What causes conflict among high-level American corporate executives? How do executives manage their conflicts? Based on interviews with over two hundred executives and their support personnel, Calvin Morrill seeks to answer these and other questions and also provide an intimate portrait of these men and women as they cope with problems usually hidden from those outside their exclusive ranks. Personal and corporate scandals, compensation battles, budget worries, interdepartmental rivalries, personal enmities, and general rancor are among the topis looked at. The author asserts that what most influences the way managers handle routine conflicts are the cultures created by their company's organizational structure: whether there is a strong hierarchy, a weak hierarchy, or an absence of any strong central authority. The issues most likely to cause conflict within corporations he identifies as managerial style, competition between departments, and performance evaluations, promotions, and compensation. Among the people whose day-to-day lives are studied are Jacobs, a divisional executive whose intuitive understanding of the corporate hierarchy enables him to topple his incompetent superior without direct confrontation; Fuller, who through a mix of brains, guile, and connections rises from staff executive secretary to corporate vice president in a large bank; Green, an old-fashioned accounting partner in a firm being taken over by management consultants; and the "Princess of Power," "Iron Man," and the "Terminator" - executives fighting their way to the top of a successful entertainment company. This portrayal of daily life and conflict management among corporate elites will be of interest to professionals, scholars, and practitioners in organizational culture and behaviour, managerial decision making, dispute, social control, law and society, and organizational ethnography.

Exploring locales such as city streets, bus stops, parking lots, bars, retail establishments, and discussion groups, "Together Alone "ventures into what is often thought of as the realm of passing strangers to examine the nature of personal relationships conducted in public spaces. While most studies of social interaction have gone behind closed doors to focus on relationships in the family, school, and workplace, this innovative collection pushes the boundaries of the field by analyzing both fleeting and anchored relationships in the seldom-studied communal areas where much of contemporary life takes place. The contributors shed light on the diversity and character of day-to-day negotiations in public spaces and at the same time illuminate how these social ties paradoxically blend aspects of durability and brevity, of emotional closeness and distance, of being together and alone.