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This paper advances the premise that leadership roles are contingent upon the requirements of evolving organizational contexts. Leadership's substantive and symbolic role aspects are reinterpreted in a conceptual model. Emphasis is given to leadership roles in situations of decline. A transition state is proposed to illustrate the volatile and unstable nature of decline contexts. In a transition state, leaders are predicted to emphasize both their symbolic and substantive roles. During more stable convergent time periods, leaders are predicted to primarily emphasize their symbolic roles while in times of major organizational reorientation, leaders are predicted to primarily emphasize their substantive roles. A conceptual model is developed to provide a framework for understanding the contingent relationship between leadership roles and the organizational context particularly in situations of decline. Some implications of this model are discussed.

Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street provides an ethnographic account of a disadvantaged urban environment where residents face poverty and racial residential isolation. For Anderson, joblessness among African-American men deprive youth of positive male role models, creating a context for the "street code" to govern behavior, leading youth to violence. Similarly, a disadvantaged urban setting in which opportunities in legitimate labor markets are lacking fosters an environment where youth may seek illicit markets for a means of economic support. Drawing on Anderson's work, we assess the availability of male role models (older, employed black males) and the concentration of urban disadvantage on black juvenile drug sales and violent arrests across multiple cities in 2000. We find Anderson's concerns over the removal of traditional role models as a result of rising disadvantage in a Philadelphia community to be generalized to large urban areas. Specifically, we find that the presence of traditional role models reduces aggravated assaults by youth, but male role models are unable to reduce the economic lure of drug sales for black urban youth in disadvantaged environments.

The European Union (EU) can be regarded as one economic region and this way its competitiveness can be defined and examined. However, there are huge tensions within the European region that raise questions about whether there exists a European economic region and thus "European competitiveness" at all. Unlike some of its largest competitors, Europe still has not overcome the financial and economic crisis that burst out in 2008. In fact, Europe is now struggling with its own crisis, being rather a new chapter than the natural continuation of the global processes. The whole story of the European integration has been the story of economic and social cohesion. In this respect, there does exist a European social market model. But there is a huge dilemma related to this model that has to be faced: on one hand, high European social standards can only be met if competitiveness is maintained but, on the other hand, these expectations on behalf of European societies appear as a mere disadvantage in cost-competitiveness in the global arena. The issue is complex and calls for balanced and sophisticated thinking. In this sense, European competitiveness is the competitiveness of the whole European social market model—highly challenged these days.