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The purpose of this paper is to present a model concerning family business participation. The model can both be used to explain why somebody chooses to become a family business member and how family entrepreneurs act inside their firms. In this paper the author will present a holistic, socio-cultural and constructivist model concerning entrepreneurship behaviour.

The model is based on field theory or the perceptions of human behaviour presented by Kurt Lewin. However, the model is expanded to include modern system theories and family business aspects. The author sees family business participation as an emerging behaviour in a complex social system. The central concept or construct, to help the author understand this emerging behaviour, is the psychological life space of the individual. It is not only family that affects the life space. This life space is affected by the current life situation, the past activities as well as the potential aspirations or “dreams” about the future.

A holistic, socio-cultural and constructivistic model is developed. It starts from the notion of a “psychological life space” construct, suggested by Kurt Lewin. The author has developed the concepts further, thereby expanding the area concerning entrepreneurship and modern theories of human behaviour by adding environment and culture to the model. The temporal dimension can be divided into three parts: i.e. the past (experience), the present (real-time) and the future (aspirations). All actions and changes happen in the present, although they are affected by the past and the aspirations for the future. These three parts will continually affect the individual's decision making. In other words the life space is never static, but constantly changing over time Thus, an individual's choice to enter, expand or exit a family business can be explained by the complex relationship between realistic and unrealistic views of the past, present and the future.

It is only a model. However, it can cast new light on the understanding of how family businesses work and could transfer knowledge to the next generation of the family business.

A better understanding of the development of the complex behavioural patterns and factors behind entrepreneurial family formation is given. This enables the author to design methods to explore and analyse individual life spaces. If the author would have such methods, the author might be able to see how and why individuals’ behaviour becomes family entrepreneurially oriented, thereby giving use effective ways and new instruments to support growth and stability in our society.

The field theory, or as it has also been named, topological psychology, has been more or less forgotten for a long time, or overshadowed by other theories of human behaviour. However, according to Martin Gold (1999), Lewin has in recent years again become one of the most frequently quoted social researchers. The paper contributes in this process by applying it to a family business context.

The practice of theory borrowing from other research fields is common in interdisciplinary and applied research. Nevertheless, educational administration researchers seldom discuss this phenomenon and its complexities in depth.

This essay provides an overview of what has been written about the practice of theory borrowing.

After presenting the criticism on misusing theory borrowing, it outlines several recommendations to improve theory borrowing in education administration research by domesticating it through conceptual blending.

The purpose of this essay is to motivate educational administration scholars to reflect on the practice of theory borrowing. The guidelines offered here for promoting conceptual blending serve as a middle ground for mitigating a key problem of theory borrowing.

The purpose of this paper is to approach women's entrepreneurship from a social psychological perspective, with the aim of contributing to a better understanding of the entrepreneurial phenomena and to its development as a field of research.

The gender aspect of entrepreneurship is essentially socio‐psychological in nature. First, the authors define the social psychology research scope and present a selection of social psychology theories that are particularly relevant to the domain of women's entrepreneurship. Concepts such as stereotypes, stereotype threat and role models are introduced. Second, the authors instantiate how the social psychology experimental method can address core questions in the women's entrepreneurship field, such as women's under‐representation in entrepreneurial positions.

The conclusion of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, social psychology theories can address crucial issues in women's entrepreneurship and on the other hand, experimentation as a research methodology enables us to determine causal relationships. However, given the specificities of both social psychology and women's entrepreneurship, we strongly recommend collaborative research between researchers in the two areas.

The authors propose concrete though non‐exhaustive areas of study in women's entrepreneurship research, where social psychological theories can be successfully employed.

Using applied social psychology research, the authors suggest practical ways to reject negative stereotypes that prevent women from being entrepreneurs.

Although women's entrepreneurship is a social psychological phenomenon, this field of study still rarely makes reference to social psychology as a discipline for theorizing the relationship between gender and entrepreneurship.

While financial organisations and systems are becoming global, there still seems to be some country-based differences explained mainly by social dynamics of power and distribution of resources. The purpose of this paper is to analyse practices of a wide variety of financial organisations in two very different social environments, namely, the UK and Chile, with special focus on recruitment and promotion procedures and work under the industry.

From 41 in-depth interviews with practitioners in London, Edinburgh and Santiago de Chile and participant observation of recruitment practices, it was possible to analyse the practices of financial organisations, emphasising on the way they interact with people in global markets and local fields. Interviews and observation were designed to understand organisational procedures in the life course of a set of people working in financial firms and related institutions.

The paper argues for a field approach since Chile’s peripheral position in global markets and its elite-concentrated local distribution of resources encourage more traditional organisational practices, especially in terms of recruitment, socialisation and staff allocation, while in the UK, organisational processes are more technically designed and competitive, as part of a different field, the one of the main centres of financial activities.

Although organisations are accessed via their workers and not studied directly, the design of the interviews and the findings allow understanding how financial work is structured by organisational procedures.

The paper contributes to highlight the role played by organisational procedures and how policies oriented to decrease inequality should take them into account.

It contributes to understanding how inequality is based on organisational practices which are, at the same time, grounded in inequal social structures.

Very few studies have compared, from an in-depth and qualitative perspective, the way organisational procedures are constituted in two very different countries. It covers a wide variety of organisations types and financial products and services. It also tries to make a contribution bridging the current economic sociology literature and organisational studies. Very few articles have also performed systematic fieldwork in two very different countries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the application of social theory as conceptual methodology in the design of case study research.

The authors examine how social theory can be used to design case study research when the choice of theory is made before or during the empirical enquiry. Rather than simply presenting the elements of design, the focus is on the ways the elements relate and connect to each other, i.e. how a researcher can design each step to facilitate the work that needs to be done in the others.

A circular research design starts and finishes with the theory. The conceptual tools that social theories offer can be used to guide researchers into the empirical field and out of it. A conceptually driven design facilitates the interconnection between the various steps of a research project and can keep theory, research problem and data closely connected.

There is a role for systematic research design in interpretative case studies in management accounting and control. Although this paper uses strong structuration theory, the circular design proposed can be applied for other social theories and methodologies where an abductive approach is appropriate.

There are very few papers that explicitly demonstrate the implications of research design choices in case study research. In particular, the authors contribute to discussions on the conduct of interpretative research in management control and demonstrate that, especially for structuration theory, a conceptual methodology approach to research design, data collection and analysis can lead to theoretical insight.

The extensive distribution of fake news on the internet (FNI) has significantly affected many lives. Although numerous studies have recently been conducted on this topic, few have helped us to systematically understand the antecedents and consequences of FNI. This study contributes to the understanding of FNI and guides future research.

Drawing on the input–process–output framework, this study reviews 202 relevant articles to examine the extent to which the antecedents and consequences of FNI have been investigated. It proposes a conceptual framework and poses future research questions.

First, it examines the “what”, “why”, “who”, “when”, “where” and “how” of creating FNI. Second, it analyses the spread features of FNI and the factors that affect the spread of FNI. Third, it investigates the consequences of FNI in the political, social, scientific, health, business, media and journalism fields.

The extant reviews on FNI mainly focus on the interventions or detection of FNI, and a few analyse the antecedents and consequences of FNI in specific fields. This study helps readers to synthetically understand the antecedents and consequences of FNI in all fields. This study is among the first to summarise the conceptual framework for FNI research, including the basic relevant theoretical foundations, research methodologies and public datasets.

Students' simplistic observations and uninspired solutions for social-ecological dilemmas were the motivation for this study. The purpose of this paper is to foster systemic thinking in students and study the role of the lecturers.

The research was designed as a self-study action-research (AR), which was carried out by the lecturers of an environmental citizenship course in a teachers' college. The paper describes three AR circuits, expressed in three stages of field mapping by students: group mapping at the beginning of the course, initial individual field mapping and field mapping prior to action design.

Analyzing the maps after each stage allowed for design modifications. The findings indicate that field mapping helped students better understand the complexity of a social-ecological system and their role within it. Lecturers were required to maintain a delicate balance between teaching and supporting the students' first-hand experience as environmental citizens.

The study's conclusions are based on a case study and are therefore presented dialectically rather than as global generalizations.

Mapping the field of action can serve as a powerful tool in fostering a system approach to environmental citizenship in many educational settings.

The paper presents the use of Kurt Lewin's field theory for environmental education and for fostering environmental citizenship based on systemic and ecological thinking. The diversity of students' conceptualizations of the complexity of a social-ecological system, as revealed in this study, calls for further research of field-mapping as a teaching method.

The purpose of this article is to review the importance of theory in social enterprise research.

The article presents and relates previous work on theory borrowing, theory extension and theory generation to social enterprise research.

Theoretical embeddeness and social relevance are important for the legitimacy of social enterprise research.

Social enterprise research offers a promising array of opportunities for theory extension and development.

In the social sciences, practical relevance is important for good theory development. Better theories have the potential to improve practice.

The article applies previous research on theory borrowing, extension and development to the context of social enterprise research.

Operations and supply chain management (OSCM) is a theoretically and philosophically fragmented field. Researchers must consider how they use theory and explain empirical phenomena. This paper aims to use critical realism to introduce more coherence into this fragmented field.

This paper draws on existing critical realism and abduction literature and this study uses a research process from two PhD projects to investigate critical realism’s role in OSCM research. This paper uses a narrative approach to collect data over a long timeframe, capturing data not commonly used in OSCM research.

Research that struggles to bridge the gap between theory and data benefits from critical realism, which provides a philosophy and associated methods to identify a suitable theory and guide researchers when they encounter obstacles. While clear steps often outline established methods, researchers are sometimes unable to identify when their research process has reached an obstacle. This paper argues that such obstacles can be treated as “crossroads” offering new research opportunities when correctly evaluated and addressed.

Importantly, researchers should be able to reflect upon their own research processes, enabling a better understanding of these processes and the discovery of new research directions. Researchers can use critical realism, abduction and systematic combining to bridge the divide between theory and data in OSCM.

This paper contributes to the field’s discussion regarding the roles of critical realism and abduction, synthesizing multiple academic sources, highlighting critical realism’s importance and providing a novel means of addressing difficulties in navigating an eclectic research area. This paper offers a philosophical alternate to the field, which is often instead considered from a positivistic standpoint. The paper is valuable to researchers in the OSCM field, who can use the research to improve their selection of data and theories, as well as their understanding of their own research processes.

Informed by the Bourdieusian construct of the social field, the purpose of this paper is to explore how different aspects of the educational field and the sub-field of English language teaching in Iran influence diverse components of the professional identity of high school EFL teachers. To this aim, the impact of the power hierarchization structure, distribution of capitals and field autonomy, as important aspects of the social field theory, is investigated in relation to Iranian EFL teachers’ professional identity construction.

Van Manen’s (1990) hermeneutic phenomenological research method was adopted to analyze the data obtained through the semi-structured interviews and reflexive journals from 15 Iranian EFL teachers at high schools.

The hermeneutic phenomenological analysis of the data yielded to the extraction of one global, three organizing and six basic themes. The global theme was the educational field and professional identity. The resulting organizing themes were: first, autonomous field and teachers’ commitment; second, asymmetric power relation and teachers’ autonomy; and, finally, cultural capital and teachers’ motivation. This study revealed how the complex and multi-dimensional nature of the power relations between the field of education and power influenced the professional identity of EFL teachers.

This dynamic representation of the inherent complexities of the educational context contributes to a more profound understanding of the role of the micro and macro contextual factors in formulating teachers’ professional identity. The implications of this study are further explained.

Hereby, the authors declare that all the procedures of data collection and analysis have been just done by the researchers.