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Can one ‘reclaim’ the future? How can a future, that, by its very definition, has not yet occurred, be reclaimed? The concept is associated with the Sankofa bird, a ‘mythical bird through which individuals, groups and, communities are reminded to look back in order to reposition themselves to more strategically move forward’ (Assie-Lumumba, 2016, p. 10). I have settled on ‘reclaiming the future’ as an appropriate metaphor for this chapter which will tell a story – or stories – of paths along which I have meandered, looked back, repositioned myself several times and, hopefully, continued to move forward in ‘being’ a higher education practitioner and in ‘being’ a human ‘being’. Such meanderings will recall encounters with different philosophies – in particular how they mediate learning and teaching – different knowledges and different people and contexts. It will privilege – but not unquestioningly – the value of critical reflexivity in research and in teaching, revisiting many of the questions that have arisen and continue to arise for me through engaging in these academic practices. It thus addresses the book’s core themes of being, interculturality and – possibly – new knowledge systems.

This study is concerned with the institutional value dimension in recent accounting research into hybrids and hybridity. Such research has been cognitively oriented and neglected the affective and emotional qualities of the values in which institutions are grounded. This study assumes that organisational members use accounting for instrumental reasons conditioned by objective facts. This study aims to offer new impetus to this literature by taking seriously the nature of institutional value.

Essay combined with discussion of published work.

Cognitive misinterpretations of institutional value underplay the force of institutions. One acts upon these not as a matter of cognitive choice but because of beliefs in deeply held values. In the extreme, the value possesses the actor not vice versa. However, because institutional values are ideal and abstract, they can never be fully and incontrovertibly achieved in practice. Certain practices, such as accounting, can come to stand in for the pursuit of the institutional value. In particular contexts, practicing accounting can come to be regarded as pursing institutional values, which makes it an institutional object.

The explication of accounting as an institutional object can show the potential significance of accounting for institutional values, including hybrid values.

Aims to examine the New Zealand internal auditor role and conceptualise on the auditor's influence over that role. At its heart lies the question of how an effective internal auditor can overcome the tension of working with management to improve performance while also remaining sufficiently distant from management in order to report on their performance.

An Eisenhardt‐inspired multiple case‐based approach in which the researcher made observations, examined documents and interviewed senior internal auditors in six New Zealand organisations.

Three concepts characteristic of those who best balanced their role: the internal auditor's external professional status, the presence of a formal and informal communication network, and the internal auditor's place in determining their own role. Informing these concepts is the auditor's ability to manage ambiguity.

Limitations of the research include those typical of qualitative study generally and that it is less objectively‐measured; however, compensating procedures suggested by Eisenhardt (1989) are employed. Further study could explore each source of influence in more detail and in different contexts, and examine the framework's application elsewhere. Gender studies may be of value.

Results reveal how independence dilemmas are addressed by those internal auditors who are most successful in balancing their sometimes conflicting professional role.

An original contribution is the conceptualisation of the internal auditor's role as both an independent evaluator of and consultant to management.

Discusses management style as portrayed in Western literature. Compares this with the approach to management taken by the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria. Describes the Igbo belief system, magic and language and the implications of this culture on library management. Refers to the impact of cultural revitalisation librarianship of the 1970s.

The question of cultural identity has taken new levels of importance in the Andean country of Ecuador. Ecuadorian scholars often treat identity as a historical construction, revealing the country's Mestizo population as a culture of oppression. However, such statements only take into account the Western definition of history and fail to appreciate the indigenous concept of myth and the human need to constantly rewrite history in terms of today. Since Ecuador's majority is profoundly Mestizo (people with both Spanish and indigenous ancestry), there exists a clash of thought structures, both Western and indigenous, which do not allow for collective transformation. This research utilizes interactive research methods, particularly Augusto Boal's “Theatre of the Oppressed,” to penetrate the clash, intensifying it so that the “cultural oppression” becomes clear to those involved in the explorations, allowing them to uncover the “power of myth” now deeply buried in the collective unconscious.

Monsters, from ghouls and zombies to shoggoths and Cthulhu, have always fascinated humans and have a prominent presence in cultural production. This is made clear by how much people enjoy Halloween events and dressing up as their favourite monster or the most recent trend of horror themed escape rooms, that include haunted houses, a zombie apocalypse or Lovecraftian monsters. Monstrous creatures represent the fears and desires of society and often embody the allure of danger, transgression and power. Monsters have long been used to construct certain images of the different/unconventional and thus represent anything diverse as the Other. Monsters, however, can be employed to invert or even overturn this relationship by empowering the Other and thus provide us with a more critical view on society in regard to our values, fears and attitudes. The stories and folklore about monsters and the monstrous that incite fear and remind us to always check under our beds before we sleep have also found their way into our everyday lives. Within the mainstream media, criminality is indicative of moral corruption, and is attributed with notions of monstrosity. These monsters do not have claws, instead, they are unpredictable, different and deviate from social and cultural norms. Like the mythical creatures in folklore, monstrosity in its human form reminds us to fear the future, the unknown, Others and society. The monstrous is centrally defined by its unfixedness, its resistance to conformity or to convenient schematic identification. It is somatically and intellectually uneasy, a restless disturbing embodied thought that unsettles, and whose greatest value to us is its very indeterminacy. This chapter illustrates the shifting shapes of the monstrous, their makers, and offers insight about what we can learn from studying these cautionary noetic chimeras. Drawing on the diversity of our academic backgrounds, ideological perspectives and the research from our individual chapters, we address the contemporary narrative of the figure of the monster. Rather than an essay style examination, our chapter explores this narrative through a question and answer format. The flexibility of this format allows readers an intimate glimpse into the ways in which the monstrous can be conceptualised and understood in various frameworks.

The purpose of this paper is to explore leadership styles and patterns in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the USA in order to contribute to a greater understanding of global leadership.

The paper uses cultural mythologies as a lens (Kessler and Wong-MingJi, 2009a) to extract the most favored leadership traits within selected countries. In doing so, the paper explores historical trajectories and core values of each country to identify their distinctive characteristics. Additionally, leadership styles of well-known business leaders in each culture are examined to develop a comparative discussion of global leadership patterns and styles.

The paper finds that leaders may share same characteristics across countries, however, their behavioral expressions tend to unfold differently within each context. The paper argues that without context, meanings embedded in cultural mythologies and behaviors often become lost. The paper concludes that a comparative analysis of selected countries reveals a more complex and rich array of cultural meanings, thus offering support to a contextual view of leadership.

Examination of cultural mythologies on leadership makes important theoretical contributions by illustrating that cultural mythologies indeed shape the values, behaviors, and attitudes of global leaders, and provide three important functions that are identified as: cultural bridging, meaning making, and contextual nuancing.

Understanding comparative leadership patterns is critical in international business. The paper offers cultural mythologies as a tool for leaders who seek to cross-cultural boundaries in developing long term and high-quality productive international business relationships.

The value of the study lies in developing a comparative analysis of leadership patterns in three Southeast Asian countries and the USA with the help of cultural mythologies. The paper urges that scholars to move beyond quantification of cultural dimensions to a more contextualized understanding of leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the symbolic forms used in selected mainstream management models and to assess whether it would be expedient for enforcing the connection between leadership and individual human reality if such management models were fundamentally inspired by a successful manager and artist.

The theoretical starting point of this article is Cassirer's philosophy on symbolic forms. The paper analyses the symbolic forms embedded in the management discourse practice of art in the way that the concept is practiced by Kasper Holten, the highly successful Artistic Director of the Royal Danish Opera.

The analysis shows that conventional management control models are rooted in the symbolic form of science, but are at risk of getting caught in assumptions of the form gliding into the symbolic form of religion and myth, where all the forms tend to oppress essential aspects of individuality. Kasper Holten integrates the symbolic forms of art and science, which makes him capable of binding to the individual's life‐world.

Analysing Kasper Holten's views on management reveals features and structures for a new management discourse practice which is far better suited to most of the knowledge jobs in contemporary society than the more conventional management discourse.

The paper provides novel insight into the interrelationship between the specific way of using language and the way of managing and constructing a world. It paves the way for another way of doing management control and accounting.

A growing number of people are using tourism as an escape from the fiction of their daily lives. The purpose of this chapter is to explore a dimension of tourism where the outer search is the vehicle for an inner journey of spiritual development. The chapter introduces a novel concept, tourism of spiritual growth, which it perceives as a variety of spiritual tourism with an esoteric motivation. In this regard, the individual undertakes an intentional “voyage of discovery” for inner awareness and transformation. The term is conceptualized, and its central dimensions—meaning, transcendence, and connectedness—analyzed in relation to the motivations it involves.

We compare two highly symbolized beverages – Coca-Cola and tesguino, a fermented maize beer of indigenous northern Mexico – to (re-)evaluate the notion of fetishism of commodities in contrasting ethnographic contexts. In the case of Coca-Cola, we observe a kind of hidden but active fetishization, meaning a strategic procedure wherein the producer invests images of social character, experience, and other naturalizing significations into its commodity. Tesguino, as a comparably sacred drink among the Rarámuri, is not characterized by its concealment in magical properties and simulacrized associations. The ritual consumption of tesguino, instead, reveals the organic social bonds in relations of production and exchange.