moving away from an insular systems focus towards more of a public sector partnership which is an imperative for police and other public safety agencies to navigate through times of complexity and chaos.

Directors help determine the strategic direction of a corporation and are responsible for ensuring the institution has a good system of internal control. Banking institutions without a strategic direction emphasizing sound lending practices that promote the long-run financial health and viability of the institution will be sued more frequently than peer institutions. Institutions that do not have a good system of internal control will also be sued more frequently. Hence, legal expense is a bank corporate governance measure. We compare the performance of bank legal expense and a widely cited corporate governance index in a regression framework to determine which better predicts bank performance. The regressions indicate legal expense is a much better predictor, hence a better measure of bank corporate governance. Regulators should require legal expense reporting and rank institutions by the ratio of legal expense to assets to help identify institutions with weak governance. Seven case studies illustrate the role of legal expense in corporate governance.

Robert Franklin Hoxie was of the first generation of University of Chicago economists, a figure of significance in his own time. He is often heralded as the first of the Institutional economists and the impetus behind the field of labor economics. Yet today, his contributions appear as mere footnotes in the history of economic thought, when mentioned at all, despite the fact that in his professional and popular writings he tackled some of the most pressing problems of the day. The topics upon which he focused included bimetallism, price theory, methodology, the economics profession, socialism, syndicalism, scientific management, and trade unionism, the last being the field with which he is most closely associated. His work attracted the notice of some of the most famous economists of his time, including Frank Fetter, J. Laurence Laughlin, Thorstein Veblen, and John R. Commons. For all the promise, his suicide at the age of 48 ended what could have been a storied career. This paper is an attempt to resurrect Hoxie through a review of his life and work, placing him within the social and intellectual milieux of his time.

This chapter reviews the literature to contextualize the intervention in the post–cold war era characterized by the momentum of globalization dominated by informal actors beside the legal authority of the state. It indicates how these actors deviate the primary purpose of the humanitarian intervention and create an ungovernable environment of the state particularly when interventions are operated in countries endowed with natural resources. The case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) serves as a model to ascertain such phenomenon in which actors such as states involved in intervention come in collusion with shadow elites, lobbyists and multinational companies to establish clandestine networks of illegal exploitation and smuggling of natural resources. The chapter winds up by suggesting the redefinition of policies of interventions to keep humanitarian intervention in its primary mission while holding actors involved in illegal and smuggling of natural resources accountable.

How can public institutions achieve their goals and best nurture virtue in their members? In this chapter, I seek answers to these questions in a perhaps unlikely place: the television series The Wire. Known for its unflinching realism, the crime drama narrates the intertwined lives of police, criminals, politicians, teachers and journalists in drug-plagued urban Baltimore. Yet even in the thick and quick of institutional dysfunction the drama portrays, human virtue springs forth and institutions (despite themselves) sometimes perform their roles. I begin this exploration of The Wire by drawing on Montesquieu and other political theorists to evaluate the problems facing state institutions – problems of diversity and principle as much as selfishness and power-mongering. I then turn to the prospects for virtue within modern institutions, developing and applying the system of Alasdair MacIntyre and paying particular attention to the role of narrative in cementing and integrating virtue.

The common view of many regulators and practitioners is that the minimum risk maturity gap is equal to zero. However, because of the interest sensitivity of such non‐gap items as the average spread between asset and liability rates, lending activity, fee income and prepayments, the minimum risk gap could be significantly different from zero. We formulate and test a model for a sample of four hundred and twenty six thrift institutions. The results strongly suggest that the minimum risk maturity gap is positive for the average firm in the sample and that there is substantial cross‐sectional variability in the ratio of the minimum risk gap to assets. This suggests that attempts to regulate interest rate risk using a uniform gap as a benchmark are misdirected. Finally, we provide some evidence that there is, in fact, a positive cross‐sectional relationship between measured maturity gap positions and our estimates of the minimum risk maturity gap.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of online banking intensity on the financial performance of community banks.

This study estimates online banking intensity and bank performance indices using a combination of primary and secondary data. Online banking intensity is specified as a latent construct and estimated using web feature data collected from bank websites. An empirical profit function of a nonstandard Fourier flexible form is estimated using bank's financial data to derive a theoretically consistent performance measure. The actual impact of online banking on performance is measured by regressing the profit efficiency index against a number of correlates including online banking intensity measure.

Study results indicate that the increasing use of internet as an additional channel of marketing banking services has significantly improved the financial performance of community banks.

These results show that online banking improves the financial performance and should encourage community banks to adopt new information technologies and offer targeted online services.

This paper is the first of its kind that applies a structural equation modeling framework to develop a comprehensive online banking intensity measure, which accounts for a wide array of products and services offered online by a bank, and utilizes the estimated index in measuring the impact of internet banking intensity on bank performance.

History involves the study of people and the times and places in which they lived. Traditional instruction often is dominated by an emphasis on decontextualized facts, dates, and events. Too often, the study of history becomes lifeless and monotonous because it artificially separates people from the larger context of times and places in which they lived. Teachers can build meaningful contexts in which students experience history by using cultural artifacts as springboards into the study of people who lived in the past. Integrating the use of cultural artifacts, such as photographs, films, and music, allows teachers to create new entry points, new ways for students to connect to, and take ownership of, their learning. This article presents a rationale for including cultural artifacts in the study of history, which can promote a better understanding of the nature of history, personalize history, encourage student inquiry, and endorse the notion that history represents multiple perspectives. Cultural artifacts can be used to enrich instruction of any historical period, at any grade level. In this article, we provide examples of artifacts that can be used in a study of the Dust Bowl for the upper elementary and middle grades.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the multinational oil companies’ (MOCs) corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in Nigeria. Its special focus is to investigate the impact of the global memorandum of understanding (GMoU) on improving gender responsiveness of the cassava value chain (CVC) in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.

This paper adopts a survey research technique, aimed at gathering information from a representative sample of the population, as it is essentially cross-sectional, describing and interpreting the current situation. A total of 780 rural women respondents were sampled across the Niger Delta region.

The results from the use of a combined logit model and propensity score matching indicate that CSR of the MOCs using the GMoU model has recorded little but significant success in enhancing rural women’s participation in the CVC in the Niger Delta.

This implies that if CSR interventions are not tailored to enhance opportunities for women, they may contribute towards reducing the participation of women in economic, political and social development and, by extension, damping efforts of reducing poverty and achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs) in the Niger Delta.

This suggests that MOCs’ CSR interventions in the CVC should consider gender relations to benefit men and women and alleviate household poverty.

This research contributes to the inequality debate in the agrifood value chain and inclusive growth literature from the CSR perspective in developing countries and the rationale for demand for social projects by host communities. It concludes that businesses has an obligation to help in solving problems of public concern.