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Previous theories discuss how corporate managers can stir anti-discrimination laws away from their initial social goal by managerializing the law. Yet, other actors – notably insider activists – can contribute to move corporate regulations beyond merely symbolic compliance. I demonstrate this influence of activists with three cases studies: (1) LGBT activists for same-sex parental leave; (2) disability rights activists for implementing a quota; and (3) Muslim activists to secure accommodations in French workplaces. Through these cases, I show how activists can move corporate laws beyond compliance, pressure firms to go from merely symbolic to substantive compliance, and analyze mechanisms that explain their unequal success. Bringing together insights from the legal endogeneity theory and social movements theory, I analyze these activist legal intermediaries as actors faced with unequal structure of opportunities, and examine what factors hinder or favor an activist-driven legal endogeneity. I demonstrate the impact of more prescriptive regulations, the institutional power of union representatives (and their alignment with activists’ claims), reputational stakes for companies, and the resources of activists themselves (legal expertise, ability to reframe laws, and informal power within their organizations). Last, I show how activists leverage organizational and legal tools (collective agreement, diversity policies) to induce recoupling between formal commitments and informal practices.

The idea of biculturalism or multiculturalism has come into sharper focus due to changing intra-national and international demographic shifts, expanding global economic markets, and persistent ethnic and religious warfare across many continents. These global political, cultural, and economic dynamics have forced us to deal with two intensely reverberating, and conflicting, cultural themes and tradition that threaten to unravel many social and political units deemed heretofore strong and unbreakable. One tradition supports and justifies a monocultural view of the world. This perspective asserts that a nation-state functions best when it is defined and controlled by one dominate cultural framework. The logic and justification for such a view is mirrored in the history and philosophy of societies and nation states which have waged relentless wars of conquest; in such wars, victors have attained and often maintained both political power and cultural hegemony over the defeated. Whether the initial causes of warfare were grounded in disputes over religious differences, land disputes, control of the seas, or overseas colonies, the reality is the victory of one nation or society over another would result in the submergence and subservience of one culture over another, as reflected in the victor's religion, language, political system, etc. The laws and rules of conquest and defeat reverberate throughout human history and whether in Africa, Asia, Europe, or North and South America and are deeply rooted in human, tribal, and clan differences. The various religions have historically justified the conquest by their zealots over non-believers, but it is only in recent history that a new and devastating logic was proffered to justify the domination of one group over another. The combination of European colonialism and imperialism, aided by the scientism of Social Darwinism and the nationalistic ideas of Manifest Destiny gave support to the ideals of White supremacy. Despite subtle political and religious differences between Western nations what they held in common was the belief that they represented the destiny of world civilization, and thus had an obligation to conquer the “uncivilized” world in order to save and perpetuate Western values and ideals. Thus, the growth and evolution of European and American social, political, economic and religious history and thought was not one in which conquering countries and groups sought to “understand” the conquered, nor would it be predicated on any cultural equality, or cultural equivalency between the victors and the vanquished. For example, in the United States the colonial government and the young republic fought Native Americans, the French, Spain (twice), the British (twice), then Mexico, for cultural, political, economic, and social hegemony over what is currently the landmass of the United States.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the challenges the author had encountered and the counter-strategies she had adopted to overcome them while conducting ethnography for the first time during her doctoral research. In this paper, the author hopes to provide guidance for future researchers by discussing the role she played in her research, the experiences she gained as a result of it, the difficulties she faced and the strategies she employed to overcome these difficulties.

Following the social constructionist perspective, this paper analyses the experience that the author had gained during her field study. As a novice researcher, the author entered the field to study the relationship between caste and occupational mobility. The caste that she had selected was the Kansari caste to which the author belongs. Therefore, her position as a researcher while conducting ethnography became a crucial part of the methodological challenges the author faced. While insider ethnography has its advantages and disadvantages, this paper does not discuss these aspects of the methodology. Instead, it discusses how, as a novice researcher, the author had to negotiate her position as an insider and outsider.

While analysing her experience as a novice researcher, the author found that her journey of conducting insider ethnography was of rediscovering herself as a Kansari as well as a researcher. Through this research, the author found that as an insider ethnographer, certain strategies had to be adopted in the field by the researcher to be objective and unbiased throughout the research process. For example, whenever the author conducted an interview, she tried to try to say less, listen more and be as objective as possible, without allowing her preconceptions to influence the information she gathered from the field.

This is an original paper based on the primary data collected by the author.

Incivility constitutes an increasing trend in different workplaces across the world. However, incivility has largely been overlooked in public organizational settings and mainly in the field of secondary education. The purpose of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the effects of supervisor incivility (SI) on psychological safety and work engagement of teachers of secondary schools, through the schools' level of perceived insider status (PIS).

Data were collected through an online questionnaire that was based on previously validated scales. The final sample included 396 educators who taught different subjects in a Greek region.

Results revealed a negative correlation between head teacher incivility and teacher attitudes (psychological safety/work engagement) through the mediating role of PIS. However, a direct link between SI and psychological safety was also discovered.

The contribution of the study is in exploring one part of the dark side of leadership behavior, e.g. SI, at school and leadership behavior's effects on teacher attitudes, which remain largely unexplored due to teacher embarrassment or fear in acknowledging supervisor misbehavior. Further, the study does not only examine direct, but also indirect effects of incivility. Finally, the current study is the first study to investigate the phenomenon of SI in the Greek context, therefore, extending the geographical and cultural data base concerning incivility.

Throughout the history of commerce, individuals have searched for informational advantages that will lead to their enrichment. In a time of global capital markets, 24 hours a day trading opportunities, and a professional services corps of market experts, informational advantages are pursued by virtually every market participant. This paper examines one of the most vilified informational advantages in modern capital markets: insider trading. In the USA during the 1980s, insider trading scandals occupied the front pages of not only the trade papers, but also quotidian tabloids. Assailed for its unfairness and characterised by some as thievery, insider trading incidents increased calls for stricter regulation of the marketplace and its participants. In the aftermath of the spectacular insider trading litigation in the USA in the late 1980s, many foreign states began to re‐evaluate the effectiveness of their own regulatory structures. In large part, this reassessment was not the produce of domestic demand, but constituted a response to American agitation for increased regulation of insider trading.

Ethnographers and other qualitative social scientists have long reflected on the ways researcher identity – who we are – shapes how we see and understand what and whom we encounter in our research, and how research participants see and understand us. In “Insider–outsider–inbetweener? Researcher positioning, participative methods, and cross-cultural educational research,” Milligan (2016) takes up questions regarding researcher positionality in qualitative research in the field of comparative and international education. In particular, Milligan argues for the use of participative techniques to gain insider perspectives and to lessen unequal power relations between researcher and the researched in cross-cultural research. In this chapter, we will engage Milligan’s discussion of participative research by analyzing the similarities and differences in studying participants with relative social privilege versus studying those from marginalized communities. Specifically, we will reflect on two ethnographic studies that explored the global educational aspirations of middle and upper middle-class Asian students. Furthermore, we attempt to complicate the discussion of “cross-cultural” research by arguing that in the neoliberal global context, researchers and the researched may move back and forth across national and cultural boundaries. The chapter concludes by raising questions regarding the unique challenges of conducting cross-cultural studies that flow across national boundaries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relatively hidden phenomenon of researchers who not only study dirty work but who also occupy the position of dirty workers. Drawing on the sociological debate on insider-outsider categories in research, this paper describes how these types of “dirty work/er researchers” understand and negotiate their occupational subjectivity and the methodological and epistemological resources they bring to their research practice.

Two biographical narratives from different types of “dirty work/er researchers” are analysed using a feminist epistemology of corporeality, social difference and power.

Ambivalence is an underlying dynamic of the narratives which indicate that the stigma attached to certain types of dirty work histories act to both facilitate and constrain research practice. Ambivalence disrupts strict binary categories often relied on in research such as insiders and outsiders, empowered and powerless and researcher and Other.

The experiences of “dirty work/er researchers” indicate a need to reconsider ethical, methodological, epistemological issues within social research.

Participatory research frameworks such as peer research should pay closer attention to issues of professional status, power and risk. Further research is required on what happens after peer researchers leave the field.

This paper contributes to the knowledge of the relatively hidden world of the “dirty work/er researcher”, their occupational experiences and the methodological and epistemological resources they bring to their job.

The purpose of this paper is to problematise the idea of “at-home ethnography” and to expand knowledge about insider/outsider distinctions by using insights from institutional ethnography (IE). It also examines the strengths and challenges of “returning” researchers recognising their unique position in overcoming these binaries.

IE is the method the researcher used to explore community-based water management in rural Chile. The researcher is interested in learning from rural drinking water organisations to understand the way in which their knowledge is organised. The data presented derived from field notes of participant observation and the researcher’s diary.

The notion of “at-home ethnography” fell short when reflecting on the researcher’s positions and experiences in the field. This is especially true when researchers return to their countries to carry out fieldwork. The negotiation of boundaries, codes and feelings requires the researcher to appreciate the complex relationships surrounding ethnographic work, in order to explore how community-based water management is done in the local setting, without forgetting where the setting is embedded.

Unique insights are offered into the advantages and tensions of conducting fieldwork “at home” when the researcher has lived “abroad” for an extended time. A critique and contribution to “at-home ethnography” is offered from an IE perspective.

Despite the crucial role of gaining access for successful research in social and management studies, very little has been written on issues and challenges associated with gaining access particularly in an undeveloped research context such as Ghana. The purpose of this paper is to share the experience with other researchers and practitioners for them to recognise the common challenges associated with gaining access to research sites and the significance of critical reflection and reflexivity on how a researcher’s positionality affects knowledge production. The paper emphasises the need for researchers to appreciate the taken-for-granted interactions that can contribute to critical thinking about identities and reflexivity in research. The paper adds to the paucity of voices particularly overseas students and researchers returning home (to country of origin) from Euro-American institutions to carry out field research.

The paper draws on the field notes relating to the PhD fieldwork experiences in accessing subsidiaries of western multinational enterprises in Ghana. The author discussed how gatekeepers hindered access to key organisational members and the need to identify helpful networks through snowballing in order to access organisations and participants.

Considerable challenges such as denial of access, physical and psychological distress were encountered in the process of accessing organisations which often led to abandoning certain sites for others, even though those originally chosen were potentially rich sources of information. Also, positionality and the manner in which a researcher is perceived by participants certainly influence the knowledge one produces. Sufficient time is needed to negotiate and build relationships of trust with gatekeepers, which often resulted in delays in data collection. In this present study, gatekeepers often denied, limited or delayed access to potential participants and sites despite institutional ethical approval.

The experiences highlighted in this paper can serve as a toolkit for qualitative researchers interested in conducting research in Ghana with regard to what to expect and how to manoeuvre through in the field.

The paper contributes to the dearth of the methodology literature on issues relating to challenges to access, positionality, insider/outsider status of the researcher and their influences on knowledge production in an under-researched context, Ghana.