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Little is known about how and why pilots are useful in the context of organisational change. There has similarly been little attention to processes of distributed leadership in organisational change. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical argument relating to how key aspects shaping organisational change can be addressed by distributed change leadership through the mechanism of pilots.

The paper contribution is to review extant literature on change management and distributed leadership to build a model of distributed change leadership.

The paper outlines how the model of distributed change leadership can be applied through a pilot strategy to help engender commitment and learning, as well as contextualising the change to cope with the complexities of the situation.

The paper concludes with a discussion on the opportunities distributed leadership through pilots can bring to the effectiveness of organisational change interventions. The paper identifies a series of research propositions to help guide future directions for research. Finally the paper explores practical implications of the suggestions.

There is an absence of discussion on distributed leadership within the context of change management. Further the mechanism of pilots shaped by distributed leadership has not been explored. This paper is intended to provide a stimulus for exploring this important area in terms of shaping thinking and designs for organisational change to enhance effectiveness.

New Public Management (NPM)-style reforms have resulted in unintended effects such as fragmentation, deficient coordination and undermining political control. This book is in search of new steering concepts to counter this fragmentation and re-coordinate the public sector. In this chapter, the search for new steering concepts is addressed by looking at a type of public management reform that is an extremely ‘wicked problem’ in terms of steering and coordination, that is, emergent and complex change processes. Such a type of reform process is a complex network of different sub-types of reform with a multitude of actors with different interests and motives. Many decentral actors initiate various reforms at different places from which in the course of time a trend emerges, and several central actors try to coordinate and supervise, but have limited influence. Such an ‘emergent and complex’ type of change process indeed requires fundamentally new steering concepts.

This paper aims to identify both the traditional and novel forms of marketing behind New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern’s landslide victory in the 2020 New Zealand General Election during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This research analysed both qualitative and quantitative data, including over 70 primary sources, the perspectives of practitioners, polling and data from surveys with over 450,000 respondents. The qualitative data was analysed interpretively against established theoretical concepts, whereas the quantitative data was analysed through descriptive statistics.

This research found that COVID-19 drastically changed what the public prioritised, allowing Ardern and Labour to position themselves as guardians of government stability, while camouflaging previous delivery failures. Labour also used a more emergent market-oriented and “polite” populist political marketing strategy.

While the survey data used is not a perfect sample of the population, it is the largest public opinion survey in New Zealand and, given its convergence with other sources, provides valuable insights into political marketing during a crisis more broadly.

This research reinforces marketing’s most important aspect; the market should drive action. How decision makers respond to the market should depend on the environment. Thus, up-to-date market research becomes even more important during a crisis, as the environment changes rapidly. This leaves prior assumptions obsolete and implies strategy needs to be adaptive. Additionally, greater public attention provides governing leaders with the opportunity to present a more well-rounded leadership image.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research to look at marketing while in government and election campaigning in the context of successful management of a global pandemic.

The object of this research is the reconstruction of the existing legal response by European Union states to the phenomenon of immigration. It seeks to analyse the process of conferral of protection.

One main dimension is selected and discussed: the case law of the national courts. The study focuses on the legal status of immigrants resulting from the intervention of these national courts.

The research shows that although the courts have conferred an increasing protection on immigrants, this has not challenged the fundamental principle of the sovereignty of the states to decide, according to their discretionary prerogatives, which immigrants are allowed to enter and stay in their territories. Notwithstanding the differences in the general constitutional and legal structures, the research also shows that the courts of the three countries considered – France, Germany and Spain – have progressively moved towards converging solutions in protecting immigrants.

The research contributes to a better understanding of the different legal orders analysed.

Accounting’s definition of accountability should include attributes of socioenvironmental degradation manufactured by unsustainable technologies. Beck argues that emergent accounts should reflect the following primary characteristics of technological degradation: complexity, uncertainty, and diffused responsibility. Financial stewardship accounts and probabilistic assessments of risk, which are traditionally employed to allay the public’s fear of uncontrollable technological hazards, cannot reflect these characteristics because they are constructed to perpetuate the status quo by fabricating certainty and security. The process through which safety thresholds are constructed and contested represents the ultimate form of socialized accountability because these thresholds shape how much risk people consent to be exposed to. Beck’s socialized total accountability is suggested as a way forward: It has two dimensions, extended spatiotemporal responsibility and the psychology of decision-making. These dimensions are teased out from the following constructs of Beck’s Risk Society thesis: manufactured risks and hazards, organized irresponsibility, politics of risk, radical individualization and social learning. These dimensions are then used to critically evaluate the capacity of full cost accounting (FCA), and two emergent socialized risk accounts, to integrate the multiple attributes of sustainability. This critique should inform the journey of constructing more representative accounts of technological degradation.

This chapter uses the theory of complex systems as a conceptual lens through which to compare the work of Friedrich Hayek with that of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom. It is well known that, from the 1950s onwards, Hayek conceptualised the market as a complex adaptive system. It is argued in this chapter that, while the Ostroms began explicitly to describe polycentric systems as a class of complex adaptive system from the mid-to-late 1990s onwards, they had in fact developed an account of polycentricity as displaying most if not all of the hallmarks of organised complexity long before that time. The Ostromian and Hayekian approaches can thus be seen to share a good deal in common, with both portraying important aspects of society – the market economy in the case of Hayek, and public economies, legal and political systems, and environment resources in the case of the Ostroms – as complex rather than simple systems. Aside from helping to bring out this aspect of the Ostroms’ work, using the theory of complex systems as a framework for comparing the Hayekian and Ostromian approaches serves two other purposes. First, it can be used to show how one widely criticised aspect of Hayek’s theory of society as a complex system, namely his account of cultural evolution via group selection, can be strengthened by an appeal to the work of Elinor Ostrom. Second, it also helps to resolve a tension – ultimately acknowledged by the Ostroms themselves – between some of their explicit methodological pronouncements and the actual, substantive approach they adopted in their analysis of polycentric systems.

This chapter reviews three analytical perspectives – ‘structural’, ‘network’ and ‘cultural’ – on the study of power and their implications for theorizing elites. It builds on this initial theoretical review by developing a critical realist approach to the study of organizational elites out of the structurally based perspective identified in the first section of the chapter. The explanatory potential of this critical realist approach is then illustrated through two case studies of ruling elites embedded in contrasting historical, political and social contexts. The final section of the chapter provides a discussion of the wider implications of these case study analyses for understanding and explaining the ‘new feudalism’ which is emerging in advanced political economies and societies.

The purpose of this paper is to emphasise projects as being part of a social process. It aims to move away from the traditional views that lay emphases on linear and predictable models of project practice to one that better highlights the complex nature of human interrelations.

The work reported upon involved a case study where one of the authors was embedded as a reflective practitioner undertaking action learning and elicitation of knowledge from colleagues using soft systems methodology as a primary research method.

Findings from the doctoral research implemented in the Middle East, indicate that socio‐cultural factors in project contexts affect knowledge creation processes critical to organisational change.

Research results benefited from viewing the project organization as a “complex adaptive system” with a structurally open project entity facilitating the contextual interconnections necessary for detecting and creating environmental change.

Pragmatic knowledge was seen as emergent through movement of human interactions and contributed to the portrayal of the project organisation as a “becoming” cognitive system whose resilience is dependent upon producing meaning as opposed to processing information. When change management is viewed in a multicultural context such as this, within this paradigm, then greater emphasis will likely be placed upon complexity and uncertainty issues arising out of the interplay of culture and the political aspects of managing change in a more empathic way.

Complexity in project management and theory has traditionally focussed on technical and structural aspects of project practice; but given the heterogeneous nature of human capital residing in today's organisations, aligning social systems with nature where disorder and uncertainty prevail, provides a more relevant ecological model of social analysis. The paper shows that the challenge today for those working in culturally pluralistic project environments is to make sense of such multiple realities and disparities in language to effectively manage the inherent power relationships that influence project outcomes.

Political economies evolve institutionally and technologically over time. This means that to understand evolutionary political economy one must understand the nature of the evolutionary process in its full complexity. From the time of Darwin and Spencer natural selection has been seen as the foundation of evolution. This view has remained even as views of how evolution operates more broadly have changed. An issue that some have viewed as an aspect of evolution that natural selection may not fully explain is that of emergence of higher order structures, with this aspect having been associated with the idea of emergence. In recent decades it has been argued that self-organization dynamics may explain such emergence, with this being argued to be constrained, if not overshadowed, by natural selection. Just as the balance between these aspects is debated within organic evolutionary theory, it also arises in the evolution of political economy, as between such examples of self-organizing emergence as the Mengerian analysis of the appearance of commodity money in primitive societies and the natural selection that operates in the competition between firms in markets.

To present an analytical framework for conducting critical dialogic accounting and accountability-based participatory action research to further democratisation, social change and empowering marginalised groups, and to reflect on its application in a Bangladeshi nongovernmental organisation's microfinance program.

The framework, synthesising prior CDAA theorising and agonistic-inspired action research, is described, followed by a discussion of the methodological challenges when applying this during a ten-year, ongoing intervention seeking greater voice for poor, female borrowers.

Six methodological issues emerged: investigating contested issues rather than organisation-centric research; identifying and engaging divergent discourses; engaging marginalised groups, activists and/or dominant powerholders; addressing power and power relations; building alliances for change; and evaluating and disseminating results. The authors discuss these issues and how the participatory action research methods and analytical tools used evolved in response to emergent challenges, and key lessons learned in a study of microfinance and women's empowerment.

The paper addresses calls within and beyond accounting to develop critical, engaged and change-oriented scholarship adopting an agonistic research methodology. It uses a novel critical dialogic accounting and accountability-based participatory action research approach. The reflexive examination of its application engaging NGOs, social activists, and poor women to challenge dominant discourses and practices, and build alliances for change, explores issues encountered. The paper concludes with reflective questions to aid researchers interested in undertaking similar studies in other contentious, power-laden areas concerning marginalised groups.