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This article illustrates a number of ways in which competency or capability-based management development (CBMD) can work simultaneously both for and against the interests of organizational agents. It does so by demonstrating how CBMD might usefully be understood as both ideological and quasi-religiously faith-based. These features are shown to provide opportunities for resistance and micro-emancipation alongside those for repression and subordination. The study employs a combination of ‘middle range’ discourse analytical techniques. In the first instance, critical discourse analysis is applied to company documentation to distil the ideological stance of an international organization’s CBMD programme. Critical discursive psychology is then used to assess the ways in which employees’ evaluative accounts both support and resist such stance. The analysis builds upon previous insights from Foucauldian studies of CBMD by foregrounding processes of discursive agency. It also renders more visible and discussible the assumptions and dilemmas that CBMD might imply.

This article introduces the first of two special issues on philosophical approaches to leadership ethics. In it, we show some of the ways that philosophy contributes to the study of leadership and leadership ethics. We begin with an overview of how philosophers have treated some of the ethical aspects and challenges of leadership. These include discussions of self-interest, the problem of dirty hands, responsibility, moral luck, power, gender and diversity, and spirituality. The articles in this issue draw on philosophy to explore a variety of ethical questions related to leadership and the relationships that leaders have with followers and others.

While many studies of knowledge exchange have been undertaken in private and service organizations, government and R&D enterprises, few have studied scientific interorganizational collaborations. Furthermore, in the literature on international networks there has been a tendency to assume that knowledge exchange will be inevitably enhanced by global dispersion. Two linked dynamics deserving further study are the role of geographic proximity and the role of information and communication technologies in facilitating knowledge flow across international networks. Studies of intra-and inter-firm knowledge transfer, managerial work values and cultural norms all point to China as being a fascinating counterpoint for the way knowledge exchange might occur in Europe. So in this study of the ATLAS collaboration, a 'big science' global network of 3,500 physicists, we explore the perceptions of two subgroups: UK physicists working in Europe and Chinese scientists based in Beijing and HeFei. Findings from 24 interviews and non-participant observation reveal that face-to-face working at European Organization for Nuclear Research (Geneva) is not without its difficulties, but for a variety of sociocultural reasons, it is primarily the Chinese scientists who perceive themselves to be inhibited from full participation in effective knowledge exchange.