Lines of Authority - An Eight-Case Series on Leadership, Governance, and Ethical Drift in Global Base Operations
Faculty Advisor:
Year:
Introductory Excerpt
Lines of Authority: An Eight-Case Series on Leadership, Governance, and Ethical Drift in Global Base Operations is a longitudinal teaching-case sequence that examines how leadership judgment, informal influence, governance weakness, and ethical voice evolve over time inside geographically dispersed U.S. government support contracts. The series follows a recurring cast of leaders, managers, and witnesses across Bahrain, Diego Garcia, Singapore, Guam, and corporate headquarters. Each case is anchored to a distinct focal actor and decision threshold, allowing students to encounter the same organizational system from different vantage points, at different moments, and under different evidentiary conditions. In design, the series intentionally mirrors an ensemble, timeline-based narrative model in which the broader institutional story emerges only through successive viewpoints rather than from a single omniscient narrator.
Purpose, Design, and Implications
The purpose of the series is to develop a doctoral-level teaching artifact for executive learners who must make consequential decisions under ambiguity, distance, and imperfect evidence. The series does not attempt to adjudicate a single ethical failure. Instead, it examines how small, individually explainable decisions can accumulate into structural risk before any single event becomes dispositive. In that sense, the series treats governance drift as a longitudinal phenomenon: visible first through atmosphere, then pattern, then financial distortion, then documentary record, and finally enterprise-level consequence.
The central contribution of the series is its ensemble design. A single case can isolate a dilemma; this series reveals a system. By shifting among field leaders, portfolio executives, finance managers, operational witnesses, compliance officers, corporate assessors, and the Chief Executive Officer, the series shows how evidence changes by vantage point. What one actor experiences as unease, another sees as budget distortion, another as documentary risk, and another as enterprise exposure. This structure requires students to confront a practical executive reality: ethical action rarely occurs with perfect information.
Purpose, Design, and Implications
The purpose of the series is to develop a doctoral-level teaching artifact for executive learners who must make consequential decisions under ambiguity, distance, and imperfect evidence. The series does not attempt to adjudicate a single ethical failure. Instead, it examines how small, individually explainable decisions can accumulate into structural risk before any single event becomes dispositive. In that sense, the series treats governance drift as a longitudinal phenomenon: visible first through atmosphere, then pattern, then financial distortion, then documentary record, and finally enterprise-level consequence.
The central contribution of the series is its ensemble design. A single case can isolate a dilemma; this series reveals a system. By shifting among field leaders, portfolio executives, finance managers, operational witnesses, compliance officers, corporate assessors, and the Chief Executive Officer, the series shows how evidence changes by vantage point. What one actor experiences as unease, another sees as budget distortion, another as documentary risk, and another as enterprise exposure. This structure requires students to confront a practical executive reality: ethical action rarely occurs with perfect information.
