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This study explores how a small minority of social entrepreneurs break free from third sector constraints to conceive, create and grow non-profit organisations that generate social value at scale in new and innovative ways.

Six narrative case histories of innovative social enterprises were developed based on documents and semi-structured interviews with founders and long serving executives. Data were coded “chrono-processually”, which involves locating thoughts, events and actions in distinct time periods (temporal bracketing) and identifying the processes at work in establishing new social ventures.

This study presents two core findings. First, the paper demonstrates how successful social entrepreneurs draw on their lived experiences, private and professional, in driving the development and implementation of social innovations, which are realised through application of their capabilities as analysts, strategists and resources mobilisers. These capabilities are bolstered by personal legitimacy and by their abilities as storytellers and rhetoricians. Second, the study unravels the complex processes of social entrepreneurship by revealing how sensemaking, theorising, strategizing and sensegiving underpin the core processes of problem specification, the formulation of theories of change, development of new business models and the implementation of social innovations.

The study demonstrates how social entrepreneurs use sensemaking and sensegiving strategies to understand and address complex social problems, revealing how successful social entrepreneurs devise and disseminate social innovations that substantially add value to society and bring about beneficial social change. A novel process-outcome model of social innovation is presented illustrating the interconnections between entrepreneurial cognition and strategic action.

The purpose of this paper is to answer two main research questions. First, the authors ask the degree to which the UK corporate governance code has changed in response to both systemic perturbations and the subsequent enquiries established to recommend solutions to perceived shortcomings. Second, the authors ask how the solutions proposed in these landmark governance texts might be explained.

The authors take a critical discourse approach to develop and apply a discourse model of corporate governance reform. The authors draw together data on popular, corporate-political and technocratic discourses on corporate governance in the UK and analyse these data using content analysis and the historical discourse approach.

The UK corporate governance code has changed little despite periodic crises and the enquiries set up to investigate and make recommendation. Institutional stasis, the authors find, is the product of discourse capture and control by elite corporate actors aided by political allies who inhabit the same elite habitus. Review group members draw intertextually on prior technocratic discourse to create new canonical texts that bear the hallmarks of their predecessors. Light touch regulation by corporate insiders thus remains the UK approach.

This is one of the first applications of critical discourse analysis in the accounting literature and the first to have conducted a discursive analysis of corporate governance reports in the UK. The authors present an original model of discourse transitions to explain how systemic challenges are dissipated.

Bourdieu’s construct of the field of power has received relatively little attention despite its novelty and theoretical potential. This paper explores the meaning and implications of the construct, and integrates it into a wider conception of the formation and functioning of elites at the highest level in society. Drawing on an extensive dataset profiling the careers of members of the French business elite, it compares and contrasts those who enter the field of power with those who fail to qualify for membership, exploring why some succeed as hyper-agents while others do not. The alliance of social origin and educational attainment, class and meritocracy, emerges as particularly compelling. The field of power is shown to be relatively variegated and fluid, connecting agents from different life worlds. Methodologically, this paper connects biographical data of top French directors with the field of power in France in a novel way, while presenting an operationalization of Bourdieu’s concept of the field of power as applied to the French elite.

The purpose of this study is to explore some of the distinctive features of organizing and organization in France which set it apart from organization in other nations, and which are fundamental to its modus operandi. In particular, this article is concerned with elite connectivity and concerted action by elite “connectors”.

The research underpinning this article stems from a cross-national comparative project on business elites and corporate governance in France and the UK. This has three dimensions, being quantitative, qualitative and case study-based. Concerted action by the ruling elite is explored through two illustrative vignettes: the ousting from office of Jean-Marie Messier and State-sponsored expansion as pursued by EDF. Both examples shed light on the French business elite’s response to globalization and the development of international business.

The paper finds elite cohesion to be achieved quite differently in the two countries. In addition, it finds that the ties that bind French connectors tend to be strong and institutionally based.

The case of EDF suggests that the most ambitious of State-sponsored strategies can also be the most successful. It implies that elite ideologies in France have deviated relatively little from sentiments expressed by Rousseau and de Gaulle concerning the primacy of the national interest and the conviction that firms can serve as an (expansionist) instrument of the nation. The Messier case illuminates the pattern of close relationships among the French business elite. It demonstrates how a strategy of expansion may come unstuck when it is not grounded in the customary modes of business regulation.

This research confirms a slight preference on the part of the French business elite for more homogenous ties. Against this, the paper demonstrates that a significant proportion of the French elite act as boundary spanners, brokering relationships with others from more distant parts of the wider network. The integration of the French elite in the Eurozone has potentially favored bridge-building relationships and weakened national embeddedness. This may contribute to the decline of indigenous interlocks, while promoting the further internationalization of top management teams. The implications of this for organizational strategy, firm survival and economic performance form an agenda for future research.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to explore how commercial hospitality has contributed to the development of urban areas in relation to commerce, hospitality, religious and imperial patronage in early modern, Safavid Iran (c. seventeenth century). Second, to combine material culture research methods in an analytical framework for future use.

Data were collected during 27 site visits over three years to 14 caravanserai six bazaar complexes. A material culture methodology is proposed, designed and implemented, supplemented by analysis of textual sources.

The form and function of caravanserai at Zein‐i Edin broadly reflect the form and function of desert caravanserai common in much of the Islamic world. However, the complex within the Qaysariyya Bazaar in Isfahan reflects the convergence of specific dynastic, geopolitical and economic issues facing seventeenth century Safavid Iran shaping both urban form and commercial focus. These are consolidation of the Safavid dynasty, rivalry with the Ottoman Empire and the vital importance of trade with Mughal India.

The research is limited by its specific contextual scope but invites further investigation in analogous contexts across this milieu as well as further implementation of the material culture methods it adopts to both historical and contemporary commercial contexts.

The paper explores, for the first time the development of commercial hospitality in early modern Iran and invites further consideration of the development of capitalism outside of Eurocentric teleologies. Furthermore, it presents a new and explicit methodological framework for using material culture as a means of enquiry.

Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD) distinguishes itself from other ETD databases by providing immediate access to theses that are freely available online. The Republic of Armenia is a small geographical area in Central Asia with a population of only three million, yet an estimated total of five to seven million people of Armenian ancestry live outside of Armenia. What knowledge of Armenian cultural heritage can be discovered by searching OATD for open access theses that relate to Armenian history and culture?. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The OATD database was searched for the terms Armenia or Armenian. Discovered thesis records were exported into citation management tools and analysed for subject content, year of publication, institutional repository source, and a determination of whether Armenia was a primary or secondary topic. Access to theses was also tested to verify their open access. The remaining thesis records (n=152) were exported into an Excel spread sheet for numerical analysis and graphic production.

From the records getting enhanced metadata (n=152), slightly more (52 per cent) were master's theses. Nearly two-thirds (63 per cent) used the Republic and culture of Armenia as a primary theme. English was the predominant author language (85 per cent) with Portuguese and French represented less than 5 per cent. World history and social sciences research were the most represented subjects. Most open access theses on Armenia or Armenian culture date from after 2000. All enhanced records, along with their abstracts and direct links, are available in a searchable RefWorks shared folder.

The OATD database was evaluated for scholarly representation of a particular country and culture.

The aim of this paper is to examine the early history of restaurants, as invented in Paris around 1766, deciding whether a market orientation ruled out genuine hospitality.

Contemporary accounts, such as Brillat‐Savarin's section “On Restaurateurs” in The Physiology of Taste in 1825, are considered against a definition of hospitality as a household's provision of care for non‐members.

The restaurateurs' innovation was selling individualized meals within the emerging consumer market. While Brillat‐Savarin recognized the commercial cynicism of even such brilliant exponents as Antoine Beauvilliers, their enterprises were hospitable to the extent that, emerging from domestic households, they were directed principally at meal‐making rather than money‐making. Highly “McDonaldized” corporations, whose primary purpose is profit, are a largely twentieth‐century development.

Defining hospitality as the provision of care by households to outsiders is a common sense approach that, nonetheless, provides an alternative to the usual characterizations of hospitality, based on ethics, personality, performance or industry.

Owner‐operated businesses are more likely to provide hospitality, certainly as traditionally understood, than corporations.

Since eighteenth‐century France, restaurants have only become more important, and the use of the household definition contributes to their better understanding, both historically and conceptually. The definition should have wide applicability.

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the changing food culture of Ireland focusing particularly on the evolution of commercial public dining in Dublin 1700‐1900, from taverns, coffeehouses and clubs to the proliferation of hotels and restaurants particularly during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Using a historical research approach, the paper draws principally on documentary and archival sources, but also uses material culture. Data are analysed using a combination of hermeneutics (Denzin and Lincoln, O'Gorman) and textual analysis (Howell and Prevenier).

The paper traces the various locations of public dining in Dublin 1700‐1900 and reveals that Dublin gentlemen's clubs preceded their London counterparts in owning their own premises, but that the popularity of clubs in both cities resulted in a slower growth of restaurants than in Paris. Competition for clubs appeared in the form of good hotels. The Refreshment Houses and Wine Licences (Ireland) Act 1860 created a more congenial environment for the opening of restaurants, with separate ladies coffee or dining rooms appearing from around 1870 onwards.

There is a dearth of research on the history of Irish food and commercial food provision in particular. This paper provides the most comprehensive discussion to date on the development of commercial dining in Dublin 1700‐1900 and suggests that the 1860 legislation might be further explored as a catalyst for the growth of restaurants in London and other British cities.