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Purpose – In this chapter, we explore how normalization of exclusionary practices and of privilege for seemingly same professionals and disadvantage for seemingly different professionals in academic healthcare organizations can be challenged via meaningful culturalization in the interference zone between system and life world, subsequently developing space for belonging and difference.

Methodology – This nested case study focusses on professionals’ narratives from one specific setting (team) within the broader research and research field of the Dutch academic hospital (Abma & Stake, 2014). We followed a responsive design, conducting interviews with cultural minority and majority professionals and recording participant observations.

Findings – In the Netherlands, the instrumental, system-inspired business model of diversity is reflected in two discourses in academic hospitals: first, an ideology of equality as sameness, and second, professionalism as neutral, rational, impersonal and decontextual. Due to these discourses, cultural minority professionals can be identified as ‘different’ and evaluated as less professional than cultural majority, or seemingly ‘same’, professionals. Furthermore, life world values of trust and connectedness, and professionals’ emotions and social contexts are devalued, and professionals’ desire to belong comes under pressure.

Value – Diversity management from a system-based logic can never be successful. Instead, system norms of productivity and efficiency need to be reconnected to life world values of connectivity, personal recognition, embodied knowledge and taking time to reflect. Working towards alternative safe spaces that generate transformative meaningful culturalization and may enable structural inclusion of minority professionals further entails critical reflexivity on power dynamics and sameness–difference hierarchy in the academic hospital.

In this chapter, drawing primarily on Wittgenstein, we argue that a representationalist view of theory in an applied or practical science such as organization and management theory (OMT) is unrealistic and misleading, since it fails to acknowledge theory's ineradicable dependence on the dynamics of the life-world within which it has its ‘currency’. We explore some of the difficulties raised by the use of representational theorizing in OMT, and mainly explore the nature of a more reflective form of theorizing. Reflective theory, we argue, invites practitioners to attend to the grammar of their actions, namely to the rules and meanings that actors draw upon in their participation in social practices. In this view, the role of theory resembles the role Wittgenstein ascribed to philosophy: it is theory-as-therapy. The latter seeks to make action more perspicuous by providing the conceptual means to practitioners to engage in re-articulating, not only their taken-for-granted assumptions and models but also their modes of orientation and their ways of relating themselves to the situations in which they must work. Reflective theory works to draw their attention to aspects of people's interactions in organizations not usually noticed, to bring to awareness unconscious habits, confusions, prejudices and pictures that hold practitioners captive, and, furthermore, to point out that other continuations of them than those routinely followed are possible. This view of theory – as perceptually reorienting rather than as cognitively explaining – is illustrated by looking at the Karl Weick's sensemaking theory.

Consumer discourse is a narrative of generically (in)formed, goal‐directed activity. If research interprets such practice, it is often deemed to draw upon phenomenology. Returning to the philosophers (Gadamer, Heidegger, Merleau‐Ponty and Ricoeur) who shaped phenomenology, the purpose of this paper is to argue that consumer studies should further cultivate their important insight – that action (particularly perceiving) is structured temporally as always already realising our pre‐given meaning. Entities are prima facie experienced as “ready‐to‐hand” “equipment” enabling “potentiality‐for‐being”. Hermeneutic phenomenology is thus a philosophical resource offering appropriate spatio‐temporal images for people responding to media marketing's branded life‐styles.

Drawing upon authoritative academic resources, the paper proceeds from philosophical definition to resulting analytical methods in marketing research, using a brief Malaysian case study as an example. Philosophically, phenomenology's core perception is of persons as located in a life‐world of socially shared concepts whose employment/ emplotment is said to “fore‐structure” (Heidegger) their understanding, shaping their “projections” (Gadamer) or expectation of events. Phenomenology posits one engages in a “hermeneutic circle of understanding” – aiming at resolving contradiction between such “fore‐sight” and our subsequent perceptions of events. Consumers thematise “pre‐understood” experience in articulating their storied accounts.

Drawing on phenomenology's account of perceiving, the paper suggests qualitative marketing research unpacks consumers' generic expectation of branding narrative as equipment enabling potentiality‐for‐being, regarding narrative as addressing assumed audience expectation.

The paper provides a conceptual route through phenomenology's application to marketing communication research practice.

The purpose of this paper is to describe phenomenological approaches to studying entrepreneurs and their behaviors. The goal is to illustrate how phenomenology can provide a complement especially to the cognitive and discursive approaches that are common in the field today.

Conceptual review.

Cognitive and discursive approaches typically seek coherent explanations of entrepreneurial behaviors by grounding them in intra-individual cognitions or extra-individual discourses. Phenomenology on the other hand seeks to capture more fully the richness of individuals’ lived experiences. While some degree of scientific reduction is inevitable in all empirical research, such reduction is also accompanied by the risk of ignoring essential insights, something that has potentially damaging implications for theoretical and meta-theoretical development as well as for practice. Phenomenological methods are thus well suited to develop new insights and to challenge and add nuance to existing, often more normative and structurally oriented, theories.

The review of the literature focusses on representative studies and is therefore not comprehensive.

Research based on a richer appreciation of entrepreneurs’ lived experiences can inform both policy and more directly the design of specific support structures.

Research based on a richer appreciation of entrepreneurs’ lived experiences can inform both policy and more directly the design of specific support structures.

This paper provides a novel discussion of the limitations of cognitive and discursive approaches by relating them to the phenomenological tradition. More generally, it identifies the potential conflict between coherent theoretical explanations and rich appreciation of the entrepreneurial life-world, as a central methodological concern in the entrepreneurship field.

This chapter outlines the potential of phenomenology to illuminate how individuals experience the emotions replete within organizations. It employs one particular type of phenomenological approach known as Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). The chapter considers how the hermeneutic and phenomenological foundations of this approach lend themselves to the study of affect. The chapter then clarifies and develops established IPA guidelines to render them more appropriate for research on emotions. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates how IPA can produce contextualized accounts that explore the role of emotions in individuals’ experiences of organizational events and processes.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to investigate the epistemological underpinning of SERVQUAL and its limitations; and second, to propose ways to enhance the utility of SERVQUAL as a library assessment tool.

The study first conceptualises quality judgment as a knowing process and locates the epistemological stance of SERVQUAL within the general framework of epistemology demarcation; it then examines related SERVQUAL assumptions and their implications for library assessment in general and for service quality assessment in particular based on two empirical investigations: a questionnaire survey and an interview survey. The questionnaire survey applies the SERVQUAL instrument to three Chinese university libraries, with a view to examining the SERVQUAL score in light of epistemological considerations; the interview survey interviews 50 faculty users in one of the three universities with a view to illuminating the naturalistic process through which users develop their judgement of the library's service quality and through which the SERVQUAL score is formed.

The study shows that the actual SERVQUAL score is distributed in a very scattered manner in all three libraries, and that it is formed through a very complex process rooted primarily in the user's personal experiences with the library, which are in turn shaped by factors from both the library world and the user's life‐world. Based on these findings, this research questions a number of SERVQUAL assumptions and proposes three concepts which may help to contextualise the SERVQUAL score and enhance its utility in actual library assessment: library planning based variance of user perception, perception‐dependent user expectation and library‐sophistication based user differentiation.

The research presented in the paper questions a number of SERVQUAL assumptions and proposes three concepts that may help to contextualise the SERVQUAL score and enhance its utility in actual library assessment.

Jürgen Habermas is one of the most important authors in contemporary philosophy. In this chapter, we analyse his contribution to the philosophical debate on universalism and relativism and consider its implications for organization studies and organizations operating in an intercultural environment. We briefly describe the critique of a universal concept of reason that has been forwarded by sceptical and postmodern philosophers. As a response to this critique, we outline the contribution of discourse ethics and analyse the theories of Jürgen Habermas and his colleague Karl-Otto Apel. We explore the justification of discourse ethics and point out some problems in its argumentative logic. In the light of this critique, we outline some characteristics of an intercultural ethics that is based on constructivist philosophy and point to some encouraging prospects on the consolidation of the debate between relativistic and universalistic philosophers.

In vol. 6, 1976, of Advances in Librarianship, I published a review about relevance under the same title, without, of course, “Part I” in the title (Saracevic, 1976). [A substantively similar article was published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science (Saracevic, 1975)]. I did not plan then to have another related review 30 years later—but things happen. The 1976 work “attempted to trace the evolution of thinking on relevance, a key notion in information science, [and] to provide a framework within which the widely dissonant ideas on relevance might be interpreted and related to one another” (ibid.: 338).

This current paper attempts to bring more light to the current debate of understanding phenomenological research methods, in order to clarify the interpretive phenomenological inquiry with Heidegger's philosophy of phenomenology.

The paper uniquely presents the three distinctions of Heideggerian thoughts in conducting interpretive phenomenological research: (1) realizing the problem of identity; (2) recognizing the inadequacy of ontology; and (3) interpreting the subject matter through historical critiques.

The paper also discusses the basis of phenomenological research issues of a priori knowledge, data analysis process and qualitative research issues of validity, reliability, and creditability. In the conclusion and recommendation, this paper suggests six key points to implement a proper research strategy to employ Heideggerian phenomenological inquiry in social science and policymaking research where investigators are dealing with the multiplicity of existing and alternative worldviews.

The paper idea is fresh and adds new knowledge to the field.