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The purpose of this paper is to explore what narratives of inequality tell us about societal inequality both inside and outside of workplaces. It illuminates the intertwined fates of social agents and the productive potential of seeing organisational actors as social beings in order to advance resistance and substantive equality.

This research empirically examines narratives of inequality and substantive empowerment among a group of 25 black bankers within a major bank in Johannesburg, South Africa. Data were gathered through one-on-one interviews. The data were analysed using narrative analysis.

The findings indicate that narratives of organisational agents always contain fragments of personal and societal narratives. An intersectional lens of how people experience inequality allows us to work towards a more substantive kind of equality. Substantive equality of organisational actors is closely tied to the recognition and elimination of broader societal inequality.

The implications for teaching and research are for scholars to methodically centre the continuities between the personal, organisational and societal in ways that highlight the productive tensions and possibilities for a more radical form of equality. Moreover, teaching, research and policy interventions should always foreground how the present comes to be constituted historically.

Policy and inclusivity interventions would be better served by using substantive empowerment as a theoretical base for deeper changes beyond what we currently conceive of as empowerment. At base, this requires policy makers and diversity practitioners to see all oppression and inequality as interconnected. Individuals are simultaneously organisational beings and societal agents.

Third world approaches to diversity and inclusion need to be vigilant against globalised western notions of equity that are not contextually and historically informed. The failure of equity initiatives in SA means that alternative ideas and approaches are necessary.

The paper illustrates how individual narratives become social scripts of resistance. It develops a way for attaining substantive empowerment through the use of narrative approaches. It allows us to see that employees are also social agents.

In the era of big data, people are more likely to pay attention to privacy protection with facing the risk of personal information leakage while enjoying the convenience brought by big data technology. Furthermore, people’s views on personal information leakage and privacy protection are varied, playing an important role in the legal process of personal information protection. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a semi-qualitative method based framework to reveal the subjective patterns about information leakage and privacy protection and further provide  practical implications for interested party.

Q method is a semi-qualitative methodology which is designed for identifying typologies of perspectives. In order to have a comprehensive understanding of users’ viewpoints, this study incorporates LDA & TextRank method and other information extraction technologies to capture the statements from large-scale literature, app reviews, typical cases and survey interviews, which could be regarded as the resource of the viewpoints.

By adopting the Q method that aims for studying subjective thought patterns to identify users’ potential views, the authors have identified three categories of stakeholders’ subjectivities: macro-policy sensitive, trade-offs and personal information sensitive, each of which perceives different risk and affordance of information leakage and importance and urgency of privacy protection. All of the subjectivities of the respondents reflect the awareness of the issue of information leakage, that is, the interested parties like social network sites are unable to protect their full personal information, while reflecting varied resistance and susceptibility of disclosing personal information for big data technology applications.

The findings of this study provide an overview of the subjective patterns on the information leakage issue. Being the first to incorporate the Q method to study the views of personal information leakage and privacy protection, the research not only broadens the application field of the Q method but also enriches the research methods for personal information protection. Besides, the proposed LDA & TextRank method in this paper alleviates the limitation of statements resource in the Q method.

The increasing growth of urbanisation, especially in developing countries, coupled with affordable housing leakages, may thwart achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 (sustainable cities and communities). Studies regarding affordable housing leakages and their aftermath to Goal 11 in one study are scarce in Malaysia. The study investigated Malaysia's low-cost housing (LCH) leakages and their aftermath to Goal 11 and proffered measures to achieving Goal 11 and its targets. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

The researchers covered four of Malaysia's major cities via a qualitative approach. The study used 40 participants via semi-structured virtual interviews, and saturation was achieved. The study adopted a thematic approach for the collected data and honed them with secondary sources.

Findings group Malaysia's LCH leakages into government/agencies/departments in housing, housing developers/building contractors and client/building owners' root causes in Malaysia's context. It shows a threat from Malaysia's LCH leakages to achieving Goal 11 and proffered measures to enhance achieving Goal 11. Achieving Goal 11 will strengthen and improve Malaysia's many SDGs accomplishments because of their link.

Apart from proffering measures to mitigate long-standing issues (leakages) in Malaysia's LCH delivery from achieving Goal 11, findings will stipulate the accomplishment of other SDGs related to housing delivery.

This study seeks to collaborate with the discussions on the usefulness of the narrative approach in accounting. In this context, this study aims to elaborate small collective stories, developed from interviews, to expose the population’s perception of the social and environmental impact (positive and negative externalities) resulting from iron ore mining in the city of Congonhas-Minas Gerais (MG).

This research, using counternarratives, aims to elaborate small collective stories, developed from 52 interviews, to expose the population’s perception of externalities resulting from the exploitation of iron ore in the city of Congonhas-MG, Brazil, to give more insight for social and environmental accounting reporting. A qualitative investigation is used with a narrative approach that focuses on a specific event in the participants’ lives.

The authors sought to create a sense of collective experiences of the interviewees through narratives representative of the residents’ perception of externalities in the form of small collective stories. However, it can be observed that the local population recognizes the impact of numerous externalities. Likewise, the use of narratives allows the reader to experience another reality – a reflection on the impact of business activities in a given context. Unlike conventional corporate social reporting, models based on qualitative information can be inclusive, produced by/for the community toward action that transforms the local reality.

This study intends to contribute to the debate on reporting models that are developed by and for external stakeholders. This approach has the potential to improve participants’ both awareness and engagement, supporting transformative social action. This study makes several contributions. It contributes to the literature with a narrative approach, which is not often used in the accounting literature; it brings insights from the Latin American context, which is especially valuable given how the Anglo-American accounting literature includes few papers addressing this context; it presents the view of marginalized communities that are too often overlooked (this narrative approach offers important insights into the lived experience of people at a very granular level).

Collective memory of conflicts is assembled around major events, such as, in the context of the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict, the 1948 Palestinian exodus from the central cities of Lydda and Ramla. To date, however, various theoretical aspects of major events of conflicts have not been considered in the literature. This article aims to address this lack by exploring for the first time the way in which the causes for that exodus were presented in Israel from 1949 to 2005.

Methodologically, this is based on studies that have analyzed separately the publications by various Israeli state establishments (e.g. National Information Center, Ministry of Education, the National Archive, and the army – IDF), and those by various Israeli‐Jewish societal establishments (e.g. the research community, newspapers and 1948 war veterans).

Theoretically, the article contributes various insights, pertaining, for example, to: the five Manifestation Characteristics and the two Influence Characteristics of major events of conflicts; the eight determinant factors that shape the impact of these events; and the dynamic nature of the representation of major events.

Taken altogether, this article contributes to the empirical and theoretical research on the major events in conflicts.

While the potential of information and communication technology (ICT) for poverty reduction is widely recognised, limited knowledge exists on its use in the social protection schemes devised for the world’s poor. Drawing on the institutionalist vision of IS development and organisational change put forward by Avgerou (2000), the authors propose that computerisation of these schemes entails two processes, namely, the progressive affirmation of ICT innovation and a shift in the programmes' organisational structure, which moves from a subsidy-based model to one grounded on direct cash transfers. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how the role of ICT in anti-poverty schemes results from concomitance of such processes.

The paper draws on a study of the public distribution system (PDS), the main food security scheme in India, as it is being computerised in the state of Karnataka. Following an interpretive case study methodology, it investigates the ongoing computerisation of the Karnataka PDS through a combination of back-end and front-end technologies, based on biometric recognition of the programme’s users.

The data reveal that transformation of the PDS results from the simultaneous processes of institutionalisation of ICT innovation and deinstitutionalisation of the extant state-led subsidy scheme, in favour of a leaner social protection system centred on cash transfers to beneficiaries. This illustrates the point that ICT innovation is intertwined with the decline of an extant social welfare structure and the rise of a new one, based on the direct transfer of benefits.

The paper offers a new theoretical perspective to illuminate the computerisation of anti-poverty programmes, a phenomenon that affects the entitlements of millions of poor people on a global scale. In parallel, it draws practical implications for countries embarking on the digitalisation of their social protection schemes.

The paper examines how oil multinational companies (MNCs) in Nigeria framed accounts to dissociate themselves from causing oil spills.

The authors utilised data from relevant corporate reports, external accounts and interviews, and used sensegiving with defensive behaviours theoretical framing to explore corporate narratives aimed at altering stakeholders' perceptions.

The corporations gave sense to their audience by invoking scapegoating blame avoidance narrative in attributing the cause of most oil spills in Nigeria to outsiders (sabotage), despite potentially misclassifying the sabotage-corrosion dichotomy. Corporate stance was reinforced through justifying narrative, which suggested that multi-stakeholders jointly determined the causes of oil spills, thus portraying corporate accounts as transparent, credible and objective.

The socio-political dynamics in an empirical setting affect corporate accounts and how those accounts appear persuasive, implying that such contextual factors merit consideration when evaluating corporate accounts. For example, despite contradictions in corporate accounts, corporate attribution of oil spills to external factors appeared persuasive due to the inherently complicated socio-political dynamics.

With compensation to oil spills' victims only legally permitted for non-sabotage-induced spills alongside the burden of proof on the victims, the MNCs are incentivised to attribute most oil spills to sabotage. On policy implication, accountability would be best served when the MNCs are tasked both with the burden of proof and a responsibility to demonstrate their transparency in preventing oil spills, including those caused by sabotage.

Crisis situations generate multiple and competing perspectives, but sensegiving and defensive behaviours lenses enrich our understanding of how crisis-ridden companies frame narratives to alter stakeholders' perceptions. Accounts-giving therefore partly satisfies accountability demands, and acts as sensegiving signals aimed at reframing/redefining existing perceptions.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, it investigates whether and to what extent “linguistic hedging”, an impression management form of linguistic expression that conveys an ambiguous level of commitment, is used in corporate social responsibility (CSR) employment narratives; and second, it explores whether there is any difference in the use of linguistic hedging between written and spoken corporate forms of language. It mobilises these objectives by examining employee-related narratives made by electronic manufacturing services (EMS) providers domiciled in Taiwan, in the context of labour malpractice incidents.

Two groups of data are examined: corporate responsibility reports (written language) and interviews and speeches of corporate founders and senior executives (spoken language). The research sample is ten Taiwanese EMS firms, all of which attracted public criticism and scrutiny due to a series of employee-related incidents. The sample period is between 2009 and 2013. Linguistic hedging is measured quantitatively by the relative word frequency of hedges, using the concordance software ANTCONC, with findings interpreted through the lens of legitimacy theory and impression management.

The study found that hedging was evident in CSR narratives. The EMS providers in Taiwan appeared to use hedging in employee-related disclosures to manage legitimacy challenges due to employee-related incidents that had happened in their assembly plants. The adjustments in employee-related disclosures made by the EMS firms as a legitimation strategy can be seen as a rhetoric device of impression management or a form of symbolic legitimation to persuade society to restore their legitimacy status. Further, overall hedging was more frequently used in spoken than written language, which suggests that rhetorical hedging in written narratives is more likely to be a deliberate choice of tactics to influence stakeholder perceptions and thereby manage corporate legitimacy.

The study introduces a new analytical technique, linguistic hedging, into the CSR literature. This enriches research methods used in this field, providing more compelling insights into the relationship between the use of language and CSR narratives in the process of corporate legitimation of employee-related practices. This study thus provides a platform for future computational-linguistics studies in the field of CSR.

The paper aims to explore the problematics of validity that are inherent to the conduct of an action research project because of the disparate language games of both practitioners and academics.

An exploration is offered of the tensions between different understandings of a research setting at different stages of the research process.

In each phase of the research there are a number of tensions between different epistemological assumptions about the “reality” of the research setting. Validity is not, therefore, about capturing a singular objective picture of the organisation, but rather it is produced through the negotiation of a temporary intersection of language games.

The paper provides a framework for understanding the role of the researcher in the research process and the issues underlying validity claims made from different epistemological positions.

The paper provides insights in to the mechanisms through which practitioners and academics come to understand each other and the limitations of this knowledge.

The article raises awareness of the different normative assumptions at play within a variety of action research contexts.