Revisiting the Meaning of Leadership

During the past fifty years, organizational scholarship on leadership has shifted from a focus on the significance of leadership for meaning-making to the significance of leadership for economic performance. This shift has been problematic for two reasons. First, it has given rise to numerous conceptual difficulties that now plague the study of leadership. Second, there is now comparatively little attention to the question of how individuals find meaning in the economic sphere even though this question should arguably be one of the most important questions for organizational scholarship. This chapter discusses several reasons for the shift, arguing that one of the most important has been the lack of a clear definition and operationalization of meaningful economic activity. As a first step to redressing this shift, we offer a definition and operationalization of meaningful action, and we propose a typology of executive behaviors as a foundation for a systematic exploration of the meaning-making capacity of leaders. We conclude with a discussion of the relationship between the capacity of leaders to infuse meaning and the capacity of leaders to impact on performance

Leading Amidst Competing Technical and Institutional Demands: Revisiting Selznick’s Conception of Leadership

This chapter explores how Selznick’s approach to leadership can inform contemporary organizational theory and research. Drawing on Selznick’s writing in Leadership in Administration and related works, we characterize organizations as simultaneously technical entities pursuing economic goals and value-laden entities pursuing non-economic goals arising from their members and their role in society. These two aspects of organizations are deeply intertwined and in continual tension with one another, and the essential task of leadership is to uphold both – protecting and promoting values while also meeting technical imperatives. To do so, leaders establish a common purpose that includes values and ideals not just technical imperatives, they create structures and practices that embody this purpose, and they make organizational decisions and personal behavioral choices that are consistent with this purpose. We consider each task of leadership in turn, showing how Selznick’s ideas enrich and extend contemporary research on competing institutional logics, organizational design, culture, and identity, leadership, and meaningful work

From social control to financial economics:The linked ecologies of economics and business in twentieth century America

This article draws on historical material to examine the co-evolution of economic science and business education over the course of the twentieth century, showing that fields evolve not only through internal struggles but also through struggles taking place in adjacent fields. More specifically, we argue that the scientific strategies of business schools played an essential—if largely invisible and poorly understood—role in major transformations in the organization and substantive direction of social-scientific knowledge, and specifically economic knowledge, in twentieth century America. We use the Wharton School as an illustration of the earliest trends and dilemmas (ca. 1900–1930), when business schools found themselves caught between their business connections and their striving for moral legitimacy in higher education. Next, we look at the creation of the Carnegie Tech Graduate School of Industrial Administration after World War II. This episode illustrates the increasingly successful claims of social scientists, backed by philanthropic foundations, on business education and the growing appeal of “scientific” approaches to decision-making and management. Finally, we argue that the rise of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago from the 1960s onwards (and its closely related cousin at the University of Rochester) marks the decisive ascendancy of economics, and particularly financial economics, in business education over the other behavioral disciplines. We document the key role of these institutions in diffusing “Chicago-style” economic approaches—offering support for deregulatory policies and popularizing narrowly financial understandings of the firm—that sociologists have described as characteristic of the modern neo liberal regime

The Social Trajectory of a Finance Professor and the Common Sense of Capital

This paper traces the career of Michael Jensen, a Chicago finance PhD turned Harvard Business School professor to reveal the intellectual and social conditions that enabled the emergence and institutionalization of what we call the “neoliberal common sense of capital,” what others have called the “shareholder value” view of the American firm. Jensen's work was embraced by a generation of corporate raiders aggressively advancing new financial practices and discourses. His contribution, commonly understood as “agency theory,” was intertwined with the transformations in corporate management and governance of the last decades of the twentieth century—from the junk bond market in the 1980s to the exponential growth of CEO pay in the 1990s to the shareholder value management strategies of the 2000s. While debates about the spread of neoliberal ideas and governance tools have largely centered on the transformations of the state and international institutions or the role of actively organized intellectual networks, this essay emphasizes the importance of identifying specific carriers of particular transformations within the space of American “business discourse.

Genetic diversity of Cryptosporidium isolates from patients in North India

SummaryBackgroundCryptosporidiosis is a significant cause of diarrheal illness in both immunocompetent and immunocompromised populations. Cryptosporidium species infect a wide range of hosts including humans. Different species are morphologically indistinguishable, and molecular techniques have become the key to detection and source tracking. The present study was designed to study the genetic diversity of human Cryptosporidium isolates in North India.MethodsCryptosporidium oocysts were detected in stool samples by special staining of fecal smears. DNA was extracted with a Qiagen kit and all samples were genotyped by small subunit ribosomal ribonucleic acid (SSU rRNA)-based nested PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) tool using enzymes SspI and VspI. Cryptosporidium hominis and Cryptosporidium parvum isolates were subtyped by sequence analysis of the nested PCR amplified gp60 gene.ResultsFifty-three fecal samples were found to be positive for Cryptosporidium oocysts. RFLP analysis revealed 39 isolates as C. hominis and 13 isolates of C. parvum; one sample failed amplification. gp60-based sequencing of C. hominis and C. parvum divided them into eight subgenotype families and 17 subtypes. gp60-based sequencing identified seven cases of mixed infection with C. hominis and C. parvum/Cryptosporidium meleagridis and showed the presence of C. meleagridis in six HIV-positive patients that were indistinguishable in RFLP.ConclusionsCryptosporidium isolates obtained in the present study from patients in North India belonged to three species, eight subgenotype families, and 17 subtypes. The existence of many Cryptosporidium species, subgenotypes, and subtypes along with mixed infections reveals the complexity of Cryptosporidium transmission; this heterogeneity indicates stable cryptosporidiosis transmission in North India. The results may have further implications in understanding the epidemiology and control of this infection

PREDICTION OF ANTI-PARKINSON POTENTIAL OF PHYTOCONSTITUENTS USING PREDICTION OF ACTIVITY SPECTRA OF SUBSTANCES SOFTWARE

Objective: Neurodegenerative disorders are group of diseased conditions in which there is loss of neuron cells occur. The main objective of this study to find/search out the phytochemical with the help of prediction of activity spectra of substances (PASSs), those show maximum activity over the selected targets of the Parkinson's disease (PD).Methods: PASSs is a valuable software which is used in this study, to predict the anti-Parkinson activity of different compounds. Canonical simplified molecular-input line-entry system is used for the prediction of anti-Parkinson activity which is obtained from PubChem website. The predicted activity also compared with marketed compound like levodopa.Results: From the study, it was found that resveratrol was the only compound which has the activity on all the selected targets. On the other hand, stemazole and celastrol were found to have the least active compounds as both have the activity only on a single target.Conclusion: In this research work, we tried to compile the information regarding the PASS predicted anti-Parkinson activity of some important phytoconstituents. We found that resveratrol can be a target for further investigation in the development of drug therapy for PD