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This paper presents an historical reconstruction of the radicalisation of Alan Fox, the industrial sociologist and a detailed analysis of his early historical and sociological writing in the classical pluralist phase.

An intellectual history, including detailed discussion of key Fox texts, supported by interviews with Fox and other Biographical sources.

Fox’s radicalisation was incomplete, as he carried over from his industrial relations (IR) pluralist mentors, Allan Flanders and Hugh Clegg, a suspicion of political Marxism, a sense of historical contingency and an awareness of the fragmented nature of industrial conflict.

Recent academic attention has centred on Fox’s later radical pluralism with its “structural” approach to the employment relationship. This paper revisits his early, neglected classical pluralist writing. It also illuminates his transition from institutional IR to a broader sociology of work, influenced by AH Halsey, John Goldthorpe and others and the complex nature of his radicalisation.

This chapter discusses the process of initiating and developing an open and ongoing conversation about values within a doctoral community in an education research center located within a British university. To do this, the authors first articulate the local and institutional context of this specific doctoral community and the intersections of values declared by the host institution and the specific research center.

This chapter then moves on to describing the process of building an open conversation with postgraduate researchers (PGRs) and staff supporting them. This open conversation questions and explores the institutionally stated values, starting from collaboratively negotiated guiding questions and prompts. The discussion of responses to those prompts, obtained through an anonymous online platform, grounds then a discussion of how values can become relevant and rooted in everyday experience for PGRs. The authors, as a collective, use the concept of “boundaries,” emerged in the conversations themselves but also relevant in academic literature, as a linking concept for the discussion of the responses.

The discussion then concludes by articulating the broader impact of the engagement in these conversations about values within and beyond the boundaries of the host institution and argues for the importance of such ongoing conversations as fundamental elements of fostering value-based communities and cultures in higher education contexts.

Targeting at the inconsistent relationship between protean career orientation and turnover intentions, this study aims to uncover when and why such inconsistency occurs. It emphasized the mediating role of organizational identification and moderating effects of current organizational career growth and future organizational career growth prospect.

The authors conducted a three-wave time-lagged study over seven months, with a sample of 1,012 participants from various occupations.

The relationship of protean career orientation to turnover intentions via organizational identification was negative when current organizational career growth was high, and it was positive when current growth was low. Future organizational career growth prospect weakened organizational identification–turnover intentions relationship. Those two moderators jointly influenced the indirect relationship. For employees low in both states, the positive indirect relationship was the most significant.

By integrating social identity theory and social cognitive theory, this study provides a comprehensive understanding of protean career orientation–turnover intentions relationship. It also enriches studies on protean career orientation and organizational identification–turnover intentions relationship.

In the quest for better construction workforce management, this chapter explored the background of workforce management and related theories, models, and practices. Through a review, the chapter provided meaning to the concept of construction and workforce management. The chapter concluded that while the construction industry worldwide is important to the economic growth of the countries where it operates, the industry’s management of its workforce is challenged by several problems. These problems include the nature of the industry, skill shortage, unhealthy working environment, and poor image of the industry, among others. Also, while the construction industry is rich in diversity, this has been a major source of problems for workforce management. The chapter further revealed that to improve workforce management and attain better-performing construction organisations, careful recruitment, effective training, providing a safe working environment, putting policies to promote diversity, and ensuring innovativeness, among others, are essential.

This chapter presents a comparative study of the trends and patterns of communication and tourism research in Brazil and the United States over the last 20 years. Through a bibliometric analysis of the CAPES and EBSCO databases, the study identifies the main theoretical and methodological references, classifies the fundamental themes in the area, and describes the role of communication for tourism. The results indicate the predominance in North American scientific literature of research related to the image and the brand of the tourist destinations, as well as the measurement and the evaluation of the communicative strategies. On the other hand, Brazilian research presents a greater diversity of approaches: destination image studies, tourism consumption, tourist narrative analysis, identities, social networks, community-based tourism, sports, and ecological tourism, with an explicit recognition of the dangers of sexual objectification and dehumanization within tourism. The survey showed that the scientific community has a strong interest in this area, signaling a search for knowledge to deepen the conceptual understanding of the subject. Thus, this chapter provides insights regarding the opportunities and directions for the next decades of research in this field of study.

The construction workforce plays a crucial role in the successful delivery of any construction project and, eventually, the performance of any construction organisation. Effectively managing these workforces becomes crucial. However, past studies have shown that workforce management within the construction industry has been on the back foot, with workers being seen as resources required to deliver construction projects. This situation begs the need for a construction workforce management model that can be tailored to an organisation’s situation and adopted to manage workers and improve organisational performance effectively. To this end, this chapter reviewed existing workforce management theories, models, and practices to develop a suitable approach towards managing the construction workforce. Ultimately, a strategic workforce management with a classical view using a soft workforce management approach that embraces employees’ empowerment and development through trust was proposed. Five major practices that best suit the soft workforce management approach were identified as key constructs in the proposed construction workforce management model.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

The conflict between institutionalism and neoclassicism in the 20th century has been investigated by scholars over the years. Many of them believe that in the postwar period, neoclassicism triumphed while institutionalism largely disappeared. The present chapter takes a very different view. The late 20th century represents a broad synthesis of neoclassical and institutional themes in a methodology we call pragmatic empiricism. That approach combines the mathematical model building and theoretical formalism of neoclassical economics with the institutional economist’s data-driven statistical analysis and concern for developing institutional forms. We use as a case study the history of American locational economics from the 1930s to the present. The mixing of institutional and neoclassical themes is quite evident in the work of three young scholars at Harvard who effectively initiated American locational economics. In the postwar period, we find a series of outstanding, well-published papers that capture the spirit of the “founders.” These papers do use more modeling, but they also focus on major institutional developments. A broader review of locational works is consistent with the pragmatic empiricism label. The history of locational economics supports the claim that institutionalism, far from disappearing, continues to provide fundamental questions and techniques for modern pragmatic empiricism.

This study aims to investigate the effect of organizational ambidexterity (OA) and organizational green culture (OGC) on corporate sustainability (CS) while incorporating the mediating role of green innovation (GI) to provide a detailed insight into CS. The study also presents a research framework based on the Organizational Ambidexterity theory and Natural Resource-based view to explain the factors contributing to CS.

Using stratified sampling, the study collected data through survey-based empirical research from 307 textile companies registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) or the All-Pakistan Textile Mills Association (APTMA). The collected data were analysed using path analysis, mediation analysis and moderation analysis through smart PLS-SEM version 4.0 to assess the composition and causal association of factors.

The study found a significant relationship between OA and OGC with CS. Furthermore, the study revealed that green innovation partially mediates the relationship between OGC and CS. The proposed research framework can be valuable for promoting and recommending actions to enhance CS.

The study on CS in the textile sector of Pakistan has limitations such as a narrow focus, cross-sectional design and reliance on self-reported data. Future research should explore additional factors, conduct longitudinal research, investigate contextual factors, scrutinize specific green innovation practices and broaden the scope of the study to include SMEs and other textile organizations.

The research framework can help senior executives to foster CS by promoting OGC, OA and GI. Practitioners and academicians can also utilize or further investigate the proposed framework for validation and to foster CS.

This study fills gaps in the existing literature by investigating the mediating effect of GI between OGC and CS. The proposed research framework provides a comprehensive understanding of the factors contributing to CS based on the Organizational Ambidexterity theory and Natural Resource-based view.

This paper aims to investigate the process by which performative technologies (PTs), in this case accreditation work in a business school, take form and how humans engage in making up such practices. It studies how academics come to accept and even identify with the quantitative representations of themselves in a translation process.

The research involved a longitudinal, self-ethnographic case study that followed the accreditation process of one Nordic business school from 2015 to 2021.

The findings show how the PT pushed for different engagements in various phases of the translation process. Early in the translation process, the PT promoted engagement because of self-realization and the ability for academics to proactively influence the prospective competitive milieu. However, as academic qualities became fabricated into numbers, the PT was able to request compliance, but also to induce self-reflection and self-discipline by forcing academics to compare themselves to set qualities and measures.

The paper advances the field by linking five phases of the translation process, problematization, fabrication, materialization, commensuration and stabilization, to a discussion of why academics come to accept and identify with the quantitative representations of themselves. The results highlight that the materialization phase appears to be the critical point at which calculative practices become persuasive and start influencing academics’ thoughts and actions.