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The branding of universities is increasingly recognized to present a different set of challenges than in corporate, for-profit sectors. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how faculty make sense of branding in the context of higher education, specifically considering branding initiatives in business schools.

The paper is based on qualitative interviews with faculty regarding their responses to organizational branding at four business schools. Discourse analysis was used to analyze the interview data.

The study reveals varied, fluid and reflexive faculty interpretations of organizational branding. Faculty interviewed in the study adopted a number of stances towards their schools’ branding efforts. In particular, the study identifies three main faculty responses to branding: endorsement, ambivalence and cynicism.

The study contributes by highlighting the ambiguities and ambivalence generated by brand management initiatives in the higher education context, offering original insights into the multiple ways that faculty exploit, frame and resist attempts to brand their organizations. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for branding in university contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between sustainability adoption and internal legitimacy construction.

The paper is designed as a critical inquiry into existing research and practice on sustainability adoption, illustrated by two corporate vignettes.

Prior studies tend to assume that awareness raising is a sufficient means to create employee commitment and support for corporate sustainability programs, while empirical observations indicate that managerial disregard of conflicting interpretations of sustainability may result in the illegitimacy of such programs.

The authors suggest that a loosely coupled approach to sustainability adoption is a productive way to understand internal legitimacy construction, as it appreciates complexity and polyphony.

The purpose of this paper is to examine what we can learn from an autoethnographical approach about public administration. In this context it presents and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of autoethnography.

The paper is based on a case study of E-rail, a European national rail service subject to extensive negative press coverage. The autoethnographic accounts, based on interviews, observations, phone calls, e-mails, and other informal interactions with the organizational members, highlight the researcher’s entry to and exit of the organization.

The paper mobilizes fieldwork access negotiation and trust building with participants as empirical material in its own right, arguing that challenges involving “being in the field” should be explored to provide new types of knowledge about the organizational phenomenon under study – in this case the rise of organizational paranoia.

This paper uses autoethnography, which is rare in public administration studies, and discusses the distinct features of autoethnography as an ethnographic approach to public organizations. It argues that autoethnographic accounts of fieldwork relationship highlight and challenge the boundaries of the kind of research questions we might ask – and the kind of answers we might provide – about public administration.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how part-time waiters perceive and respond to abusive supervision by the owner-manager of a small restaurant.

An ethnographic approach was used to collect data. One of the authors worked as a participant observer for three months. In addition, 13 interviews and three focus group discussions were conducted.

Data analysis showed how neutral identification based on a primary identity—liu xu sheng (overseas student)—overshadows employees’ occupational identity (waiter), which helps waiters to cope with abusive supervision.

Development and application of the concept of neutral organizational identification orientation encourages emotional suppression and reframing, leading to waiters’ indifference and acquiescence in abusive supervision. Implications are drawn for theory and the practice of managing part-time and temporary workers.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the socio-political role of materiality assessment in sustainability reporting literature and discuss the potential of materiality assessment to advance more inclusive accounting and reporting practices, in particular critical dialogic accounting.

Drawing on literature on the concept of materiality together with insights from stakeholder engagement, commensuration and critical dialogic accounting the paper analyses disclosure on materiality in sustainability reports. Empirically, qualitative content analysis is used to analyse 44 sustainability reports from the leading companies.

The authors argue that, first, the technic-rational approach to materiality portrays the assessment as a neutral and value-free measurement, and second, the materiality matrix presents the multiple stakeholders as having a unified understanding of what is considered important in corporate sustainability. Thus, the technic-rational approach to the materiality assessment, reinforced with the use of the matrix is a value-laden judgement of what matters in corporate sustainability and narrows down rather than opens up the complexity of the assessment of material sustainability issues, stakeholder engagement and the societal pursuit of sustainable development.

The understandings and implications of the concept of materiality are ambiguous and wide-reaching, as, through constituting the legitimised set of claims and information on corporate sustainable performance, it impacts our understanding of sustainable development at large, and affects the corporate and policy-level transition towards sustainability. Exploring insights from critical dialogic accounting help us to elaborate on the conceptions and practical implications of materiality assessment that enhance stakeholder engagement in a democratic, rather than managerial, spirit.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the current state of political and administrative ethnography in political science and public administration before suggesting that focus groups are a useful tool in the study of governing elites. They provide an alternative way of “being there” when the rules about secrecy and access prevent participant observation. Briefly, it describes the job of Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff before explaining the research design, the preparations for the focus group sessions, and the strategies used to manage the dynamics of a diverse group that included former political enemies and factional rivals.

It outlines the approach to analysis and interpretation before reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of focus groups for research into political and administrative elites.

It concludes that focus groups are a valuable tool for making tacit knowledge explicit, especially when all participants work in a shared governmental tradition.

It is the first project to use focus groups to study the political elites of Westminster systems, let alone Australian government.