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The study aims to understand the meaning of event-based and place-based community practices, as well as the resulting social impacts.

An ethnomethodological approach was followed (participant observation and interviews were supplemented by secondary data), with the analysis being exploratory and interpretative.

The festival and the place reinforce the community’s social practices, which have impacts beyond the festival, benefiting individuals, the community and the place, becoming a means for valorisation and diffusion of the rural way of life, and placemaking.

In this study the authors focus on social practices in the context of an event and of a place (the village where the event occurs). The authors connect to theories of practice, which they apply in the analysis. The value of the study lies on the underlying mechanisms (how communities exercise social practices in the context of festivals, and what social impacts may lead to) rather than its context-dependent specific results.

National and regional authorities can play a role in providing local communities with adequate tools to overcome the challenges they encounter. This can be done by issuing appropriate (events) plans and policies while giving room for the locals to voice their opinions.

Community-based festivals are key social practices that can strategically impact placemaking, strengthening community bonding, forging connections with outsiders and promoting well-being practices that discourage rural depopulation.

There is a scarcity of research that deepens the understanding of the role of festivals in placemaking and their social impacts, particularly in the rural context. This study contributes to closing this gap by focussing on the social practices of a community-based festival in a village in the interior of Portugal.

This study aimed to investigate the sensemaking strategies employed by early-career employees working within organizationally constrained environments.

Grounded in the sensemaking-as-accomplishment framework, a longitudinal multi-case study was conducted, involving three early-career employees. These participants were interviewed multiple times concerning tasks they themselves identified as anomalous and ambiguous.

The study's findings illuminate how early-career employees utilize sensemaking strategies to accomplish anomalous-ambiguous tasks. These strategies are interwoven with deliberate efforts to mitigate organizational constraints that exist in the organization or arise during the execution of complex tasks.

Notable limitation pertains to the time gap between task completion and the interviews. Conducting real-time interviews concurrently with task execution or immediately afterward was not feasible due to constraints in participant availability. This research has implications for organizational learning initiatives, particularly those encompassing employee-driven self-learning components. Insights derived from studies like this can inform the development of effective self-learning schemes within organizations.

Previous sensemaking research focused on what takes place in high-reliability organizations. This study explored sensemaking strategies in workplaces that are organizationally constrained.

Since the start of the Carers’ Movement research into unpaid care and carers has been used to advocate for policy change. The purpose of this paper is to address the changes in research into unpaid care and carers since the start of the Carers’ Movement and to explore the relationship between these changes and social policy.

This research paper is based on a qualitative study of documents within the Carers UK archive.

Research into unpaid care and carers has changed focus from caregiving as an identity and lifestyle to an interruption to “normal” life and employment. Changes in research are intertwined with changes in policy, with research evidencing advocation for policy change and policy change fuelling further research. Changes in the methodology of this research exposes transition points in the Carers’ Movement and in social research more broadly.

This paper contributes to critical understandings of the relationship between research into unpaid care and caring and policy. The paper also contributes to debates on methodology, exploring how the methodological zeitgeist presents in archived research.

Understanding how current research into unpaid care and carers has been developed and acknowledging the role of policy in research development brings available data on unpaid care and caring under scrutiny.

This paper is original in developing a critical analysis of the relationship between research into unpaid care and carers and social policy.

This research is devoted to the study of social expectations, and the purpose of this paper is to elaborate the instrument of their measurement based on the main spheres of influence.

The research was conducted using a mixed methodology: a series of semistructured interviews and a survey. In the first stage, 15 interviews, and in the second phase, both online and offline surveys (306 participants) were conducted to test the social expectations scale designed. The qualitative phase highlighted the most important areas of social expectations, identifying how they can influence individual behavior. Afterward, the scale of social expectations was developed, and its prognostic function was confirmed.

It was revealed that expectations influence goal setting, motivation, public opinion orientation, emotional experience and decision-making.

This study is an attempt to construct a measurement tool for social expectations and close the gap for many studies that used the concept without operationalization.

This article intends to explore the sustainability accounting practices that emerge from the business of artificial forestry in the Qingshui River society of southwest China in the 18th-19th centuries.

Using a historical approach, we set out to discuss the systematic use of “folk contract” as a tool of tracing accountability in timber trading and in the collective management of community forests in this region, based on the archives of Qingshui River Manuscripts.

The findings indicate that active transactions of small forest plots facilitated by the prevalent use of folk contracts allow both the landlords and the tenants to easily acquire cashflow needed any time before the harvest, and in turn prevent premature logging and deforestation for crop farming. An “open ledger” bookkeeping system emerged from the extensive contracting practices guarantees the functioning of a dualistic accountability system, where both market value of timbers and “face” value of community members' reputation are preserved for long-term sustainability of local economy, society and ecological environment.

From the perspective of economic anthropology, this study forms the link between the folk contract practice in sustainable forestry of the Qingshui River society and the emancipatory accounting literature.

This study aims to make visible the dynamic nature of leader–member exchange (LMX) in the changing realm of health-care leadership.

The qualitative study used an open questionnaire, which was distributed amongst nursing staff and managers at a Finnish public university hospital.

The participants described partly LMX theory, but the leader-member relationship was also influenced by the organizational culture and the existing management practices. Nursing staff were found to have a more variable and dynamic role in the LMX relationship than has previously been reported. The research therefore provided novel information for the field of health-care research.

The presented research was limited by the content of the data, as the collected single narratives were rather short; however, the fact that a large number of narratives were collected from diverse participants strengthened the ability to reliably answer the research questions.

Although the participants described partly LMX theory, the leader–member relationship is also influenced by the organizational culture and existing management practices; the finding that nurses have more variable roles in LMX relationships in the health-care context was new insight in this field. Therefore, the presented findings can help decision-makers change the current, perhaps antiquated, leadership practices at health-care organizations.

This study provides new insight into the field of LMX research in terms of the important role of nursing staff, the organizational factors that influence the LMX relationship and the dynamic nature of LMX relationships.

English, the lingua franca of the world, permeates a global teaching-learning space not only for communication per se but also as a medium of instruction and social interaction. The authors studied the lived experiences of five English-speaking university lecturers as regards English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching in a non-English-speaking Asian country.

Using a phenomenological inquiry and through Zoom interviews, the authors studied the lived experiences of five English-speaking university lecturers as regards EFL teaching in a non-English-speaking Asian country.

Thematic analyses guided the authors' understanding of the participants’ lived experiences in the classroom, such as the following: (1) Local students have a negative perception of EFL; (2) lecturers’ professional standards are hardly imposed and (3) local students have a mixed level of English proficiency. The authors also examined the participants’ lived experiences in the organization, where the following issues surfaced: (1) sending of communication messages beyond working hours, (2) bureaucratic working environment and (3) changing of policies.

The authors' research implies the need for programs and policies that will help EFL teachers deal with instructional and other socio-cultural challenges in an Asian context.

In the Asian setting, there is a dearth of literature that focuses on the experience of university lecturers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), in particular, their teaching challenges. The authors confronted this gap by understanding the local beliefs about EFL teaching among English-speaking university lecturers.

This research interrogates how the construction of narratives and accounting forecasts contributes to managing the emotional state of actors involved in reporting meetings by promoting discourses of hope in their organization's future, mitigating their anxiety. This study shows how narratives are built from multiple antenarratives and accounting forecasts, which restore and strengthen organizational actors' commitment to their organizations. This study contributes to a better understanding of the role played by narratives and accounting documents in mitigating organizational members' anxiety.

Over eight months, an interventionist research design method gave one of the authors the opportunity to record discussions held during reporting meetings in a business incubator. These recordings captured the production of narratives and forecasts in these meetings.

This study shows how the production of multiple antenarratives and accounting forecasts helps organizational actors who attend reporting meetings mitigate the anxiety triggered by disappointing performance figures and restore collective discourses full of hope for the organization's future. This case highlights how personal antenarratives and successive versions of accounting forecasts contribute to restoring a collective commitment to a failing organization.

This study refines current understanding of the under-explored links between accounting forecasts, narratives and anxiety management. The study provides insight into how accounting practices contribute to the production of narratives that successfully restore organizational members' commitment to working for a failing organization. The study also exemplifies the original insights gained from interventionist research protocols.

The study aims to determine the outcomes of mentorship in an online game system, as well as the characteristics of good mentors.

A combination of anonymized survey measures and in-game behavioral measures were used to power longitudinal analysis over an 11-month period in which protégés and non-mentored new players could be compared for their performance, social connections and retention.

Successful people were more likely to mentor others, and mentors increased protégés' skill. Protégés had significantly better retention, were more active and much more successful as players than non-protégés. Contrary to expectations, younger, less wealthy and educated people were more likely to be mentors and mentors did not transfer their longevity. Many of the qualities of the mentor remain largely irrelevant—what mattered most was the time spent together.

This is a study of an online game, which has unknown generalizability to other games and to offline settings.

The results show that getting mentors to spend dedicated time with protégés matters more than their characteristics.

Good mentorship does not require age or resources to provide real benefits.

This is the first study of mentorship to use survey and objective outcome measures together, over time, online.

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.