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This paper aims to adopt a relational dialectics analysis approach to provide qualitative depth and insight into the ways intercultural families manage intercultural tensions around consumption. The authors pay particular attention to how a relational dialectics analysis reveals a relational change in the family providing evidence to demonstrate how a family’s unique relational culture evolves and transitions.

Qualitative insights from a relational-dialectic analysis on 15 intercultural families are used to illustrate the interplay of stability with instability in the management of intercultural dialectic tensions within these families.

Intercultural dialectical interplay around food consumption tensions are implicit tensions in the household’s relational culture. Examples of dialectical movement indicating relational change are illustrated; this change has developmental consequences for the couples’ relational cultures.

This study provides qualitative insights on relational dialectics in one intercultural family context and reveals and analyses the dialectical dimensions around consumption in the context of intercultural family relationships. The research approach could be considered in other intercultural and relational contexts.

Family narratives can be analysed within the context of two meta-dialectics that directly address how personal relationships evolve; indigenous dialectic tensions within a family can also be identified.

This paper demonstrates the qualitative value of a relational dialectics analysis in revealing how food consumption changes within families are the result of reciprocal or interdependent learning, which has consequences for relational change.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the core meaning of critical research.

It begins by noting the frequent divergence between “Real” history (which always marches to its own beat) and academic reflection that often fails to follow the beat of a progressive drum. Indeed, rather than facilitating a productive historical movement, scholarship may, at times, window‐dress brutality. These questions are examined by drawing on pertinent literature in social theory and cultural analysis. This work cautions that only continuous, unconditional, self‐reflective criticism provides a navigational path between barbarism and enlightenment. It proposes harnessing our full repository of critical scholarship to renew ever‐relevant forms of praxis (This is not the same notion of “practical” that involves berating workers in suits and white shirts.)

Unfortunately, an examination of contemporary progressive accounting literature exposes fundamental departures from these standards for criticism; that many fields have lapsed into a form relativism, enabling highly conservative political agendas. This degeneration is instigated at the outset of research, through an inappropriate choice of initial object for analysis (or “root metaphor”).

To address the predicament, this paper proposes a greater self‐awareness in framing the initial starting point, using a procedure drawn from Hegel and Marx's dialectics. To “test’ this methodology, the paper examines four streams of progressive accounting research: professional (e.g. Brilovian) analysis, Foucauldian (culturalist) studies, ethnographic studies, and epistemic contributions.

Each review offers suggestions for a dialectical reconstruction of the original, including a revised initial starting point (object) for the analysis.

This paper uses dialectical inquiry to explore tensions that arise when adopting Industry 4.0 technologies in a lean production system and their reconciliation mechanisms.

We conducted an in-depth qualitative case study over a 3-year period on an Italian division of an international electrotechnical organisation that produces electrical switches. This organisation successfully adopted Industry 4.0 technologies in a lean production system. The study is based on primary data such as observations and semi-structured interviews, along with secondary data.

We identify four empirically validated dialectic tensions arising across different Industry 4.0 adoption stages due to managers’ and workers’ contrasting interpretations of technologies. Consequently, we define the related reconciliation mechanisms that allow the effective adoption of various Industry 4.0 technologies to support a lean production system.

This is the first empirical investigation of tensions in the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in a lean production system. Furthermore, the paper presents four theoretical propositions and a conceptual model describing which tensions arise during the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in a lean production system and the reconciliation mechanisms that prevent lean production system deterioration.

It is scholars' great mission in this era to creatively develop new implications, paradigms and discourses of China's political economy and establish a theoretical system of political economy with Chinese characteristics based on the fundamental principles of Marxist theory and the practice and historical process of Chinese economic reform, through theorizing and systemizing the practices of China's socialist market economy construction. The purpose of this paper is to give some suggestions to establish a socialist theoretical system with Chinese characteristics.

This paper makes a comprehensive analysis of the principles, objectives, study objects, methodologies as well as the framework of the theoretical system of the political economy with Chinese characteristics.

Additionally, starting from the unity of opposites between public ownership of resources and resource allocation in a market mechanism, which is the fundamental dialectical relation of China's socialist market economy, the authors will adopt the dual dialectical analysis approach to discover and understand the duality features of the socialist economic system with Chinese characteristics.

With adherence to the mission of China's socialist economic system, the goal of China's market economic reform, and the perspectives of Marxist political economy, the authors must explicitly define the so-called Chinese characteristics and then summarize the dynamics and innovations during the evolution of Chinese socialist political economy with high theory confidence and theory self-consciousness.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the process of evolution of medical autonomy as an analytic and historical aspect of the medical work organization in a public bureaucracy.

The authors draw on the analytic concept of organizational contradictions (Heydebrand, 1977) to inform a dialectical approach in organizational analysis. Semi-structured interviews with 20 doctors of a Greek general public hospital were conducted and archival data were collected.

The findings suggest that the historical development of two contradictions characterize the process of medical autonomy evolution. The first contradiction tends to develop between medical autonomy, as a self-control relation, and the established division of labour through which bureaucratic control is exercised over the allocation of resources and over the distribution of healthcare service. The second contradiction tends to develop between those reified aspects of the medical work organization and the ongoing organizing activity, i.e. activity towards extending, intensifying and centralizing organizational control over labour, resources and the distribution of healthcare services. These contradictions indicate a pressure towards constraining health professionals’ power to self-define their relationship with patients and towards curtailing their discretionary domain over the use of resources.

This paper offers an empirical approach to materialist dialectics for organizational analysis towards conceptualizing change as a historical process.

A new expression of the philosophy framework of pansystems theory is stated. Some generalized quantification formulae are developed. Concrete contents include: new forms of panderivative and pansymmetry, meta‐equation, eight‐counter methodology, pansystems relativity, dialectical logic, panbox principle, complex systems, systems engineering, analytic hierarchy process, general living systems, economy‐sociology, clustering, topology, morphology, master equation, approximation‐transforming theory, equivalence theory of dynamics of electromagnetic media, etc.

The purpose of this paper is to present an academic programme of pansystems research with a lot of new concepts, principles, methods. Universal consideration of philosophy‐mathematics‐technology is set forth with mega‐combination. The emphasis on the transfield internet‐like investigations is developed. Many theory‐methods of pansystems get further concise optimization.

The concrete contents of the paper include: historical megawave, philosophical stratagems, meta‐mathematics, meta‐methodology, technological realistic principles, unification and differentiation of encyclopedic branches, systems science, information theory, cybernetics, biosystems, generalized vitality, computer and IT, thinking science, logic, OR, AI, PR, DM, modernization of yinyang analysis combining dialectics, sociology, economics, meta‐relativity, generalized quantification and scale theory, general process of birth‐growth‐ageing‐disease‐death, the inheritance and development of 300 scholars' researches, etc.

All of the topics concerned with are reduced to the actualizations of PVOR – pansystems variational OR: V−d(xy)=^*0^*/PRR′P′/0^**, which is an integrated synthesis of 20‐PanStemCells of PanConcepts and PanMethod, and embodies a specific pansystems summarization for the core of the true and the good. Furthermore, the formula “Pansystems Researches=^*(PVOR/0^**/Pan54787721/Everything)+^*0^*=^*Pan–netlike connections of thoughts and methods” is expanded with concrete applications.

Provides information on pansystems research.

The purpose of this paper is to state new formulation of the programme‐styled framework of pansystems research and related expansions.

Pansystems‐generalized extremum principle (0**: (dy/dx=0)**) is presented with recognitions to various logoi of philosophy, mathematics, technology, systems, cybernetics, informatics, relativity, biology, society, resource, communications and related topics: logic, history, humanities, aesthetics, journalism, IT, AI, TGBZ* <truth*goodness*beauty*Zen*>, etc. including recent rediscoveries of 50 or so pansystems logoi.

A keynote of the paper is to develop the deep logoi of the analytic mathematics, analytic mechanics, variational principles, Hilbert's sixth/23rd problems, pan‐axiomatization to encyclopedic principles and various applications. The 0**‐universal connections embody the transfield internet‐styled academic tendency of pansystems exploration.

The paper includes topics: history megawave, pansystems sublation‐modes, pan‐metaphysics, pansystems dialogs with logoi of 100 thinkers or so, and pansystems‐sublation for a series of logoi concerning the substructure of encyclopedic dialogs such as systems, derivative, extremum, quantification, variational principle, equation, symmetry, OR, optimization, approximation, yinyang, combination, normality‐abnormality, framework, modeling, simulation, relativity, recognition, practice, methodology, mathematics, operations and transformations, quotientization, product, clustering, Banach completeness theorem, Weierstrass approximation theorem, Jackson approximation theorem, Taylor theorem, approximation transformation theorems due to Walsh‐Sewell mathematical school, Hilbert problems, Cauchy theorem, theorems of equation stability, function theory, logic, paradox, axiomatization, cybernetics, dialectics, multistep decision, computer, synergy, vitality and the basic logoi for history, ethics, economics, society OR, aesthetics, journalism, institution, resource and traffics, AI, IT, etc.

Research relying on laboratory protocol and case studies has demonstrated positive effects from cognitive conflict and controversy. Reported benefits have included better judgments, improved strategic decisions and a better understanding of others' positions. This study develops and assesses the psychometric properties of an instrument designed to examine decision conflict in field settings. This instrument was administered on site to 63 managers. Factors identified in the instrument were disagreement, openness, and control. Interestingly, the openness dimension was positively associated with job commitment. The control factor was inversely associated with job satisfaction.

The application of different models of organization to the study of schools is common in the literature on organizational theory. This literature distinguishes rational models, such as the bureaucratic ideal type, from natural systems models, such as the concept of schools as loose‐coupled systems and the image of schools as political arenas. This article examines the extent to which some specially selected schools in Australia and New Zealand can be viewed as resembling certain organizational models. The article concludes that there is no one model which is suitable for describing schools although many of the different models described by theorists seem to be relevant to the schools studied. The article also seeks to isolate some of the factors that result in schools resembling certain organizational models rather than others.