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Gender-diverse people experience unique cultural and interpersonal stigma in mainstream society and sometimes within their own communities; they face allegations of inauthenticity based on their nonconformity to either cisnormative or transnormative gender regimes. Based on 21 in-depth life history interviews, we unveil the intricate interactional process of negotiating identity and authenticity in the biographical work of gender-diverse individuals. In this study, gender-diverse people engaged in a “gender audit” with their gender-diverse interviewer. Gender audits yield verbal performances of gender with oneself and others. Ambiguity was “accounted for” or “embraced and created” in their biographical work to organize their life stories and undermine binary essentialism – a discourse that was “discursively constraining.” Gender audits took place in participants' day-to-day lives, either through self-audits, questioning from others, or both. In the final analysis, we assert that we all engage in gender auditing. Gender audits are intersubjective sites of domination, subordination, resistance, and social change. Gender diversity, then, can be viewed as a product of gender in flux.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the budgeting process in a local church from a social capital perspective. The social capital provides novel insights into the construction of budgets and its social aspects. A qualitative case study was adopted, with an interpretive methodology. Semi-structured interviews were used to interview 14 managers involved in the budgeting process at a local independent church. The interview data were supplemented by documentary evidence. Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) framework of social capital was used to analyse the data. The main finding was that budgeting was found to be a social process – that can best be explained by social capital theory. There may be an element of self-selection, as the church agreed to participate in the study and chose to allow a researcher to examine social aspects of its budgeting process. The chapter contributes to both social capital theory and church literature. Social capital provides novel insights into the construction of budgets and its social aspects. In addition, contemporary budgeting practices are studied in a church in a denomination and country not previously studied.

Service researchers have been tasked with improving the well-being of consumers experiencing vulnerability. The current research aims to demonstrate how these consumers can experience empowerment through transformative service improvements to the traditional microfinance model.

To ground the research in a real-world setting with consumers experiencing vulnerability, the research team worked with a nonprofit microfinance organization offering loans to communities of Indigenous women entrepreneurs. The research team worked in six communities and conducted over 25 borrower interviews and 14 staff and volunteer interviews totaling 1,200 min of recorded content.

The present investigation of a unique approach to microfinance offers a new theoretical model, the service empowerment model (SEM), which illustrates how empowerment emanates from processes and outcomes at three distinct levels: micro, meso and macro. Recognizing that change occurs individually and also at familial and societal levels begins to challenge deeply rooted structural and cultural norms involved in the services ecosystem.

Originating from the microfinance service setting, the SEM can be explored, tested and implemented as a pilot program in a variety of service settings that involve transformative service initiatives (e.g. homelessness, refugees, etc.).

As society pursues solutions to the pressing problems of consumers experiencing vulnerability, the present research offers critical insights into how services should be designed.

The present research defines a new term, service empowerment, and creates a new theoretical model, the SEM, to aid in improving transformative service initiatives.

Digital platforms increase their function and scope by leveraging boundary resources and complementary add-on products from third-party developers to interact with external entities and producers. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are essential boundary resources developers use to connect applications, systems and platforms. This notwithstanding, previous API studies tend to focus more on the technical dimensions, with little on the social and cultural contexts underpinning API innovations. This study relies on the new (neo) institutional theory (focusing on regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive pillars) as an analytical lens to understand the institutional forces that affect API integration among digital firms.

The study adopts a qualitative case study methodology and relies on phone calls and a semi-structured in-depth interview approach of a Ghanaian digital music platform to uncover the institutional forces affecting API integration.

The findings reveal that regulative institutions such as excessive tax regimes mostly constrained API development and integration initiatives. However, other regulative institutions like the government digitalization agenda enabled API integration. Normative institutions, such as the growing use of e-payment options, enabled API integration in digital music platforms. Cultural-cognitive institutions like employee ego constrained the API integration process in music digital platforms.

This study primarily contributes to deepening understanding of the relevant literature by exploring the institutional forces that affect API integration among digital firms in a developing economy. The study also uncovered a new form of an institution known as motivational institution as an enabler for API development and integration in digital music platforms.

The present study examines the risk of citizens encountering police use of intermediate and deadly force, as opposed to using physical force, given a set of individual, situational and neighborhood variables.

The study uses data from 2003 to 2016 in the Dallas Open Data Portal. Two-level multinomial logistic regression is used to analyze the data.

The effects of citizen race differ across the types of police force. Overall, citizen race plays no significant role in the officer's decision to shoot firearms at citizens. However, there is evidence of intra-racial disparity in officer-involved shootings (OISs) between Hispanic citizens and officers. African American citizens are disproportionately exposed to display-but-don't shoot incidents, while Hispanic citizens have a lower risk of encountering police use of intermediate weapons.

The study helps to understand how citizen and officer race influence and interact across various types of police force. Implications of the results are offered in relation to relevant literature.

This performance autoethnography may or may not be interpreted as a continuation of a conversation regarding the experiences of those with devalued statuses in academic settings. The authors rely on “strange accounting” to consider their experiences in the academy from various standpoints: before and after promotion, before and after leaving academia. While reflecting on our past experiences, we introduce the concept of “everyday precariousness” as a way of explaining the normalization of instability, insecurity, and negative affect that is part of everyday life for those with devalued statuses in academic settings and beyond. Everyday precariousness is an embodied experience for those in vulnerable positions. Normalized exposure to risks, such as discrimination, harassment, bullying, or structural instability, produces an undercurrent of threat that permeates academic culture. Our stories of everyday precariousness span race, ethnicity, class, academic roles, and gender boundaries (among many others). Analyzing these experiences furthers previous work on the uses of strange accounting as well as the dynamics of status silencing. In the final analysis, unresisted and unabated, everyday precariousness and status silencing can lead to institutional failure and resonance disasters.

As the youngest generation – Generation Z (Gen Z) – enters the workplace, there is a growing interest in this cohort's career needs and expectations. This paper explores the under-researched topic of Gen Z project management (Gen Z PM) professionals. In addition to shedding light on the factors that positively affect Gen Z PM professionals' early career-development phase, this research aims to identify specific organization-led practices that can foster sustainable early PM careers and so achieve greater workforce sustainability.

Through the lens of the resource-based view (RBV), Gen Z PM professionals are considered critical resources that can help ensure workforce sustainability in project-based organizations (PBOs). Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 25 Gen Z PM professionals in Australia to explore the professionals' early career experiences and the organizational-support initiatives that facilitate positive experiences. The results were analyzed using thematic analysis.

The results revealed that most Gen Z PMs experienced many challenges and a lack of support during their early career phase: Gen Z value (1) mentoring, (2) time for training and development, (3) showing support and guidance, (4) understand skill-gaps and (5) reasonable workloads. Through catering to these needs, PBOs can ensure better career sustainability for their young Gen Z talent and, therefore, greater workforce sustainability for the project profession.

According to the career sustainability lens, PBOs play a significant role in ensuring that their valuable young PM talent are supported and retained in the profession. This research sheds light on what Gen Z PM professionals value in their early careers, which guided recommendations to better support this new generation of project professionals.

The extra-low minimum wage for US restaurant workers has remained unchanged for over 30 years. Periodic campaigns have brought this wage, and its connection to the perpetuation of inequality and exploitative work, to public attention, but these campaigns have met resistance from both employers and restaurant workers. This article draws on a workplace ethnography in a restaurant front-of-house, and in-depth interviews with tipped food service workers, to examine the tipped labour process and begin to answer a central question: why would any workers oppose a wage increase? It argues that the constituting of tips as a formal wage created for workers a two-employer problem, wherein customers assume the role of secondary, unregulated, employers in the workplace. Ultimately, the tipped wage poses a longer-term strategic obstacle for workers in their position relative to management and ability to organize to shape the terms and conditions of their work.

Poor post-harvest handling practices by seaweed farmers are a key issue in seaweed value chains, contributing to low-quality seaweed being supplied to processors. To address this, a range of advanced drying technologies and methods have been developed, yet uptake by farmers remains low. This study examines factors affecting drying technology uptake by seaweed farmers to identify opportunities to incentivise improved drying practices.

This study draws on a quantitative survey of 273 seaweed farmers in two villages in South Sulawesi, 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 166 semi-structured interviews.

Farmers engage in limited adoption of improved drying technologies and practices as they don't receive higher prices for higher quality products, instead aiming to meet only the minimum acceptable standards to avoid a price discount or rejection of their product. Technologies and techniques that have been adopted are often used in ways that differ from their original purpose, such as to reduce drying times and labour input, rather than to produce products of low moisture and dirt contents. Similarly, local traders mix high- and low-quality seaweed in order to supply warehouses with seaweed which on average meets minimum quality standards.

This study reveals that improved drying practices are unlikely to be adopted unless incentivised by more targeted price-grade differentials.