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1 – 10 of 432Shalini Parth, Bhupesh Manoharan, Rishikesan Parthiban, Israr Qureshi, Babita Bhatt and Krishanu Rakshit
This paper aims to explore how a socio-digital platform can facilitate consumer responsibilisation in food consumption to encourage sustained responsible consumption and uncovers…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore how a socio-digital platform can facilitate consumer responsibilisation in food consumption to encourage sustained responsible consumption and uncovers its possible impacts on different stakeholders in the agricultural ecosystem.
Design/methodology/approach
Two-year-long case study of a socio-digital platform that aims to integrate consumers with the farming process; creating value for them and the farmers in India.
Findings
The process of consumer responsibilisation happens through three mechanisms; construction of a moral-material identity, vicarious self-artisanship and shared responsibilisation. Through these key mechanisms, the socio-digital platform could foster consumer responsibilisation and engender positive societal impacts by promoting both responsible production and consumption.
Research limitations/implications
This study shows how the construction of moral–material identity could move beyond an either-or choice between moralistic and material identity and allow space for the coexistence of both. This paper highlights how a socio-digital platform can be leveraged to facilitate responsible consumer engagement in an aestheticised farming process.
Practical implications
This paper aims to guide policymakers to design digitally-enabled human-centred innovation in facilitating consumer engagement with farming and cultivating responsible consumers in achieving sustainable development goals.
Social implications
This study shows how consumer responsibilisation can actually address market failures by enhancing the value created in the system, reducing wastage and cutting costs wherever possible, which drive better incomes for the farmers.
Originality/value
Previous studies have discussed heterogeneous motivations for responsible food consumption. However, this research explores the processes through which an individual reconnects to food production and the mechanisms that support this process in the long run.
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Cheryl Lehman, Marcia Annisette and Gloria Agyemang
This paper advocates for critical accounting’s contribution to immigration deliberations as part of its agenda for advancing social justice. The purpose of this paper is to…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper advocates for critical accounting’s contribution to immigration deliberations as part of its agenda for advancing social justice. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate accounting as implicated in immigration policies of three advanced economies.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors suggest that neoliberal immigration policies are operationalized through the responsibilization of individuals, corporations and universities. By examining three immigration policies from the USA, Canada and the UK, the paper clarifies how accounting technologies facilitate responsibilization techniques, making immigration governable. Additionally, by employing immigrant narratives as counter accounts, the impacts of immigrant lived experiences can be witnessed.
Findings
Accounting upholds neoliberal principles of life by expanding market mentalities and governance, through technologies of measurement, reports, audits and surveillance. A neoliberal strategy of responsibilization contributes to divesting authority for immigration policy in an attempt to erase the social and moral agency of immigrants, with accounting integral to this process. However the social cannot be eradicated as the work illustrates in the narratives and counter accounts that immigrants create.
Research limitations/implications
The work reveals the illusion of accounting as neutral. As no single story captures the nuances and complexities of immigration practices, further exploration is encouraged.
Originality/value
The work is a unique contribution to the underdeveloped study of immigration in critical accounting. By unmasking accounting’s role and revealing techniques underpinning immigration discourses, enhanced ways of researching immigration are possible.
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Nikos Macheridis and Alexander Paulsson
This study aims to investigate how sustainability has been incorporated – or mainstreamed - in a school at one university through techniques of responsibilization and…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate how sustainability has been incorporated – or mainstreamed - in a school at one university through techniques of responsibilization and accountabilization.
Design/methodology/approach
Inspired by the extended case study methodology, the authors participated, observed and analyzed two audit-inspired processes, whose aims included ensuring that sustainability was integrated into the educational process.
Findings
By following two audit-inspired processes, the authors show how teachers were asked to respond to open-ended survey questions and by doing so emerged as responsibilized subjects. Although the teachers were given lots of space to interpret the concept of sustainability and show how it was translated into the programs and courses offered, the teachers were made accountable as established organizational hierarchies were reproduced when responsibilization was formalized through techniques of accountabilization.
Research limitations/implications
The analysis moves beyond the instrumental epistemologies characterizing much of the positivist-oriented research in higher education. As with all studies, the authors study also has methodological limitations, such as involving a single higher education institution. There is a general need for more empirical research in this area in order to build theory and to understand whether the concepts of responsibilization and accountabilization can also be applied in other higher education contexts.
Practical implications
The study shows that higher education administrators engage in processes of responsibilization and accountabilization through formalized processes of interpellation, as documents and self-assessment exercises tie teachers to organizational contexts.
Originality/value
To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that introduces the concepts of responsibilization and accountabilization as social relationships in higher education governance.
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The Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014 extended post-release supervision to individuals serving short prison sentences while introducing an extended array of actors into the…
Abstract
Purpose
The Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014 extended post-release supervision to individuals serving short prison sentences while introducing an extended array of actors into the resettlement field. This paper aims to explore the barriers that prison practitioners and community probation workers faced in their attempts to provide resettlement support, and how in response to these barriers, these practitioners enacted particular responsibilisation strategies.
Design/methodology/approach
This empirical research features the perspectives of 19 prison, probation and third-sector actors within a case-study area in England. Qualitative interviews were carried out, alongside observations and field notes of daily practice.
Findings
Findings indicate that despite the promise of additional support, practitioners face significant barriers inhibiting their ability to provide effective resettlement assistance. The three specific barriers identified are institutional, temporal and political-economic. In response, practitioners enacted particular responsibilisation strategies, shifting blame vertically down to service users and horizontally towards the other actors involved in managing these individuals.
Practical implications
This article concludes with a brief overview of the latest iteration of resettlement practice, before exploring how a desistance-focused approach by practitioners may improve resettlement outcomes.
Originality/value
These findings help to expand our understanding of the responsibilisation literature, particularly how responsibilisation operates at a practitioner level, and how barriers become refracted and reframed into responsibilisation strategies. This article also draws on the “mass supervision” literature to demonstrate how the introduction of multiple agencies obfuscates individual responsibility for resettlement and large caseloads erode supervisory practice.
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Javed Siddiqui, Kenneth McPhail and Sharmin Shabnam Rahman
The paper explores the emergence of private sector responsibilisation for tackling governance issues in a global supply chain. The infamous case of the Rana Plaza collapse in…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper explores the emergence of private sector responsibilisation for tackling governance issues in a global supply chain. The infamous case of the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh is used to investigate the ways a frameshift, triggered by a manmade disaster, can potentially influence the effectiveness of the certification process in a research site characterised by the presence of a strong state-business nexus.
Design/methodology/approach
The empirical work for this paper is based 24 semi-structured interviews with owners, managers, operators, independent inspectors in the ready-made garments (RMG) industry in Bangladesh between 2014 and 2018. We also analyse a range of archival materials. For the purpose of data analysis, we adopted an exploratory flexible pattern matching design with nested template analysis (Sinkovics et al., 2019).
Findings
Our analysis suggests that the magnitude of the Rana Plaza collapse triggered several frameshifts in multinational corporations approach towards labour governance in Bangladesh. Subsequently, a responsibility framework for the private sector was created, resulting in significant improvements in working conditions in the sector. However, the sustainability of the labour governance mechanisms was significantly affected by the state's ability to play the role of catalyst in the process, mainly due to the presence of a significant state-business nexus.
Originality/value
We find that broadening the scope of sustainability accounting and assurance process can allow social auditors to play a more meaningful role in triggering collective actions to address labour governance issues in supply chains. However, in a context defined by the presence of a state-business nexus, the sustainability of such a process largely depends on the willingness of the state to play the role of a catalyst.
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The purpose of this study is to characterize how services present responsibilized consumers with well-being capabilities. This is done by drawing on structuration theory and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to characterize how services present responsibilized consumers with well-being capabilities. This is done by drawing on structuration theory and literatures on responsibilization, social well-being and psychological well-being.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is based on conceptual development and a qualitative interpretive study of value propositions in texts and images on websites of 11 different self-tracking wearables and applications.
Findings
This paper introduces the changing–coping–countering characterization to explicate different types of well-being capabilities that are represented in services. These capabilities represent different stances towards structures. This paper proposes and discusses how these capabilities can have different impacts on well-being on individual and collective levels.
Research limitations/implications
This study is limited to the perspective of services in a self-tracking context. Further empirical research is needed to investigate well-being capabilities from consumer perspectives.
Practical implications
The proposed characterization can help practitioners in becoming more reflexive concerning their value propositions that relate to consumer well-being. This implies becoming aware of well-being discourses that shape and affect service development.
Originality/value
This paper provides a novel characterization for understanding the role of services in the context of responsibilization. It contributes to structural perspectives on the role of services in contributing to well-being.
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This chapter explores the competing perspectives (i.e., the “community advocates” and the “community skeptics”) on the recent move toward community in an attempt to conceptualize…
Abstract
This chapter explores the competing perspectives (i.e., the “community advocates” and the “community skeptics”) on the recent move toward community in an attempt to conceptualize what this “move” means for social control. An examination of the inclusiveness of community initiatives with a focus on community policing is used to demonstrate that the move toward community contains elements of both empowerment and responsibilization. In particular, the move toward community is paradoxical in that empowerment and responsibilization occurs simultaneously and to varying degrees within inclusive community initiatives. It is argued that a socially inclusive approach to community-police partnerships works to enhance society's web of social control. However, at the same time, community members hold the potential to work together to shape this web of social control.
Nora Moran, Steven Shepherd and Janice Alvarado
The purpose of this paper is to study how individuals assess responsibility during an uncontrollable event requiring collective action, using crises affecting service workers as…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to study how individuals assess responsibility during an uncontrollable event requiring collective action, using crises affecting service workers as contexts. Specifically, the authors examine what parties consumers hold responsible for ensuring service worker welfare following an uncontrollable event and determine what factors make customers more open to accepting responsibility for ensuring worker welfare themselves.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors surveyed a nationally representative sample of US consumers regarding their attitudes toward protecting service workers during COVID-19 and used regression analysis to identify factors that predict attributions of responsibility to customers. The authors also conducted an experiment (using a new crisis context) to determine whether certain key factors impact customer perceptions of their own responsibility for helping employees during an uncontrollable event.
Findings
The survey results show US consumers hold firms most responsible for worker welfare, followed by customers and, finally, government. When examining factors that drive attributions of responsibility for customers, perceptions of how sincere firms are in their efforts to help employees predict higher responsibility attributions, and experimental results confirm that higher perceived firm sincerity increases consumers’ own sense of responsibility toward workers.
Social implications
This research identifies factors that affect consumer support for efforts to help service employees and collective action problems more generally.
Originality/value
This research highlights an under-studied crisis context – uncontrollable events that require collective action – and shows how consumers make assessments about their own responsibility (in addition to the responsibility of the service firm) in these contexts.
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The purpose of this paper is to explore and extend understanding of the concept of cultural competence in relation to whiteness, particularly the implications of this link in the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore and extend understanding of the concept of cultural competence in relation to whiteness, particularly the implications of this link in the context of heightened concerns about safety and risk connected with the responsibilisation of health and social care.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is a critical review of academic literature about cultural competence in health and social care, focussing on Scotland. The discussion develops understandings of cultural competence in light of important writing about whiteness and draws on recent related research, for example, about racial patterning in relation to disciplinary proceedings.
Findings
Cultural competence is an example of the neoliberal fusion of the ideals of quality and equality. It is a technology of whiteness which may reinforce racial disadvantage especially in the current environment of responsibilisation. Cultural competence is associated with individual responsibility tropes which undermine state-funded welfare provision and re-inscribe traditional inequalities.
Practical implications
The findings reinforce the importance of a focus on the social determinants of health and challenge “audit” approaches to competence of all kinds, favouring instead the promotion of creativity from the margins.
Originality/value
This paper brings together several areas of literature, which have perhaps previously not overlapped, to identify under-recognised implications of cultural competence in the sector, thus linking the critical discussion to decolonisation and good practice in new ways.
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Tiia-Lotta Pekkanen and Visa Penttilä
The study examines the responsibilisation of an ethnocentric consumer in commercial, meta-organisational discourses. In addition to nationalistic and patriotic discourses, the…
Abstract
Purpose
The study examines the responsibilisation of an ethnocentric consumer in commercial, meta-organisational discourses. In addition to nationalistic and patriotic discourses, the focus is on wider conceptualisations of consumer responsibility.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper uses critical discourse analysis as a methodological approach to conduct an empirical case study on the texts of two producer-driven labelling campaigns.
Findings
The campaign texts create possibilities for ethnocentric consumption with positioning, argumentative and classificatory discourses. Patriotic responsibilisation is emphasised, together with rationales to take action on environmental concerns.
Practical implications
The study highlights the responsibility of marketers over their corporate responsibility communication, suggesting that ethnocentric promotions may have the power to alter how consumers take action on various responsibility concerns.
Social implications
The study surfaces the tensions that responsible consumption can entail for consumers. Indeed, nationalistic and patriotic discourses may alter our understanding of responsibility issues that may seem completely separate from the concepts of nationalism and patriotism.
Originality/value
The paper shows how different organisational texts are deployed to bring about the idea of ethnocentric consumption and how this relates to responsibility discourses, nationalism and patriotism.
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