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The purpose of this paper is to explore the pluralist contours of Canadian management “knowledge” using the discourse “official” bilingualism – the English and French languages – to understand the impact of socio-historical-political differences on the development of management knowledge production.

Drawing upon an archival collection of management textbooks as historical data, the authors critically explore and analyze the development of Canadian “schools” and management theory. Using narrative analysis and critical hermeneutics, the paper considers the socio-historical-political context of the various “Canadian” scholars that sought to establish a unique business academy distinct but paradoxically akin to the management schools in the USA.

Mirroring the struggle of Francophones in a dominant English imperative, French management textbooks appeared decades later than English titles. When French texts began to disseminate, it remained in the shadows of American management ideologies.

As only Canadian organizational behavior texts published within the previous 50 years were used as data in this study, it may be incautious to draw broader conclusions. The empirical element of this research relied upon convenience sampling of textbooks.

Management educators weld a considered level of socio-political power that they may or may not knowingly possess, especially in terms of selecting a textbook and other course materials. Regardless of background, management students are somewhat a “tabula rasa;” open to learning new content to make sense of the world. This “open state” places a great deal of responsibility on the professorate in shaping management students’ theoretical understanding of everyday life in organizations. The authors suggest practitioners be reflexive, aware of how textbooks serve as an important vehicle in education that in times past, have promoted or reified mono-cultural agendas.

The research in this paper builds on recent research that considers the role of socio-historical-political context in how management knowledge and theory is performed, as well as contributes to understanding textbooks in how they may shape a pluralist account of Canadian management “knowledge”.

Investigates employment discrimination in Canadian Schools of Business. A review of Statistics Canada data on student (1971, 1978) and faculty composition (1980, 1985, 1989) demonstrates that the number of females as a percentage of undergraduate and graduate students of business has increased significantly as has the total percentage of female faculty. Females are, however, significantly under‐represented in senior academic positions of associate and full professors with little change over the study period. Discusses barriers to academic attainment and the consequences to feminist research in the administrative sciences.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it explains the current records management practices for Canadian criminal records. Second, it details the larger social and cultural implications of those practices, toward considering the role records management plays in long‐term sustainable offender rehabilitation outcomes.

This paper is based on a thorough literature review, which considered research on the history of Canadian criminal record management; current records management procedures for Canadian criminal records; and current Canadian social and cultural understandings of offenders, criminal records, and the relationship between criminal record management and public policy.

This paper finds that Canadian records management procedures for criminal records can have grave impacts on offenders' lives. Specifically, this paper explores how records management practices are shaped by the social norms and values embedded in public policy mandates, which ultimately appear to disrupt, rather than support, offenders' rehabilitation.

This paper's research is limited by its current approach. Consequently, it encourages researchers to further develop its findings in the future, both domestic to Canada and internationally.

This paper includes implications that advocate for increased awareness about how public policy dictated records management procedures can limit offenders' ability to reintegrate into society.

This paper addresses the grave social consequences and burdens offenders face when they are unable to seal their previous criminal record.

This paper addresses the need to study how offenders' rehabilitation is affected by the policy dictating the management of their criminal record.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze current literature on critical sensemaking (CSM) to assess its significance and potential for understanding the role of agency in management and organizational studies.

The analysis involves an examination of a selection of 51 applied studies that cite, draw on and contribute to CSM, to assess the challenges and potential of utilizing CSM.

The paper reveals the range of organizational issues that this work has been grappling with; the unique insights that CSM has revealed in the study of management and organizations; and some of the challenges and promises of CSM for studying agency in context. This sets up discussion of organizational issues and insights provided by CSM to reveal its potential in dealing with issues of agency in organizations. The sheer scope of CSM studies indicates that it has relevance for a range of management researchers, including those interested in behavior at work, theories of organization, leadership and crisis management, diversity management, emotion, ethics and justice, and many more.

The main focus is restricted to providing a working knowledge of CSM rather than other approaches to agency.

The paper outlines the challenges and potential for applying the CSM theory.

The paper reveals the range of problem-solving issues that CSM studies have been applied to.

This is the first major review of the challenges and potential of applying CSM; concluding with a discussion of its strengths and limitations and providing a summary of insights for future work.

This paper aims to use the origin story of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management as a foil for unpacking the tensions between deep disciplinary specialization and liberal education in business schools in Canada and the USA. Ultimately, the paper reveals that those tensions are not irreconcilable, and that through the fortunes of historical contingencies and deliberate decision-taking, a faculty can embrace the benefits of both breadth and depth.

The paper proposes a critical organizational history of management education through a case study. By drawing on secondary literature and archival sources, the authors focus on moments in business education, such as the founding of the Wharton School of Business, the release of the Carnegie and Ford Reports and the trend towards increased specialization to situate a case study of Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Management.

The authors find that the evolution of business education in North America from its broad, liberal origins towards narrow, specialization has come at a cost to some of the benefits of business and management education. An alternative approach, one reflected in the design of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management, its programme offerings and its interconnection with other disciplines, enables the advantages of deep disciplinarity to co-exist (and cross-inform) with the advantages of liberal approach to knowledges.

The Dalhousie model offers business schools an example of a faculty that balances the rich insights of liberal interdisciplinarity with the need for sophisticated approaches to more granular, often disciplinary, topics. In addition, the paper offers the story of a multidisciplinary management faculty, some explanation for how that faculty was maintained despite pressures towards specialization; and in doing so, contributes to the limited historical research of management education, particularly in Canada, post-2000.

Taking a transdisciplinary viewpoint, the authors synthesize the literature on the theoretical, methodological, and epistemological issues in the study of corruption as a construct in project management (PM) as applied to IDPs. While the study of corruption has focused on “who and why” to help understand corruption's occurrence, there is a lack of analysis on “where and how” to ensure corruption's prevention and improve PM to better support delivery actors. The authors rely on four theoretical frameworks to help interpret evidence and formulate a coherent model for managing project socio-cultural context: organizational interests theory (OIT), principal-agent theory (PAT), culturalist theory (CT) and institutional theory (IT).

International development projects (IDPs) have become very complex with greater diversity of donor agencies and aid delivery actors. The relative lack of success of development aid has been linked in part to corruption at various levels. PM methods are essential to help prevent this behavior. To assess the complexity of this problem, the authors completed a grounded theory research based on thirty interviews with international development experts, balancing representation from donor and receiving countries, as well as project managers in public and private sectors. Data are analyzed using a qualitative sorting process using the software NVivo.

Results show that PM, beyond PM's practical nature and technical focus, can offer numerous opportunities to prevent corruption impact on project actors, even in a context where anti-corruption initiatives may be perceived as less effective. The authors present an original theoretical model that illustrates which actors, events and context are related and linked in the dynamic efforts to understand and combat corruption in international development endeavors. Context is linked to dynamics: foreign aid cycle, capture opportunities, context pressures, personal damages done, and control mechanisms exercised.

The outcomes and quality of IDPs remain highly controversial, especially with perception of corruption by various stakeholders. Some experts recognize the inefficacy of applying classical PM tools and processes. By contrasting findings to the literature, the authors conclude that an alternative approach to overcome the taboos and prejudices in studying corruption is to ask a different research question. A research agenda is proposed for solving this phenomenon. To guide PM research on development projects, focusing on the “where and how” of corruption requires addressing how actors build their knowledge management capabilities, and address the social and cultural challenges inherent to IDPs.

The Canadian mutual fund setting is unique in that two governance mechanisms – corporate and trust – coexist. This study empirically examines the impact of each mechanism on fund fees and performance. We find that corporate class funds charge higher fees but deliver superior fee-adjusted returns than trust funds. We then analyze the impact of various board characteristics on fees and performance for corporate class funds. We find that a board with smaller size, CEO duality, and a higher percentage of independent directors is more likely to charge lower fees. In addition, smaller boards are strongly associated with higher fee-adjusted performance. Our study supports agency theory over stewardship theory and provides valuable guidelines for Canadian investors and regulatory agencies.