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The purpose of this paper is to examine autobiographical vignettes that are embedded in the annual report letters to shareholders of chief executive officers (CEOs). The aim is to reveal the capacity of this narrative to self-construct leader identity, show how they can help CEOs attain legitimacy and how they help CEOs to exert management control.

The paper is positioned within literature that focuses on the importance of the annual report CEO letter and the strategic use of CEO autobiographical vignettes therein. Three autobiographical vignettes included in letters to shareholders signed by E. Hunter Harrison, CEO of Canadian National Railway (2004, 2005 and 2007), are analysed using close reading techniques. This involved the authors separately reading each vignette by slowing down the reading process to aid understanding of the text’s “inner workings”. Several close readings of each vignette were conducted until a consensus was reached between the authors.

Autobiographical vignettes have strong potential to be used strategically, as rhetorical devices, to help CEOs exert management control, facilitate change, shape leader-follower relationships and sustain self-legitimacy.

This paper is the first within the accounting domain to highlight the potential for autobiographical narrative in a CEO’s annual letter to shareholders to convey corporate information (including strategic intent), to construct leader identity and to exert management control.

The chapter examines the storied experiences of a preservice teacher in India who transitioned to become a beginning year teacher over the course of this study. Multiple threads unraveled the complex interweaving of her personal and professional selves in her scholarship of teaching, further suggesting that teachers teach who they are. Through the course of this research, I explored the following questions about my participant: What was the source of her energy and passion for working with her students? What did her story reveal about the development of her personal practical knowledge? What were those experiences in the teacher education program which enabled her to intervene and connect with her students at a deeper level? As the inquiry travels back and forth on the temporal dimension, including various social spaces and interactions, my participant demonstrated an evolving understanding of her self-as-a-thinking being with an agency and social justice perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the conjecture that worker cooperatives (firms that practice participatory management and share profits broadly) suffer a competitive disadvantage relative to conventional firms is not supported by existing empirical research. It also considers alternative explanations for why such cooperatives are rare.

Historical analysis, literature survey, and survival analysis.

Studies of worker cooperatives in a variety of national settings indicate their failure rate is lower than conventional firms at least in the short and medium term. This contradicts the proposition that they are rare because they suffer a competitive disadvantage and focuses attention instead on their low formation rate.

The “liability of newness,” wealth and credit constraints, entrepreneurial rents, and collective action problems are cited as important barriers for the creation of worker cooperatives de novo, but these factors should be greatly reduced for those created through the conversion of an existing firm. Paradoxically, the overwhelming majority of cooperatives are created from scratch, and hence this explanation remains incomplete.

Existing policies incentivizing the creation of worker cooperatives, and current initiatives to promote them, do not encourage the creation of inferior economic institutions.

This paper contradicts the widely held belief that the distinctive features of worker cooperatives (participatory management and broadly shared profit) place them at a competitive disadvantage in a market economy. It also provides insight into why cooperatives are rare by challenging explanations based in presumed inefficiencies and focusing attention instead on barriers to creation.

This paper investigates the effect of the global financial crisis (GFC) on the level of corporate social responsibility disclosures (CSRD) in the annual report and/or CSR report of 36 major listed Portuguese companies in each of the years 2005, 2008 and 2011.

The analysis is framed principally by stakeholder theory. Data were explored using thematic content analysis and an index of disclosure calculated by year, industry type (consumer proximity versus environment sensitivity) and category of information.

Before the GFC, Portuguese listed companies increased their CSRD practices significantly. During the crisis, there was a slight decrease in CSRD. However, this was not as pronounced, as it would otherwise have been because it was counteracted by increased disclosures of company interactions with society, particularly in matters of corruption prevention and community engagement. CSRD was higher for companies with high consumer proximity but did not appear to be influenced by companies’ level of environmental sensitivity.

The results reveal a strong concern by companies for stakeholder management (particularly in respect of community relations) in a period of financial crisis. This study highlights the effect of a company’s proximity to consumers on levels of CSRD.

Self-study in teacher education practices is rife with tensions revolving around self and its position in relation to teaching practice and research. In this chapter, I explore and demonstrate these tensions building on Schwab's practical orientation and following its developments in narrative research and self-study. In particular, I focus on the role of self-knowledge in my work as a teacher educator as it has featured in my own self-studies. To present this, I rely on relational teacher education, a framework that I have developed and has guided my living and teaching as a teacher educator. Overall, this progression will demonstrate my belief that self-study is a crucial vehicle for developing self-knowledge; however, it ought to be seen as a means for relational teaching practice and not merely as an end.