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This ESRC‐based research article aims to investigate the effects of performativity on primary schools and the teachers therein. It also aims to show how performativity to maintain and improve the school's position in an educational market affects the teacher relations with their institution and how the school works to embrace its teachers in developing the school's market position.

Four researchers carried out this ESRC (RES‐000‐23‐1281) research, to a greater or lesser extent. The researchers in all of the schools, except City, carried out interview/conversations in the main, with observational field notes accounting for just over 50 per cent of their total data. They then began progressive focusing on City school where the rest of the observational field notes were carried out and in particular the bulk of conversations with young learners. This focus also included the largest group of teacher interview/conversations. This progressive focusing bears the weight of the ethnographic data and the analysis for this article, in line with a grounded theory approach. The whole database included 52 days’ observational field notes, 54 recorded conversations with teachers and other significant adults, and 32 recorded conversations with learners. All recorded conversations with management, teachers, pupils and parents that were seen as being of theoretical significance were transcribed.

The paper outlines some of the similarities with these institutions, but also shows how this new model differs and how it could be applied to a much wider constituency than the earlier three models – that of the public and private sector. It shows how the embracing performative institution in a marketised environment influences the practices of its teachers and changes to their professional commitment, which focuses more on the institutional development than broader professional values. At the same time it can be seen how supportive professional cultures encourage teachers to embrace the school's performative development and how this influences teacher identity. The findings suggest that institutional members both constitute, and are constituted by, the influence of the embracing institution and performative regulation and that their professional identities are constantly readjusted to ensure their interests coincide with the institutions interests.

This article provides useful formation on how performativity to maintain and improve the school's position in an educational market affects the teacher relations with their institution and how the school works to embrace its teachers in developing the school's market position.

This paper aims to review the literature on the use of the notion of performativity and its related concepts in accounting research. The literature uses the term performativity in almost diametrically different ways, yet most papers assume that the meaning of the term is self-evident. We build on recent reviews of the notion of performativity and explicate the implicit tensions in the accounting literature, discovering a need to clarify how the accounting literature has explored the processes – how accounting becomes performative – and effects – what is performed – of accounting performativity. The paper develops suggestions for future theoretical and empirical research.

The authors have searched in six leading accounting journals (Accounting, Organizations and Society, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, Management Accounting Research, Critical Perspectives on Accounting and Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management) for the terms “performativity” and/or “performative” and/or “performable”. This yielded 289 results from which we distilled a core sample of 92 papers which substantially draw on the concept and explicate their use of the term.

The authors find that the accounting literature has paid almost equal attention to the conforming and amplifying effects of performativity but has mostly explored how conditions of performativity are built. Less attention has been paid to how accounting generates multiple worlds and how differences in these worlds are coordinated by accounting. Building institutions and searching for accounting incompleteness have been developed as the two main processes where accounting is made performative.

The paper develops avenues for future research, highlighting the potential for a deeper understanding of how the notion of performativity can be used. We do not advocate homogenizing the literature, instead exploring its fruitful tensions to discover a renewed interest in how accounting is constitutive of existing and/or new worlds. We illustrate this potential by reflecting on the debates about accounting incompleteness and the boundaries of accounting. The authors also suggest the potentials for concepts of performativity in studying emerging phenomena such as big data and sustainability and revisiting the ethics of using accounting as a social and organizational practice.

The literature review explicates differences in the use of the term performativity, which usually remain implicit in the literature. The study develops a framework that attends to both the processes – problematizing the conditions for performativity or not – and effects – conforming and amplifying – of performativity accounting studies have drawn upon, which clarifies how the accounting literature has mobilized the notion of performativity and the contributions the accounting literature has added. Further, the authors extend Vosselman’s (2022) review both in scope and nuance.

Drawing on a performative ontology, this article extends the literature on health promotion in organizations by exploring how health promotion is performed in care work. The focus of the study is on health promotion in a context of illness and/or decline, which form the core of the studied organizational activities. The paper addresses the following question: how do care workers working in elderly care and mental health care organizations accomplish health promotion in the context of illness and/or decline?

The article develops a performative approach and analyses material-discursive practices in health promoting care work. The empirical material includes 36 semi-structured interviews with care workers, observations and organizational documents.

Two central material-discursive health promoting practices in care work are identified: confirming that celebrates service users as residents and the organizations as a home, and balancing at the limits of health promotion. The practices of balancing make the limitations of health promotion discernible and involve reconciling health promotion with that which does not neatly fit into it (illness, unachievable care aims, the institution and certain organizing). In sum, the study shows how health promotion can structure processes in care homes where illness and decline often are particularly palpable.

The paper explores health promotion in a context rarely explored in organization studies. Previous organization studies have to some extent explored health promotion and care work, but typically separately. Further, the few studies that have adopted a performative approach to material-discursive practices in the context of care work have typically primarily focused on IT. We extend previous organization studies literature by producing new insights: (1) from an important organizational context of health promotion and (2) of under-researched entanglements of human and non-human actors in care work providing a performative theory of reconciling organizational tensions.

This chapter explores the unknown territory of a lost project: an ethnography of a public swimming pool. The discussion is contextualised within my broader sociological theory of ‘nothing’, as a category of unmarked, negative social phenomena, including no-things, no-bodies, no-wheres, non-events and non-identities. These meaningful symbolic objects are constituted through social interaction, which can take two forms: acts of commission and acts of omission. I tell the story of how this project did not happen, through the things I did not do or that did not materialise, and how I consequently did not become a certain type of researcher. I identify three types of negative phenomena that I did not observe and document – invisible figures, silent voices and empty vessels – and, consequently, the knowledge I did not acquire. However, nothing is also productive, generating new symbolic objects as substitutes, alternatives and replacements: the somethings, somebodies and somewheres that are done or made instead. Thus finally, I reflect on how not doing this project led me to pursue others, cultivating a different research identity that would not otherwise have existed.

Grounded in experience of co-organizing a two-day photography-based workshop in Paris, this paper explores how photo-dialogues can facilitate anti-racist pedagogy and generative discussions about how race and racism function in marketplace contexts.

This paper draws on the authors' involvement in a cross-national and cross-disciplinary team of scholars who worked with local community stakeholders—including activists, artists and practitioners—to discuss, theorize and photo-document issues regarding race and racism in the Parisian marketplace.

This paper contributes to the literature on visual culture studies and critical race studies as it demonstrates the potentials of photography combined with dialogue to challenge the White supremacy over archiving and visuality in the context of urban spaces. This new methodology is an opportunity to reflect on archetypes of visuality that depart from the traditional Parisian flâneur to be consistent with and reinforce anti-racist stances.

Photography and visual methods often play peripheral roles in anti-racist education across various disciplines and research areas, including critical marketplace studies. This paper expands understanding of the potentials of using photographic methods as part of critical and anti-racist work related to racial and racist dynamics, including issues regarding power, White supremacy and public space. It outlines the use of photographic dialogues in a context (Paris, France) where discussion of race is regularly societally discouraged. Thus, this work shifts the focus away from decontextualized research that regards race as an object, to specifically foreground understandings of racialized experiences and how the photographic gaze produces and is produced by racialized viewers.

The purpose of this paper is to identify common and differentiating (external and internal) factors of motivation of the subordinates in the Polish uniformed services such as the armed forces, the fire service and the police. Moreover, this study aims to explore their relationship with the specificity of the profession and the selected socio-professional variables shaping their needs and value systems.

To achieve the research objective, the research problem has been specified: Which factors are universal and which significantly differentiate the strategies of motivating soldiers, firefighters and police officers? Therefore, the hypothesis assumes that motivating strategies in the examined institutions (uniformed services) depend not only on their structural and functional or legal and organizational culture specificity but also on the individual needs related to the position, corps (officer/noncommissioned officer), an individual system of values and social factors such as material and social. Methods were based on the survey research technique on a deliberately selected sample of soldiers and officers occupying different positions.

The research results have a dual character. On the one hand, they confirm the effectiveness of financial factors in the motivating process in the organization, and on the other hand, they show the specifics of total institutions, in which, apart from financial motivators, promotion and position in the hierarchy are important.

The main limitation of this study was the availability of respondents and their willingness to consent to the study. It is probably related to the nature of the organizations surveyed. It aims to explore their relationship with the specificity of the profession and the selected socioprofessional variables shaping their needs and value systems. Five motivators were adopted for the study, including two material ones, cash prizes and material prizes, and three nonmaterial motivators, promotion, participation in training (upgrading qualifications) and vacation. Two premises justify choosing such a research subject. The first reason concerns the common specificity of this type of organization that is relatively closed, unified, with a high level of hierarchization and formalization. The second one relates to differences in organizational cultures and systems to motivate subordinates.

Research results provide the basis for identifying a change in value systems (subsequent studies) in total institutions and for assessing motivational preferences in the examined organizations.

The examined uniformed services constitute an essential element of the social structure, which along with the 1989 political transformation transformed from closed and resistant to open and socialized institutions subject to similar laws that apply in other organizations. Also, the values and expectations of people serving in them changed radically. Service became a profession, and purely autotelic motivations turned into materialistic ones. This change provides grounds for conducting research in this area.

This research fills in the empirical gap in previous research on motivation in total institutions. They are justified by the changing sociopolitical and economic situation in Poland and the change in the value systems of Poles.

This paper aims to address how organizational routines paradoxically affect the process of organizational innovation based on a new construct of routines or to investigate the coexistence of both hindering and promoting effects from routines and their differentiated affecting paths.

This paper adopts an interpretive and exploratory case study on the business model innovation of Yimu Technology Company Limited (Yimu Tech) from product standardization to customization. Considering that this innovation reflects a successful down-up rather than traditional up-down innovation, this paper focuses on it to explore how the most micro routines affect the whole process of innovation. Almost two years were spent in collecting data from Yimu Tech and in following the innovation through approaches of semi-structured interviews, archival data and observation; the data were analyzed through a five-step process before a framework showing the paradoxical effects was finally set up.

This research specifies the construct of organizational routines and promotes a five-dimensional concept covering the organizational, collective and individual levels of an organization. It confirms the interaction between the performative and ostensive aspects of routines, by showing that the ostensive aspect may not only guide tasks performing but also allow multiple changes, and the performative aspect may affect the ostensive aspect through the down-up or up-down path. Also, it finds that routines may paradoxically affect all three phases of innovation, with a strong up-down hindering effect but a weak down-up promoting effect in the preparation phase, a strong down-up promoting effect but a weak hindering effect in the emergence phase and both significant effects in the consolidation phase.

This research is constrained by several limitations. The set up framework of routines and their paradoxical effects on innovation need a further confirmation in more contexts or organizations; more elements should be considered in exploring the evolution of routines and their effects on innovations; little attention has been paid to the relationship between these two types of effects, conflicting with each other, joining together or working independently.

The findings offered some valuable insights for further research on organizational routines and organizational innovation and hold important implications for management practices. This research enriched the two-aspect view of routines by constructing a five-dimensional framework; further research studies on routine dynamics by showing the interaction between the performative and ostensive aspects can contribute to the study on effects of organizational routines on innovations by showing how routines promote and hinder innovation simultaneously throughout the whole process. It reminds managers of the strong power from the microlevel of an organization in innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the identity and diversity literatures and discuss how a better understanding of the theoretical connections between the two informs both diversity research and diversity management practices.

Literature review followed by a discussion of the theoretical and practical consequences of connecting the identity and diversity literatures.

The authors inform future research in three ways. First, by showing how definitions of identity influence diversity theorizing in specific ways. Second, the authors explore how such definitions entail distinct foci regarding how diversity should be analyzed and interventions actioned. Third, the authors discuss how theoretical coherence between definitions of identity and diversity perspectives – as well as knowledge about a perspective’s advantages and limitations – is crucial for successful diversity management research and practice.

The authors argue for a better understanding of differences, overlaps and limits of different identity perspectives, and for a stronger engagement with practice.

The work can encourage policy makers, diversity and HR managers to question their own practices and assumptions leading to more theoretical informed diversity management practices.

The theoretical connections between identity and diversity literature have so far not been reviewed systematically. The work foregrounds how important it is for diversity scholars to consider identity underpinnings of diversity research to help further develop the field within and beyond the three streams the authors discuss.