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This study aims to contribute to the field of customer portfolio management by proposing a novel approach rooted in dialectic critical realism (DCR). DCR, as an ontological theory, enables a fundamental reimagining of customer portfolio management as a dialectic process. The conceptualized dialectic portfolio management is motivated by the concept of “absence”, akin to Hegelian “antithesis”, which highlights limitations, problems and tensions in portfolio management. In essence, “absence” serves as a diagnostic tool that directs portfolio actions towards resolving problems by pursuing a more comprehensive “totality”, similar to the Hegelian notion of “synthesis”.

This conceptual paper theorizes DCR in business marketing and customer portfolio management.

DCR conceptualizes customer portfolios as relational structures characterized by omissions and tensions. These issues are addressed through a dialectic synthesis aimed at achieving a more comprehensive “totality”. Consequently, DCR guides portfolio management to continually re-think the connections and distinctions that define a portfolio within its network context. This dialectic process is facilitated by a novel vocabulary that enhances the understanding of network and portfolio relations, incorporating concepts such as “intrapermeations”, “existential constitutions”, “intra-connections” and “intensive” and “extensive” portfolio practices.

This study aims to foster a fresh and process-oriented perspective on portfolio management, drawing inspiration from the growing demand for enriched dialectic theorizing within the realm of business marketing. The adoption of a dialectic process orientation based on DCR revolutionizes the comprehension of portfolio management by fundamentally reimagining the underlying ontological assumptions that underpin the existing body of literature on customer portfolios. Moreover, DCR asserts that ethical considerations are inextricably linked to human experiences and associated practices, emphasizing ethics as an integral component of customer portfolio management.

This paper aims to adopt a relational dialectics analysis approach to provide qualitative depth and insight into the ways intercultural families manage intercultural tensions around consumption. The authors pay particular attention to how a relational dialectics analysis reveals a relational change in the family providing evidence to demonstrate how a family’s unique relational culture evolves and transitions.

Qualitative insights from a relational-dialectic analysis on 15 intercultural families are used to illustrate the interplay of stability with instability in the management of intercultural dialectic tensions within these families.

Intercultural dialectical interplay around food consumption tensions are implicit tensions in the household’s relational culture. Examples of dialectical movement indicating relational change are illustrated; this change has developmental consequences for the couples’ relational cultures.

This study provides qualitative insights on relational dialectics in one intercultural family context and reveals and analyses the dialectical dimensions around consumption in the context of intercultural family relationships. The research approach could be considered in other intercultural and relational contexts.

Family narratives can be analysed within the context of two meta-dialectics that directly address how personal relationships evolve; indigenous dialectic tensions within a family can also be identified.

This paper demonstrates the qualitative value of a relational dialectics analysis in revealing how food consumption changes within families are the result of reciprocal or interdependent learning, which has consequences for relational change.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual model that uses dialectical inquiry (DI) to create cognitive conflict in strategic decision‐makers for the purpose of improving strategic decisions. Activation of the dialectical learning process using DI requires strategic decision‐makers to integrate conflicting information causing cognitive conflict. Cognitive conflict is the catalyst that stimulates the creation of new knowledge in strategic decision‐makers resulting in improved organizational performance.

A conceptual model is developed that explicitly links DI to the dialectical learning process of strategic decision‐makers. This model extends previous research on DI by identifying cognitive conflict as the critical component that links DI as a learning method to the process of dialectical learning in strategic decision‐making.

The major finding of the model of dialectical learning is that the model is an important resource that can be applied to create cognitive conflict in strategic decision‐makers for the purpose of expanding the strategic options of organizations.

Empirical research on DI that focuses on the role of cognitive conflict in the dialectical learning process is lacking. It is hoped that this conceptual paper will stimulate further interest on the topic and a greater appreciation of this method of learning. Strategic decision‐makers must consider alternative ways of generating new knowledge that is crucial for organizational performance.

It is important that the benefits of creating cognitive conflict in the dialectical learning process are understood by strategic decision‐makers. Training for participants in a DI learning intervention is essential to help minimize any dysfunctional behaviors that could result from affective conflict.

This conceptual model identifies the importance of cognitive conflict in the dialectical learning process of strategic decision‐makers and the critical role of cognitive conflict rather than affective conflict in the use of this learning method.

This study aims to introduce a new cognitive style, dialectical thinking, to demonstrate how it can influence a leader’s impact on team conflict and employee performance. Specifically, this study intends to answer the research questions “whether and how leader’s dialectical thinking would influence employee performance” with conflict management perspective in the Chinese context.

Multilevel structural equation modeling was used to test the theoretical model with 222 employees in 43 teams from Chinese high-tech manufacturing firms.

The authors found that the leader’s dialectical thinking had positive relationships with employee creativity and in-role performance and that the relationships were mediated by the leader’s conflict management approach and team conflict in sequence.

Selecting, recruiting or promoting of leaders with a dialectical thinking style or providing training to enhance leaders’ dialectical thinking is important for facilitating team conflict management and employee performance.

This is the first empirical paper to introduce dialectical thinking into the leadership, conflict and employee performance literatures.

There is evidence of discontent with contemporary university education generally, and accounting education in particular. This paper examines some reasons for the discontent and suggests one way to address it, namely dialectic enquiry. The process of contradiction and reconciliation is at the heart of dialectic enquiry. From two opposing positions, dialectic enquiry requires a third position, or synthesis, to emerge which allows the participants to progress their exploration of an issue. The authors describe the introduction of dialectical enquiry in a university accounting course and discuss the potential learning improvements it can offer. The authors hope this paper will encourage others to introduce dialectical enquiry into their classrooms and report their findings.

Here Marx's philosophy is dissected from the angle of bourgeois capitalism which he, Marx, sought to overcome. His social, political and economic ideas are criticised. Although it is noted that Marx wanted to ameliorate human suffering, the result turned out to be Utopian, contrary to his own intentions. Contrary to Marx, it is individualism that makes the best sense and capitalism that holds out the best hope for coping with most of the problems he sought to solve. Marx's philosophy is alluring but flawed at a very basic level, namely, where it denies the individuality of each person and treats humanity as “an organic body”. Capitalism, while by no means out to guarantee a perfect society, is the best setting for the realisation of the diverse but often equally noble human goals of its membership.

With rising globalization, Western and Eastern brands are increasingly collaborating and co-branding. Drawing on the theory of dialectical self that captures the degree of cognitive tendency to tolerate conflicts, inconsistencies and ambiguities in self-concept, this paper investigates the effect of consumer dialectical self on co-branding that encompasses Western and East Asian cultural brand personality traits.

Two studies were conducted using Chinese participants to examine the effects of the dialectical self on co-brand evaluation under single-and dual-personality conditions and to explore the mediating role of ideal social self-congruence and the moderating role of product type (high vs low conspicuous).

The findings suggest that counterintuitive to the received wisdom, the dialectical self negatively influences one's attitude towards a co-brand in the dual-personality condition only. Further, ideal social self-congruence mediates the relationship between the dialectical self and dual-personality co-brand evaluation in the high conspicuous product condition only.

Important implications are offered to international marketing managers for managing the dialectical self that lead to positive co-brand evaluations. Moreover, managers should highlight ideal social self-congruence for co-branding success for particular product types.

This paper examines co-branding from a novel perspective of consumer dialectical self and shows the pivotal role it plays when brands carry varying cultural traits engage in co-branding. By identifying the role of the dialectical self and the important mediator and moderator, the paper fulfils an important gap in co-branding literature and offers key implications.

Calls for dialectical learning process model development in learning organizations have largely gone unheeded, thereby limiting conceptual understanding and application in the field. This paper aims to unify learning organization theory with a new understanding of Hegelian dialectics to trace the development of the storytelling learning organization. The “storytelling learning organization” is a conceptual framework presented along with criteria to evaluate different kinds of dialectical development claims in “storytelling learning organization” work that are bona fide instances of one or another dialectical ontology ranging from Marxian, to Hegelian, to Brierian, to Žižekian.

Ontological evaluation and critique of a variety of “storytelling learning organization” practices posit different dialectical ontology and consequences for theory and practice. Through a case example of business process reengineering (BPR) in a “public research university (PRU)”, the storytelling of “schooling” versus “education” ideas and practices, in a place, in a period and in material ways of mattering, never achieves synthesis. The dialectical development of resistance to implementation evolves toward transcendence into irreducible oppositions of ontological incompleteness – the essence of a learning organization.

This ontological analysis focuses on the use of ideas and practices by opposing storytelling agents and actants to uncover a learning organization’s dialectical development in its own storytelling, its narrative and counter-narrative enactments, and its attempts to unpack contradictions. The PRU under study has gone through a series of financial crises, and its learning organization responses were downsizing staff and faculty positions and implementing BPR in ways that worsened the situation. The process resulted in staff and faculty leaving even before the reorganization was completed and enrollment dropped dramatically, in great part due to the negative press and the excessive standardization of the curriculum that accompanies “schooling” displacing acts of “education” practices and ideations. Meanwhile, the administrators are still trying to manage the narrative and control it so as to forestall additional attrition.

The theory of “storytelling learning organization” is original. The question answered here has practical value because institutions have choices to make concerning the kind of dialectical narrative and counter-narrative development that is cultivated, and there are options for transforming or moving to an alternative narrative and counter-narrative development process. The analysis of the case also illustrates a pattern of intervention that is, on the one hand, unsuccessful in developing “higher” education and, on the other hand, successful in shutting down the efficacy of a PRU by centrist use of reengineering to accomplish more schooling, more downsizing and more installation of “academic capitalism” ideas and practices.

The purpose of this paper is to study dialectical methodology as a scientific reasoning process in Islam comparatively with mainstream philosophy of science.

Comparative discursive method of inquiry using the language of philosophy of science and abstract mathematization (limited use).

This is a theoretical paper of an intellectual category, which presents the arguments within the framework of the principle of universal and pervasive complementarities as the evidential sign of the epistemology of unity of knowledge studied through functional ontological logical formalism.

The theoretical nature of an argumentative paper is at best a foundation one rather than an empirical one.

An example of the Islamic dialectical methodology of unity of knowledge is applied to socioeconomic development in Islamic perspective.

There is believed to be no other paper on Islam and its dialectical methodology in scientific reasoning compared to the theory of dialectics in mainstream philosophy of science in the contemporary literature.

The article questions what is meant by the term critical theory and discusses some common misconceptions that have arisen about the meaning of this term. The dialectic logic that was championed by the group of scholars collectively known as the Frankfurt School is outlined and a number of implications for the field of organization and behaviour are discussed.