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Identity regulation is part of a management control package. Organizations regulate employees’ self-identity to influence their behaviors. The success of this regulation depends on its trade-off with employees’ work identities and personalities. Organizational discourse nurtures this dynamic and interactive process. We focus on the regulation of an (undesired) organizational identity that is born at the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender, sex and migrant discrimination in accounting-related positions. We aim to analyze how Latina accountants who migrate to Spain perceive that their triple status as Latina, women and migrants affects their careers as accountants and interpret whether this triple intersectional discrimination aims to create a Latina accountant’s self-identity.

This critical study follows a phenomenological approach to analyze the experiences of women born in Latin America who migrated to Spain to occupy accounting-related positions. A thematic analysis of their semi-structured interviews allowed us to examine the challenges faced by Latina accountants in their accounting careers in Spain.

Our interviewees' narratives display an internalization of, even resignation to, a self-identity that we label “Latina accountant identity.” This identity is based on explicit discrimination discourses that cause them to suffer from the intersection of racism, sexism and migrant conditions and is nurtured by the discourses of their senior managers, co-workers and subordinates.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to frame the regulation of an intersectional discriminatory identity that is used to control Latina accountants from the inside, acting on the triple condition of Latinas, women and foreigners, influencing their self-perceptions regarding work and personal lives.

This paper aims to explore how music festival organisers negotiate diversity and inclusion in marketing and promotion practices through symbolic and social boundaries.

Based on semi-structured interviews with 18 festival organisers in Rotterdam and participant observation with six festival photographers I show that symbolic and social boundaries are employed in three areas: (1) boundaries in festival format (i.e. [partially] free or ticketed), (2) boundaries in distribution partners and technologies and (3) boundaries in promotional content.

Symbolic and social boundaries are intentionally used by festival organisers to build and delineate festival audiences. Implications are drawn on current understandings of the accessibility of music festival spaces, arguing that festival research should move beyond within-space dynamics to grasp the negotiation of diversity and inclusion at festivals more fully.

While music festivals are often marketed as celebratory spaces that are “welcoming to everyone”, few studies have investigated diversity and inclusion nor marketing and promotion practices at music festivals. This study shows how festival audiences are shaped through marketing and promotion practices.

An important but neglected area of investigation in digital entrepreneurship is the combined role of both core and peripheral members of an emerging technological field in shaping the symbolic and social boundaries of the field. This is a serious gap as both categories of members play a distinct role in expanding the pool of resources of the field. I address this gap by exploring how membership category is related to funding decisions in the emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI).

The first quantitative study involved a sample of 1,315 AI-based startups which were founded in the period of 2011–2018 in the United States. In the second qualitative study, the author interviewed 32 members of the field (core members, peripheral members and investors) to define the boundaries of their respective role in shaping the social boundaries of the AI field.

The author finds that core members in the newly founded field of AI were more successful at attracting funding from investors than peripheral members and that size of the founding team, number of lead investors, number of patents and CEO approval were positively related to funding. In the second qualitative study, the author interviewed 30 members of the field (core members, peripheral members and investors) to define their respective role in shaping the social boundaries of the AI field.

This study is one of the first to build on the growing literature in emerging organizational fields to bring empirical evidence that investors adapt their funding strategy to membership categories (core and peripheral members) of a new technological field in their resource allocation decisions. Furthermore, I find that core and peripheral members claim distinct roles in their participation and contribution to the field in terms of technological developments, and that although core members attract more resources than peripheral members, both actors play a significant role in expanding the field’s social boundaries.

Core AI entrepreneurs who wish to attract funding may consider operating in fewer categories in order to be perceived as core members of the field, and thus focus their activities and limited resources to build internal AI capabilities. Entrepreneurs may invest early in filing a patent to signal their in-house AI capabilities to investors.

The social boundaries of an emerging technological field are shaped by a multitude of actors and not only the core members of the field. The author should pay attention to the role of each category of actors and build on their contributions to expand a promising field.

This paper is among the first to build on the growing literature in emerging organizational fields to study the resource acquisition strategies of entrepreneurs in a newly establishing technological field.

The paper provides a theoretical framework for interdisciplinary accounting scholars interested in performances of accountability in front of live audiences.

This is a processual case study of “Falkirk in crisis” that covers the period from September 2021 to September 2022. The focus of this paper is two-fan-Q&A sessions held in October 2021 and June 2022. Both are naturally occurring discussions between two groups such as are found in previous research on routine events and accountability. This is a theoretically consequential case study.

A key insight of the paper is to identify the practical and symbolic dimensions of accountability. The paper demonstrates the need to align these two dimensions when responding to questions: a practical question demands a practical answer and a symbolic question requires a symbolic answer. Second, the paper argues that most fields contain conflicting logics and highlights that a complete performance of accountability needs to cover the different conflicting logics within the field. In this case, this means paying full attention to both the communitarian and results logics. A third finding is that a performance of accountability cannot succeed if the audience rejects attempts to impose an unpalatable definition of the situation. If these three conditions are not met, the performance is bound to fail.

An important theoretical coontribution of the study is the application of Jeffery Alexander’s work on political performance to public performances of accountability.

The phenomenon explored in the paper (what the authors term “grassroots accountability”) has broad applicability to any situation in organizational or civic life where the power apex of an organization is required to engage with a group of informed and committed stakeholders – the “community”. For those who find themselves in the position of the fans in this study, the observations set out in the empirical narrative can serve as a useful practical guide. Attempts to answer a practical complaint with a symbolic answer (or vice versa) should be challenged as evasive.

This paper studies an engagement of elite actors with ordinary (or grassroots) actors. The study shows important rules of engagement, including the importance of respecting the power of practical questions and the need to engage with these questions appropriately.

This paper offers a new vista for interdisciplinary accounting by synthesizing the accountability literature with the political performance literature. Specifically, the paper employs Jeffery Alexander’s work on practical and symbolic performance to study the microprocesses underpinning successful and unsuccessful performances of accountability.

Appearance has two meanings. On the one hand, appearance is about the physical qualities of a person being of certain height, weight, complexion and having a particular hair, eye and skin colour as well as choice and style of dress and attire. On the other hand, appearance has a social dimension, as those physical qualities of a person are interpreted, rated and judged, and attributed varied meanings and values across different settings. Appearances can influence the experiences of individuals in the workplace in both positive and negative ways: Positive, when they are mobilised as a resource that increases the influence and advantage of individuals on others; and negative, when individuals are discriminated or disadvantaged on the basis of their appearance. Drawing on a Bourdieusian conceptual repertoire, this chapter delves into this duality of appearance and frames appearance both as a resource (a form of carnal capital) and a source of symbolic violence. As appearance is an aspect of an individual's self-identity in the workplace, this chapter explores appearance and intersectionality across gender, ethnicity, class and sexual orientation at work. Appearance is examined as a cross cutting category of diversity as both privilege (carnal capital) and disadvantage (symbolic violence).

This paper aims to investigate the cultural meanings of excessive drinking in three different countries with different levels of alcohol use chosen as case studies of wider geographies representing Northern (Denmark), Southern (Italy) and Eastern (Estonia) Europe.

Data were collected according to the Reception Analytical Group Interview method, using video clips as stimuli to enhance comparability. Eight online focus groups were organized in each country for a total number of 128 participants. Symbolic boundaries defining what drinking patterns are socially acceptable were then analysed to look at cross-national variations.

Results show how different conceptualizations of excessive drinking persist, although a convergence process among drinking patterns is also observed, which suggests that differences mainly depend on meanings and values attributed to intoxication. These are both rooted in the traditional drinking cultures and affected by ongoing social and economic change processes.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability, even at country level, as there are differences also within the same drinking culture; however, addressing these differences was beyond the scope of the present study, which aimed to contribute to understanding persisting differences in European drinking culture despite different drivers seem to act for globalization of drinking habits.

The paper includes implications for the development of tailored and effective prevention messages, considering rooted attitudes and cultural values attached to drinking and drunkenness in different European geographies, which are also related to conceptualizations of risks and pleasure.

This paper fulfils an identified need to understand persisting differences in alcohol-related behaviours and outcome in different European countries emerging from quantitative data.

Organizational theorists and strategy scholars are both interested in how organizations deal with ambiguity, especially in relation to implementation. This chapter examines one source of ambiguity that organizations face, which is based on their efforts to implement moral mandates. These mandates, which are related to areas such as environmental sustainability and diversity, are inherently ambiguous, as they lack a shared understanding regarding their scope and associated practices. They are also often broad and systemic and may be unclearly aligned with an organization's strategy. Due to these challenges, in this chapter, we theorize that collective action at the field level is necessary for organizations to advance and concretize moral mandates. We examine this theorizing through the case of the implementation of sustainability in higher education. We hypothesize and find support for the idea that when an organization's members engage in collective action at the field level, those organizations have an increased likelihood of achieving sustainability implementation. To gain insight into this field-to-organization relationship, we qualitatively examine 18 years of conversations from an online forum to develop a process model of moral mandate implementation. We theorize that collective action functions as a field-configuring space, in which actors from a variety of organizations come together to (1) refine the scope of the mandate and (2) create an implementation repertoire that actors can draw on when seeking to bring sustainability to their own organizations. Overall, our study provides a model of how ambiguous moral mandates can be implemented by highlighting the important role of collective action across organizations in concretizing those mandates and providing actors with the tools for their implementation.

The purpose of this study is to explore how US graduate students described their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) education and engagement experiences outside their academic departments.

This study used a critical constructivist qualitative approach and methods (i.e. interviews) to explore how 44 graduate students across various disciplines and fields at two public research institutions in the USA described their DEI education and engagement experiences outside their departments.

Students identified expanded DEI and professional knowledge as key learning outcomes, while also highlighting the benefits and negative effects of the identity-centered (dis)connection, community and personal fulfillment that came from these experiences.

Given that DEI education and engagement opportunities addressed some students’ needs and were unsatisfactory for others, more scholarship on the nature of these experiences is needed to better understand factors that contribute to students’ desirable and undesirable outcomes. There are also practical implications for faculty who advise graduate students and administrators who are responsible for funding the campus spaces in which these experiences occurred (e.g. graduate colleges, identity-based student organizations).

Few studies have explored graduate students’ participation in DEI education and engagement opportunities outside of their academic departments. Consequently, the efficacy of these initiatives, and the extent to which students benefit from them, warrant investigation. This study, thus, adds to researchers’ and practitioners’ understanding of this topic by highlighting the benefits and limitations of these experiences for graduate students.

Organization studies in India has largely remained insular to the writings of Indian scholars in parent disciplines such as sociology. The lack of engagement with Indian sociological works has promoted excessive dependence on Euro–American theory. It has further hindered the development of indigenous theories. This paper aims to argue that engagement with the writings of classical and contemporary Indian sociologists can resolve this issue.

The paper delineates the contribution of Indian sociologists to organizational or sociological institutionalism. It focuses specifically on the contribution of these scholars concerning two subtopics: conceptualization of institutions and fields, and the dynamics of institutional change.

The paper draws upon the work of Indian sociologists to develop a concept of ecological field. It further delves into the dynamic interplay between ideas and institutional change. More precisely, it draws attention to the role of actors and mechanisms that produce ideas.

Future studies can leverage the contribution of Indian scholars to explicate, elaborate and develop creative theories of organizational institutionalism. Such cumulative efforts can help in building an Indian tradition of organizational institutionalism.