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This study explores a hegemonic alliance and the role of relational forms of accounting and accountablity in the making of contemporary capitalism.

We use the WikiLeaks “Cablegate” documents to provide an account of the detailed machinations between interest groups (corporations and the state) that are constitutive of hegemonic activity.

Our analysis of the “Cablegate” documents shows that the US and Chevron were crafting a central role for Turkmenistan and its president on the global political stage as early as 2007, despite offical reporting beginning only in 2009. The documents exemplify how “accountability gaps” occlude the understanding of interdependence between capital and the state.

The study contributes to a growing idea that official accounts offer a fictionalized narrative of corporations as existing independently, and thus expands the boundaries associated with studying multinational corporate activities to include their interdependencies with the modern state.

The study traces how global capitalism extends into new territories through diplomatic channels, as a strategic initiative between powerful state and capital interests, arguing that the outcome is the empowerment of authoritarian states at the cost of democracy.

The study argues that previous accounting and accountability research has overlooked the larger picture of how capital and the state work together to secure a mutual hegemonic interest. We advocate for a more complete account of these activities that circumvents official, often restricted, views of global capitalism.

This study aims to explore gender performance in entrepreneurial pitching. Understanding pitching as a social practice, the authors argue that pitch content and body gestures contain gender-based norms and practices. The authors focus on early-stage ventures and the hegemonic masculinities and femininities that are performed in entrepreneurial pitches. The main research question is as follows: How is gender performed in entrepreneurial pitching?

The authors carried out the study with the post-structuralist feminist approach. The authors collected and analyzed nine online pitches with the reflexive thematic method to depict hegemonic masculinities and femininities performed at the pitch.

The authors found that heroic and breadwinner masculinities are dominant in pitching. Both male and female founders perform hegemonic masculinities. Entrepreneurs are expected to be assertive but empathetic people. Finally, there are connections between what entrepreneurs do and what investors ask, indicating the iteration of gender performance and expectations.

While the online setting helps the authors to collect data during the pandemic, it limits the observation of the place, space and interactions between the judges/investors and the entrepreneurs. As a result, the linguistic and gesture communication of the investors in the pitch was not discussed in full-length in this paper. Also, as the authors observed, people would come to the pitch knowing what they should perform and how they should interact. Therefore, the preparation of the pitch as a study context could provide rich details on how gender norms and stereotypes influence people's interactions and their entrepreneurial identity. Lastly, the study has a methodological limitation. The authors did not include aspects of space in the analysis. It is mainly due to the variety of settings that the pitching sessions that the data set had.

For social practices and policies, the results indicate barriers to finance for women entrepreneurs. Women entrepreneurs are rewarded when they perform entrepreneurial hegemonic masculinities with a touch of emphasized femininities. Eventually, if women entrepreneurs do not perform correctly as investors expect them to, they will face barriers to acquiring finance. It is important to acknowledge how certain gendered biases might be (re)constructed and (re)produced through entrepreneurial activities, in which pitching is one of them.

Practitioners could utilize research findings to understand how gender stereotypes exist not only on the pitch stage but also before and after the pitch, such as the choice of business idea and pitch training. In other words, it is necessary to create a more enabling environment for women entrepreneurs, such as customizing the accelerator program so that all business ideas receive relevant support from experts. On a macro level, the study has shown that seemingly gender-equal societies do not practically translate into higher participation of women in entrepreneurship.

For theoretical contributions, the study enhances the discussion that entrepreneurship is gendered; women and men entrepreneurs need to perform certain hegemonic traits to be legitimated as founders. The authors also address various pitching practices that shape pitch performance by including both textual and semiotic data in the study. This study provides social implications on the awareness of gendered norms and the design of entrepreneurial pitching.

Political Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), based on ideas about deliberative democracy, have been criticised for increasing corporate power and democratic deficits. Yet, deliberative ideals are flourishing in the corporate world in the form of dialogues with a broad set of stakeholders and engagement in wider societal issues. Extractive industry areas, with extensive corporate interventions in weak regulatory environments, are particularly vulnerable to asymmetrical power relations when businesses engage with society. This paper aims to illustrate in what way deliberative CSR practices in such contexts risk enhancing corporate power at the expense of community interests.

This paper is based on a retrospective qualitative study of a Canadian oil company, operating in an Albanian oilfield between 2009 and 2016. Through a study of three different deliberative CSR practices – market-based land acquisition, a grievance redress mechanism and dialogue groups – it highlights how these practices in various ways enforced corporate interests and prevented further community mobilisation.

By applying Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony, the analysis highlights how deliberative CSR activities isolated and silenced community demands, moved some community members into the corporate alliance and prevented alternative visions of the area to be articulated. In particular, the close connection between deliberative practices and monetary compensation flows is underlined in this dynamic.

The paper contributes to critical scholarship on political CSR by highlighting in what way deliberative practices, linked to monetary compensation schemes, enforce corporate hegemony by moving community members over to the corporate alliance.

Despite the plethora of scholarship outputs on masculinity showing it as a fertile research domain, there are noteworthy lacunae on the topic especially in relation to its dynamics among ethnic minority groups. Accordingly, this paper aims to address masculinity and symbolic consumption among Black African consumers in the UK.

The study is interpretive in nature with the use of in-depth interviews conducted with 20 participants in London and the data analysis follows the grounded theory orientation.

It shows masculinity-oriented categorisations of market offerings but with an incidence of cultural tension. It suggests the prevalence of symbolic consumption among participants as demonstrated in their quest for admiration and commendation about their consumption and how masculinity is communicated. A new masculinity typology emerged from the study which depicts men in this context as falling into four categories of gay, conservative, contemporary and men on acme.

The study unpacks issues around masculinity, and multiculturalism, and proposes a novel typology on the topic vis-à-vis the discourse on segmentation, targeting and positioning strategy.

For the most part, the majority of the research on entrepreneurial masculinities has focused on the traditional business and finance sector, capturing a masculinity infused with notions of dominance, a cut-throat disposition and corporate acumen. There has been relatively less attention focused on the reproduction of masculinities and monetized body work in digital forms of entrepreneurship.

This conceptual article explores some of the entrepreneurial and performative skills utilized by male OnlyFans creators as they curate not only their bodies but also their sexualities in order to attract subscribers and maximize profits.

Mapping the relationship between entrepreneurialism and masculinity on OnlyFans is significant considering the platform’s popularity and the changing nature of digital entrepreneurship. Drawing connections to previous research on working-class entrepreneurial masculinities, we highlight how male OnlyFans creators, who are largely from working-class backgrounds, are actively practicing entrepreneurial skills.

We foreground the work of social media creators as sexualized and aesthetic labour, making connections between digital entrepreneurship, working-class masculinity, sexuality, and (idealized) bodies. Our article concludes with making recommendations for future research on the study of gender and sexuality within for-profit digital entrepreneurship.

School exclusion in England is highly gendered, racialised and classed. For instance, boys are three times more likely than girls to be excluded from school and certain groups, including Black Caribbean boys are subject to disproportionate levels of exclusion. Against this backdrop, I explore the context and consequences of exclusion from English mainstream schooling for young masculinities. The arguments presented also have broader international significance due to a global tendency towards punitive measures in schooling. Through bringing masculinities scholarship into conversation with childhood studies, this chapter aims to present a nuanced theorisation of young masculinities which foregrounds lived experience and is located within the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. It examines ways in which exclusion and schooling in alternative settings, such as a Pupil Referral school, can shape the identities of boys and their subjectivities. The empirical data demonstrate that excluded boys face severe constraints arising from ways in which they are positioned. Drawing on original qualitative data, it is argued that boys who are categorised in this way demonstrate highly agentic ways of ‘doing boy’. This chapter is underpinned by two questions, firstly, how can we theorise boyhood and school exclusion in ways that recognise excluded boys as agentic and constrained subjects? Secondly, what possibilities for change might our theorisation reveal? This chapter concludes by arguing for intersectional masculinities and strengthened theorisation of childhood studies which explicitly recognises lived experience. Through this discussion, I seek to illuminate the emotional costs of school exclusion and insights into ways to achieve change.

Based on qualitative data from a large study exploring Muslim experiences in the workplace, this chapter explains how Muslim dress standards inform identity and are influenced by US cultural ideals about self-presentation and perceived anti-Muslim hostility. Theoretical sampling was used to find 25 men and 59 women, 32 of whom are veiled. These individuals worked at major corporations as numerical minorities or held professions where they encountered non-Muslims regularly. Informed by theories of orientalism and social identity, findings examine hegemonic representations of organizational power and describe how men could employ masculine practices to navigate anti-Muslim discourse and foster a sense of belonging at work. Within immigrant-centered workplaces, women face cultural backlash for appropriating Western styles deemed immodest. While working outside their community, women who wore hijabs emphasized their femininity through softer colors, makeup, or “unpinning” their veil to offset the visceral reaction to their hijab. Thus, adapting to workplace dress expectations is structured by intersections of gender, religion, and workplace location. This chapter illustrates how Muslim dress strategies indirectly reflect how Western standards of dress, behavior, and self-expression determine qualifications and approachability within workplace structures, marginalizing Muslims and reproducing racial and gender hierarchies.

This chapter explores the interaction between celebrity culture and contemporary masculinities, introducing the public appearances of actors Timothée Chalamet, Paul Mescal, and Barry Keoghan that are under examination in the following chapters. The chapter sets the context of hegemony, heterosexuality, and masculinity, which will be the basis of the examination that is offered in the following chapters of these books where a showcase of their sartorial choices is presented to analyse whether they challenge traditional norms of gender and masculinity. The present chapter begins by setting a theoretical framework that draws on key theorists like Butler, Foucault, and Gramsci, emphasising the role of hegemony in reinforcing heteronormative standards. The analysis then moves to celebrities with attention to how they through their sartorial choices, particularly at high-visibility events like award shows, engage with and potentially subvert expected masculine norms. Despite being heterosexual men conforming to cisheteronormative societal norms in their personal lives, their public fashion choices serve as a form of cultural commentary that challenges rigid boundaries around male attire and behaviours. Furthermore, the chapter reviews relevant literature on the social construction of gender, the concept of hegemonic masculinity, and the performative nature of gender, drawing on established studies to frame the actors’ public presentations within broader societal and cultural dynamics. This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive overview of how gender norms are maintained and challenged within the sphere of celebrity culture.