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The purpose of this paper is to examine what counts as knowledge in the organization/management field.

Conventional, legitimated knowledge is analyzed through research into representations of an influential management text. Management and management accounting textbooks and research papers are investigated to establish the types of knowledge produced.

Mainstream representations of this book are partial, focusing on a “model” of what is likely to ensure successful organizational change – structural and systemic adaptations. What has been ignored is the problematization of structural change and the role of human agency. The foci and omissions of these representations cohere with divisions in the social sciences more generally – between “objectivist” and “subjectivist” ontologies and epistemologies.

There is a need for further research into representations of texts about organizational change, the way the objectivist/subjectivist divide is played out, and its significance for organization/management studies and more widely for the social sciences.

Questions arise as to the validity and sustainability of such knowledge. Omissions about the difficulties in implementing structural change raise epistemological and practical difficulties for students, managers and consultants.

Omissions of human subjectivities and agency from mainstream knowledge is problematic regarding successful organizational change and social issues more widely.

The paper's value lies in the in‐depth analysis of representations of a text in the organization/management area and the linking of the type of knowledge produced with broader epistemological and methodological issues in the social sciences.

This essay critically examines Raewyn Connell’s Southern Theory. Limitations of the work include a tendency to overgeneralize about “Northern Theory” and to leave some claims about the power of “Southern Theory” unsubstantiated. Southern Theory’s most important contributions include its insights into the problematic tendencies and patterns of knowledge production in the Global North and its insistent plea to make social theory more dialogic.

NOT for a long time have books and libraries featured in the correspondence columns of The Times and other newspapers as regularly as they have in 1960. Earlier in the year Sir Alan Herbert's lending rights' scheme had a good run, and we have clearly not yet heard the last of it. Indeed, a Private Member's bill on the subject is to have its second reading in Parliament on December 9th. More recently, the Herbert proposals have had a by‐product in the shape of bound paperbacks, and a correspondence ensued which culminated in Sir Allen Lane's fifth‐of‐November firework banning hard‐covered Penguins for library use.

The interest in customer experience has increased at a phenomenal rate. However, research to capture the true meaning of the concept is limited. Therefore, this study aims to address the question of what are the underlying dimensions that constitute the construct of customer experience.

The netnography method is utilized to validate a priori concepts that have been identified in the literature within the tourist industry in Egypt.

The results identified eight dimensions; comfort, educational, hedonic, novelty, recognition, relational, safety and beauty, which are consistent with major studies on experience.

The focus of the study was on customer reviews that were written in English and posted online. Therefore, care should be taken when interpreting these findings.

This study attempted to gain a meaningful degree of understanding of customer experience construct. The results suggest a number of implications for service, marketing and brand managers. The knowledge of customer experience and the challenge of creating great customer experience are of utmost importance. Many marketers acknowledge the importance of customer experience, but they have very little knowledge of what the components are of customer experience.

Netnography has not been widely used as a marketing research technique.

The present conceptual study aims to discuss the integration of corporate social and environmental responsibility (ESR/CSR) into business strategies and operations. The objective is to propose a conceptual framework for synthesising pragmatic and constructionist theoretical discourses on ESR.

The paper applies the concept of syncretism – and inherent objective and subjective perspectives – to the field of ESR/CSR. A review of existing literature unfolds the construct of syncretism as a continuum integrating both systemic/pragmatic narratives and constructionist/ethnographic. The metabolism analogy is further discussed to stress the salience of ESR in determining the prospects for corporate sustainable development.

The achievement of syncretistic equilibrium is understood to occur at the intersection of constructionist and pragmatic epistemological influences. Existing research suggest that reducing or removing the external cost induced in industrial processes and exploiting marketing opportunities to signal positive ethicality of the firm are possible pathways for syncretistic equilibrium. The metabolism analogy is argued to abound with constructive implications on how businesses can provoke synergistic or symbiotic correlations between ESR and economic sustainability.

By integrating constructionist and pragmatic narratives into one conceptual proposition, it is hoped that this paper can lead to a better understanding of the way societal responsibility appears to business managers and, through that insight, lead to improvement in practice. Examining the extent to which metabolic processes and the functioning of the business system inspire comparable challenges can offer supportive basis for contriving effective ESR integration strategies.

Both constructionist (e.g. individuals’ values) and systemic (e.g. business case for CSR) narratives have received considerable attention form scholars in the field of ESR/CSR, yet they have never been assembled into one conceptual proposition. Syncretism constitutes a new line of thinking for conceptualising the constructionist and pragmatic challenges related to the integration of ESR into business strategies and operations.

The purpose of this paper is to address four questions: what are the drawbacks of an over reliance on the objectivist tradition in culture in international business (CIB) scholarship? Is a shift from mono-paradigmatic to multi-paradigmatic cultural research justified? What explains scholars’ hesitation in engaging in multi-paradigmatic studies? What arguments can we offer to convince them otherwise?

Informed by the critical perspective, this paper encourages a shift from mono-paradigmatic to multi-paradigmatic cultural studies. Guided by an emancipatory interest, and treating the field of culture studies as a complex system, this paper offers an integrative complexity (IC) based argument in favor of multi-paradigmatic studies. It argues that multi-paradigmatic studies allow scholars to employ higher IC than mono-paradigmatic studies, resulting in more innovative research outputs.

While mono-paradigmatic studies can achieve either predictability of output or in-depth understanding of cultural phenomena, multi-paradigmatic studies are capable of attaining both. The authors illustrate this through the example of a recent multi-paradigmatic study.

This paper does not offer insights for operationalizing multi-paradigmatic research, nor does it address factors other than IC that may impede scholars from engaging in such studies.

Shifting from mono-paradigmatic to multi-paradigmatic studies will enable scholars to address questions hitherto left unaddressed in CIB literature, facilitate a better understanding of new organizational forms, and redress the power disequilibrium between different paradigmatic schools. Implications are also offered for the training of cultural researchers in business schools.

This paper is the first of its kind to relate IC to merits of multi-paradigmatic cultural studies.

This paper aims to deal with the concepts of “institutions” and “institutional logics” in the context of business-to-business (B2B) marketing systems and uses institutional theory as a framework to look at value co-creation.

By integrating the literature on value co-creation, institutional theory and institutional entrepreneurship, the paper argues that the boundaries of B2B marketing systems are continuously reshaped through legitimation processes occurring through actors’ institutional work, thus making co-created value the only legitimate value.

The paper proposes a conceptual framework and furthers the conceptual development of value co-creation and augments the literature on service-dominant logic and the notion of co-created value by assuming a legitimacy-based B2B market systems perspective.

This paper presents a number of propositions that serve to illustrate several managerial implications. These arise from organizations co-creating value by conforming to the various institutional logics that maximize their legitimacy.

The paper makes a contribution by developing a critical theoretical framework based on the application of institutional theoretical constructs/concepts (e.g. ceremonial conformity, decoupling, considerations of face, confidence and good faith).