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There has been a decades-long debate in the leadership development field about the validity and efficacy of strengths-based assessment. This debate is not about recognizing the value in “a conversation about what’s right with people […] we were tired of living in a world that revolved around fixing our weaknesses”. Most agree that there is value in building on strengths.

The debate is fueled by psychologists, recognized experts in understanding human performance who dismiss Gallup – and other strengths-based leadership firms – who falsely promote the assertion “what’s more, we had discovered that people had several times more potential for growth when they invest energy in developing strengths instead of correcting weaknesses”. This is not true – no matter how aggressively strengths-based firms market this notion.

Strength-based approaches, especially as an exclusive approach, is overtly blind to the critical fact that most people show a mix of strengths and weaknesses – performance drivers and derailers – and the whole mix interacts. So besides missing the intended mark of increasing a professional’s skills in leadership, teamwork and communications, there are significant costs to this approach that vary from missed opportunities to downright dangerous.

Stanford Business School Professor Jeffrey Pfeiffer drives this point home in his book Leadership BS, a bruising critique of the leadership development industry. Pfeiffer correctly states that the leadership development industry is driven more by marketing and sales imperatives than the application of peer-reviewed scientific studies – which a century ago transformed the medical model and led to the successful eradication of many diseases. Unfortunately, the leadership development industry is driven by marketing and sales imperatives instead of good science. In fact, this may only accelerate in the future as many top assessment firms have been bought by public companies – often in the staffing industry – that seek ways to increase their earnings, focused more on shareholder returns than the science of performance.

In his essay, “How the United States Used Competition to Win the Cold War,” Warren E. Norquist argues that Ronald Reagan deliberately “used competition” to undermine the communist regime in the Soviet Union. But what does “competition” mean? The term usually refers to the strategies entrepreneurs and corporations deploy vis‐a‐vis their “competitors” in the market. However, Norquist doesn't provide a clear characterization of how states, in an adversarial context, compete economically with one another. His evidence suggests that the United States — typically a strong proponent of laissez‐faire economics — confronted the Soviet Union economically by deploying a surprising strategy, one congruent with mercantilism.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of the probability of being a teleworker and the extent of earnings differentials between teleworkers and traditional employees.

The analysis is grounded on a theoretical framework depicting endogenous telework assignment and wage variations based on individual bargaining. The empirical strategy allows for non-random telework assignment, generating from individual- and job-specific observed as well as unobserved factors.

Results are based on the Italian labor force survey and uncover a key role of gender, higher education and family composition as determinants of the probability of teleworking. Furthermore, teleworkers enjoy a wage premium ranging between 2.7 and 8 percent.

Accounting for observed individual and job-specific effects, by both standard linear regression and propensity score matching, largely reduces the extent of wage premium emerging from unconditional descriptives; the results of an endogenous switching regression model however suggest that failing to properly care for unobserved factors leads to the underestimation of returns to telework.

I. Introduction to the Study of the Economic Role of Government: Alternative Approaches to Law and Economics

The premise that the U.S. Supreme Court never veers too far off from the dominant national political coalition (Dahl, 1957) has become widely accepted among social scientists today. To fulfill that promise, however, the confirmation process for justices must serve as a plebiscite through which the public can ratify or reject future justices based on their views. Unfortunately, modern confirmation hearings have become an exercise in obfuscation, providing little meaningful dialogue on important issues. Because conservative Republican presidents have made the lion's share of appointments in recent times, social conservatives have most often benefited from a process that has severed the link between Supreme Court nominees and the polity they must serve.

X = multiple interpretations

Scholars increasingly recognize the centrality of legal ideas and language to the political vision that inspires American conservatism. However, relevant studies have been limited to the discursive practices that motivate conservative activism at the grass-root level. Exploration of the legal discourses employed by prominent public officials thus carries significant scholarly potential. For example, this chapter's investigation of President Ronald Reagan reveals that his political vision was suffused with legal discourse. Reagan's legal discourse, moreover, has exerted constitutive effects both on American conservatism and on the form and substance of a great deal of contemporary American public policy.

In 1969, Warren Nutter left the University of Virginia Department of Economics to serve as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Nixon administration. During his time in the Defense Department, Nutter was deeply involved in laying the groundwork for a military coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Although Nutter left the Pentagon several months before the successful 1973 coup, his role in Chile was far more direct than the better-known cases of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Arnold Harberger. This chapter describes Nutter’s role in Chile policymaking in the Nixon administration. It shows how Nutter’s criticisms of Henry Kissinger are grounded in his economics, and compares and contrasts Nutter with other economists who have been connected to Pinochet’s dictatorship.

Most years, several AIB members are elected as AIB Fellows on account of their excellent international business scholarship, and/or past service as AIB President or Executive Secretary. The Fellows are in charge of electing Eminent Scholars as well as the International Executive and International Educator (formerly, Dean) of the Year, who often provide the focus for Plenary Sessions at AIB Conferences. Their history since 1975 covers over half of the span of the AIB and reflects many issues that dominated that period in terms of research themes, progresses and problems, the internationalization of business education and the role of international business in society and around the globe. Like other organizations, the Fellows Group had their ups and downs, successes and failures – and some fun too!