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This paper seeks to pinpoint the importance of critical research that gets to problematise social entrepreneurship's self‐evidences, myths, and political truth‐effects, thus creating space for novel and more radical enactments.

A typology mapping four types of critical research gets developed. Each critique's merits and limitations are illustrated through existing research. Also, the contours of a fifth form of critique get delineated which aims at radicalising social entrepreneurship through interventionist research.

The typology presented entails myth‐busting (problematisation through empirical facts), critique of power‐effects (problematisation through denormalising discourses, ideologies, symbols), normative critique (problematisation through moral reflection), and critique of transgression (problematisation through practitioners' counter‐conducts).

The paper makes it clear that the critique of social entrepreneurship must not be judged according to what it says but to whether it creates the conditions for novel articulations and enactments of social entrepreneurship.

It is argued that practitioners' perspectives and viewpoints are indispensible for challenging and extending scientific doxa. It is further suggested that prospective critical research must render practitioners' perspective an even stronger focus.

The contribution is the first of its kind which maps critical activities in the field of social entrepreneurship, and which indicates how the more radical possibilities of social entrepreneurship can be fostered through interventionist research.

The purpose of this paper is to review the development and impact of the Social Enterprise Journal (SEJ) from its inception in 2005 until present day.

The paper analyses the thematic content of SEJ and its impact data from 2005 until 2017.

SEJ has broken new ground in the study of social enterprise (SE). It was the first journal back in 2005 to commence the exploration of this field and since has been the first to publish works on defining SE, their performance management, critical perspectives plus international differences. The paper shows that in the early years, SEJ was dominated by conceptual work aiming to understand SE plus their governance and performance management, which was mainly based on UK descriptive case studies and uncritical. By 2010, SEJ became established internationally with various issues being 100 per cent dominated by international aspects of SE. Recent more critical work has also enabled a process of “myth busting” in the SE field. This paper also shows the growth of SEJ in downloads and citations.

The paper demonstrates the important role SEJ has played in both improving practice and informing policy.

The paper is the first to review the development and impact of SEJ.

Despite the harmful impact of supervisor transgressions, they have received little empirical attention. The purpose of this paper is to addresses this important gap, examining the nature of transgressions committed at work by supervisors against subordinates.

A critical incident technique was employed in which employees described a transgression committed by their supervisor. Qualitative responses were then analyzed, resulting in the emergence of supervisor transgression themes.

In total, 11 themes emerged, including: performance criticisms, demeaning insults, false accusations, undue demands, unfair employment decisions, inconsiderate treatment, inequitable behavior, inappropriate contextual selections, disregard of opinions, undersupplied resources, and underprovided recognition.

While this approach is not without limitations, including the potential for participant memory error and researcher analytical bias, it offers a necessary initial exploration into the content of supervisor transgressions. Findings open new areas for continued research exploration into the nature and functioning of supervisor transgressions.

Practitioners also stand to benefit from this work, as this identification of supervisor transgression themes affords organizations knowledge about how to best target supervisory interventions.

Though researchers have just begun to examine the nature of leader transgressions, they have yet to analyze the content of supervisor transgressions. This study offers an original investigation into how supervisors transgress against subordinates at work.

This paper aims to discuss the notion of carnival laughter in Bakhtin's examination of Rabelais's literary works. The paper suggests that what may be called, after Rabelais, the agélaste ethos, the ethos of the men and women without laughter, remains a strong influence in some domains of critical management studies (CMS) as well as mainstream organization theory.

The literature review discusses Russian literature theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of the writings of François Rabelais and related his concept of the agélaste to contemporary social and organization theory.

Some proponents of CMS praise the critical thinking and the outlook on society established by its foundational writers Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse. As a consequence, CMS tends to exclude the sources of joy, laughter and transgression and regard such social and human gestures and events as being frivolous and ephemeral. Therefore, CMS remains trapped within its own sphere of critical thinking and fails to address and understand significant components of everyday life.

The paper suggests that the notion of “critique” needs to be explored within the community of CMS researchers.

Discusses the concept of critique so central for both the CMS tradition of thinking and other domains of management studies in new terms.

This study aims to contribute to research into narrative brands by investigating if the lack of closure in the ambiguous season two’s ending of the Australian television series, Wanted, constituted a brand transgression.

Comments on posts about Wanted from social media accounts associated with the series were downloaded and analysed using thematic analysis informed by non-participatory netnography.

Audiences found the ambiguous ending of Wanted season two disappointing and it did not fulfil implied promises and their expectations, which fits the description of a brand transgression, and so they engaged in behaviours indicative of a brand transgression such as spreading negative word of mouth online. The ambiguous ending could have been a cliff-hanger to lead into a third season that was not guaranteed when the final episode aired, or the ending for the entire series. Although a third season was eventually made and positively received by audiences, viewer numbers declined by nearly a third, illustrating the importance of brand management for narrative brands.

This research has implications for the creators of television series, particularly if they do not know if it will be renewed. Not providing audiences with their expected closure can constitute a brand transgression and damage the narrative brand’s residual brand equity and potential earnings from streaming or a revival at a later date.

Prior research has focused on audiences’ responses to definitive endings, rather than ambiguous endings, which is the focus of this research. Furthermore, narrative brands are still an under-researched context.

While considerable critical energy has been devoted to unmasking the figure of the heroic entrepreneur, the idea that entrepreneurs are unique individuals with special abilities continues to be widespread in scholarly research, social media and popular culture. The purpose of this paper is to traverse the fantasy of the heroic entrepreneur by offering a reading of Richard Branson’s autobiography, Losing My Virginity.

The theoretical approach of this paper is informed by Slavoj Žižek’s concept of fantasy and his critical analytical strategy of “traversing the fantasy”. Žižek offers a theoretical framework that allows us to understand how narratives of famous entrepreneurs create paradoxical fantasies that produce desire.

By offering a reading of Richard Branson’s autobiography, Losing My Virginity, this paper serves to illustrate how the fantasy of the heroic entrepreneur creates the injunction to overcome oneself and become true to oneself, but also how this figure is ridden with contradictions and impossibilities. Branson’s book will eventually be shown to be a religious narrative, where the entrepreneur is responsible for redeeming the crises not only of the economy, but of being as such.

Rather than striving towards a processual approach that lays emphasis on the collective effort involved in entrepreneurship, this paper critically engages directly with the heroic entrepreneur by exploring how this figure is a fantasy that structures desire. This paper shows how critical entrepreneurship studies could benefit from an approach that analyses how the cultural representation of business celebrates the heroic entrepreneur as a source of value creation. The authors further argue that it is the contradictions and impossibilities embodied in the figure of the heroic entrepreneur that carry its far-reaching appeal.

The paper assumes a conflict between the discourses (domains of language) of finance, criminality and regulation. It suggests that in the recent past transgression of codes has become the norm in financial services practices. Utilising the idea that profit orientated organisations and operatives are crimogenic and that the border between organised economic activity and organised criminality is negotiable, it further suggests that the strategic deployment of nomination in relation to economic activities involving financial services serves to neutralise responses which would ordinarily classify these activities as deviant and subject to orthodox criminalisation. Without recourse to unified definitions and standards of criminality, the effectiveness of rational regulatoiy responses is flawed from the beginning. The paper raises broader questions regarding governmentality, legitimation and anomie. The deregulation, technologisation and internationalisation of the London financial markets has served to remove a central source of regulator authority (the State and its institutional agencies). Regulation through compliance suggests that the responsibility for legitimation and the production of values and ethics resides with the practitioners themselves who operate in a state of anomie (normlessness) in response to risk (financial risk and norm‐breaking risk). The absence of a grounded discourse of criminality operative within the con sciousness of practitioners and regulators enables ethical and moral relativity to flourish. The paper ends with a call for a restatement of criminological ‘labelling’ theory and for this to become an element in the informing theoretical criteria in future studies of fraudulent activity.

This paper aims to employ the concept of subjectivity taken from Lacanian psychoanalysis and Slavoj Žižek's idea of the law, enabled via its “inherent transgression”, to critique the premises of neolibertarian theory about the market's superior ways of organizing society.

An alternative conceptual framework is being developed and applied to the analysis of the transition from a planned to a market economy in former socialist countries using the example of informal payments in the health system in Russia. The proposed schema builds on the idea of the subject eternally divided between the imaginary conceptions of the self/the other, and the socio‐symbolic order, which is offered to theorize on the role of phantasy in this transformation.

The applied (psycho)‐analytic schema reveals why the totalizing discourse of the market is no less tyrannical and no less totalitarian in its intent than the socialist ideology it opposes. The central argument is how dominant ideologies are made of, and stand for, an unattainable phantasy, as it was demonstrated in both socialism and the market.

By re‐engaging psychoanalysis to understand social and political projects and by unearthing the imaginary underpinnings of the symbolic order, the study argues for considering the phantasmatic dimensions of political and organizational transformations in management studies.

This paper examines discursive strategies deployed by individuals to manage the deinstitutionalization of technology during IS development. In particular, the strategy of face‐work is an inevitable response to requirements analysis, because it centers on identifying “problems”. Directly implicated are individuals who work with the legacy system, thus threats to face and place within the organization are inescapable. This research shows that individuals save face by valorizing the past. This face‐work is accomplished through constructing the legacy system as a great system of the past and by confessing to previous transgressive acts with this system that attests to their technological competence. Both strategies are an intricate part of identity negotiations that serve to secure an individuals’ place in the organization. In this study, the presence of expert consultants and researcher gave expression to particular skewed power relations during the interviews. Thus, face‐work is profoundly influenced by the discursive field in which it takes place. Implications for research and practice are discussed.