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In this paper, we contribute to the understanding of how entrepreneurs can deploy their values to enable joint action of heterogeneous stakeholders. Such an understanding forms a critical endeavor to tackle grand challenges adequately. Building on sensegiving research, we conducted a single-case study of an entrepreneurial initiative that tackles gender inequality in Lebanon which has been successful in mobilizing heterogeneous stakeholders who ordinarily would not collaborate with each other. We find that the values of the founders were pivotal for the initiative’s success as those values activated latent values of stakeholders through processes of contextualization and enactment. We subsume these processes under the label value-driven sensegiving. As a result of value-driven sensegiving, heterogeneous stakeholders could make sense of the founders’ aspirational vision and the role they could play in it, which paved ways for tackling grand challenges collaboratively. Our study provides insights into the centrality of values for mobilizing heterogeneous stakeholders across boundaries. Therefore, it contributes to the body of work on sensegiving, societal grand challenges, and new forms of organizing.

This paper aims to revisit the debate on the insider-outsider positionality of the researcher in conducting qualitative research by highlighting the challenges of researching sexual harassment and harassment among stigmatized or hidden groups of individuals in a culturally value-laden backdrop in South Asia.

The authors drew on a bricolage of methods to analyze and write this paper. First, the authors borrowed from the case study approach to select three research projects that would shed light on the argument raised in the study. Then, narratives, together with self and critical reflexivity were used to write reflective narratives, which served as data for this paper. Next, the authors used the thematic analysis method to analyze the reflective narratives. Finally, the authors drew from literature and the experiences to provide recommendations for the challenges thus identified.

The critical reflections highlight three overarching challenges the authors encountered as insider-outsiders in researching a sensitive topic among stigmatized/hidden groups in a value-laden cultural backdrop: 1) difficulty in recruitment, 2) internalized gender norms and 3) unconscious biases. Based on these challenges, the authors posit that what is pertinent is not whether a researcher is an insider, outsider or in-betweener per se, but how to maximize benefits and minimize pitfalls of being an insider or outsider and employing other means of overcoming the drawbacks. The authors also claim that being more sensitive to the culture, reflexive, flexible and experienced would help overcome challenges faced when conducting research of this nature as insiders-outsiders.

There appears to be little empirically derived inquiry on the insider-outsider positionality of the researchers at the intersection of sensitive topics, stigmatized participants and culture. Our reflections and suggestions address this lacuna while revisiting the simplistic use of insider-outsider dichotomy and proposing other means to overcome the drawbacks brought on by the researcher positionality.

This paper aims to investigate the relative importance of audit-team and audit-firm attributes in perceptions of audit quality by two groups of users of audit services: audit committee chairs/members (“insiders”) and financial analysts/fund managers (“outsiders”).

Using a survey questionnaire, data are gathered from 39 audit committee chairs/members and 42 financial analysts/fund managers and analysed using adaptive conjoint analysis.

The findings reveal that both groups perceive audit-team attributes as relatively more important than audit-firm attributes. This is consistent with expectations for “insiders”, but inconsistent with expectations for “outsiders”. Differences are also found in the internal ratings of some of the attributes, with “insiders” and “outsiders” placing different relative importance on some attributes.

The usual set of limitations that are present in a survey method also apply in this study, i.e. surveys rely on reports of behaviours rather than observations and are therefore susceptible to measurement error. A further limitation is that, in using adaptive conjoint analysis, the number of attributes that may be included in the survey is restricted and, consequently, the attributes selected may not be comprehensive or fully representative.

The study extends the scope of prior studies by examining the relative importance of audit-team and audit-firm attributes in perceptions of audit quality. In using conjoint analysis, the study makes a unique and innovative contribution by providing direct evidence on the relative importance of attributes in perceptions of audit quality for different users of audit services. The findings have implications for regulators and the accounting profession concerned with improving confidence in corporates and for audit firms in monitoring and promoting the quality of their audit services.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the fluidity of the fieldwork roles “insider” and “outsider.” The paper aims to move the discussion of insiders from an a priori categorized status and contribute to the literary insider–outsider debate by unfolding the micro process of how the role of an insider is shaped in situ. Grounded in empirical examples, the paper illustrates how the researcher’s role is shaped through interactions with organizational members and by context.

The paper is based on an ethnographic study in an IT department of a Nordic bank and draws on empirical material generated through a combination of data: shadowing, interviews, observations and documents. Excerpts from fieldnotes are included to invite the reader into “the scenes” played out in the field and are analyzed in order to illustrate the shaping of roles in situ.

The study finds that, independent of the researcher’s role as sponsored by the organization, the interactions with organizational members and context determine whether the researcher is assigned a role as insider or outsider, or even both within the same context.

The paper contributes with a new discussion of how the roles of insiders and outsiders are fluid by discussing the shaping of the roles in situ. By drawing on relational identity theories, the paper illustrates how interactions and context influence the researcher’s role, grounded in empirical examples. In addition, the paper discusses what the assigned roles enable and constrain for the ethnographer in that particular situation.

The purpose of this chapter is to establish whether director trades provide information to investors about the future prospects of the company they form part of and thus reduce the information asymmetry beyond what is already conveyed in the financial statements.

Director Dealings were dealt with as an investment strategy by looking at past transactions of directors executed between January 2005 and December 2014 on the Malta Stock Exchange (MSE) and evaluating whether there was an increase in returns for investors who copy director trades. The study focused on whether short-term abnormal returns for up to 12 months after the transaction date, being either a buy or a sale, were made by directors in Malta when trading in their own companies.

The results show that in the short-term period of up to 12 months after the transaction date, Maltese directors do transmit information to the market both when they purchase shares in their own companies and also when they sell shares. The interesting fact about the study is that in Malta sale transactions are more valuable to the outsiders than purchase transactions. Apart from this, the results also show that some companies which are listed on the MSE are more indicative as to their future performance than others. It was ultimately concluded that even though there are informational asymmetries between directors in a company and outsiders, an outsider cannot trade solely by following director trades. The implications of the findings are discussed.

This study attempts to determine the level of significance that each insider trade has on the Maltese market, what each director trade conveys to the said market and if these trades are valuable to the outside investors even though such investors do not have knowledge of the grounds upon which the directors trade.

The scholarly conversation about insider and outsider positionality in observational research is long, rich, and often contentious. Debates about the benefits and challenges of studying sites where researchers share insider identities with participants, in particular, have yielded insights about power, inequality, and the uniquely relational character of observational research. In this chapter, we enter this conversation by relating our experiences with outsider-ness and insider-ness while studying social movements. We draw on two ethnographic case studies of social movement organizations within higher education settings. We identify some of the challenges faced while qualitatively studying identity-based movements embedded within institutions, specifically (1) being mindful of and negotiating the impact of researcher identity and how it relates to those of the subjects; (2) determining one's level of participation within the movement being studied; and (3) securing research approval and access to data. We offer suggestions for how researchers might think through these challenges in their own work.

At the level of a cognitive schema, a business model is a mental map of a firm’s value-creating, value-delivering, and value-capturing activities and the linkages between them. An important question in the study of business models as cognitive schemas is whether and how schemas differ across industry actors and whether the differences are connected to the variation observed in actual business models in the industry. This chapter examines, in particular, the ways in which business model schemas of industry insiders differ from those of industry outsiders. Using data from interviews with chief executive officers (CEOs) of 30 legal-tech firms, we graphically construct and analyze the CEOs’ schemas of important causal interdependencies between their firms’ activities. The analysis shows systematic differences between insiders and outsider CEOs’ schemas. We theorize that these differences underlie insider and outsider CEOs’ distinct approaches to opportunity recognition, expertise perception, and value framing, and have consequences for actual business model evolution in the industry.

Managing Executives occupy a pivotal role in the acquisition process. It is virtually inconceivable that major Merger and Acquisitions (M&As) could proceed without their personal sponsorship (Hayward & Hambrick, 1997). They are central to the negotiation and signing for such deals and it is these negotiations that raise questions over how the target company should be run post-acquisition, how it should be configured to fit within the newly expanded group and what sort of strategy may be appropriate for the future. Managing Executives embody their firm’s strategies and so are intimately connected with these issues of organisational fit and strategic rational. With negotiations focussed upon the future of their businesses and their personal places in corporate history, these contests can be very dramatic. The high stakes are evident in the substantial levels of acquired Managing Executive departure post-acquisition. Whilst we can observe that many acquired Managing Executives subsequently leave the enlarged firm, little evidence to date answers the question of why they have been retained or replaced?

The purpose of this paper is to draw on the authors’ experiences as a team made up of both “insiders” and “outsiders” in order to investigate how an insider-outsider peer research method facilitates productive forms of research into the lives of young Muslims, and to contribute to debates about ways of knowing youth. The authors aim to shift focus from a common claim that peer research methods simply improve research about youth to more deeply investigate how they enable, as well as limit, the production of particular kinds of knowledge, in this case, about Muslim youth in Australia.

The research aimed to explore how “ordinary” young Australian Muslims engage in civic life. Yet the authors were faced with the challenge of accessing and recruiting “ordinary” youth in times of Islamophobia, wherein Muslim communities expressed serious concerns about their voices being misinterpreted, misused and misappropriated. Therefore, the authors sought to utilise an approach of outsider-designed and guided research that was then shaped and executed by insider peer researchers. It is this research design and its execution that the authors interrogate in this paper.

As well as affording the authors access and the elicitation of rich, complex and high-quality data, the approach also fostered more complex stories about young Muslim identities and experiences, and enabled the authors to contest some common and homogenising representations. It also allowed opportunities for fundamental issues inherent in these kinds of qualitative research methods to be made explicit. These include the politics of performativity and issues of positionality in the peer research process. The authors suggest that the “insider” and “outsider” approach succeeded not so much because it got the authors closer to the “truth” about young Muslims’ civic lives, but because it revealed some of the mechanics of the ways stories are constructed and represented in youth research.

The originality and value of this paper lie in its contribution to a debate about the politics of knowledge production about young people and Muslims in particular, and in its effort to move forward a discussion about how to be accountable in youth research to the various communities and to one another in insider-outsider research teams.

This study examines associations between accrual earnings management (AEM) and real earnings management (REM), and earnings quality between countries considered under insider economics and outsider economics clusters. Countries included in the outsider economics cluster are Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. Meanwhile, countries included in the insider economics cluster are Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea. Earnings management practices have changed from AEM to REM since the publication of the Sarbanes Oxley Act and DFA 954 implementation of the Claws back provision policy in the United States.

Research data were obtained from the Bloomberg database, 2010–2016. Regression analysis and t-test were utilized. This study compared AEM and REM to determine which is stronger based on country clusters, as well as the association between AEM or REM and earnings quality.

The results of this study indicate that AEM and REM are associated with the quality of earnings in the insider economics cluster. However, AEM and REM are not associated with earnings quality in the outsider economics cluster. Furthermore, associations between AEM and earnings quality are stronger than associations between REM and earnings quality in insider economics cluster.