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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between leader narcissism (LN) and subordinate embeddedness as well as to test the moderating roles of moral attentiveness (MA) and behavioral integrity (BI) on that very relationship.

Data were collected from 19 five-star hotels in Turkey. The sample included 1,613 employees along with their first-line managers. The moderating roles of MA and BI on the LN and subordinate embeddedness relationship were tested using the moderated hierarchical regression analysis.

The moderated hierarchical regression analysis results revealed that there was a significant negative relationship between LN and subordinate embeddedness. In addition, this very relation was weaker when both MA and BI were higher than when they were lower.

This study showed that employee perception of LN decreased employee’s job embeddedness (JE). The study findings point out the importance of reinforcing an ethical context as well as the importance of leader selection. Specifically, in order to ensure that narcissistic leaders do not thrive in organizations, it is significant to maintain an ethical context. Whether the context is ethical, unethical, or interpersonally ineffective, behaviors will likely be more salient and evaluated more negatively by coworkers. On the other hand, when narcissistic leaders are inserted in organizations with unethical contexts, the result is a perfect storm that reinforces narcissists’ unethical behaviors and potentially promotes narcissistic leaders. Still, it is likely that narcissists exhibit unethical and ineffective behaviors regardless of the ethical context, meaning that an ethical context does not necessarily prevent narcissistic leaders from behaving ineffectively and unethically. Thus, the implementation of management selection geared toward targeting precursors of unethical behaviors is an equally vital strategy to prevent unethical behaviors on the part of organizational leaders.

The study provides new insights into the influence that LN may have on subordinate JE and the moderating roles of MA and BI in the link between LN and JE. The paper also offers a practical assistance to employees in the hospitality industry and their leaders interested in building trust and increasing leader-subordinate relationship and JE.

Despite the progressive values espoused by farmers' market patrons, markets have been shown to be exclusive to low-income people of color. This paper examines a particular food security program at a farmers market to ask how social embeddedness and moral economy can be incorporated to dignify underrepresented groups at the market.

This case study uses an embeddedness framework to analyze the design of a community-oriented food security program at a farmers market.

Social embeddedness contributed to the success of the program in a number of meaningful ways: face-to-face community outreach reached target populations at a human level, and engendered spontaneous support from organizations with shared values. Graphics and text used in marketing material can make transparent the moral economy of the market. However, as soon as social embeddedness is legitimized within a program design, suppressed tensions emerge that are associated with the perceived dichotomy between academic, technically-oriented professionals and on-the-ground community members. In particular, the selection of personnel from the community itself led to interpersonal tensions as well as technical difficulties.

The analysis proceeds from an administrative point of view, and does not include direct interviews with market attendees or vendors.

The findings suggest that long-term support is necessary for the implementation of socially embedded food security programs, so that personnel can build trust and technical competence over time.

This paper offers solutions to the limitations of farmers markets as sites for food security programs, and uniquely contextualizes policy administration in a social embeddedness lens.

Moral consideration is significantly important as social responsibility of economic actions. This article aims to analyze the moral embeddedness of labor market using the typology of moral behavior in market exchange by Beckert (2005).

This study contributes to methodological novelty through a digital research design using Gephi and NVIVO software. Textual Network Analysis (TNA) is used to analyze the moral embeddedness of labor market transaction of Chinese migrant workers.

Overall, the results show that the presence of Chinese migrant workers in Indonesia is a form of Trojan altruism and harmful to local labor market. This study also provides a theoretical debate that morals are always embedded in markets.

The data and focus of this study are the Indonesian side, particularly the local labor market. In addition, access to interviews with the Chinese government and companies is very challenging and cannot be done because they cannot carelessly provide information to journalists and researchers.

In contrast to previous studies on Chinese migrant workers that tend to use the economic perspective, this study applies the moral perspective that is more sociological and discusses social responsibility of market actions.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-11-2022-0737

The purpose of this paper is to explore how performance management practices are implicated in the exercise of power with particular reference to the ability of individual managers to balance between more or less institutionalized conceptions of performance while pursuing organizational change.

The paper builds on a longitudinal field study in a Chinese local government department conducted over a period of six years.

Recent reforms in the Chinese government sector have resulted in an incomplete shift between moral‐ and merit‐based conceptions of performance. The focal manager in this analysis initially balanced successfully between these conceptions of performance whilst pursuing a degree of organizational change, but was ultimately transferred as the power relationships forged through her manoeuvring were radically reversed. Whilst this balancing act was facilitated by the simultaneous embeddedness of the manager in both conceptions of performance, she experienced growing difficulties in maintaining such a position as a means of nurturing critical power relationships.

The empirical analysis underscores the importance of examining institutional embeddedness as a multi‐layered phenomenon constituted by institutionalized expectations as well as internalized values and beliefs of individual actors. The varying degree of alignment of these constituent elements of embeddedness has important implications for the ability of managers to balance between diverse conceptions of performance and effect change and the configuration of power relationships.

In contrast to much previous research on performance measurement and management the paper analyzes power as a dynamic and relational concept. The study also sheds new light on the notion of institutional embeddedness by underlining its multi‐layered nature and how this gives rise to potential value conflicts among individual actors.

Moral struggles in and around markets abound in contemporary societies where markets have become the dominant form of economic coordination. Reviewing research on morality and markets across disciplinary boundaries, this introductory essay suggests that a moral turn can currently be observed in scholarship, and draws a direct connection to recent developments in the sociology of morality. The authors introduce the chapters in the present volume “The Contested Moralities of Markets.” In doing so, the authors distinguish three types of moral struggles in and around markets: struggles around morally contested markets where the exchange of certain goods on markets is contested; struggles within organizations that are related to an organization’s embeddedness in complex institutional environments with competing logics and orders of worth; and moral struggles in markets where moral justifications are mobilized by a variety of field members who act as moral entrepreneurs in their striving for moralizing the economy. Finally, the authors highlight three properties of moral struggles in contemporary markets: They (1) arise over different objects, (2) constitute political struggles, and (3) are related to two broader social processes: market moralization and market expansion. The introduction concludes by discussing some of the theoretical approaches that allow particular insights into struggles over morality in markets. Collectively, the contributions in this volume advance our current understanding of the contested moralities of markets by highlighting the sources, processes, and outcomes of moral struggles in and around markets, both through tracing the creation, reproduction, and change of underlying moral orders and through reflecting the status and power differentials, alliances, and political strategies as well as the general cultural, social, and political contexts in which the struggles unfold.

This paper explores the contested notion of what constitutes a fair price in the context of grain exchanges in a subsistence farming village in the highlands of Matagalpa. Using ethnographic data, I show how Nicaraguan campesinos’ economic behavior plays out within a local moral universe of fairness: how much to produce and how much to sell in the market (or to give away); how prices and obligations vary depending on the social relation that binds the seller and the buyer (kinship, friendship, community, and so on); in what ways these notions of fair price are articulated and contested by different classes within a rural community; and lastly, what is expected of the State in terms of regulating food prices. Price emerges as the dialectic between the market in its abstract form and the specific social relationships and everyday politics that shape exchanges. What constitutes help (ayuda) and what constitutes exploitation in market exchanges and the determination of price is constantly contested, the moral economy is a discursive battlefield.

This paper uses the case of Islamic banking in Amman, Jordan, to assess the wide moral range of expectations, levels of satisfaction, and means of evaluating banks’ “Islamicness.”

The information is gathered from interviews conducted during over 21 months of ethnographic research and one month in participant observation and research access as an intern at the Middle East Islamic Bank (MEIB) in Amman, Jordan.

I found three modes for evaluating “Islamicness” when actors decide whether or not to become customers of Islamic banks.

These modes demonstrate that Islamic banking is no longer the cultural protectionism of a relatively homogeneous community of Muslims. Rather it is a fraught and tense field for actors’ debates about types of moralities in the markets and modes of moral assessments of “Islamicness.”

The amplification of the individual and individual choice and authority in the moral assessments of Islamic banking may ultimately serve to unseat prior dichotomous theoretical framings of morality’s presence or absence as “Islamic” or “not Islamic” and “good” and “bad.” By unleashing to individuals the construction of morality in the markets, moral rights and wrongs, and moral evaluations, fragmentation of moral consensus in market practices will occur.

American sociology has long been concerned with the social conditioning of American character, particularly with regard to caring for others. This interest can be traced to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1899[1838]) in which he reflected on how democratic participation in government and voluntary associations in the 1830s shaped the American character. Tocqueville believed that participation in social institutions, and especially voluntary societies, balanced the potentially excessive individualism he observed in the United States. David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd: A Study of Changing American Character (1950) picked up similar themes in an exploration of the isolation of the individual within modern society. These concerns reached a broad audience more recently in Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton's Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985) in which the authors argued that the scale had swung in favor of individualism at the expense of commitment to the social good. Robert Wuthnow (1991) addressed these issues again in Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves, in which he explored how in volunteer work, Americans attempted to reconcile compassion with individualism. These studies, primarily focusing on white, middle‐class Americans, have laid the groundwork for an exploration of the social nature of the American character within the context of caring for others.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the US society’s insignificant mitigation of climate change using Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) autopoietic social systems theory in ecological communication. Specifically, the author’s analysis falls within the context of Luhmann re-moralized while focusing on particular function systems’ binary codes and their repellence of substantive US climate change mitigation policy across systems.

The author achieves this purpose by resituating Luhmann’s conception of evolution to forgo systems teleology and better contextualize the spatial-temporal scale of climate change; reinforcing complexity reduction and differentiation by integrating communication and media scholar John D. Peters’s (1999) “communication chasm” concept as one mechanism through which codes sustain over time; and applying these integrated concepts to prominent the US climate change mitigation attempts.

The author concludes that climate change mitigation efforts are the amalgamation of the systems’ moral communications. Mitigation efforts have relegated themselves to subsystems of the ten major systems given the polarizing nature of their predominant care/harm moral binary. Communication chasms persist because these moral communications cannot both adhere to the systems’ binary codes and communicate the climate crisis’s urgency. The more time that passes, the more codes force mitigation organizations, activist efforts and their moral communications to adapt and sacrifice their actions to align with the encircling systems’ code.

In addition to the conceptual contribution, the social implication is that by identifying how and why climate change mitigation efforts are subsumed by the larger systems and their codes, climate change activists and practitioners can better tool their tactics to change the codes at the heart of the systems if serious and substantive climate change mitigation is to prevail.

To the author’s knowledge, there has not been an integration of a historical communication concept into, and sociological application of, ecological communication in the context of climate change mitigation.

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.