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This research interrogates how the construction of narratives and accounting forecasts contributes to managing the emotional state of actors involved in reporting meetings by promoting discourses of hope in their organization's future, mitigating their anxiety. This study shows how narratives are built from multiple antenarratives and accounting forecasts, which restore and strengthen organizational actors' commitment to their organizations. This study contributes to a better understanding of the role played by narratives and accounting documents in mitigating organizational members' anxiety.

Over eight months, an interventionist research design method gave one of the authors the opportunity to record discussions held during reporting meetings in a business incubator. These recordings captured the production of narratives and forecasts in these meetings.

This study shows how the production of multiple antenarratives and accounting forecasts helps organizational actors who attend reporting meetings mitigate the anxiety triggered by disappointing performance figures and restore collective discourses full of hope for the organization's future. This case highlights how personal antenarratives and successive versions of accounting forecasts contribute to restoring a collective commitment to a failing organization.

This study refines current understanding of the under-explored links between accounting forecasts, narratives and anxiety management. The study provides insight into how accounting practices contribute to the production of narratives that successfully restore organizational members' commitment to working for a failing organization. The study also exemplifies the original insights gained from interventionist research protocols.

In the extant literature, the concepts of charity and philanthropy have been differentiated based on the belief that charity stems from religious motivations and philanthropy is often secular in origin. Accordingly, this paper aims to investigate whether there is a distinction between managerial practices regarding the given concepts as emphasized in the conceptual discussions.

To see the managerial practices, the authors determined bazaars, community fundraising events organized by nonprofit organizations (NPOs), as the research field. Then, this study followed the general systematic of qualitative research. Accordingly, the authors conducted 44 interviews with experienced bazaar organizers from 10 NPOs in total. Furthermore, four days of participant observation with field notes were made in each bazaar, which lasted from 7 to 10 days. This study also used archival data as a secondary data source and then analyzed all data with a content analysis technique.

This study found that the field practices mainly do not support the distinction drawn over the conceptual discussions. Both concepts are nouns describing the act of giving and helping the needy. They are actively performed based on different motives (religion-based and secular).

The relevant distinction is limited to the conceptual discussions and has not been supported by the findings obtained from the field. Also, most of the studies on helping were carried out in the Western context. Studies conducted outside these cultures are quite limited. The value of the current study lies in the fact that it was conducted in a cultural context different from the Western cultures and paves the pathway for future research.

This paper explores the challenging nexus of police custody, risk and intra-organisational boundaries in the context of a recently reformed national police service. Police custody is an often-hidden aspect of policing, away from the public gaze and scrutiny. Although there is increasing recognition of the importance of rural policing (e.g. Harkness (2020); Mawby and Yarwood (2011); Ruddell and Jones (2020); Yarwood and Wooff (2016)), there has been little or no focus on rural police custody. This paper seeks to begin to redress this by focussing on the challenges faced by rural police custody in the context of large-scale organisational change.

This paper draws on data from a study funded by the Scottish Institute for Policing Research (2016–2018), entitled “Measuring Risk and Efficiency in Police Custody in Scotland”. The paper adopts a qualitative methodology to develop an understanding of the varying nature of police custody across Scotland. Two contrasting case study locations were selected, one urban and one rural. 12 semi-structured interviews and 15 hours of observation were carried out. Data was transcribed, coded and analysed and thematic analysis enabled themes to be developed. This paper draws on the data from the rural custody suite.

Drawing on the theoretical framework of Giacomantonio (2014) and more recent considerations of abstract policing Terpstra et al. (2019), this paper offers insights into the ways that police custody in rural Scotland has been organised, against the backdrop of challenging organisational change. I argue that as policing services in Scotland have become increasingly “abstract” from communities, police custody as a national division has witnessed the impact of this more greatly than other parts of local policing. Intra-organisational management around staffing has led to complex management of risk, illustrating some of the challenges of national organisational change on police custody.

This paper focuses on the impact of large scale organisational change on rural police custody and intra-organisational relationships and dynamics. Rural policing is still a largely neglected area of study and rural police custody is even less understood. This paper therefore provides an original contribution by focusing on this under-researched area of policing. It also illustrates complexity around risk, staffing and management of people being held in rural police custody suites. It is therefore of value to policing scholars in other contexts, as well as rural criminology more generally. It has applicability to international contexts where macro level policing reform is occurring.

This brief history of the International Study Association on Teachers and Teaching (ISATT) documents developments and trends during the decade 2013–2023. To situate recent ISATT history, we begin with an overview of the association's first 30 years (1983–2012). The dominant theme of those early years was developing ISATT as a recognized and influential professional organization connecting researchers on teaching and teacher education from a growing list of nations and regions of the world. During the most recent decade, there has been a concerted effort toward broad internationalization through biennial conferences and regional meetings, and a growing network of national representatives from across the world. Also, the ISATT journal, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, the journal, which began in 1995, has published hundreds of peer-reviewed articles written by more than 1000 authors and coauthors, contributing to a growing body of knowledge about teaching and teacher education in many cultures. In the last 20 years and especially in the past 10, the locations of ISATT meetings have become significantly more diverse, following a trend of greater internationalization compared with ISATT's European and North American beginnings. At the same time, the number of ISATT members remains stable and small thereby preserving a collegial and collaborative tone in our exchanges. In sum, ISATT's recent decade finds the association intellectually healthy, successful in managing the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, and enriched by the proliferation of multinational points of view and styles of research.

The formation of alliances between organisations is increasingly common, allowing firms to discover and ensure competitive advantages. This research paper aims to make a critical analysis of studies to understand the role of communication between partners in the process of strategic alliances.

A systematic literature review was carried out, using the Web of Science database to obtain data, associating the terms “communication” and “strategic alliances”, which resulted in 240 scientific articles (published between 1993 and March 2021). After data treatment using VOSviewer software and reading of the contents, the final sample consisted of 179 articles on the subject in question.

The conceptual limits, exploratory descriptive analysis of the data and content analysis of research methods are presented, with five clusters being identified. The results show growing academic interest in studying communication associated with strategic alliances, and authors’ main interest lies in understanding the critical success factors and the relation between communication and knowledge.

This study corroborates understanding of the future of alliances, assuming that learning is the main objective; trust is the factor determining success or failure; technology is the aggregating tool; culture affects the relation; and communication is not an end but a means to construct consolidated, long-lasting and high-performing strategic alliances.

This study is innovative in strategic alliances area. The research confirms that the main factor in forming alliances, in both emerging and international markets, is the learning intention. This fact reinforces the relevance of the learning made possible by this transfer of know-how through communication. In addition, this study gives critical understanding of how the process of communication between partners in an alliance must be distinct; i.e. it must be flexible enough to adjust to the stage in the alliance’s life cycle.

This case study presents a critical analysis of why and how corporate managers in China are reluctant to adopt sustainability reporting assurance (SRA) provided by externally independent third-party assurers, despite the fact that it is acknowledged as a value-adding activity globally.

A longitudinal fieldwork case study was conducted from 2014 to 2019 in a Chinese central state-owned enterprise (CSOE), a pioneer in sustainability reporting practice since the mid-2000s, to collect first-hand empirical data on managerial perceptions of the adoption of external SRA. Semi-structured interviews with 25 managers involved in sustainability (reporting) practice were conducted. The interview data were triangulated with an analysis of archival documents and board meeting minutes pertaining to the undertakings of sustainability practices in the case study organization.

Our empirical analysis suggests that while managers recognize the benefits of adopting external SRA in enhancing the legitimacy of sustainability accountability, they oppose SRA because of their deep-rooted allegiance to the dominant logic of sociopolitical stability in China. SRA is envisaged to risk the stability of the socialist ideology with which CSOEs are imbued. Therefore, any transformational approach to accepting a novel (foreign) practice must be molded to gain control and autonomy, thereby maintain the hegemony of stability logic. Instead of disregarding external verification, managers of our case SOE appear to harness sustainability reporting as a navigational space to engage in internally crafted alternative manners in order to resist the rationality of SRA.

The empirical analysis presents a nuanced explanation as to why internal managers have hitherto been reluctant to embrace the embedding of independent assurance into the sustainability reporting process. Our prolonged fieldwork provides ample context-specific, intra-organizational evidence regarding the absence of SRA in Chinese CSOEs, which warrants more attention given their considerable presence in the global economy. In addition, the empirical analysis contributes to our understanding of the managerial capture of sustainability issues in a specific context of state capitalism and how organizations and individuals in an authoritarian regime interpret and respond to novel discourses derived from distinct institutional settings.

Reality breakdowns generate reflexivity and awareness of the constructed nature of social reality. These pivotal moments can motivate institutional inhabitants to either modify their social worlds or reaffirm the status quo. Thus, reality breakdowns are the initial points at which actors can conceive of new possibilities for institutional arrangements and initiate change processes to realize them. Studying reality breakdowns enables scholars to understand not just how institutional change occurs, but also why it does or does not do so. In this paper, we investigate how institutional inhabitants responded to a reality breakdown that occurred during our ethnography of collegial governance in a large North American university that was undergoing a strategic change initiative. Our findings suggest that there is a consequential process following reality breakdowns whereby institutional inhabitants construct the severity of these events. In our context, institutional inhabitants first attempted to restore order to their social world by reaffirming the status quo; when their efforts failed, they began to formulate alternative possibilities. Simultaneously, they engaged in a distributed sensemaking process whereby they diminished and reoriented necessary changes, ultimately inhibiting the formulation of these new possibilities. Our findings confirm reality breakdowns and institutional awareness as potential drivers of institutional change and complicate our understanding of antecedent microprocesses that may forestall the initiation of change efforts.