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This study aimed to investigate the sensemaking strategies employed by early-career employees working within organizationally constrained environments.

Grounded in the sensemaking-as-accomplishment framework, a longitudinal multi-case study was conducted, involving three early-career employees. These participants were interviewed multiple times concerning tasks they themselves identified as anomalous and ambiguous.

The study's findings illuminate how early-career employees utilize sensemaking strategies to accomplish anomalous-ambiguous tasks. These strategies are interwoven with deliberate efforts to mitigate organizational constraints that exist in the organization or arise during the execution of complex tasks.

Notable limitation pertains to the time gap between task completion and the interviews. Conducting real-time interviews concurrently with task execution or immediately afterward was not feasible due to constraints in participant availability. This research has implications for organizational learning initiatives, particularly those encompassing employee-driven self-learning components. Insights derived from studies like this can inform the development of effective self-learning schemes within organizations.

Previous sensemaking research focused on what takes place in high-reliability organizations. This study explored sensemaking strategies in workplaces that are organizationally constrained.

This article aims to present aspects related to women’s personal life and work illustrated in the TV series Most Beautiful Thing (Coisa Mais Linda, in Portuguese).

To this end, a film analysis was carried out considering the first season of the TV series Most Beautiful Thing, and to analyze the data, qualitative content analysis was used according to Bardin (2006).

The analysis showed that women’s struggles were and are distinct. While white women are fighting for the right to work - concomitantly reconciling their roles as mother, wife and housewife -, black and poor women fight for survival and dignity. As result, the film analysis showed that women’s search for a different social position is related to an inherent cultural aspect. It is relevant to mention herein that this struggle remains up to the present; such struggle is characterized by the occultation of the social role played by women.

As a limitation, there are few studies that address the theme of white and black women during the period reported in the series.

The main contribution of this article is the use of a filming product that portrays the 1950s, but bringing current discussions on the role of women in society, especially regarding the labor market, the patriarchal domination of men, prejudice, racial, and class discrimination.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the literature on how actors manage competing logics in an organizational field. The authors do so by introducing the concept of organizational irony to the literature on how to manage competing logics, and analyze a collaborative cultural project encompassing actors subjected to competing institutional logics.

The case study is built on qualitative data from in-depth interviews, newspaper articles and observations.

The authors describe and analyze a cultural project encompassing actors subjected to competing institutional logics and show how they responded to institutional pressures in their environment with the use of organizational irony. Thereby, the actors could collaborate with actors subjected to a competing institutional logic and still maintain adherence to their respective institutional logic.

Most studies of how to manage competing logics asserts that one logic will prevail over a competing one, either through “battles” or gradual dominance (Reay and Hinings, 2009). This study supports and adds to Reay and Hinings’ (2009) finding that actors also can collaborate and maintain adherence to their respective logic under such circumstances. In particular, it supports two identified mechanisms of how this can be achieved, namely, to separate decisions and to jointly innovate in experimental sites. It also adds to these mechanisms by showing that this can be done through the use of organizational irony. The authors only study one cultural project in one organizational field. It remains unclear if these findings are common in other cultural projects or in other organizational field, and the authors therefore encourage other researchers to extend or challenge the findings of this study.

The authors believe that the analysis and findings can be useful for politicians to take into account and address either to minimize the risk of organizational irony or on the contrary encourage it as a source of reflexive critique of society and cultural politics. The authors also believe that the response of organizational irony to institutional pressures broadens the acting space of cultural actors, provide media and critics with an analytical tool to analyze and deconstruct practices that otherwise would risk to be silenced or neglected. Finally, the authors believe that an analysis of organizational irony has the potential to make people attend to contradictions and multiple meanings in the artworks under study in a novel way.

The paper provides an intriguing and complex empirical case to demonstrate how actors manage competing logics in an organizational field through the production of organizational irony. The authors believe that its theoretical contributions and practical implications can inspire future research on how paradoxes can be managed through the use of organizational irony in other projects and organizational fields.

This study aims to explore and identify the information-seeking process and practices of those searching for the forcefully disappeared in Colombia. It answers the questions; how do families in Colombia seek information about a disappearance, how is this seeking process mediated and how are information barriers dealt with?

Based on document analysis and interviews with families and NGO representatives, this bottom-up study explores the trajectory of the families' information-seeking process to highlight the most salient information practices.

A general trajectory of a search for information is laid out. The overwhelming barriers to information forces families to carry the burden of becoming information providers. NGOs provide situated learning on how to document a disappearance and deal with the state. This knowledge is passed on to families creating communities of practices. The information produced here becomes the main source of knowledge about this crime.

It makes a new contribution to the field of information practices by introducing the context of enforced disappearances using the example of Colombia, identifying a significant information-seeking process.

The purpose of this paper is to address both the neglect of non-Anglo-centric accounting gendered practices beyond the predominant professional setting and the controversial roles of women and accounting in power relationships inside the household. Analyzing a Spanish upper-middle class Catholic family in the early nineteenth century, the research focuses on the reciprocal interaction of accounting with practices and processes of daily life in a rigid patriarchal socio-cultural and juridical context.

This microhistory draws upon several archives, including in Spain the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Cádiz. In England, the Bath Record Office has preserved documents and correspondence, both personal and business related, and the Worcester Record Office preserved notarial documents concerning the family. The large number of letters which have survived has facilitated an in-depth study of the people who were affected by accounting calculations.

In a juridical context where women were conceived as merely the means for the circulation of property between two families, the evidence shows that accounting provided the proof of women’s patrimony value and the means to facilitate their recovery in this cosification process. Although women had a little involvement in the household’s accounting and management, they demonstrated confidence in accounting, fulfilling a stewardship function for the resources received. Also, evidence shows that by using accounting practices to shield supposedly defenseless women, this reinforced male domination over women and promoted the view that the role of women was as an ornament and in need of a good husband.

Contrasting with the Anglo-Saxon contemporary context, the Spanish law preserved a woman’s property rights, guaranteeing recovery of properties owned by her before marriage should the marriage be legally annulled or be dissolved because one of the spouses’ death. This required a detailed accounting of the wife’s properties brought to her marriage, most especially regarding the dowry provided by her family.

A large part of this paper is based on a presentation by Maria Fafalios‐Dragonas at the International Conference on Developmental/Intellectual Disabilities, ‘Bridging the Continents’, held in Cyprus, 27‐29 March 1998. The conference was organised by the North Dakota Centre for Persons with Disabilities, a university‐affiliated programme at Minot, North Dakota, and Cyprus University, Nicosia, Cyprus. The paper looks at vocational rehabilitation projects in Greece and is based on a questionnaire distributed (August 1996 to August 1997) to the directors of various sheltered workschemes throughout the country, for people with mental health problems, learning difficulties and physical disabilities. This survey ‐ unique in Greece, to our knowledge ‐ was carried out by Maria Fafalios‐Dragonas, Eleni Tsigara and Panayota Papamanoli, for Kaleidoscope social enterprise. The statistical analysis is by ORCO, Athens.

This conversation presents the reflections from four inspirational early career disaster scholars on the opportunities and challenges associated with post-disaster research and disaster studies in general.

This paper is based on the conversations that took place on Disasters: Deconstructed Podcast livestream on the 15th September 2021.

The prominent themes in this conversation include representation, power imbalances and research extractivism and reciprocity.

The conversation contributes to the ongoing discussions around how research is conducted immediately following disasters.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how healthcare and public organizations can control and monitor digital health test certificates with citizens or other stakeholders using Blockchain platforms. The paper reviews and analyses the literature by focusing on keywords like “Blockchain AND COVID-19”. In response to the 2019 pandemic, most local governments closed their borders and imposed movement restrictions, impacting the global economy, peoples' mobility and everyday life. This study aims to provide a solution to how Blockchain technology can improve the socioeconomic impacts of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) by enhancing people's mobility and achieving a balance between protecting individuals' rights and public health safety.

This research utilized machine learning bibliometric tools for investigating the normative literature in the area of blockchain and COVID-19. The article conducts a systematic literature review and develops a bibliometric map based on Plevris et al.’s (2017) method.

This study indicates that there is limited literature on the use of blockchain technology in issuing and validating COVID-19 tests. The development of such solutions can be done through the utilization of smart contracts, and it is expected to increase mobility in a secure and trusted environment that will help in monitoring and slow down the spread of the pandemic.

This analysis is done during the first ten months of the pandemic outbreak, and there is still limited scientific literature investigating blockchain and COVID-19 concepts.

Organizations are rethinking their information management due to the COVID-19 pandemic for creating better value for the enterprise and all associate stakeholders. Blockchain technology helps organizations to move from a centralized to a decentralized way of information managing. The decentralization of information in the health-care sector will create a better value for all involved stakeholders and radical change in how health-care data are managed and controlled. The implementation of blockchain applications in the health-care industry will result in a more secure, visible, auditable environment accessible by all the parties involved.

It was identified that there is currently limited research done on aligning smart contracts structure within the health-care sector. Therefore, while the current literature demonstrates the importance of aligning the key concepts, little research is done on considering people’s mobility and cross-country communication.

Drawing on the theory of goal systems applied to family business this case study focuses on the interdependence between non-economic goals and family goals, in order to identify if and how achieving non-economic goals generates dysfunctional behavioural patterns for family members in the long term.

This study used an inductive, 20-year longitudinal case-study based methodology.

This case study shows how the business family faces ethical/affective dimensions, struggling every day for a balance and often undermining the legitimisation and differentiation of its children. Findings show that the achievement of non-economic goals can occur to the detriment of family goals, such as by generating a dysfunctional system, specifically in business family adaptability.

The principal limitation is that this single case study evidently does not allow for complete generalization of the findings.

This case study makes a contribution to alerting the family business system to the long-term risk they face in trying to simultaneously maintain both harmony/cohesion and ethics/responsibility. Practitioners and consultants are therefore called on to help family firm owners with adopting a strategic vision by considering possible long-term counterfinal (i.e. mutually incompatible) goals.

SMEs are the most widespread type of firm in the world, and consequently dysfunctional behavioural patterns within business families represent a prominent socio-economical problem for policy makers and institutions.

This study shows that, in the long term, that which is perceived to be a desirable goal can transpire to be a dysfunctional pattern. In doing so, this research introduces a new point of view to the literature on goal systems in family business.