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Grid‐group analysis is grounded in a humanistic conception of social science but, it is argued, it has flaws when applied to the analysis of the environmental movement. Environmentalism is not “border” country particularly as existing only in opposition to a “centre”. Grid‐group analysis loses clarity when forced into a “border versus centre” format. And the grid‐group analysis of sub‐cultures is not sufficiently well developed; the lack of a clear holistic frame plays havoc with efforts to derive solid policy.

The purpose of this paper is to feature a cross-national study that investigates the relationship between national culture and corruption.

The study is based on the so-called “Grid-Group” framework of culture. An analysis based on a sample of 55 countries is employed to estimate the relationship between corruption and cultural, economic and political variables. Cultural dimensions were developed using the World Values Survey (WVS) Wave 4 and 5.

The study finds robust and statistically significant relationships. Cultures with strong hierarchy and fatalism are positively correlated with corruption whereas egalitarian cultures correlate with lower corruption. The regression model employed demonstrates robust statistical significance when all variable categories (culture, economic and political) were employed.

First, as a function of available data, future research should include more countries. Second, as with all previous culture-corruption studies to date, there is no explicit treatment of sub-cultures within a given country in this study: research on culture and corruption in large, multi-ethnic countries such as India, China or the USA where researching regional, sub-cultural differences may be important and insightful.

Strengthening whistle-blower processes open to managers in hierarchical and fatalistic cultures will be an important tactical weapon in fighting corruption. Multinational companies who have progressively phased out expatriate managers in their subsidiaries and replaced them with local managers should invest in training for these managers designed to combat their cultural responses to corrupt behavior. Public policy must focus on institutional reform, breaking down hierarchies, promoting greater efficiency, transparency and accountability. This is a broad and far-reaching target that has to be tackled at all levels of society and across multiple stakeholders. Public policymakers should develop strategies closely with the private sector to develop anti-corruption education and training programs for both public sector and private sector managers.

This is the first time quantitative empirical research has used the Douglas “Grid-Group” framework to estimate the role of culture in explaining corruption. From a policy and strategy perspective, the paper offers specific recommendations to governments and companies.

This study investigated the perceptions and attendant behavioural attitudes of stakeholders, including patients and visitors, to the built environments and supporting facilities provided by an NHS trust hospital. The study used a variety of methodologies to collect empirical data. This included an extensive literature survey and research review, one‐to‐one patient interviews, a large questionnaire survey, patients’ picture stories, a novice‐expert technique and a series of futures conferences. By these methods, the study assessed how stakeholders perceived the health‐care environment, including buildings, internal and external areas, and landscape and aesthetic considerations. It further identified their preferences for a range of services that were not typically provided by the NHS and established the extent of their willingness to pay.

This paper addresses the status of the concept of tradition in social theory. Tradition, precisely defined, should be one of the ways sociologists understand the logic of social action, group identity, and collective memory (Coser 1992; Connerton 1989). To date, however, most social scientists are either dismissive or indiscriminate in their use of the notion. Those who disapprove of the concept tend to “treat tradition as a residual category”’ (Shils 1981 p. 8) or they see it as a type of false consciousness susceptible to manipulation by dominant elites (Hobsbawm 1983). Scholars who embrace tradition, such as Edward Shils, often do so by broadening the concept into something indistinguishable from any cultural inheritance. A nuanced ideal‐type theory is put forth here to enable us to identify and research the particular logic of a social tradition. This theory is extracted from a critical, and highly selective, reconstruction of the history of the concept of tradition.

Using the canvas of the author’s sojourn with the Islamic preaching group Tablighi Jamaat, this study aims to exhibit reflections on how spaces can be categorized as more sacred or less sacred according to a specific religious worldview. The paper extends the conversation on Mary Douglas’s concepts of purity and danger by sharpening the focal lens on place in Douglas’s theoretics. The paper also proffers the idea of a sojourn as a vehicle of purification.

This paper depicts findings from the author’s multi-sited ethnographic field notes carried out from a 40-day sojourn with the Islamic preaching group Tablighi Jamaat in Pakistan.

The study unveils the concept of relative sacredness or how some spaces can be considered more sacred than others. The differential sacred status of these variegated spaces, each with its own etiquettes, meaning and consumption rituals is a means for purification for sojourners.

This paper prioritizes a focus on place in Mary Douglas’s arguments on purity and impurity in a religious consumption context. The thesis argues that place is a significant concept associated with metaphorical cleanliness/sacredness, which in religious terms guides consumer action.

The purpose of this paper is to propose Neo-Durkheimian institutional theory, developed by the Durkheimian institutional theory, as developed by anthropologist Mary Douglas, as a suitable theory base for undertaking cross-cultural accounting research. The social theory provides a structure for examining within-country and cross-country actions and behaviours of different groups and communities. It avoids associating nations and cultures, instead contending any nation will comprise four different solidarities engaging in constant dialogues. Further, it is a dynamic theory able to take account of cultural change.

The paper establishes a case for using neo-Durkheimian institutional theory in cross-cultural accounting research by specifying the key components of the theory and addressing common criticisms. To illustrate how the theory might be utilised in the domain of accounting and finance research, a comparative interpretation of the different experiences of financialization in Germany and the UK is provided drawing on Douglas’s grid-group schema.

Neo-Durkheimian institutional theory is deemed sufficiently capable of interpreting the behaviours of different social groups and is not open to the same criticisms as Hofstede’s work. Differences in Douglasian cultural dialogues in the post-1945 history of Germany and the UK provide an explanation of the variations in the comparative experiences of financialization.

Neo-Durkheimian institutional theory has been used in a wide range of contexts; however, it has been little used in the context of accounting research. The adoption of the theory in future accounting research can redress a Hofstedian-bias in accounting research.

Culture is a central concept broadly studied in social anthropology and sociology. It has been gaining increasing attention in economics, appearing in research on labor market discrimination, identity, gender, and social preferences. Most experimental economics research on culture studies cross-national or cross-ethnic differences in economic behavior. In contrast, we explain laboratory behavior using two cultural dimensions adopted from a prominent general cultural framework in contemporary social anthropology: group commitment and grid control. Groupness measures the extent to which individual identity is incorporated into group or collective identity; gridness measures the extent to which social and political prescriptions intrinsically influence individual behavior. Grid-group characteristics are measured for each individual using selected items from the World Values Survey. We hypothesize that these attributes allow us to systematically predict behavior in a way that discriminates among multiple forms of social preferences using a simple, parsimonious deductive model. The theoretical predictions are further tested in the economics laboratory by applying them to the dictator, ultimatum, and trust games. We find that these predictions are confirmed overall for most experimental games, although the strength of empirical support varies across games. We conclude that grid-group cultural theory is a viable predictor of people’s economic behavior, then discuss potential limitations of the current approach and ways to improve it.

The purpose of this paper is to resolve a puzzle in the explanation of organisational change, where change appears to be within-form but results unintendedly in a transition between forms, yet first appearances suggest the absence of “noise” of the kind expected during shifts between forms.

The paper uses qualitative analysis of primary archival and secondary sources on an historical case, analysing the data by coding using categories derived from neo-Durkheimian institutional theory. It examines the case of the cabinet, treated as an organisation, in the British government led by premier Harold Macmillan between 1959 and 1963, when a strategy for increasing hierarchy resulted unintendedly in an isolation dynamic.

It demonstrates that the neo-Durkheimian institutional approach can explain such puzzling cases. Appropriately for a special issue in honour of Mars’ work, it shows that his method of following rule violation and an adapted version of his concept of capture can provide a method of causal process tracing and a causal mechanism for resolving the puzzle.

The argument is presented for purposes of theory development, not testing. It examines a single case study in depth.

The findings demonstrate some of the risks which arise in changing informal institutional ordering, especially within decision-making executives, from the process by which informal institutions shape styles of judgement and decisions driven by those styles then feed back upon those executive bodies.

This is the first examination of puzzling unintended between-form transitions, the first to propose an adaptation of Mars’ concept of capture to resolve such puzzles and the first detailed causal process tracing analysis of such a case using neo-Durkheimian institutional theoretic tools. It therefore offers a significant advance in institutional explanation of organisational change.

Accounting research has struggled with how ethnicity is to be understood in relation to concepts such as nation and nationality and how ethnicity may impact on accounting and auditing practices, behaviours, education and professional values. These themes are explored and developed in the papers presented in this special issue. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to explore the contrasting theoretical and methodological approaches reflected by the papers in the issue.

This is a reflective and analytical paper which explores how notions of ethnicity are conceived and operationalised in accounting research. The authors identified two distinctive analytic ordering processes evident within this AAAJ Special issue: Mary Douglas’ scheme of Grid and Group and the Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual tools of field, capital and habitus.

The “Grid and Group” Culture Theory with Bourdieu’s theoretical tools evident in the papers provide powerful tools to explore the relationship between ethnicity and accounting both conceptually and empirically, suggesting that ethnicity can be deployed to reveal and challenge institutionalised racism. This paper highlights the potential to integrate elements of the “Grid and Group” Culture Theory and Bourdieu’s theoretical tools. The issue of ethnicity and the relationship between ethnicity and accounting should be more fruitfully explored in future.

The authors acknowledge the challenges and limitations of discussing the issue of ethnicity from any particular cultural perspective and recognise the implicit dominance of White Anglo centric perspectives within accounting research.

The papers presented in the special issue illustrate that the issue of ethnicity is complex and difficult to operationalise. This paper highlights the potential to move beyond the ad hoc application of theoretical and methodological concepts to operationalise coherent concepts which challenge and extend the authors’ understanding of accounting as a social and contextual practice. But to achieve this it is necessary to more clearly integrate theory, methodology, method and critique.