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Throughout Latin America, policy-makers are struggling to reconcile two conflicting political pressures: (i) the push to become more globally competitive on the basis of international assessments such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), and (ii) the simultaneous need to address long-standing, entrenched inequities in both educational quality and access throughout much of the region. This chapter documents how policy-making elites throughout Latin America are trying to address these two goals by incorporating “evidence-based” policy solutions that can be empirically defended as promoting equity. However, scholars throughout Latin America argue that instead of promoting equity, an increasing focus on accountability in educational policy at the national level throughout the region has resulted instead in a shift in priorities from the governance of educational systems to evaluation of those systems, with the state functioning primarily as an Evaluative State. This argument is developed through secondary analysis of the Hispanophone and Lusophone academic education literatures of Latin America, whose robust and rigorous studies of these trends at both national and regional levels remain little explored within the Anglophone academic tradition.

Purpose – In this chapter we highlight the potential of critical and poststructural paradigms and associated qualitative research approaches for future research in strategy. In addition, we aim to contribute to the proliferation of applications of qualitative methodologies as well as to facilitate the diversity of qualitative inquiry approaches in the strategy field.

Methodology/Approach – Building on insights from standpoint theory, we discuss the importance and necessity of cultivating critical and poststructural paradigms in strategy. Furthermore, we review three related qualitative inquiry approaches (i.e., discourse analysis, deconstruction, and genealogy) and develop suggestions for their utilization in future strategy research on emerging market economies.

Findings – We highlight key concepts of critical and poststructural paradigms as well as of the selected approaches and provide a variety of examples relevant to strategy research to illustrate potential applications and analytic considerations.

Originality/Value of chapter – Critical and poststructural paradigms and related research methodologies are underutilized in strategy research; however, they are important contributions to paradigmatic and methodological diversity in the field generally and necessary approaches for developing our understanding of strategy phenomena in the context of emerging market economies specifically.

Accounting history has tended to ignore the accounting research enterprise, focusing instead on particular episodes or periods, such as histories of standards setting or histories of the accounting profession. In effect, methodological and theoretical differences within the accounting research discipline have so profoundly divided the discipline that researchers working in one area are relatively unable or unwilling to understand the key issues in other areas. This chapter seeks to shed some light on the greatest divide in accounting research: the divide between positive and critical accounting research. This chapter argues that both positive and critical accounting research can trace their origins to certain key figures who were doctoral students at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The chapter employs Foucault’s concept of genealogy to examine the origins of the positivist and critical paradigms in accounting research.

Genealogy is thought to be the third most popular hobby in the United States today. Considering the recent impact of Roots, there is every indication it will remain so. A strong argument can be made that libraries should heed this interest and begin to develop genealogical collections. They should forget old prejudices, accept responsibility for this informational need, and begin an entirely new relationship with ancestor hunters and genealogists.

Drawing from Foucault’s methodological terms of archaeology and genealogy this article critically engages with understanding the inter‐relationship between old age and prison life.We draw out the relevance of a Foucauldian paradigm for investigating how penal discourses and actual prisoners experiences exemplify issues of power, knowledge and surveillance in institutional settings. We draw out how violence impinges on the lives of older people in prisons by pointing out the implications of such experiences for both a critical ontology and epistemology of ageing. It is by transgressing the boundaries of the conventional understanding of the prison and by casting a critical gaze that will gain greater understanding of how elder abuse in secure settings goes unregulated.