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The purpose of this paper is to explore the role and implications of storytelling and narrative as a means of making sense of, and giving sense to, the ambiguous concept of materiality.

The use of stories was “discovered” through the authors' attempts to “make sense” of data from 16 interviews with participants from the financial and nonfinancial reporting and assurance contexts. The authors analyse the participants' use of stories through a sensemaking/sensegiving lens.

While participants struggle to define what materiality is, they are able to tell “stories” about materiality in action. The authors find stories are a key vehicle through which participants make sense of and give sense to materiality, for themselves and (an)other. Participants tell three types of stories in sensemaking/sensegiving processes: the lived, the adopted and the hypothetical. The authors further identify “rehearsed” and “ongoing” narratives, which take any of the three story types. The use of stories to make and give sense to materiality reveals a disconnect between the static, technical definitions of materiality currently favoured by standard setters and guidance providers, and the creative authoring processes the participants employ.

The authors argue for a move towards the use of stories and narratives about materiality in standard setting, specifically “materiality in action”, which the findings suggest may assist in creating shared understandings of the ambiguous concept.

While previous research considers what materiality means within financial and nonfinancial reporting and assurance contexts, the authors empirically analyse how people understand and make sense/give sense to materiality. The authors also contribute to the use of sensemaking/sensegiving processes within the accounting literature.

Through this reflexive, theoretically informed polemical piece, this paper aims to seek to reflect on the role of accounting education in United Kingdom Higher Education (UKHE). The authors reignite an old, but pertinent debate, whether accounting graduates should be educated to be accountants or receive a holistic, critical education.

The authors adopt a theoretical position drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek and Mark Fisher, and their fusion of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism, in particular Fisher’s (2009) conceptualisation of “capitalist realism” to take a critical standpoint on the effects that UKHE marketisation is having on the teaching of accounting and other business-related disciplines.

The authors outline four key aspects of where accounting education in UKHE is influenced by capitalist realism, as a result of the marketisation of UKHE.

The paper is a reflexive polemic and so is limited by this written style and presentation.

The authors argue that capitalist realism is a dominant theme that influences accounting education. They propose that universities now, more than ever, must focus on their societal duty to foster critical viewpoints in their graduates and dispose of a model that is subject to capitalist realism ontology.

The theoretical stance allows for a potentially deeper consideration of issues surrounding marketisation of higher education, from the micro level of social interaction (that of the accounting academic and their impact/perceptions of the reality).

The deadhead subculture – centered around the band Grateful Dead – has been active for 50+ years. Despite its longevity, academic work is sparse compared to other music subcultures. Given its durability and resilience, this subculture offers an opportunity to explore subcultural development and maintenance. I employ a contemporary, symbolic interactionist approach to trace the development of deadhead subculture and subcultural identity. Although identity is a basic concept in subculture research, it is not well defined: I suggest that the co-creation and maintenance of subcultural identity can be seen as a dialectic between collective identity and symbolic interactionist conceptions of individual role-identity.

This paper aims to discuss the role of a grassroots initiative in engaging local people in an innovative place-making fringe festival. Festivals such as the Carnival of Flowers are a major tourism event for regional cities like Toowoomba and contribute to place-making through marketing and engagement. Within the professional management of such events, there exists space for innovation and genuine community involvement, which can assist in authentically reflecting place identity. Avant Garden (2007-2008) models a successful grassroots fringe festival, initiated by community members in response to the challenge of long-term drought. Avant Garden engaged locals and tourists in a positive re-imagining of place via site-specific public artworks generated by the community.

A survey of 504 visitors to Toowoomba’s public gardens during the first weekend of the 2007 Carnival of Flowers examined how Avant Garden was received by the community.

The paper suggests that fringe festivals can provide place-making capacity in broadening festivals as an expression of local identity. Fringe festivals can allow authentic community engagement within a mainstream festival and can indicate longer-term innovations to place branding.

The paper includes implications for festival managers about effective ways to engage community in grassroots initiatives which reflect innovation, authenticity and greater diversity.

The paper provides a study of a visual arts fringe festival in the context of place management. The project described allows a “bottom up” approach to engaging the local community which provides authenticity and broadens the scope of an existing mainstream garden festival.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how organisational complexities influence the design of circular business models, which have recently been introduced as a new panacea for aligning the interests of business with the needs of the environment.

The Service Shirt, a new garment concept, is used as an illustrative case example for demonstrating some of the organisational complexities of making circular business models operable. The shirt was developed through a series of design workshops for the fashion brand Fashion Alpha.

The analysis highlights multiple challenges emerging when a fashion product with a significantly extended lifecycle passes through different users, organisations and business models. It is concluded that it is difficult to talk about a circular business model (singular) as circular economy solutions depend on the contributions of multiple stakeholders with business models.

The findings illustrate how fashion companies interested in the circular economy fundamentally have to rethink conventional approaches to value, organisational boundaries and temporality.

Drawing on a case example from the fashion industry, the paper demonstrates the organisational complexities linked to the design of new business models based on circular economy thinking, as these require the coordination of actions between autonomous actors driven by different logics regarding value creation, value delivery and value capture.

This chapter shares the stories of a Mi'kmaq grandmother's reflections of stories from Elders of the Mi'kmaq Nation to share with Masie, born at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in Mi'kma'ki. These stories form a story-net of teachings and reflections to help guide Masie on her journey as a Mi'kmaq girl growing up in a kind and sometimes unkind world. These stories represent a gift in a written form from a grandmother to a beautiful soul who will need help to navigate a world of uncertainty, but a world with tremendous beauty when seen through a Mi'kmaq historical perspective.

In an effort to revise an undergraduate human resource management (HRM) curriculum and improve the relevance of the students’ learning, a collaborative effort between human resource management practitioners and HRM faculty was launched. The result was the design of a project‐based, action learning curriculum blending the knowledge acquisition that has historically been the outcome of university classroom training with the application that is so critical to effective functioning in the HRM work world. The paper provides guidance for others planning to improve the relevance of their curricula. The template presented in this paper emphasizes practitioner input, a willingness to adopt creative approaches to student learning, development of specific measurable outcomes, observable demonstrations of the learning of those outcomes and the creation of relevant, appropriate projects. Follow‐up comments after one year of experience with the newly revised curriculum are also included.