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Efforts to address the role and responsibilities of large global corporations have predominantly focused on the need for increased and more effective global corporate governance, but this underestimates the need to articulate a global ethics for these corporations. This paper aims to analyse the Woolf Committee Report (WCR; the weapon company BAE Systems plc's attempt to outline what it would take to become a global corporate leader in ethics) and benchmark it against an ethical response to corporate responsibility articulated as a global ethics.

The paper is based on a textual analysis of the WCR.

The WCR contains openings towards a re‐articulation of the role and responsibilities of large global corporations, but it is predominantly a text that gives us more clues to how difficult it will be for BAE, or any other corporation, to “live” a global ethics.

Critical analyses of the language that corporations use in order to address their role and responsibilities are important. However, how texts influence practice is dependent on how they travel and more studies on such journeys are also needed.

Given that textual analyses, such as ours, are re‐connected to practitioners, such studies might contribute to making practitioners more discursively aware of the corporate talk that they are embedded in.

The paper predominantly speaks to the field of business studies and its originality lies in its focus on a global ethics (without reducing this to governance) in relation to the role and responsibilities of large global corporations.

The purpose of this paper is to present how my positionality as a researcher aligned with the works of Latour in terms of methodological inspirations and allowed me to develop a critical vantage point and simultaneously adopt a heterogeneously rather than hierarchically informed approach to ordering the world, which I argue serves as a basis for a more inclusive study of management systems.

I reflect on my own positionality as a researcher and share how my interpretation of Latour's ontology through some of his ideas and concepts, particularly symmetry, power, translation and agency, allowed me to incorporate and organize heterogeneous actors depicted in different empirical materials into space-time contexts and subsequently theorize organizing and management practices as agential, multiple and becoming.

A base in Latour’s ontology has equipped me with openness towards empirical settings, which I argue retains a democratic approach to theorization, i.e. theorization, which remains mindful of inadvertent assumptions about power, hierarchy or the taken for granted. This approach has also given me a form of personal resilience as a researcher.

The originality of this paper lies in presenting and developing the concept of method as democratizing. I argue that Latour’s approach to the empirical allows for at least two forms of active democratizing, one relating to the researcher as self and the other in how it incorporates the empirical actors into research, making possible the inclusivity of heterogeneity in analyses of organizations and organizing.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a thesis on global careers; a topic relevant to many project managers working internationally. The main purpose of the thesis was to contribute to the understanding of global careers through applying an identity construction perspective on narratives of global careerists' working lives.

Through a narrative approach, 20 interviews with Swedish global careerists were analyzed and comparison of two types of global careerists was made – repeat expatriates and international itinerants.

The repeat expatriates and international itinerants are shown to have different patterns in their identity construction and there are differences in their career orientations, in their identifications with the organizations they work for, with their careers and with what they do. They also differ in how they identify with their home country and culture and the countries and cultures in which they live. Circumstances such as the type of location, the time abroad, and if the work abroad is perceived as temporary, are significant in their identity construction.

Both organizations and individuals benefit from understanding the implications of such careers. The results of this study can lead to the development of HRM practices to attract and maintain the relationship with these individuals and draw on their skills.

By considering individuals' subjective experiences of global careers through an identity construction perspective, new understanding can be reached on individuals undergoing multiple transitions over the course of their careers.

The purpose of this study is to explore the potential positive effects of the design of a physical organisational environment on the emergence of an organisational culture conducive to organisational creativity.

The study is based on an in-depth, longitudinal case study, the aim being to enhance understanding of how a change in physical space, including location, spatial organisation and architectonic details, supports cultural change.

It is suggested that physical space plays an implicit yet significant role in the emergence of a culture conducive to organisational creativity. It appears from the case analysis that there are three aspects of culture in particular, equality, openness and collectivity, that may be positively affected by the design of an organisation’s physical environment.

The careful choice, planning and design of an organisation’s physical location, layout and style can advance the appearance of an organisational culture conducive to creativity.

The paper describes a longitudinal study comparing a case organisation before and after a change in its physical environment. The longitudinal data illustrates how a change in the spatial environment contributes to the emergence of a culture conducive to organisational creativity.

In highly digitalised countries such as Denmark, statistics show that one out of four employees has experienced high levels of stress. However, despite ample research evidence on the presence of technostress, the knowledge on this phenomenon is not yet part of the material and guidelines from official authorities. Previous research on technostress provides quantitative psychological and neurophysiological perspectives on technostress, focussing on the individual, the technology or the technological environment. The authors see this as a limited approach, as it leaves out the social environment in which technostress arises. The authors aim to expose the sociological mechanisms that contribute to technostress by using the sociological lens of obligation. The authors ask: ‘What is the knowledge that the sociological lens of obligation can bring to the theoretical understanding of technostress?’ To answer our research question, the authors employ an embedded case study in Denmark by looking into the existing political material and interviews with 14 employees across 6 organisations. The authors find that stress in practice is mostly addressed from a response perspective, which points to the individual. This view is inherent in how the individuals take responsibility for the technostress they experience. Another critical finding from our data is that technostress is socially constructed. The authors contribute to theory by using a new-to-IS theory and a qualitative approach to technostress research, which allows us to uncover how the social construction of obligation impacts the individual employee. Our theoretical contributions point to a need for practice to move in the direction of seeing technostress as a societal, rather than solely individual, responsibility.

Workplace stress costs £3.7bn per annum in the UK and in excess of $300bn per annum in the USA. The purpose of this paper is to examine the existence, strength and direction of relationships between perceptions of social support, work–life conflict, job performance and workplace stress in an Irish higher education institution.

The selected theoretical framework consisted of a combination of reward imbalance theory, expectancy theory and equity theory. An organizational stress screening survey instrument was used to survey the staff (n = 1,420) of an academic institution. Multiple linear regression analysis was used to evaluate the relationships between the independent variables (social support, work–life conflict, job performance), the covariates (staff category, direct reports, age, gender), and the dependent variable (workplace stress).

The results showed a negative correlation between social support and workplace stress, a positive correlation between work–life conflict and workplace stress, and a negative correlation between job performance and workplace stress (p < 0.05). The results also revealed significant relationships between the covariates direct reports and gender and the dependent variable workplace stress.

The findings from this research can trigger an organizational approach where educational leaders can enable workplace change by developing and implementing social support and work–life strategies, and potential pathways to reduce levels of workplace stress and improve quality of life for employees and enhance performance.

The examination and establishment of particular relationships between social support, work–life conflict and job performance with workplace stress is significant for managers.