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This essay charts an intellectual journey. Geoffrey M. Hodgson became an institutional economist in the 1980s. He explains how he discovered institutional economics and what strains of institutional thought were attractive for him. Another issue raised in this essay is how institutional researchers organize and move forward. Hodgson argues for an interdisciplinary approach, but this is not without its problems.

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) calls for far-reaching changes to the way economic activity will occur in EU digital markets. Before its remedies are imposed, it is critical to assess their impacts on individual markets, the digital sector, and the overall European economy. The European Commission (EC) released an Impact Assessment in support of the DMA that purports to evaluate it using cost/benefit analysis.

An economic evaluation of the DMA should consider its full impacts on dynamic competition. The Impact Assessment neither assesses the DMA's impact on dynamic competition in the digital economy nor evaluates the impacts of specific DMA prohibitions and obligations. Instead, it considers benefits in general and largely ignores costs. We study its benefit assessments and find they are based on highly inappropriate methodologies and assumptions. A cost/benefit study using inappropriate methodologies and largely ignoring costs cannot provide a sound policy assessment.

Instead of promoting dynamic competition between platforms, the DMA will likely reinforce existing market structures, ossify market boundaries, and stunt European innovation. The DMA is likely to chill R&D by encouraging free riding on the investments of others, which discourages making those investments. Avoiding harm to innovation is critical because innovation delivers large, positive spillover benefits, driving increases in productivity, employment, wages, and prosperity.

The DMA prioritizes static over dynamic competition, with the potential to harm the European economy. Given this, the Impact Assessment does not demonstrate that the DMA will be beneficial overall, and its implementation must be carefully tailored to alleviate or lessen its potential to harm Europe’s economic performance.

This chapter critically evaluates the role of creative identity and how this shapes entrepreneurial identity. The main driver for creative practitioners is one of being ‘creative’, but this is in combination with the factors that support entrepreneurial behaviours, and it provides the narrative for their entrepreneurial identity. The quest to operate successfully as a creative practitioner in the creative industries drives entrepreneurial behaviour. The research examines the relationship between creative identity and entrepreneurial identity and how these two identities intertwine. To respond to this question, the study critically evaluates the concept of creative identity and entrepreneurial identity with fourteen creative practitioners in the UK, working as either chartered architects or freelance photographers. The research employed a qualitative approach and interpretivist ontology. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with the participants. The key finding that highlights the driver for entrepreneurial identity is the quest to operate successfully as a creative practitioner in the creative industries. This quest is underpinned by the desire to be able to express their creative identity, often referred to as a creative ‘voice’. Entrepreneurial identity and entrepreneurial behaviours function as conduits in which creative practitioners channel their primary driver of creative identity. This chapter contributes to the knowledge about creative practitioners’ entrepreneurial identity and creative identity and how these two identities relate to each other.

This paper explores organization-level racialized work strategies for maintaining racialized organizations (Ray, 2019). It focuses on intentional actions to maintain dominant racial norms, demonstrating how work strategies are informed by dominant racial structures that maintain racial inequities.

We compiled a chronological case study (Yin, 2012) based on 168 news media articles and various organizational documents to examine responses to athlete protests at the University of Texas at Austin following the death of George Floyd. Gioia et al.’s (2013) method uncovered how dominant racial norms inform organizational behaviors.

The paper challenges institutional theory neutrality and identifies several racialized work strategies that organizations employ to maintain racialized norms and practices. The findings provide a framework for organizations to interrogate their strategies and their role in reproducing dominant racial norms and inequities.

In 2020, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was reinvigorated within sporting and corporate domains. However, many organizations engaged in performativity, sparking criticism about meaningful change in organizational contexts. Our case study examines how one organization responded to athlete activists’ BLM-fueled demands, revealing specific racialized work strategies that maintain structures of racism. As organizations worldwide disrupt and discuss oppressive structures such as racism, we demonstrate how organizational leadership, while aware of policies and practices of racism, may choose not to act and actively maintain such structures.

Agricultural production in Honduras was devastated by the impact of hurricanes Eta and Iota in November 2020, placing people depending on agriculture in a vulnerable and food insecure situation. In addition to the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic downturn in the country, these extreme events are forcing more people to leave and head to North America in migrant caravans. Over the last decades, Honduras has been impacted by severe climate change events, including droughts and extreme tropical storms. According to the Global Climate Risk Index (CRI), developed by Germanwatch (Eckstein et al., 2019), Honduras was the second most affected country by climate change over a period of 20 years, from 1998 to 2017. Extreme rainfall and tropical storms, droughts, variation in rainfall patterns, and soil loss make agriculture more difficult, thus placing low-income rural families at the edge of hunger and food insecurity. In terms of migration policy, much focus has been given to economic instability, weak governance, violence and crime as push factors for migration, but the effect of food insecurity and climate change impact is often overlooked in this narrative. Agricultural areas in Honduras, traditionally the backbone of food production, have been identified as climate out-migration hotspots. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the most relevant data to understand the interactions between climate change, food insecurity and the current migration crisis in Honduras.

The purpose of this paper is to characterize library and information science (LIS) as fragmenting discipline both historically and by applying Whitley’s (1984) theory about the organization of sciences and Fuchs’ (1993) theory about scientific change.

The study combines historical source analysis with conceptual and theoretical analysis for characterizing LIS. An attempt is made to empirically validate the distinction between LIS context, L&I services and information seeking as fragmented adhocracies and information retrieval and scientific communication (scientometrics) as technologically integrated bureaucracies.

The origin of fragmentation in LIS due the contributions of other disciplines can be traced in the 1960s and 1970s for solving the problems produced by the growth of scientific literature. Computer science and business established academic programs and started research relevant to LIS community focusing on information retrieval and bibliometrics. This has led to differing research interests between LIS and other disciplines concerning research topics and methods. LIS has been characterized as fragmented adhocracy as a whole, but we make a distinction between research topics LIS context, L&I services and information seeking as fragmented adhocracies and information retrieval and scientific communication (scientometrics) as technologically integrated bureaucracies.

The paper provides an elaborated historical perspective on the fragmentation of LIS in the pressure of other disciplines. It also characterizes LIS as discipline in a fresh way by applying Whitley’s (1984) theory.

This paper presents an historical reconstruction of the radicalisation of Alan Fox, the industrial sociologist and a detailed analysis of his early historical and sociological writing in the classical pluralist phase.

An intellectual history, including detailed discussion of key Fox texts, supported by interviews with Fox and other Biographical sources.

Fox’s radicalisation was incomplete, as he carried over from his industrial relations (IR) pluralist mentors, Allan Flanders and Hugh Clegg, a suspicion of political Marxism, a sense of historical contingency and an awareness of the fragmented nature of industrial conflict.

Recent academic attention has centred on Fox’s later radical pluralism with its “structural” approach to the employment relationship. This paper revisits his early, neglected classical pluralist writing. It also illuminates his transition from institutional IR to a broader sociology of work, influenced by AH Halsey, John Goldthorpe and others and the complex nature of his radicalisation.

The purpose of this paper is to update the core data set of self-neglect safeguarding adult reviews (SARs) and accompanying thematic analysis. The initial data set was published in this journal in 2015 and has since been updated annually. The complete data set is available from the author. The second purpose is to reflect on the narratives about adult safeguarding and self-neglect by focusing on the stories that are told and untold in the reviews.

Further published reviews are added to the core data set, drawn from the national SAR library and the websites of Safeguarding Adults Boards (SABs). Thematic analysis is updated using the domains used previously, direct work, the team around the person, organisational support and governance. SAR findings and recommendations are also critiqued using three further domains: knowledge production, explanation and aesthetics.

Familiar findings emerge from the thematic analysis and reinforce the evidence-base of good practice with individuals who self-neglect and for policies and procedures with which to support those practitioners working with such cases. SAR findings emphasise the knowledge domain, namely, what is actually found, rather than the explanatory domain that seeks to answer the question “why?” Findings and recommendations appear to assume that learning can be implemented within the existing architecture of services rather than challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about the context within which adult safeguarding is situated.

A national database of reviews completed by SABs has been established (www.nationalnetwork.org.uk), but this data set remains incomplete. Drawing together the findings from the reviews nonetheless reinforces what is known about the components of effective practice, and effective policy and organisational arrangements for practice. Although individual reviews might comment on good practice alongside shortfalls, there is little analysis that seeks to explain rather than just report findings.

Answering the question “why?” remains a significant challenge for SARs, where concerns about how agencies worked together prompted review but also where positive outcomes have been achieved. The findings confirm the relevance of the evidence-base for effective practice, but SARs are limited in their analysis of what enables and what obstructs the components of best practice. The challenge for SAR authors and for partners within SABs is to reflect on the stories that are told and those that remain untold or untellable. This is an exercise of power and of ethical and political decision-making.

The paper extends the thematic analysis of available reviews that focus on work with adults who self-neglect, further reinforcing the evidence base for practice. The paper analyses the degree to which SARs answer the question “why?” as opposed simply to answering the question “what?” It also explores the degree to which SARs appear to accept or challenge the context for adult safeguarding. The paper suggests that SABs and SAR authors should focus explicitly on what enables and what obstructs the realisation of best practice, and on the choices they make about the stories that are told.