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Considers the question: how can we study organizational fields from a systemic angle of incidence? First determines what is meant by a systemic perspective, and then what is meant by an organizational field. Designs a superior methodological scheme, where the main entities in the systemic approach are clarified. Looks at the underlying process for each of the main entities in the research scheme. Develops a systemic research strategy for the study of organizational fields.

This paper aims to explore the role of the researcher’s emotions in ethnographic practice in accounting research. This paper focuses on shame as an emotion that lingers on, despite the efforts to work through those emotions.

The authors conducted a collective autoethnography to make sense of the fieldwork and after-fieldwork emotions and their consequences. This autoethnography began with the three authors discovering their shared feeling of shame.

Building on Hochschild’s theory (1979, 1983) on emotional labor, the authors demonstrate how shame emerged as a central and lingering emotion of the ethnographies beyond an emotional labor process. The authors show how a double shame appeared toward the field participants and the academic accounting community, affecting the writing and the work.

The authors demonstrate that the perception of the research community’s rules of feelings gives rise to emotions that ultimately change the work. The authors show how collective autoethnography can help accounting research to acknowledge and give room to emotions.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between language, thinking and society for explaining the degree of visibility of the French organizational studies (OS) production.

This paper proposes a sociological analysis based on Bourdieu field to understand the variation of reception the French OS production have had among the Anglo-Saxon field. The paper aims to underline some key elements, which can explain the differences of reception experienced by the French OS scientists. The paper opted for a general review using historical data; reviews of OS literature; and Google scholar, Web of Science and major OS Journal data.

The paper provides some evidence about how the degree of visibility of the French OS production is related to translation, cognitive and social resonance, producer place in the scientific network and relationship between the fields. It suggests that the degree of visibility is the result of a complex set of socio-cognitive schemes, social issues raised by the scholar and the place occupied by the researcher in the field.

The paper brings interesting ideas concerning the international development of the OS field, the degree of visibility of diverse contributions coming from non-English speaking researchers, notably the French ones, and how the dialogue between different linguistic and social universes can be ameliorated.

This paper aims to review the growth and development of the field of relationship marketing and, through a consideration of this body of work, identifies key research priorities for the future of relationship marketing. The paper also delineates the frequently confused associated concepts of customer relationship management and customer management and considers how they fit within the broader concept of relationship marketing.

This paper undertakes a review of the relationship marketing literature, supplemented by the authors’ on-going interactive research with managers.

The paper reviews alternative approaches to relationship marketing, reflects on the development of the field of relationship marketing and identifies three critical priorities for future research in relationship marketing.

The research priorities that are identified in this paper represent important priorities for scholars, managers, regulators and policy makers.

Although there is now a substantial body of research on relationship, marketing, much of this work focuses on the customer-firm dyad, with a smaller body of work focusing on a broader range of stakeholders. This paper argues for the broadening of the role of relationship marketing to consider ecosystems; the need for firms to shift from a value-in-exchange to a value-in-use perspective when addressing customer relationships; and the critical need to address “dark side” behaviour and dysfunctional processes in relationship marketing.

Dynamic relationships between technologies and organizations are investigated through research on digital visualization technologies and their use in the construction sector. Theoretical work highlights mutual adaptation between technologies and organizations but does not explain instances of sustained, sudden, or increasing maladaptation. By focusing on the technological field, I draw attention to hierarchical structuring around inter-dependent levels of technology; technological priorities of diverse groups; power asymmetries and disjunctures between contexts of development and use. For complex technologies, such as digital technologies, I argue these field-level features explain why organizations peripheral to the field may experience difficulty using emerging technology.

The purpose of this study is to reveal important insights by examining the relationships of two different field managers’ monitoring styles with performance through salespersons’ engagement.

Data was collected from 318 salespersons’ from 20 pharmaceutical firms. Given the performance-driven nature of the pharmaceutical sales profession, field managers seek to adopt the best monitoring style, which can optimize individual’s performance while providing a healthy work environment.

The results from multivariate analysis show the evidence of positive relationship between interactional monitoring and salespersons’ engagement. The results also confirm that engagement partially mediates the proposed relationships.

Authors assimilate and extend research and theory on field managers’ monitoring, salespersons’ performance and salespersons’ engagement to advance a model of salespersons’ reactions to different monitoring styles based on self-determination theory. Perhaps in no other field, the salespersons-field managers’ relationship is as important as in the field of pharmaceutical selling. The study offers insights about the important consequence of two different monitoring styles; also the study is one of the exceptional efforts to provide evidence regarding the role of engagement in the relationship between two different monitoring styles and salespersons’ performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the complexities associated with the trust-building process between participants and researcher in the context of a precarious work environment. Specifically, the paper seeks to discuss issues arising from the power dynamics, mistrust and tensions between different stakeholders in the research (i.e. employers, employees and the researcher), and the implications of such relationships for establishing rapport and trust with research participants.

This paper uses the case of the shipping industry and is based upon findings from two research projects. One project examined similarities and differences between the merchant vessel and Goffman’s theoretical conceptualisation of “total institutions” (Goffman, 1961); the other focused on the increasing flexibility of labour in the global labour market, using the case of shipping. Both projects incorporated ethnographic research methods which included three voyages on board merchant vessels, as well as interviews and informal conversations with over 100 participants.

The researcher encountered several obstacles throughout the projects, many of which related to the access to the restricted workplace setting of a cargo ship. However, this paper is based on her positioning in the field after permission to access the ship had been granted by the shipping company. It was often challenging to overcome participants’ suspicions of the researcher as being sent by the company to spy on them. The researcher generally managed to overcome such suspicions in the course of her fieldwork by building relationships with participants over time. Nevertheless, these relationships were influenced by the complex power dynamics amongst the different stakeholders in the field. The challenges encountered in the field sites suggest that researchers should be open and fluid in the ways they present themselves in the field. The findings potentially offer useful insights for novice researchers whose research focuses on workplace settings characterised by precariousness of employment and for those conducting shipboard research.

The main contribution of this paper lies within its ability to shed light on the often-delicate relationships between different stakeholders in a research project, and the influence of these relationships on a researcher’s continuous access to the field. The experiences described in this paper are based on the global shipping industry, but they are also relevant to other closed, isolated and/or restricted research settings. Specifically, experiences described in this paper are similar to those of researchers studying “closed” research environments that are not accessible to the general public; this is particularly the case where a hierarchical work structure controls to some extent the roles played by different stakeholders within the precarious work environment, potentially influencing the way someone from outside the workplace approaches it. These include, for example, government owned establishments such as prisons, mental hospitals as well as privately owned closed business organisations.

Reflexivity involves critical reflection by the qualitative researcher as to the influence of the researcher's culture, history and belief on the conduct and outcome of the research. It is often seen as a practice exercised in the analysis of results in order to attempt to objectify the research. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the value of reflexivity is located in its practice in the field encounter as a means of recognising and embracing subjectivity. In order to widen reflexivity as hermeneutics, the paper draws on Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics as developed in “Truth and Method”.

This is a conceptual paper which distils critical themes from Gadamer's truth and method and applies them to the concept of reflexivity as applied in the field.

The paper suggests that reflexivity is an important component in the field encounter. Immersion in the language and terms of the field is critical to understanding meaning; who I am, my past, my lived experience are essential inputs to my research; the researcher's opinions, ideas and outspoken statements are part of the fabric of qualitative research; qualitative interpretation as a creative exercise; qualitative research should bring insight and understanding that can be applied to catalyse change.

Understanding and applying reflexivity in the field will provide innovative insights which can be carried through to the data analysis.

This study uniquely applies Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics to reflexivity and the field encounter.

This study aims to examine the design of effective support systems for micro‐, small‐ and medium‐sized enterprise (MSME) development at the local and regional level in China.

The paper calls on the experience of China, in fostering the fastest growing MSME sector in the world over the past 20 years, to suggest a paradigm based upon the Chinese guanxi model of relationships.

The paper argues that the extensive international experience has not been massively successful and that the application of a stricter market‐led approach to the provision of MSME business development services will not be successful if it ignores the way that western “institutionalism” dictates the supply offer.

It is argued that the model of entrepreneurial networking and relationships demands a fundamental repositioning of policy support and a major reorganisation of the way that knowledge is made explicit and disseminated to MSMEs.

The paper explores what is termed as a stakeholder relationship model for the entrepreneur, the policy maker and the local delivery agent.

This paper responds to recent calls for deeper scrutiny of the institutional contexts of citizen science. In the last few years, at least two dozen civil society organizations in New York and Pennsylvania have begun monitoring the watershed impacts of unconventional natural gas drilling, also known as “fracking.” This study examines the institutional logics that inform these citizen monitoring efforts and probes how relationships with academic science and the regulatory state affect the practices of citizen scientists. We find that the diverse practices of the organizations in the participatory water monitoring field are guided by logics of consciousness-raising, environmental policing, and science. Organizations that initiate monitoring projects typically attempt to combine two or more of these logics as they develop new practices in response to macro-level social and environmental changes. The dominant logic of the field remains unsettled, and many groups appear uncertain about whether and how their practices might have an influence. We conclude that the impacts of macro-level changes, such as the scientization of politics, the rise of neoliberal policy ideas, or even large-scale industrial transformations, are likely to be experienced in field-specific ways.