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This study aims to investigate the dynamic interplay between the management control system (MCS) and organizational identity (OI) in the Deepwater Horizon incident involving British Petroleum (BP). It examines how the MCS manages challenges, particularly those addressing the embarrassment stemming from identity disparities between external portrayal (frontstage) and internal operations (backstage), with a focus on the often-underestimated influence of the media.

This study builds upon the frameworks developed by Ravasi and Schultz (2006) and Malmi and Brown (2008) to construct a theoretical framework that profoundly investigates the relationship between MCS and OI. The framework developed guided the research design and incorporated a qualitative approach complemented by an illustrative case study. The research data was rigorously gathered from diverse sources, including official BP documents and influential media outlets, with a particular focus on well-established American and British newspapers.

BP’s MCS plays a dual role: it exposes discrepancies in safety, leadership and values, causing embarrassment and identity damage, yet catalyses a sense-making process leading to organizational transformation and shifts in the OI. This transformation influences sense-giving and prompts changes in MCS. The study reveals an intricate interplay in identity management between frontstage audiences (e.g. influential media) and backstage actors (e.g. BP’s senior management). It highlights interdependencies both within and between MCS and OI, emphasizing their roles in interacting within identity management. The longitudinal recovery is intricately tied to mutual political interests between BP and the USA, which are significantly facilitated by the media’s role.

This study acknowledges limitations that point future research opportunities. Interviews could provide a more dynamic understanding of MCS changes and organizational transformations. Investigating the role of leadership, particularly the new chief executive office, and the influence of political versus organizational factors in shaping identity claims is essential. Additionally, the effectiveness and historical context of interdependencies should be quantitatively assessed. Theoretical limitations in the OI and MCS frameworks suggest the need for context-specific categorisations. This research serves as a foundation for further exploration of the intricate dynamics between MCS, OI and organizational responses to crises.

This study offers valuable insights with practical implications for organizations facing identity challenges in the wake of significant incidents. Organizations can better navigate crises by recognizing the multifaceted role of MCS in identity damage and restoration. It underscores the importance of addressing both frontstage and backstage aspects of OI while managing identity discrepancies, thereby enhancing transparency and credibility. Additionally, understanding the intricate interdependencies within OI and MCS can guide organizations in implementing more effective identity restoration strategies. Furthermore, the study highlights the significance of media influence and the need to engage with it strategically during crisis management.

This study’s findings have significant social implications for organizations and the broader public. By recognizing the multifaceted role of MCS in shaping identity, organizations can enhance transparency and credibility, rebuilding trust with the public. Additionally, the study highlights the critical role of media in influencing perceptions and decision-making during crises, emphasizing the importance of responsible and ethical reporting. Understanding the intricate interplay between MCS and OI can inform better crisis management strategies and improve how organizations respond to and recover from incidents, ultimately benefiting society by promoting more accountable and responsible corporate behaviour.

This study’s distinctness lies in its innovative exploration of MCS, which transcends traditional methodologies that focus narrowly on front or backstage aspects of OI and often adhere to predetermined MCS practices. It underscores the importance of concurrently addressing both the front- and backstage audiences in managing the embarrassment caused by identity discrepancies and restoration. The research uncovers multifaceted interdependencies within MCS and OI, and these extend beyond simplistic relationships and emphasize the complex nature of identity restoration management.

Although employees are considered key stakeholders, they receive limited attention in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature compared to other stakeholders such as customers. This study aims to address this gap, investigating how different factors, including CSR communication, may affect employee perceptions, and to what extent they can influence or be influenced by CSR activity.

Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data from three multinationals (MNCs) operating in Bangladesh. Mid- and entry-level employees from different departments, namely, marketing, logistics, human resources, IT and finance, were approached for data collection. It is important to note that all the study participants were Bangladeshi.

This study demonstrates how CSR perceptions, shaped by the level of employee awareness, personal beliefs about CSR and perceived motivation for adopting CSR, strengthen psychological ties between employees and their organisation. One-way CSR communication adopted by these MNCs disseminates positive information about an organisation’s contribution to society and creates an aspirational and ideational image, which enhances identification, evokes positive in-group biases and encourages employees to defend their organisation against criticism. This study further demonstrates that employee CSR engagement can galvanise their experience of organisational identity, enhance their pride and reinforce their organisational identification.

Drawing on social identity theory and the CSR communication model proposed by Morsing and Schultz (2006), this study aims to understand employees’ CSR perceptions and the possible impact of this on their behaviour. Previous studies largely focus on customers’ perceptions of these activities, which means the link between CSR perception and employee behaviour remains unclear. The current study suggests that employees working in Bangladesh will not withdraw support from their organisations if CSR is used to build reputation or public image. The findings extend the literature by arguing that some employees in developing countries not only seek to improve their status by working in a reputed organisation but also tend to engage with CSR activities undertaken by their organisation.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the literature on information elicitation. The authors investigated the impact of social influence strategies on eyewitness recall performance. Specifically, the authors examined the effect of social influence techniques (Cialdini, 2007) on recall performance (Experiment 1) and conducted a follow-up experiment to examine the incremental effect of social proof on the report everything cognitive interview mnemonic (Experiment 2).

Participants watched a video depicting vandalism (Experiment 1: N = 174) or a verbal altercation (Experiment 2: N = 128) and were asked to recall the witnessed event. Experiment 1: Participants were assigned randomly to one of six conditions: control (open-ended prompt), engage and explain (interview ground rules), consistency (signing an agreement to work diligently), reciprocity (given water and food), authority (told of interviewer’s training) and social proof (shown transcript from an exemplar participant). Experiment 2: The authors used a 2 (social proof: present, absent) × 2 (report everything: present, absent) between-participants design.

Across both experiments, participants exposed to the social proof tactic (i.e. compared to a model exemplar) spoke longer and recalled more correct details than participants not exposed to the social proof tactic. In Experiment 2, participants interviewed with the report everything mnemonic also spoke longer, recalled more correct details, more incorrect details and provided slightly more confabulations than those not interviewed with the report everything mnemonic.

The findings have practical value for police investigators and other professionals who conduct interviews (e.g. military personnel, doctors obtaining information from patients). Interviewers can incorporate social proof in their interviewing practices to help increase the amount and accuracy of information obtained.

In 1979, Galbraith wrote a manuscript titled “The Social Consequences of Inflation and Unemployment and Their Remedies.” The manuscript was found in the John Kenneth Galbraith Personal Papers at the John F. Kennedy Library. The reasons for Galbraith to write the article might appear at first glance to be purely contextual. At the macroeconomic level, the United States was experiencing stagflation, a situation unseen since 1945, resulting in double-digit inflation rates and high unemployment. A policy debate was going on about the Phillips curve and whether there is a trade-off between inflation and unemployment. Milton Friedman challenged the Keynesian analyses of the Phillips curve in the mid-1960s (Friedman, 1977). Galbraith’s 16-page draft manuscript provides us an incisive summary of Galbraith’s views about the causes of stagflation and what can be done about it. He provides us with an alternative to the neoclassical synthesis of Samuelson and Solow and the neoliberal thinking of Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek.

Working conditions, pay rates and the rights of workers to collectively negotiate have become important points of discussions in recent years, with support for unions and union applications rising to levels long unseen in America. In many instances, though, companies have responded aggressively. This is not the first time such a dynamic has played out in American business. This study aims to take a fresh look at one of America’s most prominent historical disputes between labor and ownership – the Homestead Massacre of 1892 – to glean lessons from that conflict that remain relevant to today’s business environment.

This study adopts game theory and the principles of repeated interaction to assess how differing discount factors led to differences in time orientations between the workers and the Carnegie company. These differing time orientations affected both the strategy each side deployed in the negotiations and the payoffs received by the parties. Letters, contemporary news reports and histories of the events leading up to and immediately following the 1892 Homestead Massacre are qualitatively analyzed with a genealogical pragmatic approach.

Differences in temporal orientation between management and workers exacerbated the conflict, with the workers adopting a more cooperative stance and distal time orientation, while the Carnegie company negotiated with a proximal time orientation and played to “win” a game that, in fact, could not be fully won or lost given its infinitely repeating nature. The result was a short-term victory for the Carnegie company but with long-term negative consequences that highlight the suboptimal outcome the company achieved by playing a proximal strategy in an infinite game.

Although the incident at Homestead is a well-studied labor dispute, many of the themes that preceded the incident have resurfaced in the modern work context. This work, by adopting game theory as an analytical framework, provides new insights into management mistakes that led to the labor conflict and lessons for what present-day managers can do to avoid exacerbating labor strife.

In this paper, I explore what shapes the identities of digital nomads (DNs), a class of remote workers who travel and work concurrently. Through extensive fieldwork and interviews with 50 digital nomads conducted in seven coworking hostels in Mexico in 2022, I construct a theory of DN identity. I base this upon the frequent transformations they undergo in their Circumstances, which regularly change their worker identity.

DNs relinquish traditional social determinants of identity, such as nationality and religion. They define their personal identities by their passions and interests, which are influenced by the people they meet. DNs exist in inherently transitive social spaces and, without rigid social roles to fulfil, they represent themselves authentically. They form close relationships with other long-term travellers to combat loneliness and homesickness. Digital nomads define their worker identities around their location independence. This study shows that DNs value their nomadic lifestyle above promotions and financial gain. They define themselves by productivity and professionalism to ensure the sustainability of their lifestyle. Furthermore, digital nomad coworking hubs serve focused, individual work, leaving workplace politics and strict ‘office image’ norms behind. Without fixed social and professional roles to play, digital nomads define themselves personally according to their ever-evolving passions and the sustainability of their nomadic life. Based on these findings, I present a cyclical framework for DN identity evolution which demonstrates how relational, logistical, and socio-personal flux evolves DN’s worker identities.

Economists usually shy away from talking about power. They assume an economy comprised of many small and medium-sized firms, each competing for consumer dollars. This circumvents the problem of economic power. John Kenneth Galbraith, however, refused to ignore power. It stood at the center of his economics, and he saw it as a key reason the US economy thrived in the years following World War II (WWII). This chapter examines Galbraith’s changing views regarding economic power. American Capitalism explains how countervailing power, or power on the other side of the market, solves the problem of economic power. In The New Industrial State, scientists and educated managers within the firm (the technostructure) mitigate the negative consequences of economic power wielded by large firms. The Affluent Society and Economics and the Public Purpose look to the government as the main check on corporate power. It does this through labor legislation or programs such as the New Deal and Fair Deal. This chapter then evaluates the different solutions Galbraith proffered to the problem of economic power. It contends that Galbraith got three things right when analyzing economic power. First, we no longer live in a world of scarcity due to oligopolistic firms. Second, capitalism was different in the post-WWII era because the US economy thrived and gains were shared widely. Third, Galbraith understood that power was unequally distributed – both between the public and private sectors and within the private sector itself. On the other hand, Galbraith was overly optimistic in believing the market economy or the public sector could counter corporate power.

This chapter studies communication during a longitudinal crisis by exploring the Irish airline Ryanair’s use of Twitter (now X) in early 2022 when the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic had already been affecting the airline industry for almost 2 years. It studies the airline’s approach to interacting with its passengers online and their reaction to its posts, at times, rather provocative posts. A corpus linguistic methodology is used to study tweets posted by and addressed to Ryanair between January and March 2022, a period that saw unprecedented peaks in COVID-19 infection numbers and the simultaneous lifting of travel restrictions. The analysis is based on the Ryanair 2022 Corpus which includes 27,089 tweets and more than half a million words. The findings of this case study show that Ryanair reappropriates instructing and adapting information on crisis-related topics as promotion and takes a political stance in its tweets to encourage consumer engagement. While the corporate tweets are successful in generating reactions online, the airline’s followers do not always perceive them in a positive manner. This case study makes an important contribution to crisis communication research as it shows how established communicative strategies, such as instructing and adapting information, may be reappropriated during a longitudinal crisis. At the same time, it demonstrates how these communicative strategies may – as a consequence – no longer be aligned with the core values of a legitimate organisation that is expected to act responsibly and ethically.

This study aims to explore the determinants of engagement with and of stakeholders in corporate social responsibility (CSR) decision-making.

Using stakeholder theory, this study is mainly based on business ethics and CSR literature to develop a model depicting social and organizational contextual factors for engagement in the context of CSR decision-making.

This study identifies nine antecedents for engagement with and of stakeholders in CSR decision-making. Based on stakeholder perspective, the author explores how engagement constructs are influenced at both social and organizational levels by the determinants stakeholder pressure, stakeholder roles, stakeholder resources, stakeholder relationships, stakeholder management, two-way communication, procedural justice, interactional justice and stakeholder proactive strategy.

This study provides insights for companies regarding the determinants underlying engagement to reflect its importance in the context of CSR decision-making.

A better understanding of the determinants of engagement is critical because engagement contributes to achieving “win-win” solutions that ensure increased stakeholder satisfaction.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is one of the first to explore the determinants of engagement with and of stakeholders in CSR decision-making at both social and organizational levels by referring to stakeholder theory.