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The purpose of this paper is to share interdisciplinary ideas about the purpose of social theory in empirical research.

The formal interview took place in front of an audience at the Strong Structuration Theory and Management Research workshop at IAE de Paris, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, on 10 May 2016. A recording was made, transcribed, and then edited. Elements from a recorded lecture on the same day are also included. A conversational format is retained to enhance the sense of interdisciplinary dialogue that characterises the research project.

The use of SST as a conceptual methodology is explained, and the use of agent’s conduct and agent’s context analyses is elucidated providing pointers regarding how accounting research can be developed further by basing the analysis in an understanding of the status and adequacy of knowledge on which people act to produce and reproduce structure.

The value of the interview is to provide insights into the process of empirical research and conceptualisation, which are likely to be particularly helpful for early career researchers.

Taking as reference a sample of around a hundred biographical materials on entrepreneurs in Mexico and Colombia, the purpose of this chapter is dual. Both to show the relevance and varied modalities that the biographical approach has enjoyed in business history research since the 1990s, and to display the intrinsic potential this modality of scholarship entails for entrepreneurship endeavors. In particular, it discusses the prospects to incorporate this body of empirical works into the large Latin American audience attending undergraduate, graduate and executive education programs in business, economic history and related fields. The chapter is organized into three sections. The first two are devoted to illustrate relevant patterns in the entrepreneurial trajectory of individuals and entrepreneurial families studied in each of the two countries under consideration. The last section identifies some conceptual issues that may impact current debates on Latin American business development as exemplified in recent business and economic history journal venues and scholarly conferences.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential of life story for the teaching of sociology to Social Work students. It contains the results of a teaching experiment in higher education which aims to foster sociological imagination among students.

The study employs a mixed methodology. The quantitative data came from a survey handed out to the students with closed and open questions. The qualitative information came from the contents of class exercises in which the students had to connect the theoretical contents of the course of sociology with the biographical narratives of different research subjects.

The results reflect student satisfaction or appreciation regarding the use of the life story as a teaching resource, as well as a successful acquisition of sociological skills and knowledge, such as critical thinking, micro-macro connection and the interplay between structure and agency.

Life story and narrative methods should be employed in post-secondary education as teaching instruments.

The study contributes to expand the reflection on narrative techniques as a pedagogical tool. The paper provides several examples of class exercises with biographical narratives that have demonstrated to be successful for teaching sociology in higher education.

Purpose — The purpose of the chapter is to make retrospective data from biographic surveys comparable with traditional cross-section travel surveys, by correcting some biases attached to the biographic collection method. This is applied to a biographic survey passed in France within the 2007–2008 national travel survey.

Methodology/approach — The methodology implemented deals with three specific biases: the general survey sampling and response rate, the survival bias, due to differential surviving rates according to generations, and the geographical bias, as biog‘raphies were not passed in all regions. All biases were corrected by computing specific weightings.

Findings — One main finding is that with these three corrections, biographic data can yield modal shares for commuting trips to work and for commuting trips to education that are similar to those derived from the historical cross-section surveys about regular trips.

Research limitations/implications — Though biographic collection suffers from the memory effect, this effect remains low and does not disturb the modal shares derived from biographies.

The most challenging issue is that of missing generations that contributed to past mobility. But they can be replaced by modeling with an age-period model.

Practical implications — The chapter provides methodology to correct biographic data to reconstitute historical behavior.

Social implications — Exploring the memory of living people is essential to save data about the past, that otherwise could be lost, although they may be useful to understand present behavior and future likely trends.

Originality/value of chapter — Investigating biographic surveys is a new topic in the field of transport survey methods.

Narrative-biographical perspectives have taken on a very prominent role in both the research on and practices of teacher education (both preservice and in-service) over the past decades. This chapter briefly situates and explains this “narrative turn,” and continues with the presentation and discussion of concrete pedagogical applications of narrative-biographical approaches. A storied example of one approach is followed by a general discussion of its educational rationale and the necessary conditions for its use. References are made to narrative language as a genre, its contextualized nature as well as the connection with (student) teachers’ developing sense of self.

The purpose of this article is to advance biographical work in marketing, to summarize the status of biography in marketing, and to illustrate the process with an example of a developing study.

The article is based on a literature review of biography and a brief review of biography in marketing; the article illustrates biographical research and writing.

The discussion introduces approaches for undertaking marketing biography, especially the challenges of developing information, assessing its quality, as well as methods for telling the story.

Biography is a “flawed process”. It is difficult to fully elaborate the scope of biography in a journal length article let alone apply the principles. Some topics are shortened, others are hinted at, and others are omitted but the discussion points the way to undertaking biography.

This article introduces contemporary elements for the development of marketing biography illustrated with elements from the life of E.T. Grether.

This paper aims to analyse the question of whether women freely choose to pursue a non‐linear career or whether they are forced by their circumstances to take this path.

Semi‐structured interviews with older female employees, who had non‐linear careers, were conducted. The qualitative analysis of women's biographical narratives was achieved through adopting a socio‐biographical approach. The subjective view of success in the non‐linear careers was addressed.

All respondents would have preferred a linear career. However a non‐linear career is accepted as a possibility to follow one's own professional interests and to cope with professional insecurity. Moreover women discover strategies to cope with insecurity, organizational injustice or life course stereotypes, such as networking, additional qualifications, and making the change over to a self‐employed position.

As all interviews were conducted with German professionals and a small qualitative sample, the results need an adaptation for other countries, younger generations and different social strata.

The need for social political concepts for non‐linear careers became evident. The risk of the non‐linear careers should be pooled between individuals and organizations.

The study found that some decisions, which aim to avoid professional insecurity (e.g. additional qualification), produce non‐linearity and hence increase the insecurity. The importance of social constraints for individual career decisions has been emphasized in the paper.

The purpose of this paper is to make a specific attempt of historicizing outstanding academic leadership in the field of management history.

By using the biographical method and applying it to the material contained in Hodgetts's video interview of Wren and Bedeian's autobiography, the authors examine how outstanding management laureates, Wren and Bedeian, look back on their own lives and the people who influenced them.

The intellectual and institutional origins of their life stories are traced and the factors in Wren's and Bedeian's lives that might explain their pathways to becoming the US outstanding management historians as the Academy of Management Fellows are assessed.

The paper highlights the most outstanding achievements of the past in a manner that might be valuable when addressing the present day concerns about outstanding teaching and research in the field of management history.

The unique contribution of this study is its focus on showing how the manner in which outstanding management historians narrate the past may explain their present‐day achievements, and thus help readers understand that very past.

To support digital humanities research more effectively and efficiently, this study develops a novel Knowledge Graph Analysis Tool of People and Organizations (KGAT-PO) for the Digital Humanities Research Platform for Biographies of Chinese Malaysian Personalities (DHRP-BCMP) based on artificial intelligence (AI) technology that would not only allow humanities scholars to look at the relationships between people but also has the potential for aiding digital humanities research by identifying latent relationships between people via relationships between people and organizations.

To verify the effectiveness of KGAT-PO, a counterbalanced design was applied to compare research participants in two groups using DHRP-BCMP with and without KGAT-PO, respectively, to perform people relationship inquiry and to see if there were significant differences in the effectiveness and efficiency of exploring relationships between people, and the use of technology acceptance between the two groups. Interviews and Lag Sequential Analysis were also used to observe research participants’ perceptions and behaviors.

The results show that the DHRP-BCMP with KGAT-PO could help research participants improve the effectiveness of exploring relationships between people, and the research participants showed high technology acceptance towards using DHRP-BCMP with KGAT-PO. Moreover, the research participants who used DHRP-BCMP with KGAT-PO could identify helpful textual patterns to explore people’s relationships more quickly than DHRP-BCMP without KGAT-PO. The interviews revealed that most research participants agreed that the KGAT-PO is a good starting point for exploring relationships between people and improves the effectiveness and efficiency of exploring people’s relationship networks.

The research’s limitations encompass challenges related to data quality, complex people relationships, and privacy and ethics concerns. Currently, the KGAT-PO is limited to recognizing eight types of person-to-person relationships, including couple, sibling, parent-child, friend, teacher-student, relative, work, and others. These factors should be carefully considered to ensure the tool’s accuracy, usability, and ethical application in enhancing digital humanities research.

The study’s practical implications encompass enhanced research efficiency, aiding humanities scholars in uncovering latent interpersonal relationships within historical texts with high technology acceptance. Additionally, the tool’s applications can extend to social sciences, business and marketing, educational settings, and innovative research directions, ultimately contributing to data-driven insights in the field of digital humanities.

The research’s originality lies in creating a Knowledge Graph Analysis Tool of People and Organizations (KGAT-PO) using AI, bridging the gap between digital humanities research and AI technology. Its value is evident in its potential to efficiently uncover hidden people relationships, aiding digital humanities scholars in gaining new insights and perspectives, ultimately enhancing the depth and effectiveness of their research.

How can a qualitative life course approach inform the analysis of the impact of disability policy on individual lives? This contribution puts forward the concept of policy reception in an effort to apply the key principles of a life course perspective to the study of policy impact, a perspective which is of particular relevance in the case of disability policy. Drawing on a broader qualitative study of the reception of disability policy in France, the paper, focusing on the in-depth analysis of two life stories, makes two main contributions. The first is theoretical, putting forward the concept of policy reception to address the missing link between “the state and the life course,” as pointed out by Mayer and Schoepflin (1989). The second is methodological, detailing how biographical interviews, following this life course approach, can be used to operationalize this concept of policy reception. These contributions are illustrated by study results focusing on the reception of disability-related educational policies.