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The purpose of this paper is to propose a typology of enchantment approaches that are related to storytelling practices in organizations: enchantment by design and enchantment by emergence.

The authors explore this enchantment framework in a storytelling drawing on examples of living storied spaces and narratives from hospital studies.

This essay asserts three aspects about enchantment: that mainstream organizational narrative, rooted in classical structuralism and modernity, seems intent on disenchanting life within them. Second, despite such narratives, organizations, such as hospitals the authors studied, were never disenchanted because enchantment resides in many living storied spaces. Finally, many forms of “enchantment” and “disenchantment” are taking place in organization action and its storytelling.

The paper equips managers with a deeper understanding of how storytelling in organizations can encourage enchantment or disenchantment within the organization and in its relations with their environments (community, nature, humanity).

The value of the paper lies in its theoretical contributions, integrating enchantment‐disenchantment perspectives with a theory of storytelling.

This paper aims to set out an analysis of Gregory Bateson's thought about the relations between parts and wholes, between separateness and togetherness in order to illuminate the kind of answers Bateson proposed to the contemporary ecological dilemma.

It roughly situates discourses of the “enchantment” of nature on the side of togetherness and discourses of scientific disenchantment on the side of togetherness.

The essay looks at Bateson's discovery that neither separateness nor togetherness can ever be thought of without the other as an indication of the limits of both disenchantment and enchantment, and it suggests that awareness of these limits enables ecological insight.

The essay proposes a broad summary of a general problem in Gregory Bateson's epistemology and shows how it emerges in political, social and ecological space.

In this paper the authors investigate precarious value creation in English football clubs. They examine strategic, economic, cultural and social capital to analyse the orientations of legal owners of football clubs (entrepreneurs) and the implications for moral owners (the fans). Their research question is not if entrepreneurs create value – but whether the value created is productive or destructive.

The research design is a case study of the professional football industry, specifically 44 football clubs in the top two professional divisions in England, namely the English Premier League and the English Football League Championship. The authors’ methodology is secondary textual data. Their approach is to examine official club statements, triangulated with regional and national press reports, fan accounts and narratives from published artefacts; fan blogs and websites.

The “opening up” of the professional football industry in England to market forces in 1983 has subsequently attracted entrepreneurs that use football clubs as artefacts to pursue other business interests. Over-grazing on strategic and economic capital at the expense and exploitation of social and cultural capital exists. As entrepreneurial opportunities to exploit a football club's assets becomes more apparent, the unique relationship between club and fan is being strained. The authors observe detachment, disenchantment and protest.

The data sought for this study design was necessarily in the public domain and therefore drawn from secondary sources. The scope was English football and the top two divisions, thus the findings are context specific to that region and level.

For policy, the authors call for a new government inquiry into football ownership in English football, re-examining heritage, purpose and value creation.

Football fans are the majority stakeholder in the football industry but are under-represented in English football because of the private ownership of football clubs. Fans are, however, a barometer for how their owners are acting as custodians of their clubs and if the value created by entrepreneurs is productive or exploitative.

This paper has value in drawing attention to this unique and ignored industry from an entrepreneurship perspective, provoking a call for further research to explore this phenomenon. Sustainable value creation may be a useful framework for further research in this and other industries.

This paper explores the moral and ethical dimension of indeterminacy in educational administration within the context of the managerialisation of education. Drawing on Max Weber’s seminal work on rationalisation, disenchantment, and the ethic of responsibility and the ethic of conviction, the author discusses the conflict between accountability and educational autonomy. While this conflict constitutes a key dilemma of educational leadership, educational theorists all too often attempt to resolve the conflict in favour of accountability over commitment consistent with managerial principles. By contrast, it is argued that mature educational leadership is characterised by an appreciation that conflicting ethical orientations are irreconcilable and that sound educational policy and practice must reflect practical realities and demands without sacrificing educational ideals.

Entrepreneurs engaging in social entrepreneurship are inspired by a need to make a difference in their local socio-economic circumstances. In developing countries and emerging economies, social entrepreneurs from deep rural areas are tapping into different types of ways to inspire themselves to sustain actions. Little research has been done to investigate the role religion plays as a source of inspiration to rural entrepreneurs in developing countries. Many scholars from economic sciences reject the probability of linking religion to social entrepreneurship. The purpose of this study is to investigate themes as inspired by religious paradigm aspects of desire, disenchantment, epiphany, bridging and enlightenment. A framework was created for social entrepreneurship development by using religious drivers as premise.

In a partially inductive, exploratory design, this study examined the objectives through a qualitative approach. ATLAS.ti, a qualitative data analysis programme, was used for thematic analysis.

The key finding was that in this specific rural demographic area, social entrepreneurs often express a common motivation as an aspiration to integrate their religious beliefs and work.

Investigating a specific demographic sample in a deep rural area in Nigeria provided valuable insights into the community’s way of living by incorporating aspects of religious drivers to develop social entrepreneurship. It was also valuable to discover that the sample views qualities such as hard work, independence and thrift as drivers to strengthen their religious belief and in return boost social entrepreneurship.

Reflects on strategic alliances including local/home alliances and global alliances. Suggests there are three factors driving the growth of strategic alliances: globalization; accelerated technical change; and disenchantment with mergers and acquisitions. Uses two Figures for explanation of points and alliances. Concludes research shows that most partnerships achieve the desired objectives — for at least one partner anyway.

The paper argues that the diatextual analysis could be considered a psycho-cultural path of critical discourse analysis because it stresses the role of hermeneutical procedures in catching the inter-subjective nature of meanings. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these theoretical speculations in light with some empirical evidences coming from a discursive study exploring the construction of organizational identity through socialization practices.

Two focus group discussions were conducted, respectively, with retired workers and young workers employed in the same working organization to investigate how workers discursively shape their sense of belonging to the organization. Narratives of past and present membership were analyzed adopting the diatextual perspective, which was precious in tracking down the discursive traces of subjectivity, modality and argumentation emerging from their discourses.

Diatextual analysis was a precious tool to explore organizational identity through the different rhetoric that older and young workers used to make sense of it: “enchantment” vs “disenchantment.”

The study was a case study. It involved few people and results cannot be generalized, but the main aim of the paper was to support qualitative methodology.

The implication of the study are precious to design formal socialization and human resource management practices better attuned with the need of workers.

The social implications are connected with a wider revision of the organizational policies in terms of HRM.

The value of this paper is the discursive diatextual approach in organizational research.

Strategic analyses of Mediterranean destinations have well documented the impacts of mass tourism, including high levels of seasonality and landscape degradation as a result of the “anarchic” nature of tourism development in these destinations. The lack of a strategic framework is widely recognised in academic and popular discourse. What is often missing, however, is local voice and attention to the local particularities that have shaped the course of tourism development in these places. Focusing on narratives of people living and working in Santorini, Greece, this paper aims to examine tourism development as a particular cultural experience of development.

The authors conducted narrative interviews with 22 local residents and entrepreneurs. Participants belonged to different occupational sectors and age groups. These are supplemented with secondary data, consisting of books, guides, documentaries and online news articles on Santorini.

The analysis and interpretation by the authors identify remembered, experienced and imagined phases of tourism development, which we label as romancing tourism, disenchantment and reimagining tourism.

Professionalisation has certainly allowed the improvement of quality standards, but in transforming hosts into service providers, a distance and objectivity is created that results in a loss of authenticity. Authenticity is not just about what the tourists seek but also about what a place is or can be, and the “sense of place” that residents have and use in their everyday lives.

Local narratives offer insights into the particularities of tourism development and the varied, contested and dynamic meanings of places. Place narratives can therefore be a useful tool in developing a reflexive and participative place-making process.

The study serves the understanding of how tourism, subject to the global-local relations, is a particular experience of development that shapes a place’s identity. The case of Santorini shows how place-making involves changing, multilayered desires and contradictory visions of tourism and development. This makes socio-cultural and environmental challenges hard to resolve. It is thus challenging to change the course of development, as various actors at the local level and beyond have diverse interests and interpretations of what is desirable for the place.

The development of undergraduate key skills programmes has been a major concern for some years now, recently given added impetus by the Dearing report. This paper discusses the development, implementation and evaluation of web based key skills materials at the University of North London. Take up of these was positively correlated with academic success, although misuse of online discussion fora was evident. Lecturers and students differed markedly in their perception and evaluation of the system. Many of the advantages trumpeted by academics were dismissed by students, who felt that material posted online gave them extera work; represented an abrogation of lecturers’ teaching duties and shifted printing costs from the institution to the student. Network and other access problems caused further disenchantment. The paper concludes that moree attention needs to be paid both to user needs and attitudes, and to the resource implications of running such a system.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the transition of midlife women from employment in organizations to self‐employment. It examines how midlife women account for their transition from organizations to self‐employment; why they opted for self‐employment rather than simply changing organizations and their experience of self‐employment.

This paper is based on semi‐structured interviews (n=100), with women between the ages of 46 and 60 who have moved into self‐employment from organizational employment.

Two themes emerged from the study. The first was the negative organizational experience of some of the women which had caused dissatisfaction and disenchantment and therefore self‐employment was seen as the only next step. The second theme was changes triggered by a positive proactive choice to move into self‐employment.

There are limitations to using individual perceptions and anecdotes. It cannot be assumed that the women in this study represent the views of all midlife women.

Silence about midlife women leaving organizations perpetuates high costs for both the organization and the individual involved. Organizations need to address the negative and discriminatory perceptions about midlife women and recognize the trend towards more, not fewer, older women in the workplace and value the experience, skills and knowledge they bring.

The paper is original in that the focus is on women in midlife, which is unique, as previous research about women in organizations has rarely encompassed the experiences of this group of women moving into self‐employment.