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The purpose of this study is to identify the fundamental elements necessary for formulating criteria to be used when recruiting politicians into the Sri Lankan political system with a view to professionalization. By means of a thorough examination of political practice issues, the paper focuses on the possibility of introducing the concept of political professionalization and endeavors to determine the prerequisite conditions needed to resolve or minimize those issues.

A total of 27 respondents: academics, clergy and journalists were purposively selected for this study and they were divided into three groups to enable data collection through focus group discussions. A thematic analysis method was used to analyze the data.

The main political practice problems were bribery and corruption, the misuse of state resources by politicians, the involvement of family in politics, and unscrupulous and unethical political campaigning. The majority of respondents cited greed for political power, low levels of education and an inadequate understanding of the parliamentary process as the leading factors which cause problems to arise in politics as practiced in Sri Lanka. The analysis revealed three main themes: “knowledge”, “skills” and “values”. Respondents recommended policy initiatives for political recruitment.

The findings suggested that the professionalization of political practice should be promoted by introducing knowledge C skills and values as criteria for political recruitment. And it also suggested that the introduction of professional political practice methods is vitally necessary to reduce political practice issues in the current political scenario of Sri Lanka.

The paper discusses the evolution of leadership practices performed by local political leaders in the last decade (2009–2019, a period which we might call post-global financial crisis and pre-COVID-19). It offers some new theoretical concepts to make sense of emerging contemporary public leadership practices, namely: leaders-hip hop; charismatic followership; and digital fabrication of charisma (digital charisma).

The paper is based on a single case study, and it relies on qualitative data coming from multiple sources and collected at different points of time, specifically interviews, participant and non-participant observations from an ethnography conducted in 2009; interviews conducted between 2019 and 2020, and an analysis of the posts made within one Facebook group between February and May 2016.

The paper focuses on three stories of local political leadership at three different points in time which describe three leadership practices: political managerialism; charismatic followership; and hands-on relational leadership. It highlights the importance of hands-on relational leadership through popular acts of leadership which are performed face to face and/or on social media and the shift in the dominant technologies of local political leadership from the logic of managerialism toward the logic of social media.

The paper is focused on a limited temporal (2009–2019) and sociocultural context (North Italy). Findings are presented as three stories, although other ways of showing qualitative data could have been used.

Practical implications deal with the attempt to enable a reflexive view of local governance and public leadership attentive to soft and sociocultural variables. It is important to consider these implications for the purposes of training and learning.

The paper introduces new concepts to understand contemporary public leadership practices; it combines insights from a decentered theory of governance and collective theories of leadership; and it makes use of storytelling as a method for analyzing and reporting the findings.

This study aims to explore the complex, multi-level institutional dynamics of smart city reforms and projects and their potential sustainability pressures on the implementation of a management accounting system in an Egyptian state-owned enterprise (SOE), which has a politically sensitive institutional character.

This study adds to institutional management accounting research using a multi-level perspective of institutional dynamics in the smart city context. Data were collected from an interpretive case study of an Egyptian SOE that was under socio-political sustainability pressures to implement a smart electricity network project in New Minya city.

Smart city projects have formed social and political sustainability pressures, which introduced the enterprise resource planning (ERP) network as a new management accounting system. A new (complex and multi-level) management accounting system was invented to reinvent the sustainable city as an “accounting city” (which appeared rhetorically as a “smart city”). “Smart” being the visibility and measurability of the sustainability performance of the collective body, which calls the city and its connectivity to different institutional levels brought out in a city network project for the ERP-enabled electricity distribution.

This study examines a single case study from a single smart city and identifies the accounting community’s need for multiple and comparative case studies to further analyse the potential impact of smart city reforms and projects on the sustainable implementation of management accounting systems.

City policymakers and managers may benefit from the practical findings of this interpretive field-based case study in planning, implementing and monitoring smart city projects and objectives.

Individual and collective well-being may be enhanced through new management accounting forms of multi-level local governance and increased political, field and organisational sustainability.

This study provides important insights into the sustainability dynamics of management accounting in achieving smart city reforms. The achievement of sustainability management accounting systems has connected to multiple ERP roles at different institutional levels, which resulted in accommodating the socio-political objectives of smart city projects.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of performative struggle through the use of an interpretative case story focussed on a strategic decision-making process concerning infrastructural development. Performativity is about “world-making” (Carter et al., 2010), based on the assumption that conceptual schemes are not only prescriptions of the world, for the practices flowing from these abstract ideas bring into being the world they are describing. The focus on agency and multiplicity in the academic debate on performativity in organizational settings are combined, resulting in the conceptualization of a multitude of performative agents struggling to make the world.

The methodological approach of this paper is based on an interpretative analysis of contrasting narratives that are told by political-executives in a strategic decision-making process. These narratives are based on in-depth interviews and participant observation. The interpretative case story, exhibiting the strategic decision-making practices of Aldermen, Delegates and Ministers – focusses on the moments of performative struggle based on strategic narrative practices.

The interpretative case story will exhibit the way in which a multiplicity of agents reflects on the performative dimension of the decision-making process, anticipates on its performative effects and attempts to manipulate the strategic vision that is actualized into reality. Moreover, the agents are not primarily concerned with the actualization of a specific infrastructural project; they are more concerned with the consequences of decision making for their more comprehensive strategic visions on reality.

The notion of performative struggle has not yet been explicitly studied by scholars focussing on performativity. However, the concept can be used as an appropriate lens for studying meaning making within ethnographic studies on organizational processes such as for instance culture change intervention and strategy formation. The concept of performative struggle is especially useful for understanding the political dimension of meaning making when studying an organizational life-world through the use of ethnographic research.

The originality of this paper lies in the innovative conceptualization of struggle between a multiplicity of reflexive agents in the debate on performative world-making. Moreover, the incorporation of the perspective of performative struggle within organizational ethnographic research is valuable for the development of organizational ethnographic methodology.

The purpose of this paper is to examine political marketing with regard to its different conceptualisations and dimensions, and to suggest cognate areas for empirical research efforts, especially in Sub‐Saharan Africa.

Perspectives from relevant extant literature on meaning and dimensions of political marketing are examined, and empirical examination of these perspectives in developing countries suggested.

It was found that political marketing has many conceptualisations and dimensions, and its practice may be coloured by environmental issues, especially in developing economies with weak democratic infrastructure.

Empirical investigations of political marketing in developing economies, as suggested in this paper, may be constrained by secrecy, lack of secondary data, and aparty on the part of relevant party executives, among others.

Party executives will benefit from the conceptualisations and dimensions documented in this paper. In addition, researchers and students in the areas of marketing and political science will find the research agenda a fertile ground for empirical research effort.

This paper should be of value to political party executives, electoral commissions, educators and students of marketing and political science, in addition to government executives interested in relating beneficially with their citizens and other relevant stakeholders.

This chapter offers a speculative essay regarding how religion may foster intellectual humility in public life, drawing on case studies from faith-based community organizing in the United States. and liberation theology in Latin America. Despite a plethora of religious teaching about the virtue of humility across a variety of traditions, I do not think there is anything inherent in religious belief – in any tradition – that predisposes believers toward authentic humility in their personal or public lives. I argue instead that religious conviction – when embodied in particular kinds of religious practice – does help drive us toward the balance of confidence and intellectual humility required for vigorous engagement in democratic public life. My argument draws on the concept of focal practices and insights from philosophy, theology, and social theory as I consider religious practices, religious conversion, and the nature of human passions as they relate to democratic life.

This chapter presents and discusses the value of cultural political economy (CPE) as a theoretical framework for the analysis of the international governance of education. CPE is situated historically as a contemporary example of attempts within the Marxist tradition to explore the relations between the cultural (the world of discourse and practice), the political (actors and institutions), and the economic. The chapter builds on the developed account of CPE to address the challenges presented by the European Union (EU) as an example of international governance. Established accounts of the development of an EU role in the governance of education since the launch of the Lisbon Strategy in March 2000 are examined so as to establish what a CPE approach can offer to attempts to complement and transcend them. In conclusion, the chapter acknowledges the aspects of CPE that remain undeveloped and problematic as well as underlining the terms upon which the CPE as presented here might need to engage with other theoretical approaches.