In Chapter 1, I explain how the book can be read and used in a nonlinear fashion, providing affordances for further exploration, comparable to the way the book approaches the creation and experience of works of art. The chapter proceeds to present a detailed advance organizer in the form of a point-by-point overview of the main messages and ideas of this book, providing a framework for the way the book can be read and used.

Legal risks are a significant part of a firm’s overall risk profile, and is typically guided by calculating the probability of risk and its potential magnitude. Yet this calcuation does not fully capture how risks manifest for organizations. This chapter presents a novel way of evaluating legal risk termed transformative legal risk management. Transformative legal risk management is different from traditional approaches because it incorporates a new layer of understanding legal risk. Using a four-pronged approach to risk management known as VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity). This chapter introduces two of the four VUCA risks: volatility and uncertainty. The chapter defines volatility, identifies sources of legal volatility, and presents responses that legal experts can use in response to volatility risk. The chapter then defines uncertainty, identifies sources of legal uncertainty, and presents responses firms can use to reduce uncertainty risk. The chapter shows how firms applying VUCA can not only minimize harm from legal risks but also elevate legal risk management into a practice that generates a competitive advantage over rivals.

Continuing the exploration of transformative legal risk management, this chapter addresses the remaining two risk dimensions that govern a VUCA environment: complexity and ambiguity. Complexity is an environment that contains numerous interconnected parts, accepts inputs, generates outputs, and develops a capacity to learn and remember. The fourth and final dimension of VUCA is ambiguity. Especially challenging for firms deploying legal knowledge, ambiguity is an environment where causes and effects propelling events forward are largely unknown, the firm does not know whether an organized system will emerge, and little historical precedent exists for determining the most appropriate course of action. The chapter defines complexity and ambiguity, explains how they are applicable to legal risk, and articulates strategies for firms to use their legal knowledge to anticipate and address complex and ambiguous legal problems.

In this chapter I describe how my interests in and commitment to developmental psychology grew in a multidimensional, discontinuous, nonlinear fashion. Prominent early personal, social, and intellectual influences included: coming of age in the 1960s, transitioning from fervent Catholicism to philosophy and science as my guiding stars through college and graduate school. I shape my story around the notion that “half of life is accident, and the other half is what one intentionally makes out of accident.” I began my work by focusing on the nature, causes and consequences of child maltreatment. Pursuing further research, practice, and policy interests, I conducted theory-informed longitudinal studies of the influence of risk factors (especially poverty and violence) on various dimensions of developmental processes and outcomes. More recently, I shifted focus to the design, conduct and analysis of randomized trials of school and/or neighborhood-based, social-emotional learning interventions, in the USA and then in conflict-and-crisis affected countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Creating and supporting collaborations with students, colleagues, and organizations has been critical throughout.

The introduction describes some of the key features and the wide range of actors and activities that characterise the workings of a long-distance bus station in Accra, Ghana’s capital. It then presents two meanings of hustle that capture the station’s workings: as a noun, describing crowded, hectic, and potentially confusing situations; and as a verb, denoting precarious yet venturesome economic activities. Building on the ambivalences evoked by the different uses and perspectives of the term, it situates the significance of this study in relation to scholarly discussions of transport work, the ‘informal economy’, (auto)mobility, infrastructure, and urban social life. It then outlines the diversity of functions and types of Ghanaian bus stations, and concludes with a reflection on methodology, highlighting the value of a single-sited ethnographic approach to urban complexity and trans-local mobility, and an itinerary of the book’s chapters.

Global Leaders in the 21st Century examines the current context of international management and looks at the noteworthy changes in the business and leadership contexts of globalization. A major shift appears to be taking place in the global political economy. The predominant system characterized by global economic agreements, free trade, global supply chains, and multilateral institutions is being challenged by an increase in the primacy of national interests and security. In this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, traditional ways of managing are not entirely adequate, and global leaders need to develop new skills. This chapter introduces the concept of Mindful Global Leadership and its components of context sensitivity, perspective taking, and a process orientation. It also presents a global leadership typology-based task complexity and relationship complexity.

We begin with the theoretical and empirical foundations of happiness economics, in which the aim of economic policy is to maximize self-reported happiness of people in society. We also discuss the economic correlates of self-reported happiness. We outline some of the key insights from the literature on behavioral industrial organization, such as phishing for phools and the effects of limited attention on the pricing decisions of firms. When products have several attributes, we explain how some might be more salient than others. We also explain the effects of limited attention on economic outcomes. We introduce the basics of complexity economics. Here, people use simple rules of thumb and simple adaptive learning models in the presence of true uncertainty. We show that the aggregate systemwide outcomes are complex, characterized by chaotic dynamics, and the formation of emergent phenomena. The observed fluctuations in the system arise endogenously, rather than from stochastic exogenous shocks. We introduce two kinds of learning models – reinforcement learning and beliefs-based learning. Finally, we critically evaluate the literature on competitive double auction experiments.

A short epilogue brings together the themes of the book, inviting us to look at the period not as a ‘Dark’ or ‘Golden Age’ but as a period of great complexity and transformation. As Gregory of Tours himself wrote: many things happened, both good and bad.

In this chapter we consider aspects of phonology for bimodal bilinguals, whose languages span distinct modalities (spoken/signed/written). As for other bilinguals, the primary issues concern the representation of the phonology for each language individually, ways that the phonological representations interact with each other (in grammar and in processing), and the development of the two phonologies, for children developing as simultaneous bilinguals or for learners of a second language in a second modality. Research on these topics has been sparse, and some have hardly been explored at all. Findings so far indicate that despite the modality difference between their two languages, phonological interactions still occur for bimodal bilinguals, providing crucial data for linguistic theories about the locus and mechanisms for such interactions, and important practical implications for language learners.

In the adjacent to Market Studies research stream, the emerging Market System Dynamics (MSD) tradition similarly studies how markets are constituted as complex social systems and how actors and institutions actively shape (and are shaped by) them. This chapter firstly provides an overview of the body of work that has accumulated within this tradition. Secondly, our chapter outlines five theoretical processes that highlight specific aspects of how markets are constituted as from an MSD lens. These processes include the (de)legitimation, the (de)moralization, the (de)politicization, the aestheticization, and the complexification of markets. We conclude this chapter by briefly discussing a set of biases within the MSD tradition (process inflation, enabling lens myopia, presentism, and particularism), and discuss how MSD and Market Studies as distinct research traditions might benefit from greater interaction.