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This paper reviews the latest learning and development books across the globe and pinpoints practical implications.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Driven to Lead Good, Bad and Misguided Leadership is the author's effort to create a unified and accurate model of human behavior and leadership. Paul Lawrence has spent a lifetime researching and writing across the social science fields while teaching at Harvard Business School. In his previous book, Driven, he introduced the concept of four drives that explain human behavior. This book applies that concept to the practice of leadership. Dr Lawrence calls his theory The Renewed Darwinian Theory of Human Behavior and Leadership, finding deep insights from Charles Darwin's second book, The Descent of Man. In 300 pages, this book shows how disciplines from cultural anthropology and psychology to biology and economics can come together to explain human evolution, the current state of the world, and the way forward.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to digest format.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for theoretical integration as a major step in consolidation of the vast leadership literature. It is an attempt to lay out a basic canvas that could be further used for building an integrated theory of leadership.

The concept matrix framework (Webster and Watson, 2002) has been used for analytical abstraction to organize the published research on leadership and distill certain commonalities. The paper finally proposes certain pivots for theoretical integration of the leadership literature.

A thorough analysis of the leadership literature and the identification of commonalities within the various theories help the authors to identify the change and collective filter, outcomes of leadership, organizational outcomes, leadership role, sources of leadership, processes within the larger leadership process and the context as the pivots for building an integrated theory of leadership.

While the paper is not a detailed literature review and lacks predictive power, it is a synthesis of the published literature. The paper proposes a descriptive model meant to provide a sound foundation for an integrated theory of leadership.

The paper provides a framework to reduce the complexity and ambiguity of leadership research literature and could be utilized as a starting platform for an integrated theory of leadership. It is hoped that this shall also provide leaders and leadership training providers with a more holistic approach for leadership assessment and development.

Based on a survey of literature, the explanation of the leadership process, suggestions for evaluation of quality of leadership and pivots for theoretical integration are the main contributions.

Why has responsible management been so difficult and why is the chorus of stakeholders demanding responsibility getting louder? We argue that management has been framed within the structural confines of corporate governance. Corporate governance in turn has been developed within the frame of agency theory (Blair, 1995; Eisenhardt, 1989). Agency theory in turn is based on ontological assumptions that do not provide for responsible actions on behalf of management (Jensen, 2001; Jensen & Meckling, 1976; Jensen & Meckling, 1994). As such, we argue that managers need to be aware of the paradigmatic frame of the dominant economistic ontology and learn to transcend it in order to become truly response-able.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

This paper aims to examine the role of individual action in addressing challenges of sustainability, and to help marketing scholars and practitioners better understand what motivates sustainable living.

Semistructured interviews with 35 individuals self-identifying as sustainable shed light on motivations and identity expression in sustainable living. Four Drive Theory, and Personal and Social Identity Theory (operationalized through the Dynamic Model of Identity Development), provide this study’s guiding theoretical framework. Data analysis was informed by the Gioia methodology.

Individuals differently express their personal and social identities through sustainable living, and are differently motivated to live sustainably. Those expressing personal identity salience through sustainable living draw on a broader set of motivations than those expressing social identity salience. This results in varying levels of commitment to sustainable living, with differences also found in individuals’ personal satisfaction derived from their sustainable living efforts. Based on these findings, a novel typology of sustainable individuals is developed.

This study is limited by its focus on one geographic area and relatively small sample size. A key implication is the need to consider both personal and social identity when studying behavior in other marketing contexts.

The research provides important insights for marketing practitioners, policymakers and others seeking to better categorize sustainable individuals and target marketing messages to encourage sustainable behaviors.

This paper contributes to marketing scholarship by providing new insights on the role of identity and motivations in sustainable living. It introduces a novel typology of sustainable individuals, founded on differences in identity expression and motivational drives, which are also associated with the range of sustainable behaviors people engage with and how individuals make sense of these behaviors.

The authors examined the traditional leadership practiced by the Old Order Amish located in the Holmes and Wayne counties of America. Despite popular stereotypes, this community is remarkably innovative and resilient. Amish leadership aligns with the central tenets of humanistic leadership and provides a rich illustration of how such a leadership paradigm can foster a vibrant, inclusive and sustainable community. Unlike current leadership models that focus on instrumental values like wealth, profit and growth, Amish leadership is concerned with faith, community and living a simple life with purpose and dignity.

The primary data required for this paper were collected by the lead author during a six-month ethnographic study on several Amish communities located in Ohio. The authors also consulted a large set of archival data, including think tank reports, census data, biographies, magazine features and academic publications, which helped in placing the primary data in perspective and reminding of the particularities of the contexts from which the primary data were collected. For the data analysis, the authors used a thematic analysis approach to allow the salient themes of Amish humanistic leadership emerge from the data.

A total offour themes emerged from this study: (1) leadership as local identity and practice; (2) leaders without benefits, chosen by the lot; (3) leaders present matters, followers discuss and decide; (4) community welfare as the yardstick for evaluation. These themes highlighted some of the key aspects of humanistic leadership eclipsed in the mainstream theories of management and leadership. They showed how the Amish respond to the encroachment of technology, which holds critical clues for how humanistic leaders can place the needs of their people before the demands of their shareholders. By examining Amish leadership in detail, this study demonstrated the potential of humanistic leadership for creating a strong and sustainable community while also contributing to the empirical foundation of humanistic management.

Given the closed nature of the Amish, only few academic studies exist, which examined their leadership style. Furthermore, the traditional and conservative nature of the Amish community has prevented critics from investigating their leadership as a model for revitalizing other communities.

This essay introduces the first translation of Schumpeter’s article Entrepreneur, originally published in 1928. We describe the background of Entrepreneur and use new archival sources to situate the article in time. Entrepreneur marks a transition of Schumpeter’s conception of entrepreneurship that took place between 1911 and 1926. Entrepreneur also contains Schumpeter’s most profound vision on economic selection, a vision that Schumpeter never elaborated further. We consider the most important implications of the new material in Entrepreneur and the reasons for the apparent shift in Schumpeter’s thought.

Purpose – This chapter focuses on the role evolution has played in our development of politics and public policy and reviews the theoretical approaches and studies of the last decade that address biopolitics and evolution, such as the “gene-culture co-evolution theory.”

Design/methodology/approach – In this chapter some of these theoretical developments will be reviewed, including what has been called the “Synergism Hypothesis,” with particular emphasis on what is relevant for understanding the role of politics and public policy in the evolutionary process.

Findings – A new, multileveled paradigm has emerged in evolutionary biology during the past decade, one which emphasizes the role of cooperative phenomena in the evolution of complexity over time, including the evolution of socially organized species such as humankind. I refer to it as “Holistic Darwinism.”

Practical implications – This study develops an understanding of the complicated relationship between human biology and the role of evolution in shaping politics and public policy.

Originality/value – This study addresses several existing biopolitical concepts and presents new explanations and terminology for its understanding.