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Central to the fit concept is that congruence between individual and environmental attributes leads to improved outcomes. However, when discussing fit, researchers often describe congruence as alignment between distinctive or unique individual and environmental attributes. We suggest that current approaches to examining fit do not adequately account for this assumption of distinctiveness because they fail to consider normative expectations and preferences. As such, we propose an alternative theoretical and methodological approach to conceptualizing and measuring fit.

We introduce the normative theory of fit, outline how researchers can decompose fit into distinctive and normative components and identify areas for future research.

Management researchers have largely ignored the importance of decomposing fit into distinctive and normative components. This shortcoming necessitates additional research to ensure a more accurate understanding of fit and its relationship with outcomes.

We provide a clarification and critical examination of a pervasive construct in the field of management by introducing the normative theory of fit, identifying areas where researchers can employ this theoretical lens and suggesting a reevaluation of the importance placed on differentiation that is traditionally employed in practice.

This paper engages multidisciplinary perspectives on truth, authority, expertise and belief to unpack and better understand the underlying epistemology and implications of the ACRL Frame “authority is constructed and contextual.”

Following an overview of the issues confronting us in a “post-truth world,” the paper reviews critiques of the ACRL Frame “authority is constructed and contextual” and examines the related concepts of truth, authority, expertise and belief from multidisciplinary perspectives.

While the Frame acknowledges the limitations and biases of current scholarly publishing and implicitly supports social justice, it runs the danger of promoting relativism and is ambiguous regarding the relationships between expertise and authority. The critical concepts of truth and belief are conspicuously absent. Engaging a critical discussion and understanding of these concepts is a valuable contribution to information literacy.

This paper offers an important and accessible analysis of the frame “authority is constructed and contextual” and its underlying concepts. It moves beyond the library literature to include multidisciplinary perspectives and will require the engagement of the wider library community to promote discussion of the underlying epistemology and links between the construction of authority and truth, expertise and belief. In particular, the discussion of the construction of belief and the difference between judgments of fact and judgments of value offers important additions to the library literature.

This chapter addresses a significant topic in Algeria, namely the issue of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), by examining the use of business ethics codes. In recent years, there has been growing interest among companies in implementing practices that can justify their CSR efforts, including the development of corporate business ethics codes. These codes play a crucial role in formalizing the integration of CSR strategies. In Algeria, several companies have adopted business ethics codes; one such example is the companies in the oil and gas sector, the leading oil industry company in Algeria. These companies have implemented a business ethics code to provide justification and guidance for their CSR practices. The main objective of this chapter is to demonstrate the commitment of companies to CSR through the development of their business ethics codes. It presents the results of a comprehensive analysis of the business ethics codes of Algerian companies in the oil and gas sector. The approach involved the development of an analytical framework with various criteria and an objective examination of the business ethics code to yield results that aligned with these criteria. The study concludes that the business ethics codes of these companies serve as sources of internal regulation that primarily address ethical concerns and reflects the existing Algerian regulations at the organizational level.

This research aims at explaining the phenomenon of the “black children” (heihaizi), a very little-known generation who lived with concealment under the one-child policy in China. The one-child policy was officially introduced to nationwide at the end of 1979 by permitting per couple to have one child only, later modified to a second child allowed if the first was a girl in rural China in 1984. It was officially replaced by a nation-wide two-child policy and most existing research focused on the parents’ sufferings and policy changes. The term “black children” has been mainly used to describe their absence from their family hukou registration and education. However, this research aims at expanding the meaning of being “black” to explain the children who were concealed more than at the level of family formal registration, but also physical freedom and emotional bond. What we do not yet know are the details of their lived experiences from a day-to-day base: where did they live? How were they raised up? Who were involved? Who benefited from it and who did not? In this way, this research challenges the existing scholarship on the one-child policy and repositions the “black children” as primary victims, and reveals the family as a key figure in co-producing their diminished status with the support of state power. It is very important to understand these children’s loss of citizenship and human freedom from the inside of the family because they were concealed in so many ways away from public view and interventions. This research focuses on illustrating how their lack of access to continued, stabilized, and reciprocally recognized family interactions framed their very idea of self-worth and identity.

Drawing from cognitive dissonance theory (CDT) and attribution ambiguity theory (AAT), this paper aims to examine how employees interact with queer customers within the hospitality service and the ways that queer representations regulate emotions when discriminated against by normative gender roles.

This study used a mixed method. Study 1 used firm-level secondary data to analyze hospitality firms’ efforts in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and the effects on firms’ profit margins and customer satisfaction. In Study 2, an experimental design was used to understand how employees’ assailing behavior toward queer customers interacts with employee feelings of guilt and impacts their sabotage and organizational citizenship behavior via self-serving bias. Study 3 further explored how queer customer victimization interacts with stress to influence their perceptions of organization DEI authenticity and corporate social responsibility (CSR) through resilience.

Hospitality firms’ DEI efforts were associated with varying outcomes, including higher profit margins but lower customer satisfaction, while guilt weakened the impact of employees’ assailing behavior on their outcomes and customer stress amplified the effect of assailing behavior on queer customers’ perceptions of DEI authenticity and CSR through resilience.

Hospitality organizations should take proactive measures to address self-serving bias among employees. Moreover, fostering an inclusive culture is crucial, with managers playing a pivotal role in facilitating discussions and creating an environment that values diversity, inclusivity and respect for all employees.

The study makes a remarkable contribution to hospitality literature by focusing on CDT and AAT in providing valuable implications for DEI advocators to be aware of the tensions between heteronormativity and queer representations in service encounters.

This paper draws on African anti-colonial thought and Black consciousness to propose critical conscious leadership (CCL) as a decolonising leadership approach appropriate for pursuing emancipation, social justice and innovation in a new African university.

I utilised the method of critical discourse analysis to study Ihron Rensburg’s language as he reflected on his leadership at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). The study engaged with Rensburg’s writings and texts on his account of leading the merger and transformation of UJ. The primary text draws from his book “Serving Higher Purposes” (2020).

Through the construction of CCL, the paper proposes alternative tenets for leading transformation towards a new African university. CCL grounds a decolonised and pluriversal new African university’s character premised on a consciously revitalised alternative thinking that will carry the communitarian spirit of Africa in knowledge production, dissemination and consumption in humanising all and serving the greater good. And it operates within the dialectical tensions of the social and economic purpose of higher education (HE), African and global relevance, African and Western paradigms, excellent performance and attainment of social justice.

The proposed CCL offers an alternative leadership approach that responds to the call to “Dethrone the Empire” by centring Blackness in HE leadership, which is crucial for authentic transformation and decolonisation.

This study aims to explore how managers exercise agency in strategic investment decisions (SIDs) by drawing on their knowledgeability of the strategic context. Specifically, the authors address the role of position–practice relations and irresistible causal forces in this conduct.

The authors examine SID-making (SIDM) practices in four case organisations operating in highly competitive markets, conducting interviews with managers at various levels and analysing company documents. Drawing on strong structuration theory, the authors show how managerial decision makers draw upon their knowledge of organisational context when exercising agency in SIDs.

The authors provide insights into how SIDM behaviour, specifically agents’ conduct, is shaped by a combination of position–practice relations and the agents’ comprehension of their organisation’s context.

The authors extend the SIDM literature by surfacing the issue of how actors’ conjuncturally-specific knowledge of external structures shapes the general dispositions they draw on in exercising agency in practice.

The authors extend the SIDM literature by surfacing the issue of how actors’ conjuncturally-specific knowledge of external structures shapes the general dispositions they draw on in exercising agency in practice. Particularly, the authors contribute to this literature by identifying irresistible causal forces and illuminating why actors might not resist in SIDM processes, despite having the potential to do so.

This article aims to explore the potential of feminist phenomenology as a conceptual framework for advancing women’s entrepreneurship research and the suitability of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to the proposed framework.

The article critically examines the current state of women’s entrepreneurship research regarding the institutional context and highlights the benefits of a shift towards feminist phenomenology.

The prevailing disembodied and gender-neutral portrayal of entrepreneurship has resulted in an equivocal understanding of women’s entrepreneurship and perpetuated a male-biased discourse within research and practice. By adopting a feminist phenomenological approach, this article argues for the importance of considering the ontological dimensions of lived experiences of situatedness, intersubjectivity, intentionality and temporality in analysing women entrepreneurs’ agency within gendered institutional contexts. It also demonstrates that feminist phenomenology could broaden the current scope of IPA regarding the embodied dimension of language.

The adoption of feminist phenomenology and IPA presents new avenues for research that go beyond the traditional cognitive approach in entrepreneurship, contributing to theory and practice. The proposed conceptual framework also has some limitations that provide opportunities for future research, such as a phenomenological intersectional approach and arts-based methods.

The article contributes to a new research agenda in women’s entrepreneurship research by offering a feminist phenomenological framework that focuses on the embodied dimension of entrepreneurship through the integration of IPA and conceptual metaphor theory (CMT).

The aim of this paper is to contribute to knowledge about the diversity of credibility arrangements in new audit spaces “in the margins” of auditing and the implications of such arrangements.

The paper is based on an in-depth qualitative study of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) rights certification run by the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Rights (RFSL) during its first decade of operation. We have interviewed employees and studied documents at the certification units within the RFSL. We have also interviewed certified organizations.

We highlight two features that explain the unusual credibility arrangements in this audit practice: the role of beneficiaries in the organizational arrangements chosen and the role of responsibility as an organizing value with consequences for responsibility allocation in this certification. These features make it possible for the RFSL to act as a credible auditor even though it deviates from common arrangements for credible audits.

The RFSL certification is different in several ways. First, the RFSL acts as both a trainer and an auditor. Second, the trainers/auditors at the RFSL have no accreditation to guarantee their credibility. Third, the RFSL decides for itself what standards should apply for the certification and adapts these standards to the operation being audited. Therefore, this case provides a good opportunity to study alternative credibility arrangements in the margins of auditing as well as their justifications.

The purpose of this paper is to explore two financial inclusion measures adopted within the local welfare context of the city of Milan, Italy, examining their functioning and underpinning representations. The aim is also to understand how such representations take concrete shape in the practices of local actors, and their implications for the opportunities and constraints regarding individuals' effective inclusion. To this end, this paper takes a wide-ranging look at the interplay between the rise of financial inclusion and the individualisation and responsibilisation models informing welfare policies, within the broader context of financialisation processes overall.

This paper draws on the sociology of public action approach and provides a qualitative analysis of two case studies, a social microcredit service and a financial education programme, based on direct observation and semi-structured interviews conducted with key policy actors.

This paper sheds light on the rationale behind two financial inclusion services and illustrates how the instruments involved incorporate and tend to reproduce, individualising logics that reduce the problem of financial exclusion, and the social and economic vulnerability which underlies it, to a matter of personal responsibility, thus fuelling depoliticising tendencies in public action. It also discusses the contradictions underlying financial inclusion instruments, showing how local actors negotiate views and strategies on the problems to be addressed.

The paper makes an original contribution to the field of sociology and social policy by focusing on two under-researched instruments of financial inclusion and improving understanding of the finance-welfare state nexus and of the contradictions underpinning attempts at financial inclusion of the most vulnerable.