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We propose that group affective tone may be dysfunctional for teams faced with complex, equivocal, and dynamically changing tasks and environments. Group affective tone (and in particular, a positive affective tone) may exacerbate pre-existing tendencies of teams to develop a single-shared reality that team members confidently believe to be valid and to be prone to group-centrism. Alternatively, heterogeneity in member mood states within teams may lead to the development of multiple-shared realities that reflect the equivocality of the teams’ tasks and circumstances and other functional outcomes (e.g., multiple perspectives and minority dissent), which ultimately may enhance team effectiveness.

An earlier researcher, Wood, proposed that cinema is the most appropriate metaphor for interpretation of contemporary life and organizations. The paper adopts the enthusiasm for the cinema metaphor and explores the implications for industrial marketing and business networks, with particular reference to the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) Group research.

The paper outlines the Cartesian picture theory of the early Wittgenstein, the comparable “pictures agenda” within the IMP, then the post‐Cartesian “language gaming” approach adopted by the later Wittgenstein, and associates it with an agenda to introduce a more “cinematographic” approach, introducing issues within the “linguistic turn” to the study of business networks.

The transformation of the contemporary “post‐Cartesian” culture from “written” to “visual” was not fully appreciated until the invention and mass appeal of cinema and the concomitants of a visual culture became more apparent. In the notion of the “spectacle”, Debord was amongst the first to show that the postmodern visual culture was one where social relations are dominated by commodified images. The images that prevail, from this critical viewpoint, are “social opiates” masquerading as progress that control actors through addictive consumption and acquisition by spectator consumers. In this context, business to business relationships are about how these image‐based addictions are maintained within business cultures.

The adoption of a cinematographic metaphor would appear to be a pertinent development for understanding of business network relationships.

The advantage of a cinematographic metaphor over other, less visual, metaphors is that cinema is more visually sophisticated and entirely embedded in cultures dominated by commodified images. It is appropriate, therefore, that visual literacy, realities as increasingly “image‐dominated” and “virtual” business networks are better understood through the lens of a cinematographic metaphor.

Contradictory accounts in empirical material are often perceived as deliberate “lies” or “misleading deceptions” performed in acts of impression management, or they are simply neglected. When observed in the material collected empirically, methods have been developed in order to identify and remove them from the analytical work. The purpose of this paper is to re-visit and re-introduce a dissensus-based management research strategy in order to analytically be able to work with what appear to be contradictions and misinformation in qualitative research accounts, and give them a more profound role in the understanding of management ideas, work and practices.

A literature review is presented on consensus and dissensus orientated theories on contradictions and multiple and conflicting identities in a single individual in an ethnographic inquiry. The purpose is to analyse and reflect upon the contradictory information gathered, and how it can shed light upon important aspects of the management work and practices performed by the informant. This is done by focusing on apparent contradictions in a single interview situation from an ethnographic case study through, respectively a consensus and a dissensus perspective.

The findings indicate that dealing with contradictions and inner conflicts between self-view and external demands and conditions, led the informant to the production of multiple narrative self-identities imaging multiple realities that all appeared real to the informant. Each of these realities had different and contradictory impacts on the ideas and management work and practices he presented and performed in the organisation. These findings challenge the notions of “lies”, “deception” and “misinformation” in management research, and call for a more reflexive approach to analysis work in ethnographic accounts.

By applying consensus and dissensus-oriented theories to a single account the authors point to conditions, phenomena and relations, which most current and historic management research streams fail to see. Multiple and conflicting identities surface in a single respondent during an interview situation, creating clearly self-contradictory and conflicting narratives and practices, that all appear to be oblivious to the respondent. These multiple and contradictory narrative identities all have significant impact on the management work performed by the respondent.

The aim of this paper is to apply principles of the realism paradigm within qualitative research projects.

The paper starts by establishing the usefulness of realism research for investigating marketing management phenomena, and then considers the implications of the realism paradigm for research design.

Issues such as the level of prior theory required, the use of replication logic and triangulation are discussed. In addition, guidelines for realism data analysis and reporting are developed.

This paper provides an explicit set of principles for realism research design and data analysis that is different from those in other types of research.

The purpose of this paper is to articulate an ontological anarchist approach for an engaged post-human politics and present insurrection training as a pragmatic tool for researchers to directly transform the world.

The paper analyses how post-humanism has been criticised for dissolving political agency. It shows that this is due to the way post-humanism has been framed as sensitising and including non-humans into liberal politics. Instead, the paper examines anarchist-influenced post-humanism and combines this with the notion of multiple ontologies and ontological interventions. The paper presents the notion of insurrection training as offering the possibility for researchers to become emotionally sensitised to ontological difference. A case study of the “Seeds of Hope East Timor Ploughshares action” (1996) is used to illustrate what insurrection training and ontological interventions look like in practice. Finally, the paper makes suggestions as to how post-human researchers can apply this approach in their everyday lives.

The paper suggests that beyond a liberal framing of post-humanism as inclusion, there is also an ontological anarchist post-humanism that can support transformative impacts in the world. This form of post-humanism offers specificity of intervention and reflexive training practices. Insurrection training can offer new possibilities for post-humanist researchers: experience ontological difference, de-trivialise the everyday, connect to social movements, make post-human politics “doable” and offer “direct” change.

The paper addresses discussions that claim post-humanism is disabling political change. Its contribution is to map an anarchist post-humanism and extend this with concepts of multiple ontologies. It proposes the notion of insurrection training which places attention on the role of the researcher as an active agent that needs to be sensitised to ontological difference to carry out interventions. A case study of direct action illustrates what ontological intervention and insurrection training look like in practice. The case study suggests that insurrection training is an everyday performative practice that integrates and negotiates the personal, material and political. Finally, the paper suggests how researchers can adopt such an approach in their everyday lives.

You must attach clear, specific meanings to words, i.e. be able to identify their referents in reality…. All philosophical con games count on your using words as vague approximations. You must not take a catch phrase – or any abstract statement – as if it were approximate. Take it literally. Don’t translate it, don’t glamorize it, don’t make the mistake of thinking, as many people do: “Oh, nobody could possibly mean this!” and then proceed to endow it with some whitewashed meaning of your own. Take it straight, for what it does say and mean. Instead of dismissing the catch phrase, accept it – for a few brief moments. Tell yourself, in effect: “If I were to accept it as true, what would follow?” This is the best way of unmasking any philosophical fraud…. To take ideas seriously means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true. Philosophy provides man with a comprehensive view of life. In order to evaluate it properly, ask yourself what a given theory, if accepted, would do to a human life, starting with your own (Rand, 1982, p. 16).We begin this chapter by taking Ayn Rand’s advice. We project – by means of a fictional story – what it would be like for a businessman to accept and live by the philosophy of postmodernism.

This chapter points out that the use of a wide range of theoretical paradigms in marketing research requires researchers to use a broad range of methodologies. As an aid in doing so, the chapter argues for the use of case study research (CSR), defines CSR, and describes several CSR theories and methods that are useful for describing, explaining, and forecasting processes occurring in business-to-business (B2B) contexts. The discussion includes summaries of six B2B case studies spanning more than 60 years of research. This chapter advocates embracing the view that learning and reporting objective realities of B2B processes is possible using CSR methods. CSR methods in the chapter include using multiple interviews (2 + ) separately of multiple persons participating in B2B processes, direct research and participant observation, decision systems analysis, degrees-of-freedom analysis, ethnographic-decision-tree-modeling, content analysis, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fs/QCA.com). The discussion advocates rejecting the dominant logic of attempting to describe and explain B2B processes by arms-length fixed-point surveys that usually involve responses from one executive per firm with no data-matching of firms in specific B2B relationships – such surveys lack details and accuracy necessary for understanding, describing, and forecasting B2B processes.

This paper provides a balanced commentary on Rossiter’s paper “How to use C-OAR-SE to design optimal standard measures” in this issue of the “European Journal of Marketing”. It also relates the comments in general to Rossiter’s other C-OAR-SE work and throws light on a number of key measurement issues that seem under-appreciated at present in marketing and business research.

The authors use conceptual argument based on measurement theory and philosophy of science.

The authors find that Rossiter’s work makes a number of important points that are necessary in the current stage of development of marketing and social science. However, the authors also find that many of these points are also well made by fundamental measurement theories. When measurement theory is correctly interpreted, the idea of multiple measures of the same thing is not problematic. However, they show that existing social science measurement practice rarely takes account of the important issues at play here.

The authors show that marketing, management and social science researchers need to get better in terms of their appreciation of measurement theory and in their practices of measurement.

The authors identify a number of areas where marketing and social science measurement can be improved, taking account of the important aspects of C-OAR-SE and incorporating them in good practice, without needlessly avoiding existing good practices.

Promotes the notion that the emergent field of facility/facilities management (FM) requires a philosophical basis, where philosophy refers not to esoteric, academic abstraction, but to the basic theory and general principles of knowledge that underpin everyday activity. Argues specifically for generation of a philosophy of “the workplace”; the separate but related social, physical, technological and organizational contexts of work; the centre stage of FM activity, in order to: first, provide a knowledge base that critically engages with the complexities and ambiguities of these diverse but interconnected contexts of work; second, engage with some of the failings of FM knowledge to date, where idealistic best practice is presented as if it were theory, and simplistic research presents universal solutions based upon limited engagement with a single context; and third, provide a knowledge base that can stand up to critical analysis from other fields of knowledge, some of which overlap with that of FM.