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The purpose of this paper is to argue that intersubjective experiences, governed by various dimensions of space, and induced actions are invaluable to invisible public administrators. Knowledge of these experiences holds the keys to good public administration practice and theory building.

This paper seeks to establish various dimensions for cultivating space in public organizations. These dimensions are related to intersubjective experiences.

The development and refining of methods, including reflection, reflexivity, hermeneutics, and dialectics, to enrich intersubjective experiences, is found to be essential.

As organizational realities change, the administrative understandings of intersubjective experiences will have to evolve.

Knowledge of the invisible administrator and intersubjective experiences has not been accorded enough research importance.

I provide an exploration and critique of reflexive research practice, which explores the nature of reflexivity, its relevance to and influence on accounting academic identity formation.

The paper gives detailed explanations of three different approaches to reflexivity dependent on perspectives on reality and exemplifies the chosen approach – intersubjective reflexivity. It draws from three personal experiences to illustrate intersubjective reflexive practice in action and its impact on academic identity, including my own identity as a feminist accounting academic. The examples involve the process of reflexively “being struck” regarding voice and representation; addressing power, privilege and decolonisation in knowledge production; and negotiating insider/outsider academic identities.

I reconceptualise and illustrate reflexivity as academic identity formation that enables transformative experience and more reflexive academic praxis within a turbulent academic context. Reflexive academic identity formation will resonate with accounting academics who are reflecting on the role and purpose of the accounting academy and their identity within it.

The paper provides a significant contribution into understanding intersubjective reflexivity, by reconceptualising intersubjective reflexivity beyond research and applying it to the identity formation of accounting academics. I identify the process of reflexive identity transformation through active engagement in identity work and emotion work, which transforms academic praxis. I argue for a broader more nuanced and power-laden perspective on reflexivity and academic praxis, which moves us to consider the responsibility of our academic identity and actions as accounting academics.

This essay represents a dialogue between the two co‐authors about the role of intersubjectivity in their respective fields of research‐intergroup dialogue and communication at the end of life. Using dialogue and intersubjectivity as both the topic and the method of their inquiry, the authors work together to articulate the nature of intersubjective moments in interview research, the relationship between dialogue and intersubjectivity, the conditions under which they experienced it, and what such moments bring to the process and products of research grounded in participation. Engaging the concept of dialogue as praxis, the essay attempts to capture and illustrate dialogic engagement.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between Husserl’s phenomenology and soft systems. An important idea arising from the action research programme at the University of Lancaster is the notion of soft systems. The concept of soft systems, that distinguished it from other systems (holistic) thinking of the time, was the conscious link between soft systems thinking and phenomenology. Phenomenology is that the realm of intentional consciousness that enables the phenomenologist to develop a radically unprejudiced justification of his (or her) basic views of the world and of himself and explore their rational interconnections. Similarly, in soft systems, it is acknowledged that reality is formed by sensation and fashioned by experience. It is not exclusively a process of thought (although this may shape how we process our experience), for us the world exists as the result of a subjective appreciation of it. In Part 1, the author explores how phenomenology informs soft systems theory and practice through the work of Husserl and some of those that influenced him and were influenced by him. In Part 2, the author explores a possible relationship between Husserl and Gadamer as a possible intellectual grounding for organisational inquiry.

The research was conducted by examining published material relating to the development of soft systems ideas and Husserl's phenomenology.

An analysis of the ideas within the material suggests that phenomenology can be considered as a underpinning the notion of soft systems

There is difficulty tracking down important papers that recorded the development of soft systems (i.e. 1970–1990) as Lancaster University had disposed of all issues. However, the author tracked down a source and was able to use this material as part of the research. In addition to helping research the origins of the idea, it also provides a paper trail for other researchers interested in these ideas.

Tracing the published material relating to soft systems necessitated visits to several universities as many of the important papers where no longer held by the University of Lancaster library.

It seems apposite that the ideas behind soft systems are resurrected as they offer an alternative way of thinking about complexity – which the modern world seems increasingly creating

There is a lack of research into soft systems as the publications describing the Lancaster research programme have centred around soft systems methodology (SSM). Checkland remarked a decade or so ago that said SSM should be taken as given and other ideas explored. There is little evidence that the soft ideas have been explored outside variations of SSM, this paper is intended to encourage more research into ‘soft’ systems.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a more integrative and inclusive conceptualisation of reflexivity as a way of identifying, understanding and managing some of the risks associated with reflexivity's potentially solipsistic “inward turn”.

The paper draws on the authors' experience of empirical qualitative research with working carers. This experience is grounded within the traditions of interpretative phenomenology and critical epistemology.

Two reflexive risks: an unintended focus on researcher rather than participant; and process at the expense of substance are discussed and the first of these, reflexive narcissism, is associated with the recognition of biographical similarity between researcher and participant, and the second, a kind of reflexive “process‐ism”, with certain research designs involving meta‐reflection with participants on the research experience. The paper advocates the use of multiple reflexivities and an intrinsic sensibility to reflexive possibility throughout the duration of a research programme.

The paper offers an alternative model of reflexivity and some practical guidelines, which may be of value to researchers working across a range of different qualitative methodologies.

The paper makes some preliminary observations about the phenomenon of the working carer, which may be of value to organisational practitioners.

The approach to reflexivity outlined in this paper helps to clarify some of the issues and difficulties associated with the reflexive thesis, and in particular, will help less experienced qualitative researchers to avoid some common pitfalls of reflexive practice.

This paper aims to build around an abductive argument: the epistemological value of the Arts-derived knowledge is equivalent and may be supplementary to that of science, contributing to the literature on the epistemological mistrust between both systems of knowledge.

This essay proposes a conceptual model – a tool, in Kuhn’s terms – grounded on the sociology of knowledge (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Schütz, 1951), to frame the apprehension of reality from a social perspective, and the philosophical pragmatism (Peirce, 2012), considering the fixation of beliefs as the seminal concept that leads to the legitimation of knowledge in society. The proposed conceptual model guides analysis on the epistemological value of the knowledge derived from the Arts and supports reflection on the commonalities between both finite provinces of meaning.

Reproducibility, doxastic grounding, community/membership, intersubjectivity and evidence are criteria identified as commonalities between the Arts and Science. Acceptance and legitimation across finite provinces of meaning emerge to produce minimally acceptable objectivity, made possible by the mutual validation of impressions.

The discussion on greater levels of aesthetic appreciation has been eclipsed by the authors’ intention to find specific epistemological properties of knowledge derived from the Arts.

As practitioners in applied social science, management researchers are supposed to have mastery over how to apply what they know. So, the findings suggest participation (becoming accepted, first of all) in communities of practice, learning from and contributing to distinct finite provinces of meaning. The role of organizations in the understanding of knowledge derived from the Arts and its application might be that of a protagonist, promoting creativity and innovation through openness to new perspectives on knowledge.

This essay rescues knowledge as not a justified true belief, but the result of fixed beliefs continuously and socially legitimated. This rescue escapes previous attempts that appeal to Gettier-type counterexamples. A conceptual model was proposed to frame knowledge from a philosophical and sociological perspective and represent a methodological contribution of this essay. The proposition of third-order interdisciplinarity, also represents a contribution, of conceptual nature.

While extant service-centric research has largely focussed on managerial advantages, few studies have addressed how brand engagement emerges in the broader context of consumer lives. The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel intersubjective hermeneutic framework that bridges the socially constructed as well as the individualised meanings of brand engagement in the context of service research.

This conceptual paper adopts a theory-building approach based on recent developments in the service-centric marketing literature.

The authors offer a novel theoretical perspective that recognises the intersubjective and phenomenological nature of individual and collective consumer brand experiences, and show how such experiences emerge from socially constructed brand engagement practices using the co-constituting lens of value-in-use.

The proposed conceptual framework invites further empirical and contextual investigations of intersubjective brand engagement in both online and offline contexts.

The contribution of this framework is twofold. First, the authors draw on the intersubjective orientation and hermeneutic framework to provide conceptual clarity in relation to the nature of brand engagement practices, brand experiences, and value-in-use, and discuss their interrelationships. Second, the authors address the nature of meaning ascribed to engagement beyond customer-firm-brand relationships, and discuss why any given consumer’s experience of brand engagement reflects a complex dialectic between socially constructed and individualised brand meanings. In doing so, the integrative framework recognises the interplay between the intersubjective and phenomenological natures of consumer brand experiences, and offers insights as to how these experiences are framed by broader socially constructed engagement practices.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a unique approach to accessing, interpreting, and presenting issues concerning the lives of social science research participants. It particularly focuses on accessing those considered to be economically, socially, or politically marginalized and where there is reliance upon intersubjective accounts in two languages.

The conceptual and empirical material referred to in this paper is drawn from the author’s doctoral research of a Fair Trade case study in Malawi. The approach presented is influenced by concepts derived from postcolonial theory, grounded theory, and intersubjectivity.

For the community empowerment research focus it was important to provide space to capture voices of all participants, accounting for the hierarchical socio-political context in which people were embedded. This required the use of interpreters, introducing challenges related to intersubjectivity such as recognizing and accounting for positionalities and impressions of multiple parties collaborating in the process of collecting and interpreting qualitative research material.

Investing in trained and engaged interpreters, using pilot interviews, including participants’ data in the field research design process, and capturing marginalized voices helps a researcher to mitigate challenges related to bias and power relations.

Recognizing inherent shortcomings related to interpreter-facilitated research and power relations, the framework presented provides a reflective and practical methodological approach for qualitative researchers.

This chapter elaborates a phenomenological framework for the concept of “communication” by drawing mainly on the notion “lifeworld,” created by Husserl and developed by Habermas. The concept of “lifeworld” is approached as a communication-grounded idea.

The chapter is a theoretical essay, grounded mainly on bibliographical research. Main sources are the two volumes of Habermas’ The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas, 1987), seconded by other works by the German philosopher and some commentators as Stein (2004) e Pizzi (2006). The chapter endeavors to show that the phenomenological notion of “lifeworld” might be key to a critical understanding of main constructivist approaches in communication theory. It could be particularly illuminating where the focus is on a “reality,” which results from intersubjective interactions in everyday life. Most communication theories are media-centered, which means that they regard the “media,” both in its technical and institutional aspects as the main focus of the communication process. This chapter argues that the “lifeworld” is a far broader way to understand communication as a form of social interaction, whether mediated by media technologies or not. The chapter discusses the concept of “lifeworld,” framing its relational and communicative aspects as fundamental to the notion of “reality” as an interactive social creation. It also proposes the understanding of “communication” grounded on this phenomenological notion. Finally, it discusses some problems and limits of this approach, offering an alternative approach to conventional communication theory.

The purpose of this paper is to engage a different notion of feminism in accounting by addressing the issues of feminism, balance, and integration as a means of understanding differently the world for which one accounts. The ideas are communicated by the sharing of experiences through myth and storytelling.

An alternative lens for understanding the giving of accounts is proposed, drawing on earlier feminist accounting literature as well as storytelling and myth.

Including the subjective and intersubjective approaches to experiencing and understanding the world recommends an approach whereby both the feminine‐intuitive and the masculine‐rational processes are integrated in constructing decision models and accounts.

Through an expanded view of values that can be included in reporting or recounting a different model is seen, and different decisions are enabled. The primary limitation is having to use words to convey one's subjective and intersubjective understandings. The written medium is not the most natural language for such an undertaking.

By enabling the inclusion of more feminine values, a way is opened to engage more holistically with the society in which decisions are embedded.

Drawing on the storytelling tradition, a holistic model is suggested that can lead to emergence of a more balanced societal reporting.