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The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of consumption values and the moderating role of consumer innovativeness for intentions to purchase convergence home robots.

The data were collected from 506 participants in South Korea, where convergence home robots with a combination of multiple functions have rapidly penetrated the marketplace. A hierarchical moderated regression model was employed in order to analyze the data.

The results show that functional, epistemic, and emotional values are important factors affecting intentions to purchase convergence home robots. In addition, consumers' innovativeness shows a moderating effect on the relationship between emotional value and purchase intentions. This result showed that the effect of emotional value has a greater influence on purchase intentions for the high consumer innovativeness group than for the low consumer innovativeness group.

Marketers should focus not only on functional value, but also on the hedonic value represented by the emotional value, as well as the epistemic value that convergence home robots provide, especially to innovative consumers in the marketplace. Consumer innovativeness is a useful variable to divide value‐based segments in convergence products.

As technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, the convergence of technology has shifted people's lifestyles. However, it was not until a few years ago that convergence products were investigated. It is necessary for researchers to understand the factors influencing intentions to purchase convergence products, as well as the consumption value and consumer innovativeness that consumers place on these products in order to accurately direct marketing efforts. This paper contributes to that understanding.

It is critical for those who are engaged in the work of resisting the movement of academically restrictive policy to understand that it is a deliberate act on the part of conservatives to outlaw critical race theory (CRT) specifically, because it is a theoretical mechanism for discrediting the rhetorical foundations of their policy movement. The knee-jerk institutional courses of action to now defund initiatives and curriculum related equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) represent what has always been a deeply rooted investment in white supremacy on the part of the institutions (Baldwin, 2021; Patel, 2021; Squire, 2021).

The author explores and defines the CRT tenets of interest convergence (Bell, 1980) and whiteness as property (Harris, 1993) in relation to EI (Fricker, 2007; Dotson, 2011) as frameworks for examining three EGOs in the region where these policies have become most dominant. All three are critical tools of analysis for understanding the stake the White conservative political elite have in EGOs, and the magnitude of EI these policies represent, and stand endorse in their rhetoric. Definitions of EI often rely on the work of Amanda Fricker’s (2013) text on the subject, but this paper is invested in the expansions of this theorization for speaking to the nature of the injustice that EGOs represent as a matter of historical trend, with grave implications for futures marked by continued oppression. Whiteness as property and interest convergence are points for explicating the dialectic and material aspects of issues of race and equity in this country; namely, how knowledge processes inherent to higher education sound even more alarms as EGOs become commonplace for college campuses.

To support the arguments laid out, the author provides a historical review of the settler-colonial foundations of higher education as an american institution. This is meant to provide contour to the image of postsecondary education that exists today. In accordance with this paper’s allegiance to CRT, many of the texts would be considered revisionist history (Delgado and Stefancic, 2023), which stray from dominant narratives of american comfort and speak more accurately to the experiences of minoritized populations. The author then applies the same analysis to the sociopolitical contexts of EGOs, and to policy language itself. Each section is closed with an explanation of its connection to tenets of CRT and EI so as to provide a thread to follow into the subsequent discussion section.

In the first presentation of the early writings of this work, the author was lucky enough to be in community with Barbara Applebaum at the annual meeting for the American Educational Studies Association and engage in discourse surrounding EI and CRT applications to EGOs. In conversations surrounding the will in the willful ignorance that is exemplified in the movement of EGOs, the author had shared with Dr Applebaum the early thinking on how that will was the same force that brought together converging interests, which have continually forecasted interest divergence. This is commonly referred to as “political backlash.” The author had said something along the lines of: “if we follow the interest convergence, we can get in front of the subsequent political moves to turn the clocks on what was once celebrates progress.” This conversation planted the seed for what is the thesis of this paper. Interest convergence and divergence happen at the will of white populations because of the american truth of whiteness as property. In the context of higher education, this means that because educational pursuit has largely been white property, it has served as an arena for white populations to converge and diverge their interests with those of the minoritized. For example, the policies that drained federal funding for higher education in the 1970s were passed on the tails of a Civil Rights Movement that shook the very foundation of this country and expanded access to postsecondary education for racially minoritized groups (Berret, 2015).

Ensuring that this social construction is a matter of status quo has largely been the work of postsecondary institutions, and EGOs represent the most recent attempt at epistemically imposed inferiority. Explicit attention to the fact of higher education’s complicity and overall investment in the socialization of oppression is necessary to engage in transformative practice that resists anachronism. If higher education researchers and practitioners do not recognize the stake in both the presence and resistance to EGOs, there would likely be acts of resistance that will belie an act of interest convergence – and later divergence – on the part of the state.

This paper aims to analyse the nature and extent of convergence within the literature of the narrative turn in narrative accounting research.

The paper offers an actor–network–theoretic perspective drawing on Latour’s theory of citation and Shwed and Bearman’s development of that theory to analyse patterns of convergence.

The paper finds that across the exemplars of narrative turn research examined, there is only a limited level of epistemic engagement so that exemplars achieve their status without undergoing trials of strength.

The paper argues that the resources of the relevant academic community are spread so thinly that each seam – each research question, methodology or method and research context – is mined by no more than a small handful of researchers unable to generate a meaningful volume of contestation. Steps are suggested to better focus research activity.

The use of Latour’s theory of citation to analyse patterns of convergence in accounting research is innovative. The paper proposes a substantial change in the community’s approach to narrative turn research on accounting narratives.

This paper provides an analytical theory of appropriateness judgments that introduces structural dimensions in the study of social rationality of organization members. This approach helps explore the coevolution of members’ relative position in structure and normative choices in their organization. Illustration of this approach is based on the study of controversial judicial decisions and dynamics of advice networks in a courthouse where lay judges have to choose between punitive and nonpunitive awards in cases of unfair competition in business. In this case, coevolution is facilitated by an endogenous process of centralization–decentralization–recentralization of advice networks over time, and by use of a procedural “weak legal culture” that helps align and homogenize conflicting normative choices among organization members. It is suggested that this approach to social rationality helps revisit our understanding of social processes, in this case collective learning and secondary socialization in organizations and flexible labor markets.

This paper aims to discuss the concepts of co-creation and value-in-use with a specific focus on big data technology in agriculture. The authors provide a unique narrative of how farmers experience co-creation and value-in-use in monetary and non-monetary forms.

The qualitative study is based on semi-structured interviews with mid-Western farmers. The constant comparative method was used for coding the data. Results were analyzed through open and axial coding, and matrix queries helped establish linkages between different concepts via NVivo 12.

The paper provides rich insight into co-creation through direct and indirect interaction, autonomous co-creation and epistemic, monetary and environmental value-in-use in the digital agriculture sector. Interestingly, co-creation through indirect interaction gives rise to epistemic value-in-use. Also, value-co-destruction can undermine co-creation, while relational actors and the concept of psychological ownership are very relevant to the process of co-creation.

The authors build on the extant literature on co-creation in knowledge-intensive B2B sectors with the unique findings linking different forms of co-creation with value-in-use.

The findings on co-creation and value-in-use are beneficial to diverse agriculture stakeholders such as farmers, agriculture technology providers, extension agents and policymakers. Agricultural technology providers can determine how to make the co-creation process more meaningful for farmers and also create suitable technology tools that enrich farmers’ knowledge about crop management. Agricultural stakeholders can learn how to develop big data analytic tools and marketing narratives to maximize value-in-use and pre-empt value co-destruction.

The research can impact policy, as it addresses a very relevant issue of how farmers relate to big data technology amidst growing consolidation and privacy concerns in the digital agriculture sector.

Our work is both theoretically and contextually relevant. We incorporate elements of service-dominant and customer-dominant logic while analyzing farmers’ perspectives of co-creation and value-in-use.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the problem of reconfiguring epistemic boundaries and the authority relationships that these boundaries represent in corporate R&D. The authors focus the analysis on the mediation of this reconfiguration by project management tools, specifically the development plan and its subsidiary roadmaps and timelines.

The authors analyze discourse data from an ethnographic study to show in situ the communication about and through project management tools in collaborative project development. The concepts of organizational map and mapping from the perspective of the communicative constitution of organization (CCO) frame the close-up analysis of this communication.

The analysis reveals how the plan and its subsidiary texts participate in the negotiation and legitimation of epistemic ownership and authority for a collaborative strategy to be implemented. The authors illustrate the material agency of these texts in the objectification and prioritization of strategic choices in this implementation.

To conclude, the authors discuss the significance of exploring the mapping function of supposedly mundane representational tools used in project management.

The originality of this study comes from applying the organizational map concept to demonstrate the politically charged materiality of project management tools in the discursive establishment of authority and accomplishment of corporate strategy.

This paper aims to draw attention to a broad range of experimental institutional initiatives which operate in the absence of a global antitrust regime. The purpose of this paper is to offer food for thought to scholars in other fields of international trade law facing challenges from divergent national regimes.

Taking inspiration from political science literature on institutions, this paper crafts a broad analytical lens which captures various organisational forms (including networks), codes (including soft law) and culture (including epistemic communities). The strength and shortcomings of traditional “bricks and mortar” institutions such as the European Union (EU) and General Agreement Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organisation are first examined. Then, the innovative global network of International Competition Network (ICN) is analysed.

It highlights the value of the global antitrust epistemic community in providing a conducive environment for extensive recourse to “soft law”. Examples from the EU and the ICN include measures which find expression in enforcement tools and networks. These initiatives can be seen as experimental responses to the challenges of divergent national antitrust regimes.

It is desktop research rather than empirical field work.

To raise awareness outside the antitrust scholarly community of the variety of experimental institutional initiatives which have evolved, often on a soft law basis, in response to the challenges experienced by national enforcement agencies and businesses operating in the absence of a global antitrust regime.

It offers some personal reflections on the ICN from the author’s experience as a non-governmental advisor. It draws attention to the ICN’s underappreciated range of educational materials which are freely available on its website to everyone. It submits that the ICN template offers interesting ideas for other fields of international trade law where a global regime is unrealisable. The ICN is a voluntary virtual network of agencies collaborating to agree ways to reduce clashes among national regimes. Its goal of voluntary convergence is portrayed as standardisation rather than as absolute congruence. Even if standardisation of norms/processes is too ambitious a goal in other fields of international trade law, the ICN model still offers inspiration as an epistemic community within an inclusive and dynamic forum for encouraging debate and creating a culture of learning opportunities where familiarity and trust is fostered.

The purpose of this paper is to open a theoretical discussion on the preventive anti‐money laundering (AML) regime, both international and domestic in Russia, building theoretical assumptions on the role of epistemic community in the AML network in Russia.

The discussion is based on the analysis of the preventive pillar of the AML regime in Russia. Cognitive (or knowledge‐based) approach is used to study domestic AML regime and to reveal the main reason of the network deficiencies in Russia.

The paper argues that the representatives of banking community in Russia should play the role of epistemic community to foster better understanding of the context and purposes of the AML regime, thus, decreasing uncertainty, facilitating cooperation between the stakeholders, and eventually having a great influence on the quality of the AML regulations elaborated by the policy makers.

The paper limits its scope to the study of money laundering (ML) prevention focusing on the financial institutions – banks – which play the most important role in Russian AML network.

The paper reveals the roles of the main actors of Russian AML regime play. The ineffectiveness of the regime could be eased by increasing communication and cooperation between the stakeholders. The formal compliance approach used by the regulator in the financial sector supervision has not been effective and should be reviewed with the shift to the reasonable judgment approach used by both supervisor and financial institutions to prevent ML in Russia.

Studies of the peculiarities of the AML legislation implementation in different countries is one of the helpful tools to measure the efficiency of the global AML regime.

Three distinctive domains of inquiry in comparative and international education (CIE) point to epistemic fault lines that simultaneously enable and disable the possibilities for social transformation in the cultural ecologies that demarcate, but also entangle, the so-called Global South and the North. Historically, these domains of inquiry – language/multilingualism, education, and development – engage arenas in which ideas about wellbeing, social arrangements, and the politics of knowledge (and of power) are constantly constructed, contested, and renegotiated. This analysis pinpoints some of the discursive technologies, which guarantee that active scholarly innovations and differentiation proceed in ways that ultimately leave intact the territorialized regionalizations of development differences. It reflects on ongoing fieldwork from the South to highlight three spheres of social control, and struggle, illustrative of the coloniality of difference and the expanding institutionalization of learning (as schooling) in an era of global interventionism. These loci – the sources of knowledge traditions, the sites of its enactment, and the power of knowledge transactions – represent overlapping activation points through which education interventions both stimulate and stultify social transformations. Specifically, the sources, sites, and power of knowledge offer empirical and discursive tools for historiographic reconsideration of the role of linguistic diversity and education in social change processes, and, crucially, for shifting critical focus from merely the occidentality of contemporary education traditions to the universalism of its social imaginaries. In this critical reading of new understandings of language(s) as invention, therefore, lies analytic opportunities for rethinking epistemic dilemmas in linking education and “development” in CIE scholarship.

Hayek’s “Use of knowledge in society” is often misunderstood. Hayek’s point is not just that prices aggregate dispersed knowledge, but also that the knowledge embedded in prices would not exist absent the market process. Later, in The Constitution of Liberty, he argues that this same idea can also be applied to the study of political and collective choice phenomena. Democracy is not just about aggregating preferences. Absent the democratic process, the knowledge necessary to solve collective problems is not generated. We compare this perspective on democracy to Bryan Caplan’s and Helen Landemore’s theories, and we argue that Hayek’s account focused on “opinion falsification” is richer. Unlike Caplan or Landemore, who adopt a static perspective, Hayek is more interested in the long-term tendencies and feed-back mechanisms. For example, why do Western democracies seem to have gradually moved away from the most deleterious types of economic policies (such as price controls)? Hayek’s conjecture is that the democratic process itself is responsible for this. We connect Hayek’s conjecture about democracy to the broader argument made by Vincent Ostrom, who has claimed that public choice should study not just incentive structures, but also collective learning processes. We believe that this line of research, that is, comparative institutional analysis based on the collective learning capacities embedded in alternative institutional arrangements, merits a lot more attention than it has received so far. The question “Which collective choice arrangements have the best epistemic properties?” is one of the most important neglected questions in political economy.