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Article
Publication date: 5 November 2020

Saiful Alam, Seuwandhi B. Ranasinghe and Danture Wickramasinghe

The purpose of this paper is to reflectively narrate the methodological journey of the authors in penetrating the positivitic hegemony of accounting and management control…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to reflectively narrate the methodological journey of the authors in penetrating the positivitic hegemony of accounting and management control research in their native countries, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper offers an auto-ethnography to demonstrate the lack of diversity in accounting, accountability and management control research.

Findings

Global developments in accounting and accountability reforms entail not only about how developing countries being governed through these reforms but also about how accounting research itself can be pursued alternatively. In the past several decades, a camp of British accounting researchers initiated a programme of research in this direction. Inspired by post-positivistic traditions, they aimed to explore how these reforms are predicated upon cultural-political milieus in developing countries. However, the academia in most accounting and management researchers from local universities in these countries are blindly bombarded with positivistic traditions.

Originality/value

The authors unpack how this hegemony formed and how attempts were made towards some emancipatory potentials.

Details

Journal of Accounting in Emerging Economies, vol. 11 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2042-1168

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 March 2006

Lauren Langman

To pay tribute to Felix Geyer's contributions to the activities of Research Committee (RC) 36, alienation research and theory, of the International Sociological Association.

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Abstract

Purpose

To pay tribute to Felix Geyer's contributions to the activities of Research Committee (RC) 36, alienation research and theory, of the International Sociological Association.

Design/methodology/approach

The author recollects his involvement with RC36 and his longstanding relationship with Felix Geyer.

Findings

The establishment of RC36 and its current viability stand as testimony to the effort of Felix Geyer.

Originality/value

Alienation, one of the oldest concepts in social analysis and critique, remains a lively and exciting topic for theory and research, thanks not least to Felix Geyer. It is right that he should receive recognition for his hard work and achievements.

Details

Kybernetes, vol. 35 no. 3/4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0368-492X

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 26 August 2019

Jorge M. Gorostiaga and Óscar Espinoza

In this chapter, the authors analyze the academic field of comparative education in Spanish speaking Latin America as a contested construction both in epistemological and…

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors analyze the academic field of comparative education in Spanish speaking Latin America as a contested construction both in epistemological and political dimensions. First, the authors provide a brief historical account of the origin and development of comparative education in the region since the nineteenth century. Next, they focus on the current state of the field by addressing three aspects: (1) the institutional basis, specially the development of comparative education societies; (2) an account of the contributions of international organizations, both in terms of studies that have been recently conducted and of the development of data bases; and (3) an analysis of prevailing topics as well as theoretical and methodological approaches in a sample of articles published during the 2010-2017 period. The authors conclude by summarizing the main aspects of the current situation, and pointing to future epistemological and political challenges for the field in the region.

Details

Comparative and International Education: Survey of an Infinite Field
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78743-392-2

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 4 December 2009

George Steinmetz

Anthropologists have long discussed the ways in which their discipline has been entangled, consciously and unconsciously, with the colonized populations they study. A foundational…

Abstract

Anthropologists have long discussed the ways in which their discipline has been entangled, consciously and unconsciously, with the colonized populations they study. A foundational text in this regard was Michel Leiris' Phantom Africa (L'Afrique fantôme; Leiris, 1934), which described an African ethnographic expedition led by Marcel Griaule as a form of colonial plunder. Leiris criticized anthropologists' focus on the most isolated, rural, and traditional cultures, which could more easily be described as untouched by European influences, and he saw this as a way of disavowing the very existence of colonialism. In 1950, Leiris challenged Europeans' ability even to understand the colonized, writing that “ethnography is closely linked to the colonial fact, whether ethnographers like it or not. In general they work in the colonial or semi-colonial territories dependent on their country of origin, and even if they receive no direct support from the local representatives of their government, they are tolerated by them and more or less identified, by the people they study, as agents of the administration” (Leiris, 1950, p. 358). Similar ideas were discussed by French social scientists throughout the 1950s. Maxime Rodinson argued in the Année sociologique that “colonial conditions make even the most technically sophisticated sociological research singularly unsatisfying, from the standpoint of the desiderata of a scientific sociology” (Rodinson, 1955, p. 373). In a rejoinder to Leiris, Pierre Bourdieu acknowledged in Work and Workers in Algeria (Travail et travailleurs en Algérie) that “no behavior, attitude or ideology can be explained objectively without reference to the existential situation of the colonized as it is determined by the action of economic and social forces characteristic of the colonial system,” but he insisted that the “problems of science” needed to be separated from “the anxieties of conscience” (2003, pp. 13–14). Since Bourdieu had been involved in a study of an incredibly violent redistribution of Algerians by the French colonial army at the height of the anticolonial revolutionary war, he had good reason to be sensitive to Leiris' criticisms (Bourdieu & Sayad, 1964). Rodinson called Bourdieu's critique of Leiris' thesis “excellent’ (1965, p. 360), but Bourdieu later revised his views, noting that the works that had been available to him at the time of his research in Algeria tended “to justify the colonial order” (1990, p. 3). At the 1974 colloquium that gave rise to a book on the connections between anthropology and colonialism, Le mal de voir, Bourdieu called for an analysis of the relatively autonomous field of colonial science (1993a, p. 51). A parallel discussion took place in American anthropology somewhat later, during the 1960s. At the 1965 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Marshall Sahlins criticized the “enlistment of scholars” in “cold war projects such as Camelot” as “servants of power in a gendarmerie relationship to the Third World.” This constituted a “sycophantic relation to the state unbefitting science or citizenship” (Sahlins, 1967, pp. 72, 76). Sahlins underscored the connections between “scientific functionalism and the natural interest of a leading world power in the status quo” and called attention to the language of contagion and disease in the documents of “Project Camelot,” adding that “waiting on call is the doctor, the US Army, fully prepared for its self-appointed ‘important mission in the positive and constructive aspects of nation-building’” a mission accompanied by “insurgency prophylaxis” (1967, pp. 77–78). At the end of the decade, Current Anthropology published a series of articles on anthropologists’ “social responsibilities,” and Human Organization published a symposium entitled “Decolonizing Applied Social Sciences.” British anthropologists followed suit, as evidenced by Talal Asad's 1973 collection Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. During the 1980s, authors such as Gothsch (1983) began to address the question of German anthropology's involvement in colonialism. The most recent revival of this discussion was in response to the Pentagon's deployment of “embedded anthropologists” in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East. The “Network of Concerned Anthropologists” in the AAA asked “researchers to sign an online pledge not to work with the military,” arguing that they “are not all necessarily opposed to other forms of anthropological consulting for the state, or for the military, especially when such cooperation contributes to generally accepted humanitarian objectives … However, work that is covert, work that breaches relations of openness and trust with studied populations, and work that enables the occupation of one country by another violates professional standards” (“Embedded Anthropologists” 2007).3 Other disciplines, notably geography, economics, area studies, and political science, have also started to examine the involvement of their fields with empire.4

Details

Political Power and Social Theory
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84950-667-0

Article
Publication date: 2 April 2019

Raghunandan Reddy, Arun Kumar Sharma and Munmun Jha

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Bourdieu’s concept of masculine domination offers a comprehensive social theory of gender as compared to Connell’s concept of

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Bourdieu’s concept of masculine domination offers a comprehensive social theory of gender as compared to Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity through examining the proposition of positive hegemonic masculinity.

Design/methodology/approach

This is a conceptual paper that argues that Bourdieu’s concept of masculine domination offers a comprehensive social theory of gender as compared to Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity.

Findings

The findings demonstrate that Bourdieu’s concept of masculine domination incorporates both discursive and material structures of the gender system that privileges men/masculine over women/feminine, making it a comprehensive social theory of gender.

Research limitations/implications

The concepts of hegemonic masculinity and masculine domination have not been reviewed in the light of emerging perspectives on hegemony, power and domination. The future research could focus on a review of research methods such as institutional ethnography, in examining masculine domination.

Practical implications

Using masculine domination perspective, organizations could identify specific managerial discourses, aspects of work organization and practices in order to eliminate gender-based discrimination, harassment and unequal access to resources.

Social implications

Public policy interventions aimed at inclusive development could examine women’s condition of continued disadvantageousness, through masculine domination perspective.

Originality/value

The authors seek to provide a comparative view of the concepts of hegemonic masculinity and masculine domination, using the categories of comparison that was not attempted earlier.

Details

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 39 no. 3/4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-333X

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 5 July 2005

Martijn Konings

Over the last decades, the social sciences have become increasingly concerned with the role of the state and the politics of institutional restructuring. Within mainstream…

Abstract

Over the last decades, the social sciences have become increasingly concerned with the role of the state and the politics of institutional restructuring. Within mainstream political science this has led to the development of a “state-centered” research program that emphasizes the autonomy of institutions. Marxist theory, however, has continued to adhere to a “society-centered” perspective, seeking to combine an ability to account for institutional change with the analysis of more structural social and economic forces. After some introductory comments that frame the problematic within which the paper is situated (Section 1), I discuss in Section 2 three of the most important recent Marxist attempts to construe the relation between socio-economic imperatives and political institutions. My argument is that Marxists’ attempts to relativize the autonomy of state institutions are too often still based on the postulation of an unexplained structural moment. This leaves them vulnerable to institutionalist claims concerning the autonomous nature of institutions. Section 3 proposes a different way of thinking the role of institutions in capitalist society. This approach breaks with a causalist, structuralist mode of explanation and relies on a more hermeneutic understanding of the role of institutions. I will shift the problematic to the relation between institutions and agency, arguing for a more pragmatist understanding of the role of institutions and an agency-based understanding of the formation of socio-economic imperatives. Section 4 concludes with some thoughts on the prospects held out, as well as the challenges faced, by the approach proposed in this paper.

Details

The Capitalist State and Its Economy: Democracy in Socialism
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-176-7

Article
Publication date: 1 April 1999

Margaret H. Vickers

Information technology (IT) development methodologies may be described as another bastion of rationalist, positivist, functionalist hegemony. The paper historically reviews IT…

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Abstract

Information technology (IT) development methodologies may be described as another bastion of rationalist, positivist, functionalist hegemony. The paper historically reviews IT development methodologies of the past 30 years. The major methodologies of the Classical Systems Life Cycle, Structures Systems Development, Data Modeling and Object Oriented Analysis are briefly reviewed in terms of their ubiquitously quoted evolution and maturation and the benefits they purport to offer IT specialists and managers, general management and user groups. This paper argues that, while it has traditionally been the case that such methodologies be compared on a case‐by‐case basis, it is time to step back from the traditionally reductionist, positivist approaches of IT. IT methodological development is considered here from a critical, anti‐positivist perspective. It is suggested that qualitiative research methodologies be employed to assist in creating a new IT development epistemology to spare us from further IT implementation disasters.

Details

Journal of Management Development, vol. 18 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0262-1711

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 7 August 2007

R.I. Westwood and Gavin Jack

Submitted in the form of a manifesto, this article seeks to make a call to scholars in international management and business studies to embrace post‐colonial theory and to allow…

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Abstract

Purpose

Submitted in the form of a manifesto, this article seeks to make a call to scholars in international management and business studies to embrace post‐colonial theory and to allow it to provide an interrogation of the ontological, epistemological, methodological and institutional resources currently dominating the field.

Design/methodology/approach

A manifesto approach is adopted in providing a series of deliberately provocative principles which it seeks to have the field adopt.

Findings

The paper finds the field to be currently imprisoned within a limited and limiting paradigmatic and institutional location and offers the resources of post‐colonial theory as a way to interrogate and reconfigure it.

Research limitations/implications

The paper points to the limitations of the field and provides the grounds for a radical reconfiguration across all aspects of its knowledge production, dissemination and research practice.

Practical implications

The paper offers practical steps which the field can take to reconfigure itself more appropriately in terms of its various research commitments and its institutional frame.

Originality/value

This article offers an original assessment of the orthodoxy currently controlling and disciplining the field, presented in the relatively novel and challenging form of a manifesto.

Details

Critical perspectives on international business, vol. 3 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1742-2043

Keywords

Abstract

Details

Organization Theory
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78560-946-6

Article
Publication date: 27 May 2014

Barbara Marie L’Huillier

– This paper aims to develop a framework of connotative meanings afforded to the term “corporate governance”.

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Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to develop a framework of connotative meanings afforded to the term “corporate governance”.

Design/methodology/approach

An examination of academic publications from 1985-2012 containing the term “corporate governance” was conducted. The articles are sorted into the theoretical constructs that influence the contemporary connotative meaning of corporate governance.

Findings

That a combination of a weak definitional base coupled with strong motivational forces have aided the development of competing theoretical perspectives of the meaning of corporate governance. The dominant meaning is written from an agency theory perspective.

Research limitations/implications

Theoretical analysis was restricted to articles found in academic journals published since 1985.

Practical implications

This study provides a very useful analysis into the connotative meanings and theoretical bases used by academic writers in the study of corporate governance.

Originality/value

This paper provides an updated and developed analysis to the theoretical dimensions that underpin the contemporary use of the term “corporate governance”.

Details

Corporate Governance, vol. 14 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1472-0701

Keywords

1 – 10 of 124