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This paper aims to explore how immigrant small business owners construct entrepreneurial identities by deploying strategies of boundary making in Hong Kong.

Conceptually, it departs from the theoretical discussions of immigrant economy and ethnic boundary making. The analyzes are based on qualitative data collected from in-depth interviews and participant observation primarily in the South Asian immigrant economies in Hong Kong in the period 2014-2017.

Four strategies of boundary work including blurring boundaries, inversion of boundaries, personal repositioning and reconfirming of boundaries are identified. They bring to light that small immigrant entrepreneurs in Hong Kong still encounter considerable obstacles in the process of social integration. Boundary work serves as strategies to release sentiments that would symbolically bring them closer to the mainstream society. Following the “city as context” framework (Brettell, 1999; Foner, 2007), this paper argues that the various boundary making strategies have been shaped by the legacies of racism, neoliberal governance of integration and urban work ethos highlighting problems and individual responsibilities in Hong Kong.

This paper contributes to the literature of the immigrant economy and social integration. First, it sheds light on the role of symbolic meanings and non-economic gains of immigrant entrepreneurship in social integration. Second, it illuminates our understanding that immigrant economy can provide a channel for advancing and weakening social status, thus reminding us not to assume the path of social integration as a straightforward and positive one.

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

Financial accounting necessarily depends on an entity assumption that shapes the way it recognizes and accounts for organizational exchanges with social environments. It thereby constructs boundaries and frames permeability in terms of what counts, is accounted for, as being inside and outside of the organization. Yet there are different possible entity concepts reflecting different values about the relationship between the organizational entity and society. This essay considers four problem areas in which these values and the entity–society relationship are at stake within financial accounting: the problem of control within group accounting; accounting for externalities; the economization of public organizations; and the construction of organizational actorhood. These four problematics suggest that financial accounting, its boundary determining assumptions, and the forms of organizational permeability it permits are deeply intertwined and subject to continuous pressure for change.

This paper aims to explain the effects of national and organizational cultures of boundary spanners on their choices of using three archetype power-based behaviors – dominance, egalitarian and submissive – with supply chain partners. Improved outcomes for global supply chain (GSC) partners are anticipated due to the ways that cultural intelligence affects these culturally guided decisions.

Drawing on multiple streams of literature and focusing on boundary spanners in GSCs, the authors build a conceptual framework that highlights cultural antecedents of predispositions toward power-based behaviors and explains the moderating role of cultural intelligence of boundary spanners on behaviors performed.

The authors propose that boundary spanners’ national and organizational cultural values influence predispositions toward applying and accepting power-based behaviors. They also discuss how cultural intelligence moderates the relationship between culturally determined predispositions and power-based behaviors applied by partners. The cultural intelligence of boundary spanners is argued to have a pivotal role in making power-based decisions, resulting in healthier cross-cultural buyer–supplier relationships.

This paper is the first paper to advance an understanding of the cultural antecedents of boundary spanners’ power-based behaviors that are exercised and interpreted by partners in GSCs. Furthermore, the potential role of cultural intelligence in inter-organizational power dynamics and power-based partner behaviors in supply chains has not previously been discussed.

Since the emergence of new public health in the 1970s, health has not merely been considered the absence of disease, but physical, mental and social wellbeing. This article seeks to analyzes the implications of this broad concept of health at an organizational level.

The paper presents a qualitative case study of boundary drawing in a Danish municipal agency in charge of planning and conducting health promoting and disease preventing activities from 1989 to 2005. The theoretical framework draws on Niklas Luhmann's organization theory.

Two different organizational answers were found to the challenges inherent in the broad concept of new public health. First, the organization tried to increase its size and incorporate as many aspects of the environment as possible. This expansive strategy jeopardised the identity of the organization. Second, the organization tried to keep clear and tight boundaries and from this position irritate entities in the environment. This limitative strategy made the organization spend relatively more energy on organizing and controlling itself than on public health work.

The case study shows how a broad concept of health makes boundary management topical in organizations dealing with health promotion and disease prevention. Organizations in charge of public health activities need to reflect on how they can create intelligent compensations for the disadvantages involved in an expansive or a limitative strategy.

The broad concept of health inherent in new public health has been widely accepted and yet its challenges to organizational boundary drawing have attracted little attention. This paper provides an analysis of these challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a boundary-focused analysis of career patterns in Greek public education.

A descriptive, interpretive design from the naturalistic paradigm was chosen for the study, based on narratives of 27 public education employees who used decision-making models for outlining their career plans.

This study depicted career-related boundaries and intentions of employees to develop their career within their domain or crossing particular boundaries, namely, the public-private boundary, the public education to higher education boundary, the occupational and other less salient boundaries.

The delimitation of the study on public education employees studying for a postgraduate diploma might limit the scope of inter-occupational mobility.

This study highlights the subject of the first degree as the most critical determinant of career development, and identifies the role of structural constraints, especially of promotion systems, in “bounding” graduate careers.

This study developed a typology of career paths of public education employees and associated them with the identification of two main employee profiles, related to the subject of their first degree.

While there is anecdotal evidence that internationally mobile workers often form isolated nation-based communities or “expatriate bubbles,” previous academic scholarship on the expatriate communities and their subjective boundaries is limited. The primary purpose of this article is to advance the theoretical or conceptual understanding of expatriate communities as bubbles.

As developed by Lamont and Molnár (2002), the theory of symbolic boundaries is applied and set to scrutinize the production and maintenance of insulated expatriate communities. Empirically, an ethnographic study of a community of Finnish expatriates in a Southeast Asian country is undertaken to describe how symbolic boundaries are constructed.

The main theoretical implication of the paper is the recognition that expatriates themselves are involved in creating the “bubble.” The boundaries separating the national expatriate community are not externally imposed but can be viewed as consequences of the active boundary work of the expatriates. The empirical study demonstrates how the Finnish expatriates negotiated the symbolic boundaries of their community, drawing on cultural, moral and spatial modalities in different levels of boundary work.

There need to be more systematic attempts to develop a theoretically grounded understanding of insulated expatriate communities and their boundaries. This article contributes to the sociological conceptualization of expatriate bubbles by utilizing the symbolic boundary approach, which adds perspective to the embryonic theory of the subjective boundaries of expatriate communities. The multiplicity of different types of symbolic boundaries and their modalities suggests that an expatriate bubble is rarely a finished state or structure.

This chapter explores the question – where is the economy? In taking up this question, I explore the action of economists in making the economy, framed in the place of ‘place’ in the economy and how the politics of economic data and calculation and boundaries make economies. In this way, I argue for a performative understanding of regional economics where the economy can be said to be made, often out of real things such as hospitals, factories, shops and schools, and infrastructure, but also out of social practices that echo out of the field of economics into institutions and ways of thinking calculatedly.

To make this case of this approach, and to grasp the slippery fish of where the economy is, I introduce autoethnographic materials from my experience of being a regional economic commentator, holding forth on the Waterford economy. These empirics relay the everyday methods of economic analysis as a material and political practice, alighting on the data, calculations and boundaries that go into making the economy. Here the curious relationship between the economist and their economy, the dancer and the dance come into view and how people, including myself, call an economy into being.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the development of a workplace development programme (WPDP) targeting small and medium sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) by focussing on the people who acted as brokers providing cross-boundary connections between its collaborating partners.

The material, from interviews with 32 individuals and 11 meetings, was analysed in a boundary-crossing framework, which provided tools to reveal how the roles of brokers at different levels (operative, strategic and national) of the WPDP affected its development.

The findings indicate that cross-boundary connections were made by persons who acted as brokers within and between different levels of the WPDP. The brokers who provided cross-boundary connections between different levels of the WPDP were found to play the most important role for the prompt development of the WPDP.

Apart from unique empirical material depicting the development of a collaborative venture between national and regional stakeholders of the manufacturing industry, the value of this study is the attention given to the people behind the policymaking of publicly funded national WPDPs, revealing the complex business of developing policy-driven competence development activities to employees in SMEs.

Parallel organizations (POs) perform tasks that operating organizations (OOs) are not equipped or organized to perform well. However, POs rely on OOs’ goodwill for implementation of their ideas and recommendations. Little is known about how POs achieve impact in OOs; this paper aims to examine this important topic.

Through the analytical lens of boundary spanning, the paper analyzes the PO–OO relationship in a manufacturing organization. Data were collected through 31 semi-structured in-depth interviews with OO managers, PO team leaders and PO team members.

Primary PO–OO boundary dimensions were favoritism toward local practice in the OO, specialized knowledge across PO–OO contexts and power asymmetry favoring the OO. The main boundary-spanning activities were translating, which targets specialized knowledge, and anchoring, which targets favoritism towards local practice and power asymmetry.

The findings on PO–OO collaboration, especially PO–OO power relations, complement conventional topics in PO literature, such as POs’ purpose, structural configuration and staffing.

POs should be staffed with team members, especially team leaders, who can translate effectively between the PO’s and the OO’s frames of reference, and facilitate complicated knowledge processes across these contexts. Additionally, senior managers should understand their role in anchoring the PO initiative and its results within the OO.

This is the first study to view the PO–OO relationship via boundary spanning, and thus to identify power asymmetry as a key challenge not previously described in PO literature, and describe how this asymmetry is overcome through anchoring.