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Dualism ‐ the division of an object of study into separate, paired elements ‐ is widespread in economic and social theorising: key examples are the divisions between agency and structure, the individual and society, mind and body, values and facts, and knowledge and practice. In recent years, dualism has been criticised as exaggerating conceptual divisions and promoting an oversimplified, reductive outlook. A possible alternative to dualism is the notion of duality, derived from Giddens’s structuration theory, whereby the two elements are interdependent and no longer separate or opposed, although they remain conceptually distinct. This paper argues that duality, if handled carefully, can provide a superior framework to dualism for dealing with the complexity of economic and social institutions. Its main attraction is not its twofold character, which might profitably be relaxed where appropriate, but its ability to envisage a thoroughgoing interdependence of conceptually distinct elements.

While there is a large volume of entrepreneurial social capital research, the philosophical assumptions have received limited attention. The purpose of this paper is to review and classify entrepreneurial social capital studies according to the following approaches – objectivist (positivist-realist, structuralist) and subjectivist (social constructionist). There is a neglect of structure and agency, and the authors encourage a critical realist approach that permits an understanding of observable network structure, constraint-order and human agency as a dynamic system.

The ontological and epistemological assumptions, and associated strengths and weaknesses of objectivist (positivist-realist, structuralist) and subjectivist (social constructionist) entrepreneurial social capital studies are discussed. The case for a more progressive critical realist approach is developed.

The authors demonstrate that objectivist (positivist-realist, structuralist) research with findings bereft of situated meaning and agency dominates. The emergence of subjectivist research – narratively examining different network situations from the perspective of those embedded in networks – is an emerging and competing approach. This dualism is unlikely to comprehensively understand the complex system-level properties of social capital. Future research should adopt critical realism and fuse: objective data to demonstrate the material aspects of network structures and what structural social capital exists in particular settings; and subjective data that enhances an understanding of situated meaning, agency and intention in a network.

This paper contributes a review of entrepreneurial social capital research and philosophical foundations. The development of a critical realist approach to understanding social capital gestation permits a system-level analysis of network structure influencing conduct, and agency.

The paper aims to examine the involvement of global accountancy firms in devising and selling tax avoidance schemes euphemistically marketed as “tax planning”.

The study draws upon a range of secondary sources, including legal cases and government reports, to demonstrate how “tax planning” involves “wilful blindness” to complicity in dubious and sometimes fraudulent activity.

The study reveals in detail the construction and promotion of elaborate tax avoidance schemes by big accounting firms. It casts doubt upon the “business culture” that has become established in these firms.

The study relies upon secondary sources. Subject to gaining adequate access to the big accounting firms, research based upon close-up investigation of “tax planning” would further illuminate such practices.

The study shows how normalised and institutionalised “tax planning” schemes have become in the big four accounting firms. It suggests that such schemes require closer scrutiny if payments of tax are to be made as intended, and thereby provide the revenues required to maintain public services such as education, health and pensions.

The study informs a debate about the payment of taxes and the role of big accounting firms in creating aggressive tax avoidance schemes. It questions the appropriateness and adequacy of private regulation of these firms and so contributes to a public debate on the tax contribution of comparatively powerful and privileged parties.

The study “blows the whistle” on the role of big accounting firms in devising schemes that reduce the “tax take” on business and thereby reduces the revenues required to provide and maintain public services.

This paper aims to highlight the importance of the study of emotions in the successful implementation of information systems projects in developing countries. This paper studies one emotion, namely, anger, and discusses its detrimental impact on information system interventions. This paper suggests that controls are necessary for the management of anger emotion.

This research study explores the case of an Indian agricultural marketing board that implemented an information systems project on the integration of agricultural markets. The data was collected through semistructured interviews from four stakeholder groups. This paper uses a qualitative approach and analyzes the data using thematic analysis. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice is used to study emotions in the case.

This paper finds that anger is the prominent emotion displayed at public sector organizations in India. This paper permeates all aspects of public organizations and has a detrimental impact on successfully implementing the information systems projects. Successful implementation of the information systems (IS) projects in India will need to have a framework for managing the anger emotion.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper within the information systems discipline that focuses on anger and its detrimental impact on successful IS interventions. A unique contribution of this paper is a framework for the study of emotions. This paper also introduces the idea of controls for emotional management.

TCS (previously the Teaching Company Scheme), claimed to be the UKs premier technology transfer mechanism, employs recent graduates to improve the competitiveness of primarily small and medium‐sized enterprises. The data are drawn from the author's experience of acting as academic supervisor on a two‐year TCS programme in PaperProds. Structuration theory acts as a “sensitising device” to the way in which the actions and discourses of owner‐managers in small firms exercise power. The author demonstrates the way in which managerial concerns with the “bottom line” gradually subverts broader conceptions of company “competitiveness” which include improving the skills, knowledge and commitment of shopfloor employees. In this particular programme the TCS associate found that he constantly had to reconcile the managing director's view that workers were disposable factors of production with his own implicitly “humanist” perspective.

Research into older adults' use of social media remains limited. Driven by increasing digitalisation in China, the authors focus on Chinese older adults (aged 60–75)’ use of WeChat.

This study used a qualitative interpretive approach and interviewed Chinese older adults to uncover their social practices of WeChat use in everyday life.

By using social practice theory (SPT), the paper unfolds Chinese older adults' social practices of WeChat use in everyday life and reveals how they adopt and resist the drastic changes in Chinese society.

The study contributes to new understandings of SPT from technology use by emphasising the dynamic characteristics of its three elements. The authors synthesise both adoptions and resistance in SPT and highlight the importance of understanding three elements interdependently within specific contexts, which are conditioned by structure and agency.

The purpose of this paper is to examine in greater depth the influence of internal factors on the disclosure of environmental information by companies. The influence of pro-environmental managers´ personal values on environmental disclosure quality is analyzed and the extent to which the influence of those values is mediated by the practices associated with the environmental organizational structure of the company.

The authors use a partial least squares structural equation model to analyze the relationship between the quality of the environmental information disclosed by 137 environmentally sensitive Spanish firms, their level of commitment towards the environment and the personal values of the directors in charge of those reports.

A central finding of this work is that a positive relationship between the pro-environmental managers’ personal values and environmental disclosure quality is fully mediated by the environmental organizational structures of their companies.

A better understanding of the relationship between the personal values of managers and corporate environmental reporting quality will contribute to the design of policies that can enhance firm transparency and accountability, for example, by educating future managers in sustainability values.

Light is cast on the mechanisms that can enhance corporate transparency and accountability in relation to environmental matters.

In this paper, a quantitative study of the internal driving forces of environmental disclosure is conducted, an aspect that has often been ignored in the literature on quantitative voluntary social reporting. The merit of this approach is its contribution to the literature through the analysis of the reasons why powerful actors within firms could (or could not) develop corporate social reporting practices.

The premise for this volume is that there is “a need to develop a Handbook that takes scholars and practitioners through the paradigm change going on in the field of management and organizational inquiry.” In their invitation to contributors, the editors suggested we should comment on this transition and inform readers of theoretical and philosophical changes that have occurred in recent times. In this chapter, we attempt to do this by revisiting the influential concept of paradigm from the philosophy of science (Kuhn, 1962, 1970) and explore its relation to recent contributions to postmodern social theory in organizational analysis. In particular, the influential paradigm model of Burrell and Morgan (1979) is revisited through meta-theoretical analysis of the major intellectual movement to emerge in organization theory in recent decades, post-structuralism and more broadly postmodernism. Proposing a retrospective paradigm for this movement we suggest that its research can be characterized as ontologically relativist, epistemologically relationist, and methodologically reflexive; this also represents research that can be termed deconstructionist in its view of human nature. Consequently we demonstrate not only that organizational knowledge stands on meta-theoretical grounds, but also how recent intellectual developments rest on a qualitatively different set of meta-theoretical assumptions than established traditions of agency and structure.

Following the lead of neighboring fields such as strategy and organization studies, entrepreneurship is gradually joining in the adoption of a practice perspective. Entrepreneurship as practice (EaP) is thus a nascent domain of investigation where the methodological debate is still unsettled and very fluid. In this paper, the authors contribute to this debate with a focus on family entrepreneurship.

The authors develop a conceptual paper to discuss what it entails to look at family entrepreneurship through a practice lens and why it is fruitful. Moreover, the authors propose a research strategy novel to the field through which such investigation can be pursued, namely process tracing, and examine its inferential logic.

Process tracing is a strategy of data analysis underpinned by an ontology of causal mechanisms. The authors argue that it complements other practice methods by inferring social mechanisms from empirical evidence and thereby establishing a connection between praxis, practices and practitioners.

Process tracing helps the articulation of an “integrated model” of practice that relates praxis, practices and practitioners to the outcome they jointly produce. By enabling the assessment of impact, process tracing helps providing prima facie evidentiary grounds for policy action and intervention.

Process tracing affinity with the practice perspective has been so far acknowledged only to a limited extent in the social sciences, and it is, in fact, a novel research strategy for the family entrepreneurship field.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the argument that scholars' imputations of agency serve modern professional/institutional purposes other than the refinement of testable theories.

Data include articles from twenty‐first century issues of four gerontological journals. Content analysis involved coding articles for imputations of agency, constructivist analysis thereof, and the parties to whom authors directed their imputations.

Most authors rehearse theories of “structuration” and call for more imputations of agency to old people. They do this without imputing agency to privileged groups or to policy makers; and without settling theoretical question of how much agency people have or how scientists could demonstrate that. One article in ten provides constructivist critique.

Patterns in imputations of agency in other scholarly realms (such as books) may support another interpretation.

Scholars should treat their imputations of agency as political activities and not refinements of testable theories. They position professional scholars as advocates for an oppressed group.

This paper provides a sociological context for interpreting routine imputations of agency in social scientific and humanist scholarship.