This article illustrates the extent to which adult development models can be useful tools for contributing to a more adequate, developmentally informed understanding of political leadership. In a case study of Russian president Vladimir Putin, we analyze evidence about important elements of the president's political identity and worldview, as well as his goals and behavioral strategies that result from them. We draw on extensive published materials, including biographies, interviews, speeches, and public discourse, which are analyzed through the lens of neo-Piagetian theories of adult development, in particular, ego development. On this basis, we identify a leadership profile revolving around a self-protective center of gravity and discuss this finding in methodological regard.
The paper focuses on corruption and attitudes towards corruption in organizations. It proposes an interdisciplinary framework for reassessing them. It is argued that an integrative theoretical and analytical framework based on the Model of Hierarchical Complexity (mhc) can provide new insights on corruption. Furthermore the proposed framework offers new theoretical horizons for understanding and evaluating public and scientific discourses on corruption. This approach compensates for frequent shortcomings and disciplinary reductionisms in large parts of the social science literature on corruption. It can thus offer a substantially new outlook on the field of behavioral ethics in organizations based on a meta-systematic theory integration.
This article expands on Wagner and Fein's (2016) analysis of Vladimir Putin's political leadership viewed through a developmental lens. On the basis of a qualitative analysis of selected published materials on Putin's role in Russian politics from 2000 to 2015, 2 case studies take a closer look at important domestic (Case Study 1) and international (Case Study 2) issues. First, these case studies analyze in what sense the way in which Putin has dealt with important political challenges during his past 15-plus years in office can be interpreted through a developmental lens. Second, we discuss some of the major implications of a developmentally informed interpretation of Putin's leadership for Russian and Western politics.
This article provides a brief overview of literature on corruption from different disciplinary perspectives. After a short look at contributions from history, sociology, anthropology and psychology, the paper primarily reviews articles on corruption in organizations from fields like organizational behavior (ob), behavioral ethics (be) and management studies (ms). Despite frequent calls for a more interdisciplinary or even a “holistic view" of corruption in this literature, we claim that the literature reviewed here often fails to offer an adequate, i.e. multi-faceted and integrative understanding of the phenomenon, and that this is due to disciplinary constraints and traditions often inducing researchers to take less-than-desirably complex views onto the phenomenon. Moreover, we argue that many articles on corruption do not reflect, question and/or contextualize their own moral and/or ethical standards and evaluation criteria systematically. This is shown, first, with regard to the degree of reflexivity of the applied analytical terms and concepts in general and with regard to the extent to which value judgments are contextualized in particular. Second, our claim is illustrated by a tendency to underrate or ignore major aspects of the subjective dimension of behavior, namely actors' empirical action logics.
Corruption is one of the typical problems facing societies that aim at making transitions toward modern, Western-type democracies. Even though corruption also exists inside most developed democracies, the scope and quality of corrupt practices, as well as the way they are evaluated and dealt with by politics, justice, and public discourse, differs substantially, depending on the degree of complexity of the dominant political, legal, and economic cultures in the respective country. This article looks at how a developmental perspective can provide deeper insights into the role of patronage, clientelism, and corruption in Russian society. It is based on an earlier in-depth discussion on the relation between adult development and phenomena of corruption (Fein & Weibler, 2014), and draws on the metatheoretical framework for analyzing corruption, discourses on corruption (and anticorruption), and action taken against corruption developed there. By looking at how these phenomena have changed in Russia over the past 150 years, it shows that developmental perspectives provide a considerable surplus value for analyzing and understanding culture and society, as well as the functioning of political institutions. Both can be interpreted in relation to the dominant level of complexity of Russia's political culture as it has changed over time.
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