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The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a novel storytelling approach that investigates lived experience at the intersection of motherhood/caregiving and Ph.D. pursuits. The paper contributes to the feminist tradition of writing differently through the process of care that emerges from shared stories.

Using a process called heartful-communal storytelling, the authors evoke personal and embodied stories and transgressive narratives. The authors present a composite process drawing on heartful-autoethnography, dialogic writing and communal storytelling.

The paper makes two key contributions: (1) the paper illustrates a novel feminist process in action and (2) the paper contributes six discrete stories of lived experience at the intersection of parenthood and Ph.D. studies. The paper also contributes to the development of the feminist tradition of writing differently. Three themes emerged through the storytelling experience, and these include (1) creating boundaries and transgressing boundaries, (2) giving and receiving care and (3) neoliberal conformity and resistance. These themes, like the stories, also became entangled.

The paper demonstrates how heartful-communal storytelling can lead to individual and collective meaning making. While the Ph.D. is a solitary path, the authors' heartful-communal storytelling experience teaches that holding it separate from other relationships can impoverish what is learnt and constrain the production of good knowledge; the epistemic properties of care became self-evident.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a gender-sensitive analysis of economic agency in Islamic economic philosophy.

A critical review of classical ethics literature and the concept of khilafah is undertaken and discussed in conjunction with the current understanding of homo Islamicus.

Building on the principles of khilafah, the concept of homo Islamicus is a pious stand-in for the flawed homo economicus. Among its flaws is the complete absence of a discussion of women as economic agents. To remedy this the discipline must acknowledge explicitly the denial of women and gender from the discussion of moral agency and include gender as a category of analysis for economic agency. This is only possible by: (1) introducing a non-patriarchal reading of khilafah as the model of agency and (2) by operationalising taqwa as the cardinal virtue of the economic agent instead of neoliberal rationality.

If Islamic economic philosophy is to contend as an alternative mode of economics, it must consider gender and class dimensions in its micro-foundation discussion, economic agency is one of them.

This study reveals the patriarchal readings that are part of the foundation of the concept of the economic agent in Islamic economics, problematising it and providing a gender-sensitive concept of economic agency.

Over the past decade, researchers have witnessed an exponential growth in the number of publications on IR. This paper aims to understand the state of the art of the research field and to highlight the areas where further academic research is needed, guiding developments in theory, research, policy and practices.

The authors apply the dynamic literature review method called “Systematic Literature Network Analysis”, which combines systematic literature review and bibliographic network analysis. Furthermore, to overcome some of the limitations connected to the methodology, the authors integrate the literature with a manual content analysis of papers.

IR adoption and practices and their determinants represent the most analyzed aspects of literature. Over time, attention has been paid to more specific issues, such as the relationship between IR and other disclosure mechanisms, IR quality and its assurance, the critical analysis of the IR framework and principles and difficulties in IR adoption. Although the literature on IR can be considered to be in its mature stage, many aspects are still under-researched, so there is plenty of space for future research.

The authors propose the following main issues as subjects to be investigated in future studies: IR is not simply an evolution of sustainability reporting, but an innovative communication tool; the debate on who the recipients of value are (shareholders or stakeholders) and on what the definition of value adopted by IR is still remains an open issue; more attention should be given to the role of IR as a managerial tool, which could support strategy formation and communication, and influence internal processes of performance measurement and evaluation; what the future of IR will be in light of recent EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and new ISSB's standards is still an open question. From a methodological perspective, little is known about structured approaches in accounting studies. The authors confirm how methodologies, such as that of this paper, may be exploited as a tool to support dynamic analysis for setting the agendas for future studies in the accounting field.

This paper is an extension of a panel presentation delivered in response to a joint call for panels by the Social Informatics and Information Ethics and Policy Special Interest Groups for the 2022 Association for Information Science and Technology conference. The purpose is to introduce critical race frameworks and tenets as a lens to develop, assess and analyze the social informatics (SI) within information science (IS) research, professional discourse, praxis and pedagogical paradigms. This paper spotlights one of the presentations from that panel, an iteration of Critical Race Theory (CRT) designed specifically for information studies: CRiTical Race information Theory (CRiT).

Just as importantly, using SI as part of the context, the paper also includes a discussion that illustrates research and theory building possibilities as both counter and complement to the technocratic advances that permeate society at every level (macro, mezzo and micro), which can also be reasonably framed as the information industrial complex. Thus, CRiT joins other forms of critical discourse and praxis grappling with deconstructing, decolonizing, demarginalizing and demystifying the influence and impact of information technologies. While CRiT has global intentions and implications, this specific discussion has an extensive American focus.

If we consider the rapid pace in which techno-determinism is moving toward the vise grip of techno-fatalism controlled by frameworks generated from the information industrial complex, we can reasonably consider that humanity on a global basis is living within a meta-large technocratic crisis moment. This crisis moment is both acute and chronic. That is, the technocratic crisis is continuously moving quickly while simultaneously worsening over an extended period of time with no remedies and few responses to substantively address the crisis.

Part of the nature of information and data is measurability. Thus, identifying compatible nomenclature connecting the descriptiveness of intersectionality (a seminal CRT tool) as a qualitative research method to the measurability of data connected to quantitative research, a mixed method approach moves from possible to plausible. Additionally, within IS, there are often opportunities to measure human engagement, such as social media content, search engine use, assessing practices of categorizations, and multiple forms of surveillance data as a short list. Hence, the descriptiveness of intersectional qualitative research “mixed” with the measurability of quantitative research within information settings implies exponential methodological possibilities.

CRiT is multilayered, on the one hand, with the intention of being a discipline-specific, information-specific form of CRT. On the other hand, CRiT theory building is interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary based on information as omnipresent phenomena. An ongoing challenge for CRiT theory building is identifying and working within a balance between, practitioners who typically throw anything and everything at practical problems, while scholars often slice problems into such small segments that practical understanding is severely limited. Embracing and integrating the dynamic interplay between developing ideas and using them is the key to evolving CRiT within the social sciences.

There is plenty of room as well as a need for additional narrative discussing or challenging the use or appropriation of information from a technocratic approach, a counter to the information industrial complex.

CRiT is emerging and cutting edge in discussion that addresses the technocratic determinism found in most scholarly discourses.

This paper aims to shed light on how children's literature in Africa deserves to be studied because African writers “decolonize” the minds of African children and children and adults around the world.

This paper defines children's literature from an African perspective and the “decolonization of the mind.” This is done to examine how two African writers provide narratives for children inspired by their cultures. They deal with themes, characters and symbols that interest children and adults.

Achebe and Youssef crossed many borders: the world of children and adults, animals and humans, vice and virtue, supernatural and real. Their stories take the reader on journeys that involve enriching, engaging and inspiring adventures.

Youssef and Achebe are prolific writers. Providing a survey of what is available in Arabic and Nigerian literature for children, is beyond the scope of this paper.

This paper sends a message to those in charge of the curriculum in schools in Egypt, the Arab countries, Africa and the world at large: decolonize the syllabi in schools because the world is not black and white. Literature for children that encourages critical thinking is available by African writers in Egypt, Nigeria and elsewhere.

The works discussed show that African writers are creative, and their works inspire the African child with pride in his/her identity, culture and heritage.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, no one has compared Egyptian and Nigerian literature for children before. Youssef and Achebe provide evidence that “Good literature gives the child a place in the world … and the world a place in the child.” – Astrid Lindgren.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the congruence between predecessor and successor personality traits (PTs) with the values of their small family business (SFB) contributes to a successful succession transition across generations.

The conceptual model method was employed in this investigation, which describes an entity and identifies issues that should be considered in a study (MacInnis, 2011). It involves a form of theorizing that seeks to create a nomological network around the focal concept, to examine and detail the causal linkages and mechanisms at play (Delbridge and Fiss, 2013).

Drawing on the trait activation theory (TAT), this study conceptualizes that the congruence of the successor's PTs with those of the predecessor, as well as the values, transitions and nature of the assigned task, activates the successor's PTs and motivates him to work diligently for a successful succession transition while preserving the business's core values established by the founder.

This study is an eye-opener for strategists and SFB predecessors to ponder the successor's PTs disparities across generations. Additionally, it urges them to consider the congruence of SFB's values and nature of operations with the successor's PTs for successful succession transition. Thus, such awareness may contribute to stabilizing the SFB's survival rate.

This study contributed to the existing literature by answering how predecessor’s and successor's PTs congruence and SFB's values and nature of operations congruence with their PTs may contribute to successful succession transition across generations. This study contributed to the TAT by thematically explaining the organizational cues to bridge a relationship between entrepreneurial personality traits (EPT) and succession success of SFBs.

Hazel Kyrk’s contribution is the most advanced formulation of the economics of consumption as a social phenomenon, an approach to the analysis of consumption that, originated from Veblen’s theory, was developed in the US in the early 20th century. This approach was part of a wider stream of empirical analyses of consumption expenditure that had begun more than a century earlier.

Along with elements that can be traced back to the neoclassical tradition, in Keynes’ analysis of consumption, we find original elements. The dependence of consumption expenditure on the level of income, which is essential for asserting the principle of effective demand, can also be found in a long tradition of empirical studies. In qualifying this relationship, Keynes uses theoretical elements echoing key insights of the economics of consumption as a social phenomenon. There is no documentary evidence that Kyrk or the economics of the social relevance of consumption came to Keynes’ attention. It is possible, however, to develop reasonable speculative considerations to argue a link between Keynes’ elaboration and both the empirical literature on the determinants of consumption and the economics of consumption as a social phenomenon.