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This paper reports a sub-set of results from a mixed-method ethnographic study of literacy among female graduates and undergraduates of a United Arab Emirates public university. With reference to survey data and two in-depth interviews, the paper focuses in particular on the predispositions and preferences of these women with regard to reading and writing in English and Modern Standard Arabic. Employing a New Literacy Studies theoretical framework along with a number of concepts developed by Bourdieu, the paper finds that literacy practices in this context are developing rapidly, influenced by the diverse transnational linguistic marketplaces in which these women grow up. Suggestions are made with regard to possible directions for curricular development in higher education in this region based on the opinions expressed by these young women.

The purpose of this study is to examine the potential of integrating material from the arts into postgraduate curricula to deepen students’ engagement with marketing phenomena. The authors assess the use of arts-based activities, within a broader critical pedagogy, for encouraging imaginative and analytical thinking.

The authors devised two learning activities and an interpretive method for studying their value. The activities were an individual essay connecting themes in song lyrics to marketing, and a group photography project. These were applied, within a broader, critical approach, in postgraduate modules on sustainability, ethics and critical marketing. Data collection comprised diaries kept by the teachers, open-ended feedback from students and students’ assignments.

Students showed high levels of engagement, reflexivity and depth of thought, in felt experiences of learning. Their ability to make connections not explicitly in the materials, and requiring imaginative jumps, was notable. Several reported lasting changes to their behaviour. Some found the tasks initially intimidating or, once they were more engaged, stressful or saddening.

This adds to scholarship on management education by showing the usefulness of an arts-based approach towards a transformative agenda.

It offers a template of how to draw from the arts to strengthen critical engagement upon which marketing teachers can build. It also contains practical advice on the challenges and benefits of doing so.

The authors provide evidence that this approach can enhance sensitivity and reflexivity in students, potentially producing more ethical and sustainable decisions in future.

The pedagogical interventions are novel and of value to lecturers seeking to enhance critical engagement with theory. An empirical study of an attempt to integrate arts into teaching marketing represents a promising direction, given the discipline’s creative nature.

Many organisations monitor statistics on the background of job applicants to inform diversity management, a practice known as equality monitoring (EM). The study examines perceptions of EM and employers that use it. Additionally, it aims to assess potentially salient group differences in attitudes towards EM, focussing on perceived history of employment discrimination, ethnicity, sex, and a comparison between the UK and Sweden – two countries which differ extensively in EM prevalence.

A cross-sectional self-report survey assessed attitudes toward EM, attraction to employers using it, pro-equality and diversity attitudes, perceived history of employment discrimination and background characteristics (e.g. ethnicity and sex), and compared a UK and Sweden sample (N = 925).

The results reveal positive perceptions of EM overall. Although no differences were observed between UK ethnic majority and minority respondents, White British men rate employers using EM as less attractive with increasing levels of perceived past discrimination. Women have more positive perceptions than men. Finally, the UK sample rated EM more positively than the Sweden sample.

Despite EM being widespread, the study is the first to investigate detailed perceptions of it, making group and country comparisons. Results support the use of EM in HRM but highlight the need for clear communication to avoid confusion with positive discrimination, which is perceived negatively in some majority group members, and to allay fears of data misuse. Recommendations are made for future implementation.

Building on the institutional theory perspective on corporate governance change and based on interviews with investor relations (IR) managers in large Japanese companies, this study aims to examine Japanese IR managers’ perceptions of the influence of foreign shareholders on Japan’s corporate governance reform and stakeholder-based system. The paper examines tensions, conflicts and collaborations among different stakeholders involved in corporate governance changes in Japan, especially in the areas of firm ownership, employment relations and boards of directors. The paper explains why convergence does not happen in some large Japanese companies by investigating Japanese managers’ responses to and perceptions of foreign shareholders in multiple corporate contexts.

The author conducted in-depth interviews with ten IR managers at large, listed Japanese companies in Kyoto and Tokyo and two managers at foreign investment banks in Tokyo, between 2018 and 2021.

This paper explores five themes that emerged from my interviews: Chief executive officers’ (CEOs’) mixed perceptions of foreign investors, the effectiveness of CEO compensation and outside directors, managers’ reluctance to accept stock price-driven business strategies, foreign investors’ engagement vs investments in index funds and gender patterns, including the effectiveness of token female outside directors. The Japanese companies the author looked at incorporated foreign shareholders as consultants and adopted a few major shareholder-based customs, such as CEOs communicating with investors, having outside directors, increasing CEO compensation and slimming down unprofitable parts of the business via restructuring and downsizing. Simultaneously, they resisted a few major shareholder-based practices. Foreign shareholders’ pressure revealed tensions and contradictions between the Japanese stakeholder system and shareholder primacy-based customs.

This paper is one of the few qualitative studies that explores Japanese IR managers’ responses to and perceptions of foreign shareholders in corporate governance reform, with a particular focus on ownership, employment relations and board members. This paper provides examples of tension, conflict and cooperation between Japanese managers and foreign investors, as seen through the eyes of Japanese IR managers. Examining changes in Japan’s stakeholder-based system of corporate governance reform enables us to better understand the processes by which, with vigorous pressure from government and foreign shareholders, a non-western country like Japan may adopt shareholder-based customs and how such a change may also lead to institutional changes.

Fetishism has been often linked to misrecognition and false belief, to one being “ideologically duped” so to speak. But could we think that fetishism may be precisely the very opposite? The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of this at first sight counterintuitive notion. It locates the problem of fetishism at the crux of the problem of disavowal and argues that one needs to distinguish between a disavowal – marked by cynical knowledge – and fetishistic disavowal, which can be understood as a subcategory of the same belief structure of ideology.

This conceptual paper is based on literature review and utilizes examples from the author’s ethnographic fieldworks in India (2008-2013) and central Europe (2015-2019).

The paper provides a new insight into the structure of fetishism, relying on the psychoanalytic structure of disavowal, where all disavowal is ideological, but not all disavowal is fetishistic, thereby positing a crucial, often unacknowledged distinction. Where disavowal follows the structure “I know quite well how things are, but still […],” fetishistic disavowal follows the formula: “I don’t only know how things are, but also how they appear to me, and nonetheless […].”

The paper develops an original conceptualization of fetishism by distinguishing ideological disavowal from fetishistic disavowal.

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of research on mothers and midwives’ understanding of the concept of respectful care in the Ugandan public health settings. It focusses on one aspect of respect; namely communication that is perhaps least resource-dependent. The research found endemic levels of disrespect and tries to understand the reasons behind these organisational cultures and the role that governance could play in improving respect.

The study involved a combination of in-depth qualitative interviews with mothers and midwives together with focus groups with a cohort of midwives registered for a degree.

The findings highlight an alarming level of verbal abuse and poor communication that both deter women from attending public health facilities and, when they have to attend, reduces their willingness to disclose information about their health status. Respect is a major factor reducing the engagement of those women unable to afford private care, with health facilities in Uganda.

Access to quality care provided by skilled birth attendants (midwives) is known to be the major factor preventing improvements in maternal mortality and morbidity in low income settings. Although communication lies at the agency end of the structure-agency continuum, important aspects of governance contribute to high levels of disrespect.

Whilst there is a lot of research on the concept of respectful care in high income settings applying this to the care environment in low resource settings is highly problematic. The findings presented here generate a more contextualised analysis generating important new insights which we hope will improve the quality of care in Uganda health facilities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore different health care professionals’ discourse about privacy – its definition and importance in health care, and its role in their day-to-day work. Professionals’ discourse about privacy reveals how new technologies and laws challenge existing practices of information control within and between professional groups in health care, with implications not only for patient privacy, but also for the role of information control in professions more generally.

The authors conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with n=83 doctors, nurses, and health information professionals in two academic medical centers and one veteran’s administration hospital/clinic in the Northeastern USA. Interview responses were qualitatively coded for themes and patterns across groups were identified.

The health care providers and the authors studied actively sought to uphold the protection (and control) of patient information through professional ethics and practices, as well as through the use of technologies and compliance with legal regulations. They used discourses of professionalism, as well as of law and technology, to sometimes accept and sometimes resist changes to practice required in the changing technological and legal context of health care. The authors found differences across professional groups; for some, protection of patient information is part of core professional ethics, while for others it is simply part of their occupational work, aligned with organizational interests.

This qualitative study of physicians, nurses, and health information professionals revealed some differences in views and practices for protecting patient information in the changing technological and legal context of health care that suggest some professional groups (doctors) may be more likely to resist such changes and others (health information professionals) will actively adopt them.

New technologies and regulations are changing how information is used in health care delivery, challenging professional practices for the control of patient information that may change the value or meaning of medical records for different professional groups.

Qualitative findings suggest that professional groups in health care vary in the extent of information control they have, as well in how they view such control. Some groups may be more likely to (be able to) resist changes in the professional control of information that stem from new technologies or regulatory policies. Some professionals recognize that new IT systems and regulations challenge existing social control of information in health care, with the potential to undermine (or possibly bolster) professional self-control for some but not necessarily all occupational groups.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways assemblaging communities work to support, hinder or disrupt literacy pedagogy in one English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Through an expanded understanding of community based on the concept of assemblage, this paper discusses the ways in which one teacher’s critical literacies instructional practices emerged, configured and ruptured through the assemblaging communities’ that affected her enactment of critical literacies pedagogy. A focus on assemblaging communities recognizes the de/re/territorializing power of the evolving groups of bodies that produce a classroom and pedagogy in particular ways.

Drawing on observational field notes and informal exchanges, this qualitative study uses post-structural and post-human theory to examine the assemblaging communities that produced the enactment of critical literacies pedagogy in a seventh grade ELA classroom. Assemblage theory is used to analyze data to examine the assemblaging communities that de/re/territorialized in Ms T’s teaching in relation to critical literacies pedagogy. This analytical orientation allowed for a nuanced look at communities as evolving, de/re/territorializing formations that, in this study, created tensions for enacting critical literacies pedagogy.

Assemblaging communities are always producing classrooms in particular ways, demonstrating the complexities and realities of enacting literacy pedagogy. Through analysis of the data, the rupture between the assemblaging communities that produced the enactment of critical literacies pedagogy and the assemblaging communities that produced test prep (and altered critical literacies) became apparent. Ruptures like this must be attended to because enacting critical literacies pedagogy is never done neutrally and without attention to the assemblaging communities that are always de/re/territorializing pedagogy, teachers may not be equipped to respond to the unexpected ruptures as well as material realities produced from these.

Educators can use the concept of assemblaging communities for recognizing the territories that shape their literacy pedagogy. By foregrounding assemblaging communities, researchers and educators may be more appropriately equipped to consider the real-time negotiations at play when enacting critical literacies pedagogy in the classroom. Enacting critical literacies pedagogy is never done neutrally, and attention to the assemblaging communities that are always de/re/territorializing pedagogy, teachers may be more equipped to respond to the material realities that are produced through their pedagogical actions.

This study suggests assemblaging communities as a way to productively move forward a perspective on communities that foregrounds the moving bodies that produce communities differently in evolving ways and their de/re/territorializing forces that create material realities for classrooMs Assemblaging communities moves the purpose from defining a community or interpreting what it means to looking at what it does, how it functions and for this study, how assemblaging communities produced critical literacies pedagogy in one classroom.

Covert research has a mixed reputation within the scientific community. Some are unsure of its moral worth, others would proscribe it entirely. This reputation stems largely from a lack of knowledge about the reasons for choosing the covert method. In this chapter, these reasons will be reconstructed in detail and all the elements that will allow one to judge the level of ethicality of covert research will be laid out for the reader. In particular, the chapter will answer the following questions: What harms can result from covert research to the subjects participating in the research? Is covert research necessarily deceptive? In which cases is it ethically permissible for a researcher to deceive? What is the scientific added value of the covert research, that is, what does covert research discover that overt research does not? What are the risks to researchers acting undercover? Finally, some suggestions will be offered to research ethics reviewers to help in their appraisal of covert research.