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Organizational sociology and organization studies have a long history together, while also sharing a proclivity to self-diagnose crises. Instead of taking these assessments at face value, this paper treats them as an object of study, asking what conditions have fueled them. In the case of organizational sociology, there are indications of a connection between rising levels of discontent and community building: self-identified organizational sociologists have progressively withdrawn from general debates in the discipline and turned their attention to organization studies, which, they suspect, has seen dramatic levels of growth at their expense. Organization studies, on the other hand, are still haunted by “a Faustian bargain”: leaning heavily on the authority of the social sciences, business school faculty were able to facilitate the emergence of a scholarly field of practice dedicated to the study of organizations, which they control. However, in doing so, they also set organization studies on a path of continued dependence on knowledge produced elsewhere: notably, by university disciplines such as sociology.

This paper illuminates our journey as accounting educators by exploring accounting as a technical, social and moral practice towards decolonising ourselves. It lays the foundations for decolonising the higher education curriculum and the consequences for addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This paper focuses on the potential to foster a space for praxis by adopting dialogism-in-action to understand our transformative learning through Jindaola [pronounced Jinda-o-la], a university-based Aboriginal knowledge program. A dialogic pedagogy provided the opportunity to create a meaningful space between us as academics, the Aboriginal Knowledge holder and mentor, the other groups in Jindaola and, ultimately, our accounting students. Since Jindaola privileged ‘our way’ as the pedagogical learning process, we adopt autoethnography to share and reflect on our experiences. Making creative artefacts formed the basis for building relationships, reciprocity and respect and represents our shared journey and collective account.

We reveal our journey of “holding to account” by analysing five aspects of our lives as critical accounting academics – the overarching conceptual framework, teaching, research, governance and our physical landscape. In doing so, we found that Aboriginal perspectives provide a radical positioning to the colonial legacies of accounting practice.

Our journey through Jindaola contemplates how connecting with Country and engaging with Aboriginal ways of knowing can assist educators in meaningfully addressing the SDGs. While not providing a panacea or prescription for what to do, we use ‘our way’ as a story of our commitment to transformative change.

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.

The manoeuvring of everyday spaces to nudge the population towards a physically active lifestyle or active living has been the hallmark of the policy modes of instrumental thinking for combating physical inactivity, particularly in urban spaces across the world. Thus, the active promotion of fitness activities by the postcolonial state signifies the centrality of the body in disciplining docile and inactive individuals to produce fit and active citizens. Such a population-based approach has often raised concerns about social and spatial justice and expressions of identity, liberty, and surveillance, even as everyday spaces in cities continue to exhibit elements of colonial governmentality. In the midst of this, the body continues to be central to the ways in which such a population makes sense of being physically active and ‘being healthy’ in their everyday lives. By employing a multi-sited ethnography conducted over a period of 10 months in different public parks in Delhi, the present chapter aims to understand the ways in which fitness activities are performed, produced, and practised in the city. While public parks themselves are a product of colonial urban governmentalities in Delhi, this chapter argues that active bodies engaged in everyday sports in the parks also emerge as the critical site for the bodily inscription of global standards of physical activity. Driven by Western fitness regimes, individuals tend to understand themselves as entrepreneurial selves that can bring to life this imagination of the body ideal even while being engaged in various fitness and leisure activities aimed at being ‘healthy’.

This paper aims to point to the shift in the temporal orientation, going from reporting on the past to creating insights about the future, which might be suggestive of perennial managerial attempts to push the boundaries of bounded rationality.

In this essay, the authors want to critically engage with the concept of “data-driven management” in the context of digitalization. To do so, they sketch the edges of current discourses around the emerging idea of data-driven management and its relationship with the inner workings of organizations from an accounting perspective. They question the often-times supposed objectivity and increased rationality of the concept and instead introduce the idea of becoming “data-curious” (before being data-driven).

The authors observe that this push also seems to be accompanied by trends of individualized decision-making and prevailing hopes of technology to solve organizational problems. They therefore suggest that it is valuable for current debates to take a moment to give attention, in practice and in research, to the role of temporality, benefits of collective decision-making and changes in professions (of accountants).

The aim of this paper is to spark curiosity and engagement with the phenomenon of data-driven management by outlining a novel set of potential future pathways of research and point towards methods that might help studying the questions arising for a data-curious approach.

Healthcare providers are under pressure due to increasing and more complex demands for services. Increased pressure on budgets and human resources adds to an ever-growing problem set. Competent leaders are in demand to ensure effective and well-performing healthcare organisations that deliver balanced results and high-quality services. Researchers have made significant efforts to identify and define determining competencies for healthcare leadership. Broad terms such as competence are, however, inherently at risk of becoming too generic to add analytical value. The purpose of this study is to suggest a holistic framework for understanding healthcare leadership competence, that can be crucial for operationalising important healthcare leadership competencies for researchers, decision-makers as well as practitioners.

In the present study, a critical interpretive synthesis (CIS) was conducted to analyse competency descriptions for healthcare leaders. The descriptions were retrieved from peer reviewed empirical studies published between 2010 and 2022 that aimed to identify healthcare services leadership competencies. Grounded theory was utilised to code the data and inductively develop new categories of healthcare leadership competencies. The categorisation was then analysed to suggest a holistic framework for healthcare leadership competence.

Forty-one papers were included in the review. Coding and analysing the competence descriptions resulted in 12 healthcare leadership competence categories: (1) character, (2) interpersonal relations, (3) leadership, (4) professionalism, (5) soft HRM, (6) management, (7) organisational knowledge, (8) technology, (9) knowledge of the healthcare environment, (10) change and innovation, (11) knowledge transformation and (12) boundary spanning. Based on this result, a holistic framework for understanding and analysing healthcare services leadership competencies was suggested. This framework suggests that the 12 categories of healthcare leadership competencies include a range of knowledge, skills and abilities that can be understood across the dimension personal – and technical, and organisational internal and – external competencies.

This literature review was conducted with the results of searching only two electronic databases. Because of this, there is a chance that there exist empirical studies that could have added to the development of the competence categories or could have contradicted some of the descriptions used in this analysis that were assessed as quite harmonised. A CIS also opens for a broader search, including the grey literature, books, policy documents and so on, but this study was limited to peer-reviewed empirical studies. This limitation could also have affected the result, as complex phenomenon such as competence might have been disclosed in greater details in, for example, books.

The holistic framework for healthcare leadership competences offers a common understanding of a “fuzzy” concept such as competence and can be used to identify specific competency needs in healthcare organisations, to develop strategic competency plans and educational programmes for healthcare leaders.

This study reveals a lack of consensus regarding the use and understanding of the concept of competence, and that key competencies addressed in the included papers are described vastly different in terms of what knowledge, skills and abilities they entail. This challenges the operationalisation of healthcare services leadership competencies. The proposed framework for healthcare services leadership competencies offers a common understanding of work-related competencies and a possibility to analyse key leadership competencies based on a holistic framework.

The current study explores the role of social psychological factors on organizational commitment. It examined the relationships between organizational fairness, inclusion, diversity, sexism, psychological safety and affective commitment.

The study adopted a cross-sectional survey method where data were collected from staff across six higher education institutions in the United Kingdom. A total of 416 responses were collected and the data were analyzed by employing independent sample t-tests to explore gender differences regarding organizational diversity, inclusion, fairness, sexism, psychological safety and affective commitment. The mediating role of psychological safety in the effects of organizational diversity, fairness, inclusion and sexism on staff’s commitment to the organization was evaluated through a series of simple mediation models. Finally, the mediated effect of organizational social psychological factors on affective commitment through psychological safety, moderated by gender was tested.

As hypothesized, men had higher perceptions of organizational inclusion and diversity and viewed their organization as less sexist. Psychological safety mediated the positive effects of organizational diversity, fairness, inclusion and sexism on staff’s affective commitment to the organization. Organizational diversity and sexism played a bigger part in how women evaluate their organizational environment as safe to take risks and be themselves and consequently on how they commit to the organization. On the other hand, organizational fairness and inclusion seem more closely tied to men’s evaluation of their organization as safe to be themselves and consequently stronger commitment.

The findings shed light on the underlying mechanisms that shape affective commitment, that can lead to more inclusive work environments and contribute to systemic change in the Higher Education context.

This paper aims to extend our understanding of the concept of crisis leadership based on perceptions of 48 Australian leaders drawn from various sectors including Australian politics, higher education, not-for-profit and corporate sectors.

This qualitative study employed semi-structured virtual interviews of 48 leaders from Australian politics, higher education, not-for-profit and corporate sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Leximancer text analytics program was used for data analysis.

Participants perceived effective leadership during a crisis as encompassing four macro themes: leadership as power, leadership as emanating from people, leadership as management and leadership as specific to the organization. While these findings reinforced extant literature on facets of effective leadership, leaders from different sectors differed on the relative importance of some leadership themes and their relevance to specific sectors.

While the data were collected from a convenient sample, our findings from multiple sectors in Australia extend our knowledge on crisis leadership by revealing differences in sectorial perspectives of crisis leadership. Further, these findings help refine the extant traditional explanations of leadership and especially offer an enhanced understanding of leadership during a crisis. Consequently, our findings support future research that could help identify specific attributes of leaders navigating organizational crises. Such future research could subsequently help develop a theory on crisis leadership based on a valid and reliable measurement for assessing crisis leadership effectiveness in diverse organizational settings.

Our study is based on multi-sector data and consequently lays a solid foundation for extending the conceptualization of leadership during crisis, and the need to reconceptualize effective leader attributes useful in crisis contexts. Theoretically, the current study extended recent research on crisis leadership, by examining the conceptualizations of crisis leadership within specific Australian sectors.

The purpose of the paper is to produce new knowledge about the positions that public libraries both take and are given in the conflicts over politics and identity that play out in contemporary cultural and library policy debates. Using conflicts over drag story hour at public libraries as case, the study seeks to contribute to an emerging body of research that delves into the challenges that public libraries as promoters of democracy are confronting in the conflictual political landscape of today.

The paper presents an analysis of debates reported in news articles concerning Drag story hour events held at Swedish public libraries. Utilizing the analytical lenses of discourse theory and plural agonistics, the analysis serves to make visible the lines of conflicts drawn in these debates – particularly focusing on the intersection of different meanings ascribed to the notion of the reading child, and how fear is constructed and used as an othering devise in these conflicts.

Different imaginings of the reading child and the construction and imagination of fear and safety shapes the Drag story hour debates. The controversies can be understood as a challenge to the previous hegemony regarding the direction and goals of Swedish cultural and library policy and the pluralistic democratic society these policies are meant to promote.

The paper offers new insights into the consequences of the revival of radical right politics, populism and societal polarization, and the different responses from public libraries.