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The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of decolonizing interpretive research in ways that respect and integrate the qualitative sensibilities of subaltern voices in the knowledge production of anti-colonial possibilities.

The paper draws from the decolonizing and post-colonial theoretical tradition, with a specific reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s contribution to this analysis.

Through a critical discussion of decolonizing concerns tied to qualitative interpretive interrogations, the paper points to the key assumptions that support and reinforce the sensibilities of subaltern voices in efforts to move western research approaches toward anti-colonial possibilities. In the process, this discussion supports the emergence of an itinerant epistemological lens that opens the field to decolonizing inquiry.

Its practical implications are tied to discursive transformations, which can impact social and material transformations within the context of research and society.

Moreover, the paper provides an innovative rethinking of interpretive research, in an effort to extend the analysis of decolonizing methodology to the construction of subaltern inspired intellectual labor.

The flow of cash funds from employer‐sponsored pension plans into mutual funds has been an important driving force behind the mutual fund industry's unprecedented recent growth. The increased attractiveness of mutual funds to pension investors is due to a shift from defined benefit to defined contribution plans, to changes in the tax laws, and to the growing recognition of certain types of mutual funds as suitable long‐term investment vehicles. Accompanying the tremendous growth in defined contribution plans, however, has been a shift in investment risk from employers to employees. Using the responses from a nationwide telephone survey of 2,000 mutual fund shareholders, this paper analyzes various characteristics and investment knowledge of purchasers of mutual funds through employer‐sponsored pension plans. The results show that overall, pension investors are as knowledgeable about the costs, risks, and returns associated with mutual funds as investors who purchase mutual funds through other distribution channels. However, when dividing the sample of pension‐plan investors into two subsamples consisting of those who purchase mutual funds solely through the pension channel and those also employing other distribution channels, pension‐channel‐only investors are found to be significantly less knowledgeable. These results suggest that there is much room for improvement in investor education for a large segment of pension‐channel investors.

As the assets of public employee retirement systems grow (to $1 trillion by 1994), so does the interest in targeting these assets to specific goals, primarily housing and job creation, in a system's geographic area. If properly structured, these investments, often called economically targeted investments, or ETIs, can be a legitimate part of a public retirement system's portfolio. This article clarifies several essential characteristics of ETIs. Previous studies, national surveys and actual ETI portfolios are examined. The article argues that further analysis, especially involving evaluation techniques, is essential as this investment strategy continues to gain steam, especially with the encouragement of the Clinton Administration.

Explores the role of trade unions in relation to team working. Asks the questions: are unions incompatible with team working and what are the implications for shop stewards of team working? Argues that moves towards team working are likely to be fragile because of political and power‐based tensions, within and without the employment relationship, which impinge on trade union responses to team working, and likewise impact on management’s ability to adopt a sustained approach towards team working. Consequently, in contrast to its unitarist ethos, team working is characterized by resistance, conflict, accommodation and contradiction. This is an attempt to highlight the complex, temporal and contested nature of team working.

Research problems focused on sustainability, such as changes to procurement practices, are new which necessitate new approaches to research methods. The purpose of this paper is to describe the application of an arts‐based inquiry technique to supplement a mixed‐methods approach.

This paper presents an application of arts‐based inquiry techniques as part of the qualitative analysis regime to communicate the approaches adopted by Australian organisations introducing sustainable procurement utilising the medium of collage.

Arts‐based inquiry is found to offer organisational research several complementary features. It engages multiple audiences in different “ways of seeing” and engaging with research.

Arts‐based techniques demonstrated in this paper offer sustainability and other researchers a complementary method of inquiry, to communicate change in society by opening the discourse between art, transdisciplinarity and sustainability, and to engage with multiple audiences in the process of change.

This paper aims to provoke a conversation in marketing scholarship about the overlooked political nature of doing research, particularly for those who research issues of social (in)justice. It suggests a paradigmatic shift in how researchers might view and operationalise social justice work in marketing. Emancipatory praxis framework offers scholars an alternative way to think about the methodology, design and politics of researching issues of social relevance.

This is a conceptual paper drawing on critical theory to argue for a new methodological shift towards emancipatory praxis.

As social justice research involves a dialectical relationship between crises and critique, the concept of emancipation acts as a methodological catalyst for furthering debate about social (in)justice in marketing. This paper identifies a set of methodological troubles and challenges that may disrupt the boundaries of knowledge-making. A set of methodological responses to these issues illustrating how emancipatory research facilitates social action is outlined.

Emancipatory praxis offers marketing scholars an alternative methodological direction in the hope that more impactful and useful ways of knowing can emerge.

The paper is intended to change the ways that researchers work in practical and concrete terms on issues of social (in)justice.

Although this paper is theoretical, it argues for an alternative methodological approach to research that reorients researchers towards a politicised praxis with emancipatory relevancy.

Emancipatory praxis offers a new openly politicised methodological alternative for addressing problems of social relevance in marketing. As a continuous political and emancipatory task for researchers, social justice research involves empirical encounters with politics, advocacy and democratic participation, where equality is the methodological starting point for research design and decisions as much as it is the end goal.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of human capital (HC), intellectual property rights (IPRs) and research and development (R&D) expenditures on total factor productivity (TFP), which leads to economic growth.

The panel data technique is used on a sample of 16 countries categorized into two groups, namely Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) and Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries and, in order to make a comparison for the time period of 2007–2015, the researchers used a fixed effect model as an estimation method for regression.

The results indicate that HC, IPRs and R&D expenditures appear to be statistically significant and are strong factors in determining changes in TFP and exhibit positive results in all sample sets. Moreover, IPRs alone do not accelerate growth in an economy, especially taking the case of emerging nations.

Considering the importance of CEE and BRIC countries, and inadequate research on these regions with respect to current study’s variables and techniques, the present research provides valuable insights about the importance of HC, IPR and R&D activities and their impact on TFP, which leads to economic growth. IPRs create a fertile environment for R&D activities, knowledge creation and economic development. Distinct nations can attain better economic status via HC, R&D activities, innovation, trade and FDI, although the relative significance of these channels is likely to differ across countries depending on their developmental levels.

Recent works by organisational anthropologists have identified bureaucracy as a major challenge for unskilled workers in the global economy. Daily encounters with bureaucratic processes only enhance general feelings of inadequacy, frustration and insecurity experienced by social groups who have to rely on precarious work. However, a focus on people’s homespun strategies and on the role of the non-profit sector in helping them to navigate bureaucracy is still incipient. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The research, ethnographic in its approach, unveils some of these challenges by drawing on 29 interviews with migrant workers in a third sector organisation in Manchester, UK. It explores migrants’ work experiences and aspirations, and the strategies used to navigate the bureaucracy embedded in the organisation of their lives. Informed by the different roles the researcher performed at the centre and by the inter-disciplinary nature of the projects, the methodology includes interviews, participative observation, analysis of life story narratives and drawings, and participation in community workshops.

While acknowledging that bureaucracy can keep people in liminal spaces and enhance their sense of insecurity, this paper reveals how personal aspirations and the ability to make connections across different social networks provide the much needed drive that enables migrants to acquire language skills, a tool that helps them to learn the ropes of bureaucratic processes, become culturally savvy, and leave the stage of quasi-citizenship.

Responses highlight the significance of recent welfare reforms and reveal adaptive mechanisms to deal with resulting uncertainties, which include the use of a variety of social networks, learning hew digital and language skills, and seeking specialized knowledge found in organisations in the third sector. The study also questions the taken-for-granted rationality of bureaucracy, unveiling its messy and ambiguous logic.

I explore Bevir’s approach to interpretive social science and its implications for his study of governance. I make two arguments: one methodological and one substantive. First, I argue that we should think of the philosophy of interpretive social science as necessarily tied to some chosen method of recovering knowledge, be it local or expert knowledge. Without such a recovery of knowledge, interpretive analysis of local reasoning is impossible. Second, I argue that the recovery of not only expert knowledge - Bevir's primary focus - but also the local knowledge of citizens who are affected by these reforms, ought to play a central role in our understanding of governance.

I summarize my views on democratic governance before responding to critics. Governance arose partly from the impact of modernist social science on public policy and it limits the space for democratic action. My preferred alternative is an interpretive social science inspiring more participatory and dialogic democratic practices. In defending these arguments, I concentrate on the nature of interpretive social science and its relation to democratic theory. I define interpretive social science in theoretical terms as based on recognition of the role of meanings in human life and the holistic and historical nature of meanings. This interpretive social science does not lead to any particular methods or topics, but it does rule out reified and deterministic appeals to structures. Democratic renewal depends on promoting interpretive social science, not institutional blueprints.