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Since its emergence as a field of study, law and society scholarship has grown to encompass an array of disciplines, perspectives, methods, and political orientations. A consequence of this disciplinary hypostatization has been to produce a scholarly goulash which, while at times nourishing, now faces the dual dangers of institutional fracture and intellectual incoherence. The aim of this essay is to map a way to embrace the eclecticism that characterizes the field and yet avoid the dangers of dilettantism and to cultivate the interdisciplinarity its founders envisioned without sacrificing a sense of shared purpose or abandoning the possibility of collectively producing a better understanding of law.

Building strong human brands inscribed in social and symbolic recognition is a strategic issue for branded individuals. In the context of film director human brands, this study aims to examine the respective influences of the economic and critical performance of films, on the one hand, and the professional legitimacy bestowed by internal stakeholders, on the other, on changes in human brand identity. Contrary to what is generally believed, it shows that the specific legitimacy bestowed by producers and the institutional legitimacy bestowed by elite peers mediate the effects of performance on changes in human brand identity. Brand extension (i.e. new films) incongruence and initial human brand identity moderate the effect of performance on legitimacy.

This study is applied to film director human brands and to their extensions through the films they make. Data were collected for 81 films, including information before and after the brand extension occurs, to capture changes in human brand identity and extension effects.

The results show that economic performance influences both specific and institutional legitimacy, whereas critical performance only impacts institutional legitimacy. These relationships are moderated by initial human brand identity and congruence. Both types of professional legitimacies also help reinforce human brand identity.

The study challenges the role of performance on the building of human brand identity and shows that the latter is co-constructed by the branded individual and internal stakeholders. It also enhances the key roles of global incongruence and genre incongruence in the model.

The concept of style is gaining momentum in organizational research. Focussing on its implications for strategy, this paper presents a conceptual and methodological framework to make the notion of style operational and applicable to both research and practice. Style is defined here as a combinatorial, socially situated and semiotic device that can be organized into typologies – recurrent combinations of stylistic dimensions exerting a normative and semiotic function within and across contexts. The empirical analysis, situated in the field of electronic music, considers the music genres and the colour dimension of artists' appearance as components of their style. Results show how coherent style typologies normatively dominate the field and how non-conformist but coherent typologies correspond to superior creative performance. Operating as unifying device, style can transform varied and potentially confounding traits into distinctiveness and shed light on competitive market dynamics that cannot be fully explained via other theoretical constructs.

The purpose of this afterword is to examine which questions have been illuminated in the present issue and which theoretical problems still need to be addressed.

Examines articles in this issue.

Many epistemological views, e.g. social constructivism, critical theory, feminist epistemology, postmodernism and systems theory, need to be considered more deeply within library and information science (LIS). For some of the other epistemologies such as phenomenology and (post)structuralism there is still a need for deeper explorations of their potential contributions. Finally eclecticism is discussed as one way of coping with different theories in a field.

The value of this afterword is to contribute to future reflections and debates concerning the philosophical basis of LIS and the specific contributions of specific systems of thought.

This chapter presents an affirmative and emancipatory postmodernism characterized by epistemological and methodological pluralism. Many narratives are to be preferred to just one, many styles of research are available and useful, and local, limited and fragmented research initiatives have contributions to make to our common enterprise. The chapter outlines postmodern ideas such as fluidity, deconstruction and pluralism; debunks misconceptions concerning postmodernism’s relationship to science, modernity and theorizing; and offers a four-step guide to those interested in postmodernizing a research area. The chapter ends with a call for transparency in theory and method, pursuit of nonobvious research ideas and pragmatic engagement with the world of practice.

This paper aims to show how researchers can overcome problems of fragmentation and eclecticism in an important strategy paradigm, namely, the Dynamic Capabilities (DC) perspective.

First, the explanandum of the theory of DC, conceptualized as a theory of strategic change, is generates. Second, four main constituent theoretical perspectives of DC were selected and their explanans on the explanandum of a theory of strategic change was mapped. Third, the explanans of a theory of strategic change was parsed out to derive the critical fragmentation sources as illustrated by the classical papers in DC.

First, consistent explanans of a theory of strategic change are integrated to build a meta-theory of strategic change. Second, testable propositions based on the meta-theory, in the context of industry convergence, a context which requires the development of dynamic capabilities in an uncertain and changing environmental context are developed.

By developing a meta-theory of strategic change, researchers are provided with the tools to overcome the confusion of fragmentation and eclecticism, specifically in the field of strategy research.

Unlike postwar reconstruction of urban districts, the architectural projects developed during the Lebanese war are a relatively unexplored subject, moreover if one is dealing within housing in the rural realm. Little attention has been paid to its contemporary propositions, especially to the ones directed by the Lebanese Diaspora during the war. By living abroad and by maintaining a link to their origins, members of the Diaspora put together all their strength and wealth to keep in touch with their land. For a large part, the idea of dwelling refers to their identity: by investing and building houses in their native village, they aim at preserving a place in their community.

In this article, the Lebanese Diaspora will be regarded as an ethnoscape, figure of the globalization introduced by Arjun Appadurai, namely a social and political matrix structured by and for the production of a cultural model and identity. Our hypothesis postulates that each village constitutes a micro ethnoscape (with, of course, exceptions and alternatives) and uses a particular architectural language. However, it is not a question of homogenizing all constructions but rather to find a common vocabulary referring to identity and appropriation in the various villages of origin of the Diaspora.

The houses built on the native soil by emigrants' take part in the debates that oppose the local production to the global one. Thus, contrary to many researches that denounce globalization for the cultural standardization that it produces, this article intends to show the imaginative character of the members of the Diaspora, their resistance to the traditional models and the contemporary interbreeding which results from it. In this sense, the local and the global are intrinsically related one to the other.

This study aimed at providing a systematic review of the research conducted on the application of the eclectic approach in language teaching since 2016.

The articles have been selected from seven renowned databases (i.e. EBSCO, Online Library, Scopus, ScienceDirect, Sage Journal Online, Education Resources Information Center, and Web of Science). The number of total articles identified in the initial research was 432, out of this number, only 47 articles were selected for the review using predefined inclusion criteria. The selected articles have been analyzed and coded into different categories: research design, location, context, level of education, learning outcomes and pedagogical implications.

The review analysis showed the major trends and outcomes in the eclectic approach topic. It also provided useful information for stakeholders regarding the application of the eclectic approach in language teaching.

The study contributes to some unaddressed points identified in the selected articles, and it recommends some points to be considered in future research.

This commentary was stimulated by two things. First, the apparently growing concerns within marketing academia with the gap between academia and practice. Throughout Europe academics are expressing the need to link their work closely with practitioners, yet there is little sign of urgency from those who influence research output. Second, the opportunities for changing academic practices illustrated by cultural changes taking place in commercial market research. Market researchers now approach their task differently: to begin with they are adopting a more relaxed attitude to their methodologies. Eclecticism and bricolage are the new vogue. They have become much more focused on what their internal customers want: help in making decisions. The change of name from market research to customer insight is but one symptom of this re‐evaluation. This commentary questions the existing cultures of academic marketing research and publication, and asks what lessons we can learn from commercial market research. The paper concludes that applied marketing academics need to adopt a different set of priorities in comparison to their classical marketing colleagues. Commercial market researchers and applied academics share a requirement to make their research accessible, engaging and even actionable. There is little overt acknowledgement of this at present, and until this changes, the current academic cultural norms may erect barriers to our messages getting across.

The process of commercialization of art is often referred to as “monetization,” denoting the use of art as an investment class. I discuss the reverse mechanism, defined as “Monet-ization,” where investment is overlaid with artistic value, and unproven art is imbued with aesthetic qualities. This mechanism is derived from a historical overview of key periods in the history of art, such as the flourishing of new genres in early 17th century Dutch art and the rise of Modern art in the early 20th century. An analysis of original data on the leading art collectors in the world in the period 1990–2015 highlights the tendency for collectors with an “investor” profile and eclectic taste to buy contemporary art. Combining artworks from diverse periods and styles, eclectic personal collections contribute to the conversion of economic into aesthetic value by way of spill-overs across genres and to the attribution by association of “old” value to “new” art. The “Monet-ization” process helps elucidate how paradigm shifts occur in the art world and how innovation survives under conditions of insufficient demand.