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In this chapter, we draw on our study involving interviews with Australians who identify as current self-trackers to discuss why and how they monitor themselves. Our approach for analysing self-tracking practices is based on a sociomaterial perspective, viewing enactments of voluntary self-tracking as shifting heterogeneous assemblages, bringing together diverse actors who are both human and non-human. We use vignettes to illustrate the ways in which our participants enacted self-tracking and to identify some of the diverse meanings and motivations that mediate decisions to self-track and resultant uses of the information thus generated. We found that a varied range of self-tracking practices were taken up by our interviewees, including not only digital devices and methods, but also recording their details using pen-and-paper, or simply maintaining mental awareness and using memory. We identified several agential capacities in our participants’ accounts of why and how they monitor themselves. These capacities are interrelated, but can be loosely grouped under the headings of ‘self-improvement’, ‘exerting control’ and ‘identifying patterns and achieving goals’. They are motivators and facilitators of monitoring practices. The broader sociocultural contexts in which monitoring of the body/self is undertaken were also revealed in the participants’ accounts. These include ideas about the moral virtues of self-responsibility and the individual management of life circumstances to avoid chaos and risk, and the notion that monitoring practices can successfully achieve these virtues.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of agency on basis of a pragmatist philosophy framework of analysis. Agency is a key analytical concept in management studies, debated in terms of its theoretical elements and its degree of empirical substantiation. Agency is commonly either assumed to be the case, understood as some generic human capacity to act with integrity, or, alternatively, agency is considered to be derived from social structures, say professional norms or occupational identities acquired through socialization. In contrast, in an attempt to escape the agency/structure model, agency may be considered as what is generated in and through meso-level interactions, constituted as recurrent practices wherein accomplishments in the past serve as the template for new activities that further reinforce agential capacities.

Drawing on the work of pragmatist philosopher Donald Davidson and what he calls the principle of charity, this paper presents an analytical model wherein agency is generated on basis of a shared everyday language wherein beliefs and preferences are constituted and thereafter serve as the basis of agential action.

Davidson’s externalist theory of action is supportive of the theory and study of meso-level interactions and helps to overcome the question whether agency is exogenously given or the effect of social structure.

This paper reviews recent social science literature on agency and introduces pragmatist philosophy concepts to better examine under what conditions social actors can reasonably have faith in an interaction being premised on beliefs that are held on basis of rational and reasonable grounds. This adds to an integrated theory of agency, being of importance for social theory and organizational analysis more specifically.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the findings from the Digital Privacy Story Completion Project, which investigated Australian participants' understandings of and responses to digital privacy scenarios using a novel method and theoretical approach.

The story completion method was brought together with De Certeau's concept of tactics and more-than-human theoretical perspectives. Participants were presented with four story stems on an online platform. Each story stem introduced a fictional character confronted with a digital privacy dilemma. Participants were asked to complete the stories by typing in open text boxes, responding to the prompts “How does the character feel? What does she/he do? What happens next?”. A total of 29 participants completed the stories, resulting in a corpus of 116 narratives for a theory-driven thematic analysis.

The stories vividly demonstrate the ways in which tactics are entangled with relational connections and affective intensities. They highlight the micropolitical dimensions of human–nonhuman affordances when people are responding to third-party use of their personal information. The stories identified the tactics used and boundaries that are drawn in people's sense-making concerning how they define appropriate and inappropriate use of their data.

This paper demonstrates the value and insights of creatively attending to personal data privacy issues in ways that decentre the autonomous tactical and agential individual and instead consider the more-than-human relationality of privacy.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-05-2020-0174

Although the case for case studies is now well established in accounting and management research, the exact nature of their contribution is still under discussion. This paper aims to add to this debate on contribution by arguing that case studies explore not one reality but several.

This is a theoretical paper that discusses ontology using a deductive approach.

The paper argues that reality is differentiated into physical, structural, agential, cultural and mental realms.

The paper begins to draw out some of the implications of “differentiated realities” for case studies, but there is much more that could be said.

Because case studies encompass differentiated realities, the paper discusses how expectations about the contribution of case studies should be intimately linked to the nature of the differentiated realities being researched.

“Differentiated realities” provides a fresh look status of case study findings and challenges the idea of a single social reality – as portrayed by both social positivism and social constructivism.

Based on a critique of reductive understandings of physicality, this chapter explores the significance of embodied materiality, the artefactual physical, the role of the living body and embodiment in relation to ‘intra and inter’ practices of leadership from a phenomenological perspective. Using a phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approach, issues of an embodied physicality in leadership are systematically explored and implications discussed beyond physicalist empiricism and meta-physical idealism. Furthermore, the chosen phenomenological approach reveals problematising limitations of naturalist and constructionist approaches.

Following Merleau-Ponty an extended understanding of physicality as well as the significance of the co-constitutive role of embodiment, inter-corporeality and intra-action in and of leadership practices in organisational life-worlds are identified and discussed. Insights into the role of corporeal materio-socio phenomena and expressions of meaningful practices of leading and following are rendered. The chapter concludes by noting limitations and implications of embodied physicality and physical inter-becoming of ‘bodiment’ for a more integral and sustainable conception of leader-and followership in organisations. Through its specific post-dualistic approach the chapter provides an innovative perspective on the interrelations between living, material, bodily and embodied dimensions of physicality in leadership.

The paper aims to examine how indigenous accounting practices are mobilised in the daily life of a subaltern community, and how and why the members of that community have managed to preserve such practices over time despite external pressures for change.

An ethno‐methodological field study is employed to produce a text that informs readers about the ways in which people engage in social accounting practices. It uses the concepts of structuration theory to understand how indigenous accounting systems are shaped by the interplay between the actions of agents and social structures.

The case study suggests that it is the strongly prevailing patronage based political system, as mobilised into the subaltern social structure, which makes individuals unable to change and exercise their agencies, and tends to “preserve” and “sustain” indigenous accounting systems. Social accounting is seen as the common language of the inhabitants in their everyday life, as sanctioned by the unique form of autonomy‐dependency relationship shaped by patronage politics.

The findings imply that any form of rational transformations in indigenous accounting systems in local subaltern communities requires a phenomenological analysis of any prevailing and dominant patronage political systems.

This is the first empirical study that focuses on how and why local subaltern communities preserve their indigenous accounting practices over time. This contrasts with previous work that has focused on the presence or absence of accounting beyond work organisations.

This paper aims to report on subalterns' emancipatory accounting (SEA) embedded in transformation of governance and accountability structures (GAS) in Ceylon Tea.

The paper draws on James Scott's political anthropology to examine how subalterns' resistance and emancipatory accounting triggers structural transformations.

An attempt is made to theorise subaltern resistance as a form of emancipatory accounting. Concerning the commentaries that accounting has been to suppress or hegemonise the subalterns and appreciating the analysis of indigenous resistance implicated in emancipatory potential, this paper examines how a distinct subaltern group in Ceylon Tea deployed their own weapons towards the changes in GAS.

The accounting literature neglects how subalterns reconstruct governance and accountability structures: this paper introduces a social accounting perspective on resistance, control and structural transformations. Also, it introduces to accounting researchers James Scott's political anthropology as an alternative framework.

In this chapter, I uncover the jail diaries of a revolutionary woman of the 20th century Pakistan, Akhtar Baloch. Although feminism in Pakistan has oscillated between liberal and postcolonial camps, through reading Akhtar's diaries, compiled as Prison Narratives (2017), I center Akhtar's own struggles for Sindh, along with the resistance of the women she met in the prison convicted for the murders of their husbands, to better theorize Marxist Feminism in Pakistan that overturns the structures that commodify women through love and revolution. My article will show the commodification of women's bodies; the “sale” of women through marriage as the goal of this commodification; the lovelessness and alienation women experience in commodified marriages; the unexpected fall in love with someone whom it is subversive for the commodified wife to love; the subversion of this unexpected event that leads to the attempted resolution of this tension through murder; the separation of the lovers through the incarceration of the woman by the capitalist-patriarchal state; and finally, the unexpected outcome (albeit the most common one) that the male lover abandons his female lover once she's jailed, but the defiantly brave female lover finds platonic love in jail through close female friendships with other women who are similarly brave in both love and in revolution. Through this exposition, I show that Akhtar's diaries provide a way for us to build on Marxist Feminist theory through a theory of love and revolution from a Sindhi feminist perspective.