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This chapter explains the research design. An interpretive methodology was considered most suitable for the study. Informed by an institutional framework, the interpretive methodology was selected for this monograph for its strengths of focusing on the research context, interactive processes, and meanings that are not measurable by quantitative approach. The interpretive methodology is also consistent with the ontological and epistemological positions of the researchers. Data were collected from interviewing four groups of key persons and a document survey. The data triangulation and multiple perspectives helped increase the reliability and validity of the study. Also, conducting data collection in a natural setting produced a rich data source. This enabled the provision of an enhanced understanding of the operation and effectiveness of corporate governance and financial reporting practice in a real setting. In addition, the systematic set of data analysis procedures helped improve research rigor and develop conceptual and theoretical understanding of issues of interest.

The author argues that the familiar distinction between interpretive and non-interpretive theories of constitutional interpretation obscures another important distinction: that between hermeneutically open and hermeneutically closed theories. Closed theories seek resolution to constitutional conflict by employing methods of interpretation that are intuitively persuasive. Open theories deny that such methods are always available, and seek resolution of conflict through a combination of legal, political, and social means. The author argues that closed theories have failed to live up to their implicit promise of self-justification, and examines the practice of constitutional interpretation in Canada and Australia to support this view.

The paper reviews some basic themes in postmodernism and argues for a moderate incorporation of these themes in organization studies and methodology. This approach, named interpretive unpacking, takes issues of multiple and fluid meanings, ambiguities and fragmentation seriously without the a priori privileging of these qualities over assumptions of stable meanings and coherence in social phenomena. The suggested position is illustrated in the fields of identity and image in organization studies through a critical reading of a key text. Assumptions around identities, identification, beliefs, perceptions and images are here problematized and seen as themes for critical exploration and careful interpretive inquiry rather than as robust starting points for the formulation of hypothesis for testing.

S.I. Hayakawa said, “The map is not the territory.” Taking this as my theme, I explore the idea of economics as a cultural-interpretive map that can be usefully employed to navigate the legal landscape. As a map, economics facilitates our understanding of law in a market context. At the same time, the map is not the metaphorical territory that it represents, just as economics is not the market exchange process to which it refers. Therefore, we must be careful not to conflate our conception of the economic map with our understanding of the legal territory.

This chapter examines organisational change processes that occur when accountability demands from powerful external stakeholders change. It investigates, firstly, whether these external accountability demands impact on the performance management systems of two different types of organisations. Secondly, it considers whether the goals for improved performance contained within the external accountability demands are realised. The chapter derives its primary insights from analysing in-depth interviews with managers working in a private sector company and in public sector organisations. The analyses reveal complex organisational responses. In the public sector case study, the organisations tended to reorient their performance management systems towards the external accountability demands; whilst in the private sector organisation, pressures from falling share prices forced managers to focus their decision making on the preferred performance measures contained in shareholders’ accountability demands. However, whilst there is some evidence of performance management system changes, the desires for improved performance subsumed by the external accountability demands are not necessarily realised through the performance management system changes.

The purpose of this conceptual study is to explain the way in which employees influence social innovation in the employee–organization relationship, such as job crafting, i-deals, New World of Work, talent management, or high performance work practices.

This study applies a practice perspective in order to explain how employees affect their employee–organization relationship and thus influence the outcomes of social innovation.

The theoretical exploration suggest that employees can engage in the enactment of the employee–organization relationship in three ways: enacting employment relationships, enacting employment practices, and enacting employment practices’ outcomes. In doing so, they can draw on interpretive schemes, resources, and norms for realizing the benefits of social innovation for themselves and/or their employer.

Although organizations have started social innovation initiatives that allow employees to actively shape the employee–organization relationship, existing studies still treat employees as inactive recipients in the relationship with their employer. As a result, it remains unclear how social innovation in employee–organization relationships is implemented in practice and thus, how social innovation provides benefits to the employee and the organization. The originality of this study is its focus on how employees, as (pro-)active constituents, shape the employee–organization relationship, for finding better explanations of the outcomes of social innovation initiatives.

This paper has two purposes. First, I offer a reading of interpretive biography (Denzin, 1989a) as an alternative method for understanding how individual lives are rendered meaningful in postmodern communication processes. Second, given the importance of many rock performers as cultural heroes, I present an interpretive biography of Pete Townshend, chief songwriter and most visible member of the classic rock band the Who. This method of inquiry is grounded in the more general tradition of interpretive interactionism (Denzin, 1989b, 1990a) and has its roots in C. Wright Mills's (1959) concept of the sociological imagination. Its guiding question is this: How is the postmodern self (or stated more accurately, selves) created within and sustained by the mass media? I argue that as postmodern cultural symbols, Townshend and the band (however ambiguously) mirror a collective search for identity on the part of audiences and society-at-large.

For professional service firms (PSFs) the partnership form of governance is the most effective means of reconciling the potentially competing claims of three sets of stakeholders: shareholders, professionals, and clients. Increasingly, PSFs are abandoning this traditional form of governance in favour of incorporation and flotation. Very little is known about the implications of this trend. We examine an alliance between a partnership and a corporation and analyse the systems and structures that professionals in both firms deploy in their efforts to preserve and sustain the interpretive scheme of professionalism and partnership. We emphasise the need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between governance as a legal form and governance as an interpretive scheme.

This chapter describes how women who work as pleaders in the Israeli rabbinic courts try to decipher the dissonance between their canonical texts and their modern sensibilities, dividing the interpretive strategies that the pleaders employ to that end into three different categories. The chapter then explores the implications of these findings with respect to theories of agency, feminist consciousness, how law is read, and identity politics (multiculturalism), as well as with respect to issues of value, power, and divorce reform.

This chapter explores the idea of paradigm shifts and the changes that have taken place in the field of teaching and teacher education over the past four decades. The work unpacks how teachers, their practices, their professional development, and their education are conceived in the positivist and interpretive paradigms. The study of teaching and teacher education is likewise shaped by the ontological and epistemological underpinnings associated with different research methods and the paradigms with which they are associated. To demonstrate the influence of paradigms, this chapter concludes with a rich example of how the interpretive tradition has shaped a teacher education program in northern Finland.