Günter K. Stahl

Mark E. Mendenhall

Milda Žilinskaitė

Rachel Clapp-Smith

The need to ensure principle-driven, legally sound, and ethically acceptable behavior in the global context is not an easy task for leaders. They face the requirement of meeting the needs and expectations of a diverse set of stakeholders. They are increasingly called upon to protect, preserve, and restore the resources of the environment. They are expected to improve human well-being and social equity and recognize and effectively address economic and social issues concerning equality, social justice, and human rights protection. How should leaders in global organizations go about meeting the multiple demands of a complex global stakeholder environment? This book explores the dilemmas, paradoxes, and opportunities that leaders in global organizations of all types confront daily and addresses how managers can and should think about and approach these complex issues in responsible and productive ways. This book will be of interest to students and scholars across business, management and the social sciences more broadly.

Dilemmas, Paradoxes, and Opportunities

Responsible Global Leadership

This dissertation is a comparative study of lives and works of two émigré writers : the Polish Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) and Cuban Virgilio Piñera (1912-1979). The two met in 1946 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they developed a lifelong friendship grounded in intellectual compatibility and fueled by literary collaboration. My study focuses mainly on the body of work that the two authors produced during the twenty- three-year span of time between their initial meeting and the death of Gombrowicz. I argue that the writers shared a strong desire to renovate the world of literature in their home countries, including their host culture, Argentina. This desire in turn allowed them to develop in their writings a unique mode of cultural criticism which sought to build a bridge between the literary worlds of two geographically distant and, at least at first sight, culturally remote regions: Latin America and East-Central Europe. There are five chapters that comprise this dissertation. The introductory chapter conceptualizes the theoretical framework for analyzing Gombrowicz and Piñera's works in relation to their historical and biographical contexts. Chapter One focuses specifically on the year 1947 and the writers' collaboration on six critical texts which target the most prominent Argentine literary and intellectual figures of the time. The subsequent two chapters examine the novels La carne de René by Piñera and Trans-Atlantyk by Gombrowicz, both written in the early 1950s, when the exchange of ideas between the two writers was still at its peak. Finally, the fourth chapter presents the long censured theater plays Los siervos (by Piñera) and Operetta (by Gombrowicz). Regardless of tangible similarities in their storylines as well as conceptual underpinnings - especially, a shared concern with cultural and political nationalism, including the particular case of Peronism in Argentina - neither the two novels nor the theater pieces to my knowledge have yet been addressed in parallel. By engaging with Gombrowicz and Piñera scholarship in English, Spanish, Polish, French and German, I aim to join a body of research that recovers and contextualizes the voices that come from the margins of the Western literary history.

Milda Žilinskaitė

Books

Your next favorite book is out there