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The category of ‘child’ is often presumed to be underpinned by ‘natural’ biological differences from the category of ‘adult’, and the category of ‘family’ is open to similar ‘naturalising’ and universalizing tendencies. Challenging this view has been a central tenet of the New Social Studies of Childhood, arguing instead that ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ are socially constructed, and highlighting children’s agency in shaping their social worlds. More complex frameworks have since emerged, whether concerning the need for a relational ontology of ‘child’, or for a recognition of the diversity of childhoods and families globally. Here we extend the debate to engage with the problematic of the very nature of ‘categories’ themselves, to explore how categorical thinking varies across, and is embedded within, linguistic, historical and philosophical processes and world views. Drawing on the examples of the categories of ‘child’ in China, and ‘family’ in Senegal, West Africa, we consider aspects of fluidity in their indigenous linguistic framing, and how their translation into European terms may fail to fully capture their meanings, which may ‘slip away’ in the process. Such ‘gaps’ between divergent linguistic framings include underlying world views, and assumptions about what it means to be human, raising issues of individuality, relationality and connectedness. Through this discussion we raise new questions concerning the processes of categorical thinking in relation to ‘child’ and ‘family’, calling for cautious consideration of what may be ‘unthought’ in these categories as they feature in much of contemporary childhood and family studies.

The author’s story of a familial connection on the move was part of the research process of an ethnographic project about a demolished ex-industrial village. Growing up in the 1970s, the author’s fatherless childhood was silently lived out in its spatial geography. The author’s proximate, unknown father was a potent figure that the author would glimpse in the street spaces but was never allowed to acknowledge. Twentieth century accounts of working-class life have little to say on the personal stories of families where ‘father’ was rarely present (Steedman, 1986). Here the author offers a daughter’s emotional geography of fatherlessness. To sketch a socio-cultural backcloth to the personal subplot, the author draws on scholarship about fatherhood, fatherlessness and lone motherhood as a way to discuss men’s involvement in fathering in relation to the author’s own experience of living without a father in a paternalistic company village. Turning to the author’s return in 2015 as a researcher, the author uses autoethnography to explore the personal familial subplot bubbling underneath the main project. The author charts how the methodologies used held affordances which offered a process of coming to terms with the inter-connections of spatial and familial absence and loss: the loss of author’s home-village where memories of an absent father were played out and the revelation of the loss of an already absent father through a DNA test. In this way, it traces the shifting movements of a familial (dis)-connection through memories, photographs and mobile research encounters against the backcloth of the absent spaces of an ex-industrial community.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of managerial values in improving the effectiveness of employee performance management (EPM).

The research has been conducted as a conceptual study, in which EPM criteria are compared to managerial values and the related maturity model. A thorough review of the EPM and values literature identified relevant and significant works.

Despite copious extant literature on EPM, the process is riddled with persistent problems, particularly concerning the manager’s enthusiasm to adequately implement EPM and its subsequent effectiveness. A managerial grounded values framework is, therefore, proposed. Using a circular approach that is assisted by a values maturity model, it serves as a charter that guides the supervisor’s actions, goals, choices, decisions and attitudes; principles that are very much at the heart of an effective EPM process. Curiously, managerial values and EPM have not generally been connected.

This values-based circular framework contributes to the effectiveness of the EPM process and thus to a positive EPM experience that motivates, enhances engagement and guides personal development. When enacted individual values and EPM are linked, they are argued to lead to sustained superior financial performance.

This study makes an important and novel contribution to the performance literature by using a values-based maturity model to improve the effectiveness of the EPM process.

This study aims to examine the phenomenon of self-perceived age (SPA) identity for Generation X (GenX) women in the UK. Squeezed between the more ubiquitous “boomer” and “millennial” cohorts, and now with both gender and age stigma-related challenges, this study looks to provide insights for understanding this group for marketing.

This study adopts an existential phenomenological approach using a hybrid structured/hermeneutic research design. Data is collected using solicited diary research (SDR) that elicits autoethnographic insights into the lived experiences of GenX women, these in the context of SPA.

For this group, the authors find age a gendered phenomenon represented via seven “age frames”, collectively an “organisation of experience”. Age identity appears not to have unified meaning but is contingent upon individuals and their experiences. These frames then provide further insights into how diarists react to the stigma of gendered ageism.

SDR appeals to participants who like completing diaries and are motivated by the research topic. This limits both diversity of response and sample size, but coincidentally enhances elicitation potential – outweighing, the authors believe, these constraints. The sample comprises UK women only.

This study acknowledges GenX women as socially real, but from an SPA perspective they are heterogeneous, and consequently distributed across many segments. Here, age is a psychographic, not demographic, variable – a subjective rather than chronological condition requiring a nuanced response from marketers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first formal study into how SPA identity is manifested for GenX women. Methodologically, this study uses e-journals/diaries, an approach not yet fully exploited in marketing research.