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The purpose of this paper is to: (1) identify strategies to (re)establish organizational legitimacy which dominates the literature; (2) propose and empirically illustrate an analytical framework that establishes the linkages between the dimensions of purposefulness, transparency and participation identified in this literature review as important resources in the creation of organizational legitimacy.

Based on a review of the academic literature, we propose a three-dimensional conceptual framework for understanding and studying strategic communication in contexts of high sustainability pressure. The empirical material we use for illustration is the letters from the chief executive officer (CEO) and the chairman published in the integrated annual report of a Danish company that is well known for its focus on sustainability.

The analysis shows that all three dimensions, i.e. purposefulness, transparency and participation, are present in this data, which the authors find supportive of the theoretical argument that strategic communication needs to encompass all three concepts in order to appear legitimate in contexts of high sustainability pressure.

In recent years, there has been an increased focus on strategic communication of sustainability. However, there is still a lack of general consensus of what is understood by strategic communication in contexts of high sustainability pressure. Overlapping concepts and dimensions make operationalization difficult. This, for example, is a problem for corporations who are increasingly asked by their stakeholders to account for their sustainability activities and engage in conversations of strategic significance to their sustainability goals.

This study aimed to investigate the sensemaking strategies employed by early-career employees working within organizationally constrained environments.

Grounded in the sensemaking-as-accomplishment framework, a longitudinal multi-case study was conducted, involving three early-career employees. These participants were interviewed multiple times concerning tasks they themselves identified as anomalous and ambiguous.

The study's findings illuminate how early-career employees utilize sensemaking strategies to accomplish anomalous-ambiguous tasks. These strategies are interwoven with deliberate efforts to mitigate organizational constraints that exist in the organization or arise during the execution of complex tasks.

Notable limitation pertains to the time gap between task completion and the interviews. Conducting real-time interviews concurrently with task execution or immediately afterward was not feasible due to constraints in participant availability. This research has implications for organizational learning initiatives, particularly those encompassing employee-driven self-learning components. Insights derived from studies like this can inform the development of effective self-learning schemes within organizations.

Previous sensemaking research focused on what takes place in high-reliability organizations. This study explored sensemaking strategies in workplaces that are organizationally constrained.

This study problematizes the prevailing normative and managerial-dominated view of self-initiated employee ambassadorship on social media from a power perspective. The aim is to provide a more nuanced and critical understanding of the negative aspects of this phenomenon.

The empirical material encompasses qualitative interviews with employees from 14 organizations and Foucault’s concept of disciplinary discursive power to analyze which and how discourses exert power over employee communication on social media and what role visibility plays in it.

This study indicates that employee ambassadors’ social media communication is governed by two discourses that create complex tensions, where ambassadors constantly must negotiate between self-branding requirements and an authenticity paradox. These tensions intensify through visibility on social media, where employees strategize and situationally silence their communication through self-monitoring and self-surveillance practices. Conclusively, the findings also outline the need for further critical research to offer a deeper understanding of power relations that influence the communication practices of organizational members.

The paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of self-initiated employee ambassadorship on social media and highlights disciplinary power relations that go beyond organizational borders.

The findings underscore that organizations need to address the critical aspects of self-initiated employee ambassadorship and act as facilitators to support employees in their navigation process.

This paper contributes a new critical power perspective on employee ambassadorship on social media.

Taking the dialogic organizational development perspective, this study aims to investigate the framing processes when engaging in dialogue for strategy implementation and how these enable the evolution of implementation opportunities.

Through a qualitative exploratory study conducted in a large multinational, the authors analyse the dialogue and interactions among 25 dyads when identifying opportunities to contribute to strategy implementation. The data analysis relies on a process-coding approach and linkography, a valuable protocol analysis for identifying recursive interaction schemas in conversations.

The authors identify four main framing processes – shaping, unveiling, scattering and shifting – and provide a framework of how these processes affect individuals’ mental models through increasing the tangibility of opportunities or elevating them to new value hierarchies.

From a theoretical perspective, this study contributes to the strategy implementation and organizational development literature, providing a micro-perspective of how dialogue allows early knowledge structures to emerge and shape the development of opportunities for strategy implementation.

From a managerial perspective, the authors offer insights to trigger action and change in individuals to contribute to strategy when moving from formulation to implementation.

Rather than focusing on the structural control view of strategy implementation and the role of the top management team, this study considers strategy implementation as a practice and what it takes for organizational actors who do not take part in strategy formulation to enact and shape opportunities for strategy implementation through constructive dialogue.

This paper aims to examine how auditors make sense of the ill-theorized and contentious notion of other comprehensive income (OCI), specifically by uncovering their use of metaphors to make OCI plausible and intelligible.

This interpretative paper draws on a collection of 21 interviews with experienced auditors. The analysis first uncovers metaphors that naturally surface within the talk and sensemaking of auditors about OCI (elicited metaphors). The authors then encapsulate these elicited metaphors into second-order constructs (projected metaphors) to synthesize and further explain auditors’ practical sensemaking.

Auditors conceive OCI as a “safety” that ensures the well-functioning of fair value accounting, metaphorically qualifying this notion as a “necessary evil”, a “passage obligé”, and a “parking lot” resolving fair value-related issues and aberrations. Auditors also metaphorize OCI as a “purifier” that allows “polluted”, “noisy”, and “unloved” items to be “parked” outside net income.

The study’s findings further the understanding of auditors’ tendency to remain uncritical throughout their sensemaking process. Making sense of professional standards of practice through metaphors indubitably involves shadowing and silencing other worldviews.

This paper extends knowledge of auditors’ sensemaking, specifically showing how auditors easily make sense of complex notions even in the absence of conceptual grounds. This study also highlights that metaphors are a powerful sensemaking device that auditors mobilize to render complex notions intelligible and mitigate IFRS inconsistencies.

This paper aims to consider the legitimacy challenges faced by hybrid organizations, examining the narrative strategies hybrids use in responding to these challenges and offering a framework for managers to consider in their choice of narratives.

A narrative analysis of texts addressing the legitimacy of the business models used by four hybrid organizations is conducted.

The results of the analysis suggest that the nature of conflicting stakeholder demands – centered on goals or means – is an integral factor influencing hybrids’ choice of narrative strategies to emphasize distinctiveness or conformity.

This paper adds to extant research examining the challenges hybrid organizations face and emphasizes that the choice of narrative strategies is an important factor hybrids must consider when managing legitimacy. Generalizability is a notable limitation of the case approach; the authors suggest areas for future research to address this limitation.

The research offers a practical framework for hybrids’ leaders, as they manage legitimacy, choosing to emphasize distinctiveness or conformity in the face of conflicts regarding goals or means.

By studying the legitimacy challenges faced by hybrid organizations, this study can form a more complete view of legitimation, encompassing different types of enterprises offering distinct value propositions.

This paper aims to explore how the maieutic role of management accounting (MA) can be sustained in the context of MA digitalization.

The paper begins with practitioners’ descriptions of the context that makes the MA support of non-routine decisions maieutic. To understand how the maieutic characteristics can be sustained in future MA digitalization, the authors then analyze the discourses these practitioners have about artificial intelligence (AI) in providing MA support.

As a basis, the authors’ data show various maieutic characteristics within the use of MA answers in decision-making as well as within the MA process of generating such answers. The paper then identifies three MA digitalization discourses, namely, “computation,” “judgment” and human-AI “interaction” discourse, each with their unique agendas on how AI should be used.

The paper is based on the premises that AI and digitalization are often discussed without sufficient understanding about the context being digitalized. The authors’ data suggest that MA support in non-routine decision-making is fundamentally maieutic, and AI – as it currently stands – is not expected to change this by providing perfect answers. The authors provide novel insights about maieutic MA support and the current discourses on using AI in MA support, and how digitalization does not necessarily compromise maieutic MA support but instead has the potential to sustain or even enhance it.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of different levels of place understanding (primarily typo-morphological analysis) on the nature of interventions within historic urban setting and buildings within the City of Amman.

The research methodology depended on an extensive thematic survey and analysis. The typo-morphological analysis addressed several of Amman's residential hills and their connections with the downtown area. The thematic place survey tool included different units of analysis (e.g. buildings, public spaces, streets and sloped lands between streets) and addressed the values of these various buildings and spaces, their typology, typo-morphology and relation to the urban context, nature of change and transformations over time to mention a few. The extensive survey also included semi-structured interviews about these buildings addressing their emergence, historic context and values.

The paper presents an architectural typology for Amman's architecture and its relationship with the city's morphology stressing the specificity of Amman's historic core and residential hills. The paper also discusses the effect of this level of place understanding on the nature and levels of interventions within historic settings and buildings.

This level of place understanding (typo-morphological analysis) can have a positive impact on the practice of architectural and urban conservation by informing the nature of interventions within historic urban setting and buildings within the city. More specifically, this level of place understanding can, first, inform the development of urban and heritage guidelines within conservation areas in one of Amman's residential neighborhoods (Weibdeh) and, second, inform the nature of interventions to existing historic buildings based on respect of building typology.

This paper contributes to the disciplines of architectural and urban conservation illustrating how place understanding can inform practices of heritage conservation and future policies and strategies concerning new intervention within such heritage places.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the discussion surrounding the definition of accounting proposed by Carnegie et al. (2021a, 2021b) and further elaborated by Carnegie et al. (2023) from/under an institutionalist political-economy (IPE) based foundation and to specifically extend this approach to the arena of social and environmental accounting (SEA).

By adopting an IPE approach to SEA, this study offers a critique of the use of the notion of capital to refer to nature and people in SEA frameworks and standards.

A SEA framework based on the capabilities approach is proposed based on the concepts of human capabilities and global commons for the purpose of preserving the commons and enabling the flourishing of present and future generations.

The proposed framework allows the engagement of accounting community, in particular SEA researchers, with and contribution to such well-established initiatives as the Planetary Boundaries framework and the human development reports initiative of the United Nations Development Programme.

Based on the capability approach, this study applies Carnegie et al.’s (2023) framework to SEA. This new approach more attuned to the pursuit of sustainable human development and the sustainable development goals, may contribute to turning accounting into a major positive force through its impacts on the world, expressly upon organisations, people and nature.

The goal was emancipatory, to characterise and dislodge oppressive management practices, to allow for the possibility of seeking an alternative organisational construction free of postcolonial/subaltern subordination and discrimination in a local, well-documented narrative.

The study was informed by a postcolonial/subaltern perspective and drew on the employment experience of an Aboriginal woman, Canada’s first Indigenous Dean of a law school. The researcher employed a combination of case study and critical discourse analysis with the aim of advancing rich analyses of the complex workings of power and privilege in sustaining Western, postcolonial relations.

The study made several conclusions: first, that the institution, a medium-sized Canadian university, carefully controlled the Indigenous subaltern to remake her to be palatable to Western sensibilities. Second, the effect of this control was to assimilate her, to subordinate her Indigeneity and to civilise in a manner analogous to the purpose of Indian residential schools. Third, that rather than management’s action being rational and neutral, focused on goal attainment, efficiency and effectiveness, it was an implicit moral judgement based on her race and an opportunity to exploit her value as a means for the university’s growth and status.

Through a postcolonial/subaltern perspective, this study demonstrated how management practices reproduced barriers to the participation of an Indigenous woman and the First Nations community that an organisation was intended to serve. The study demonstrated how a Western perspective – that of a university’s administration, faculty and staff – was privileged, or taken for granted, and the Indigenous perspective subordinated, as the university remained committed to the dispossession of Indigenous knowledge and values.