Corporate CEOs are headline news. Stock prices rise and fall at word of their hiring and firing. Business media debate their merits and defects as if individual leaders determined the health of the ...economy. Yet we know surprisingly little about how CEOs are selected and dismissed or about their true power. This is the first book to take us into the often secretive world of the CEO selection process. Rakesh Khurana's findings are surprising and disturbing. In recent years, he shows, corporations have increasingly sought CEOs who are above all else charismatic, whose fame and force of personality impress analysts and the business media, but whose experience and abilities are not necessarily right for companies' specific needs. The labor market for CEOs, Khurana concludes, is far less rational than we might think.
Khurana's findings are based on a study of the hiring and firing of CEOs at over 850 of America's largest companies and on extensive interviews with CEOs, corporate board members, and consultants at executive search firms. Written with exceptional clarity and verve, the book explains the basic mechanics of the selection process and how hiring priorities have changed with the rise of shareholder activism. Khurana argues that the market for CEOs, which we often assume runs on cool calculation and the impersonal forces of supply and demand, is culturally determined and too frequently inefficient. Its emphasis on charisma artificially limits the number of candidates considered, giving them extraordinary leverage to demand high salaries and power. It also raises expectations and increases the chance that a CEO will be fired for failing to meet shareholders' hopes. The result is corporate instability and too little attention to long-term strategy.
The book is a major contribution to our understanding of corporate culture and the nature of markets and leadership in general.
The article is concerned with a study of the process of search for and recruit the organization’s staff, taking into account two key directions: analysis of channels of search and recruitment of ...staff; evaluation of the efficiency of the technologies used in searching for and recruiting staff. The mentioned analysis was carried out on the example of a company that specializes in wholesale trade (distribution) of food and non-food product groups. The study identified a number of problems: high fluctuation of personnel; lack of well-established search process standards; significant percentage of temporary deviations in the search and recruitment process; high relevance of the estimates of search channels by the department professionals in the context of presence of shortcomings; the resulting estimates of search channels by professionals differ from actual estimates; sub-optimal choice of staff search technologies; negative and non-progressive dynamics in some indicators of the efficiency of the search process; lack of close human resources department cooperation with educational institutions in the search for young prospective professionals; problems in optimizing search channels in the selection process. The identified problems were diagnosed with the help of the authors’ own instrumentarium of sociological survey of professionals in the search for and recruitment of the staff of the researched enterprise, as well as analysis of performance indicators. The pros and cons of various technologies for finding and recruiting candidates are identified and ranked; the frequency of use of these technologies in the researched enterprise is determined; the time expenditures at different stages of implementation of core technologies are analyzed; a comparative characterization of the time spent on implementing both internal and external ways of finding and recruiting staff is made; the most effective channels for finding candidates are defined. A list of indicators for assessing the search and recruitment process is been formulated and the indicators that have negative dynamics are identified.
This article explores the social significance of violence as potentiality and performance among former headhunters engaged in ritual killings. Taking its outset in an ethnographic study of violence ...and masculinity among the Philippine people known as the Bugkalot, we explore how violence as 'performed violent potentiality' plays a critical role in relation to Bugkalot men's construction of hegemonic masculinity and the sustaining of complex egalitarian relations. The Bugkalot have a notoriously violent history; until the late 1970s more than half of the adult men engaged in ritual killings. While most Bugkalot men have today abandoned headhunting, the potentials for violence and dominance, which the act of headhunting sought to elicit, remains a critical aspect of masculinity. We propose that a focus on the social significance of performative violent potentiality among Bugkalot men can provide general insights that can also be used in other contexts to understand how men construct hegemonic masculinity by strategically adopting the interspace of civility and violence.
This essay examines how anthropogeographical conceptions become materialized in place names inscribed on human remains. With respect to a type of headhunting artefact designated in museum ...anthropology as 'stuffed human heads', I consider processes of inscription and theorizing accompanying the circulation of stuffed heads between New Guinea and Cambridge. I trace the micro-history of one inscription - 'Strickland R' - across interrelated labels, articles, texts, notes, and the head itself, in order to reveal intellectual constructs simultaneously abbreviated and materialized in the human remains. In Papua, stuffed heads were understood as evidence of the geography of headhunting and cannibal customs. In Cambridge, they were framed within anthropologist A. C. Haddon's studies on the anthropogeography of New Guinea. By abbreviating colonial and scientific constructs, the words 'Strickland R.' enabled the material 'stuffed head' into which they fused to become inextricably linked to the theory and display of 'culture areas' in the museum.
We report on archaeological excavations undertaken at Kumukumu 1 atop the dense rainforest-clad Aird Hills of the Kikori river delta islands, south coast of Papua New Guinea. Results indicate ...exploitation of the nearby environment, including the gathering of some 200 million shellfish from riverine habitats at the base of the hill some 600 years ago, and deposition of shell remains onto hilltop middens. We ask what the implications of such a site in a defensive location on the upper, steep hillslope of Kumukumu hill are for regional occupation and dynamics. We conclude that the hinterland-marine fringe islands of the river deltas that include the site of Kumukumu 1 were especially sensitive to heightened cross-cultural influences and inter-group raids and competition, leading to accelerated processes of centralisation and aggrandisement among some groups, and the subjugation, fragmentation and dispersal of less powerful neighbouring groups.
In 1988, the disarticulated human remains of forty Roman individuals were discovered at 52-63 London Wall, London. Examination of the sample using techniques employed by forensic anthropology and ...entomology found that some of the material had been deposited in open waterlogged pits. The majority of the sample were adult males who had evidence for multiple peri-mortem blunt- and sharp- force injuries; many also had healed injuries, suggesting that violence was a common feature of their life. Despite the fact that this material was recovered from an industrial area in the upper Walbrook Valley of London, the evidence for trauma, their context and associated archaeological and environmental evidence reveals that these deposits are markedly different from other published examples of human remains from the Walbrook stream and River Thames, and may represent the remains of headhunting by the Roman army and/or defeated gladiators.
•Probable evidence for gladiatorial combat in Roman Britain.•Probable evidence for headhunting in Roman Britain.•The sample has a catastrophic mortality profile- young adult males.•The majority have evidence for multiple peri-mortem sharp and blunt force injuries.•Ritual deposition of human remains in Roman London.
This paper explores the origins of the horse games (hippika gymnasia) of the Roman imperial army. It argues that the equestrian displays lengthily described by Arrian in his tactical treatise were ...borrowed from the Gallic and Iberian Celts, who formed the most important part of the Roman auxiliary cavalry at the end of the Republic and at the beginning of the Principate. Mask helmets were worn by the most renowned horsemen during these games. The first examples of such masks in Roman context can be found on triumphal representations celebrating victories over Celtiberian or Gallic foes. The evidence suggests that they were initially made of organic materials, like the over-modelled or plastered skull masks that could adorn public monuments in pre-Roman Gaul. From the end of the 1st century BC onward, they began to adopt the form of full metal helmets and were progressively adapted to the Greco-Roman taste. The idea that the hippika gymnasia were borrowed from the Roman equestrian parade called the lusus Troiae and that mask helmets were part of an old Italic tradition should, therefore, be abandoned.
•Tudulgal use of reef islands depended on risk buffering strategies.•Tudulgal socio-political development aimed to obviate economic vulnerability.•Tudulgal socio-political dominance centred on ...control of trade and headhunting cults.•Socio-cultural complexity is possible in coastal contexts poor in terrestrial resources.
Survival for the ethnographically-known Kulkalgal of the drought-prone reef islands of central Torres Strait focused on high mobility, translocation, food storage, and importation of cultivated plant foods. These buffering mechanisms were underpinned by a dynamic and flexible web of social alliances and exchange relationships spread across 700km of seaspace. The small and resource-poor island of Tudu (inhabited by the Tudulgal, a subgroup of the Kulkalgal) was a central place within the regional archipelago polity. It is hypothesised that the Tudulgal strategically increased resource self-sufficiency and orchestrated socio-political dominance to help obviate economic vulnerability. These ethnographic patterns provide the basis for developing archaeological hypotheses on socio-political ascendancy of the Tudulgal, focusing on chronological insights into material dimensions of increasing self-sufficiency (e.g., intensified use of local marine foods, horticultural garden produce, and clam shell technology), and increasing regional domination of exchange (e.g., intensified importation of exotics), canoe trade (e.g., intensified production of shell valuables), and headhunting cults and warfare (e.g., intensified use of skull shrines). While cultural complexity is usually associated with resource-rich coastal contexts and hierarchical societies, the Tudulgal demonstrate that regional polity development and associated socio-political and socio-economic complexity can occur in response to limited availability of critical terrestrial food and water resources in societies that are largely heterarchical and egalitarian.
There is a longstanding interest in the 'production of markets' and the various political- and cultural-economic strategies associated with demand-creation. This article shows how the professions, ...because of their central role in contemporary economy, provide an example of both the political- and cultural-economic production of international markets. Drawing on interviews conducted in the European executive search industry, we examine how firms and professional associations have combined cultural- and political-economic strategies of professionalization to legitimize the internationalization of the industry. We show how the success of these approaches is determined by the degree to which geographical variability exists in the use of cultural-and political-economic market production and legitimation tactics. We suggest that there is scope to bring work on the sociology of the professions into closer dialogue with work on the internationalization of professional services in ways that can be beneficial for wider debates about the 'production of markets'.
Headhunting Among Extremist Organizations Windisch, Steven; Logan, Michael K.; Ligon, Gina Scott
Perspectives on terrorism (Lowell),
2018, Volume:
12, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Open access
In recent years, terrorism scholars have proposed that more established and popular extremist organizations make pragmatic assessments of their human capital needs and modify operating standards to ...acquire members with advanced training and expertise such as medical, religious, or military backgrounds that may benefit extremist activities. To examine these claims, we rely on data pertaining to 105 extremist organizations gathered throughout the Leadership of the Extreme and Dangerous for Innovative Results (LEADIR) project. The results provide empirical support for these propositions by suggesting that older and more publicly supported extremist organizations contain membership populations that possess expertise, and these organizations also become increasingly diverse across demographic characteristics of members. We conclude with suggestions for future research that extend the study of extremist recruitment and provide recommendations for practitioners in terms of addressing terrorism prevention initiatives.
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