Search results

This chapter begins with the premise that much that has been considered ‘new’ within Centre-Western institutions of research and learning has already been there outside the West but not recognised as such. A reconstructed ethnographic account, using creative non-fiction, of the experience of a doctoral student abroad in a Western university shows how she struggles to recover the unrecognised ‘new’ from her own deCentred past. The element of struggle is made harder by powerful Centre narratives of denial that she meets and also brings with her. This analysis follows a postcolonial, critical cosmopolitan approach informed by the social action theory of Max Weber. This is embodied in my grammar of culture, at the centre of which small culture formation on the go brings intercultural experience from the everyday past. However, this deCentred, hybrid, third-space process is constantly derailed and truncated by Centre discourses and narratives that seek to segment and rationalise learning and research processes within positivist and neoliberal structures and false essentialist conceptualisation of hybridity and third space. The chapter also addresses my own positionality as a Western researcher and educator and how I am able to write about the deCentred Self struggling against a divisive Centre Other. I claim insider knowledge of the workings of Centre structures and a neoliberal West as steward discourse that covertly Others beneath a seductive yet false veneer of well-wishing. My own interculturality is enriched by a personal struggle to find hidden realities. The reconstructed ethnographic account will therefore also demonstrate how false perceptions from the Centre make it difficult for all of us to arrive at deCentred understandings.

The Westminster Parliament is multifaceted, lacks cohesion and collective direction, appearing at times to challenge the very notion of a structured public institution itself. Within an environment with little collective identity, understanding who leads in the UK Parliament is challenging; there are multiple, contestable sites of leadership and governance. The purpose of this article is to explore the understudied concept of legislative leadership, to better understand what goes on inside the legislature. The author presents a decentred and nuanced disaggregation of “leadership as practice” in parliament, examining three faces of legislative leadership.

Interpretive approaches to studying legislatures have presented new impetus to research in this area and the author utilises such anti-foundationalism. The article draws on ethnographic research into “everyday practices”, conducted during an academic fellowship in the UK Parliament from 2016 to 2019, which involved privileged access to the parliamentary estate. The data used include observations, shadowing and elite interviews collected during the fellowship.

By looking at the legislature from the inside, the author can better understand elite behaviour. This helps to explain motives, daily pressures and performative skills deployed in displays of autonomous, decentred leadership. The legislative leadership the author observed was atomised and could be stretched to accommodate the incumbent office holder. There were multiple relationships both formally constituted and informally constructed, but little collaborative or consensus leadership.

This article fulfils an identified need to study leadership in legislatures – and in particular key elites – from the inside.

Presents two questionnaires for measuring service quality. Derived from the SERVQUAL instrument, they have been field tested on around 100 subjects. The adapted questionnaires are shorter and more flexible when compared with SERVQUAL. They may be used separately or in combination. One questionnaire is given to consumers of the service and the other may be given to the service providers. Comparing results from the two groups can help shape the service quality strategy of the provider. Although describing a hospitality application, the approach to adapting SERVQUAL can be followed in other service contexts. Further introduces the concept of “decentring” in a quality context i.e. perceiving the service from the consumer’s viewpoint. Using the two adapted questionnaires helps service providers see quality from the customer’s perspective and so promote customer focus.

This paper welcomes Bevir’s Democratic Governance, applauding especially its theoretical coherence and sophistication, and its conclusion that we need a more dialogic, diverse notion of democracy. However, it also raises concerns regarding Bevir’s decentred approach to the state and his non-foundationalism. In the former case it suggests that the demise of the role of the state has been over-estimated, especially in the wake of the financial crisis. In the latter case, it claims that to understand the problems public services face, it is often necessary to embrace a materiality that non-foundationalism finds it hard to accommodate. The paper illustrates concerns by showing how these combined in the development of Labour policy in the UK between 1997 and 2010 o produce an account that has a very different emphasis to Bevir’s.

Conjoint analysis has emerged as a contemporary research technique to reveal consumers’ preference towards choosing a particular restaurant. Through some focus group discussions, a list of restaurant attributes was identified as important for restaurant‐goers in deciding where to dine. While the research was based on Hong Kong experience, the research technique can be generalised to restaurant choices in other countries. It is possible to segment the restaurant market by different meal purposes (i.e. family meal, business meal and tourists) and employee groups (i.e. service sector, hotels and floating restaurants). The concept of decentring was applied in the study to help reveal restaurant preferences as perceived by the respondents standing in the shoes of others.

This paper aims to answer the following question: where does our capacity for epoche, for decentration, for suspending representations come from? This question is an important one if we accept, as phenomenology does, that this is how we can find the meaning of our life and our actions.

In order to answer this question the paper undertakes a critical genealogy of what those in the Western world consider to be the real, stressing how much Western thought overestimates the reality of what can be seen, measured, and calculated, and underestimates the experience of interiority by silencing the real dynamic of development of each person's lives.

Following on from Michel Henry's phenomenology the paper shows how epoche, decentring is precisely about paying attention to this very real dynamic of development of life with others. Suspending for a while the representations and calculations and allowing people to be guided by such dynamic is therefore totally justified. Moreover, because it is fully embodied, this dynamic gives us the power and strength to engage in reasonable and responsible action. Two experiences recounted by managers illustrate this point.

The paper shows that phenomenological epoche is not about speculation, it is not idealism, but a totally realistic, practicable choice.

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize work in the emerging field of how accounting and accountability can be reoriented to better promote pluralistic democracy which recognizes and addresses differentials in power, beliefs and desires of constituencies. An agenda for future research and engagement is outlined, drawing on this and insights from other papers in this special issue of the Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal (AAAJ) aimed at taking multiple perspectives seriously.

The paper reviews and synthesizes the central themes associated with accounting, accountants and accountability regimes in pluralistic societies, especially with respect to the research studies in this AAAJ special issue, and it identifies possibilities for future research and engagement.

Three central themes are identified: the challenges of achieving critical, pluralistic engagement in and through mainstream institutions; the possibilities of taking multiple perspectives seriously through decentred understandings of governance and democracy; and the value of an agonistic ethos of engagement in accounting. The articles in this issue contribute to these themes, albeit differently, and in combination with the extant social science literature reviewed here, open up pathways for future research and engagement.

This work seeks to encourage the development of pluralistic accounting and accountability systems drawing on conceptual and practice-based resources across disciplines and by considering the standpoints of diverse interested constituencies, including academics, policymakers, business leaders and social movements.

How accounting can reflect and enact pluralistic democracy, not least to involve civil society, and how problems related to power differentials and seemingly incompatible aims can be addressed has been largely neglected. This issue provides empirical, practical and theoretical material to advance further work in the area.

The “welfare reform” narrative of successive Conservative-led UK Government emphasises public spending reductions, individual responsibility and strengthening of benefit conditionality. The purpose of this paper is to cast light on how this narrative is challenged and disrupted by the Scottish Government through their articulation of a social democratic welfare state imaginary.

The study draws together a decentred governance perspective that emphasises ideational tradition for understanding (re)construction of governance (Bevir, 2013, p. 27) with critical discourse analysis to examine how welfare interpretations/representations are carried into the policy and public arena. The Scottish Government documents are deconstructed to interrogate the ideas and form of their emergent discourse and its relation to the independence referendum and welfare governance reform.

Responding to changing socio-economic contexts and welfare governance, the Scottish Government has developed a discourse of modernisation rooted in British and Scandinavian social democratic traditions. Fusing (civic) nationalism with social wage and social investment concepts, they conjure up imaginaries of a prosperous, solidaristic, egalitarian welfare state as a feasible future reality, recuperating “welfare” as a collective endeavour and positioning a maldistribution of power/resources between groups and constituent countries of the UK as the “problem”.

The paper is of value to those interested in how changes to centralised-hierarchical welfare governance can open new spaces for actors at different levels of government to articulate counter-hegemonic discourses and practices. Its originality lies in the analysis of how the Scottish Government has reworked social democratic traditions to weave together a welfare imaginary that directly contests the problem-solution narrative of successive Conservative-led UK Governments.