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Editorial boards of academic journals represent a key institutional mechanism in the governance and functioning of the academic community. Board members play an important role in knowledge production and development of the discipline. The purpose of this paper is to enquire into the diversity characteristics of boards of accounting journals.

Drawing on a diversity framework that distinguishes between societal diversity and value of diversity, the paper examines two board characteristics: gender diversity and internationalisation. Moreover, it examines the influence of three journal and two editor characteristics on board diversity and analyses trends over time.

On gender, overall board trends are consistent with societal diversity and value of diversity: boards reflect the gender profile of senior academics. Further, female representation on boards is broadly consistent across the different journal nationalities; has improved over time; has experienced a convergence in “gender sensitive” sub-disciplines; and is influenced by female editorship. However, inequities appear to be present at the highest level: women appear to be less well represented than men as editors and women also have a lower representation on boards of higher ranked journals than on those of lower ranked journals. On internationalisation, once again, overall trends broadly reflect societal diversity and value at diversity. However, international scholars are less well represented on 4* boards than on 2* and 3* boards and on US boards than on Australian and UK boards. Further, there are signs of weakening US dominance in non-US journals.

Drawing on the diversity framework, this is the first study to comprehensively examine gender diversity and internationalisation of accounting boards.

As a result of the global financial crisis, the meaning of action has reemerged as a central focus of the current debates. This paper seeks to analyze the meaning given by managers to their contribution to the strategy development process.

The core underlying assumptions in this research are that social phenomena such as strategy are determined by representations shaped by discourse and that education is a major vector for promoting strategic discourses. Through the concepts of social representation and strategy lens, the paper examines the beliefs and paradigms underlying the strategy development process. Based on a sample of 1,033 managers, this research constructs a holistic typology of the social representations of strategy among managers.

Four different groups of social representations of strategy are identified and characterized. Links are established between these groups and a range of socio-demographic, social, occupational and structural variables.

By clarifying various paradigms and providing reference points, this research encourages increased awareness of these paradigms among managers in order to promote emancipation from them.

The study is primarily synthesis-based at a theoretical level, but also in the analysis and interpretation of the role of strategists. It also helps to close the gap between research, teaching and practice.

This paper aims to examine union and non‐union consultation and representative arrangements at South West Water (SWW) over a ten‐year period, from 1992 to 2002.

The paper attempts to fill the gap in the current research by examining the processes leading from union derecognition, non‐union employee representation (NER), to recognition of union representation using SWW as an example.

The SWW experience suggests that any representative structures within firms need to have full support of the majority of employees and to have been seen as being organic to the workplace rather than an imposed arrangement by management. Without such a bottom‐up approach, the legitimacy and respect for such arrangements will diminish, creating obstacles for developing meaningful dialogue and trust between management, staff and unions. For unions, maintaining high membership density, while no guarantee of continuing recognition, creates an environment of strong union organisation and representation at workplace level.

As the experience at SWW has shown, where unions have been excluded from the workplace, maintaining a presence through the representation of individual employee interests and through colonisation of NER structures has been shown to pay dividends in the long run. However, a recognition agreement is not enough on its own to secure new members and unions need to be effective and relevant to the workforce.

The public administration literature on representative bureaucracy identifies several advantages from having a diverse public service workforce, but it has not explicitly focused on leadership. For its part, the public sector leadership literature has largely ignored the issue of gender. The purpose of this paper is to rectify these limitations by advancing the argument that having a representative bureaucracy is fundamentally a leadership issue. Moreover, it assesses the extent to which representativeness has been achieved in the Canadian federal public service.

The paper begins with a discussion of the importance of a representative bureaucracy for democratic governance. In the next section, the case is made that representativeness is fundamentally intertwined with the concept of administrative leadership. Then, the article provides an interpretive case study analysis of the federal public service in Canada, which is the global leader in terms of women's representation in public service leadership positions.

The initial breakthrough for gender representation in the Canadian federal public service was 1995. From that point onward, the proportion of women in the core public administration exceeded workforce availability. However, women continued to be modestly under-represented among the senior leadership cadre throughout the early 2000s. The watershed moment for gender representation in the federal public service was 2011 when the number of women in the executive group exceeded workforce availability for the first time. Significant progress toward greater representativeness in the other target groups has also been made but ongoing vigilance is required.

The study only determines the passive representation of women in the Public Service of Canada and is not able to comment on the extent to which women are substantively represented in federal policy outcomes.

The paper traces the Canadian federal government's progress toward achieving gender representation over time, while commenting on the extent to which the public service reflects broader diversity. In doing so, it explicitly links representation to leadership, which the existing literature fails to do, by arguing that effective administrative leadership is contingent upon having a diverse public service. Moreover, it highlights the importance of gender for public sector leadership, which hitherto has been neglected.

A dominant theme in the high performance HRM literature concerns complementarities among individual practices and the positive performance benefits associated with adopting simultaneously a bundle of HRM practices. While there is little consensus over what practices should be included under the “high performance” label, most authors see employee representation and consultation as representing a traditional management approach. Moreover enterprise performance is commonly measured as financial performance and relatively little attention has been given to innovative performance. In contrast to the mainstream view, we argue that employee representation can be highly complementary to the training and incentive devices focused on in the high performance HRM literature. This proposition is empirically tested for the innovative performance of comparable populations of U.K. and French private sector establishments. The chapter constitutes one of the first major comparative empirical investigations of the HRM/innovative performance link.

A place in the boardroom is often considered a necessary if not sufficient condition for HR directors to exercise strategic influence on business decision‐making. The purpose of the paper is to explore the perceived importance of HR boardroom representation, both in a formal and symbolic sense, and to what extent HR directors can exercise strategic influence without it?

Evidence is explored from a survey of 1,188 UK HR practitioners, including 255 board members, and a series of follow‐up interviews with 16 HR directors.

Analysis of the survey findings suggests that boardroom versus non‐boardroom representation of HR appears to matter in four key areas: board members believe they have greater involvement and influence in business planning processes; they have more positive perceptions of the overall performance of HR; they give higher ratings of CEO perceptions of the HR function; and they believe they achieve greater integration of HR strategy with business strategy.

While there are increasingly other formal mechanisms and forums (e.g. executive committees, personal networks) outside the boardroom for HR directors to exercise their influence, it appears that the “symbolic capital” of boardroom recognition and esteem still retains enormous significance and rhetorical appeal for the HR profession.

The paper seeks to reframe the debates on the relative importance of HR boardroom versus executive committee representation as forums of strategic influence, by focusing on the continued symbolic significance of boardroom representation. It is concluded that a reworking of Bourdieu's concept of “symbolic capital” (i.e. professional esteem, recognition, status, or respect) as board capital may be useful in reframing future research on HR boardroom representation.

The goal of the research is to explore whether the use of higher‐level semantic features can help us to build better self‐organising map (SOM) representation as measured from a human‐centred perspective. The authors also explore an automatic evaluation method that utilises human expert knowledge encapsulated in the structure of traditional textbooks to determine map representation quality.

Two types of document representations involving semantic features have been explored – i.e. using only one individual semantic feature, and mixing a semantic feature with keywords. Experiments were conducted to investigate the impact of semantic representation quality on the map. The experiments were performed on data collections from a single book corpus and a multiple book corpus.

Combining keywords with certain semantic features achieves significant improvement of representation quality over the keywords‐only approach in a relatively homogeneous single book corpus. Changing the ratios in combining different features also affects the performance. While semantic mixtures can work well in a single book corpus, they lose their advantages over keywords in the multiple book corpus. This raises a concern about whether the semantic representations in the multiple book corpus are homogeneous and coherent enough for applying semantic features. The terminology issue among textbooks affects the ability of the SOM to generate a high quality map for heterogeneous collections.

The authors explored the use of higher‐level document representation features for the development of better quality SOM. In addition the authors have piloted a specific method for evaluating the SOM quality based on the organisation of information content in the map.

“User” is the lingua franca term used across IT design, often critiqued for giving a reductionist portrayal of the human relationship with technologies. The purpose of this paper is to argue that equating “user” with flesh and blood “people out there” is naïve. Not only that, it closes important options in conducting human-centered design.

The authors conceptually elaborate a relational understanding of the user and integrate research findings on user representations found at the intersection of human-centered design and social studies of technology.

The user is best understood as a relational term that bridges between people out there and renditions of them relevant for design. A distinction between “user representations” and “engaged use” is a key distinction to clarify this further. Research to date demonstrates that R & D organizations have a wide range of user representations and positioning human-centered design to these would advance its likely yield.

The strategic positioning of user studies and other human-centered design within R & D organizations is a growing research area that merits further research.

Descriptions of users would benefit from being more strategic in order to become viable amidst other design concerns. This can be aided by, for instance, visualizing the “users” that different fractions in the company rely on and compare these to the users indicated by human-centered design.

The paper makes an original reconceptualization of the user and integrates literature on user representations to open new options for conducting human-centered design.

The purpose of this paper is to explore what has happened to the notion and reality of equal pay over the past 50 years, a period in which women have become the majority of trade union members in the UK. It does so in the context of record employment levels based upon women’s increased labour market participation albeit reflecting their continued over-representation in part-time employment, locating the narrowed but persistent overall gender pay gap in the broader picture of pay inequality in the UK.

The paper considers voluntary and legal responses to inequality and the move away from voluntary solutions in the changed environment for unions. Following others it discusses the potential for collective bargaining to be harnessed to equality in work, a potential only partially realised by unions in a period in which their capacity to sustain collective bargaining was weakened. It looks at the introduction of a statutory route to collective bargaining in 2000, the National Minimum Wage from 1999 and at the Equality Act 2010 as legislative solutions to inequality and in terms of radical and liberal models of equality.

The paper suggests that fuller employment based upon women’s increased labour market activity have not delivered an upward pressure on wages and has underpinned rather than closed pay gaps and social divisions. Legal measures have been limited in the extent to which they have secured equal pay and wider social equality, whilst state support for collective solutions to equality has waned. Its replacement by a statutory minimum wage initially closed pay gaps, but appears to have run out of steam as employers accommodate minimum hourly rates through the reorganisation of working time.

The paper suggests that statutory minima or even voluntary campaigns to lift hourly wage rates may cut across and even supersede wider existing collective bargaining agreements and as such they can reinforce the attack on collective bargaining structures, supporting arguments that this can reduce representation over pay, but also over a range of other issues at work (Ewing and Hendy, 2013), including equality.

There are then limitations on a liberal model which is confined to promoting equality at an organisational level in a public sector subject to wider market forces. The fragmentation of bargaining and representation that has resulted will continue if the proposed dismantling of public services goes ahead and its impact upon equality is already suggested in the widening of the gender pay gap in the public sector in 2015.

This paper aims to study the use of photos in corporate sustainability reports (CSRs) as a means to gain legitimacy concerning Colombian post-conflict representations.

From a critical perspective based on legitimacy theory and political economy theory, and using visual semiotics and critical discourse analysis, this paper examines the use of photographs in sustainability reports as a mechanism to account for corporate actions regarding peace in Colombia. This paper relies on 121 pictures from 30 CSRs.

The analysis shows that companies are gaining legitimacy by referring to post-conflict through visual forms. Nonetheless, the structural conditions that caused the Colombian conflict are still present. Sustainability reporting that includes peace action representations becomes a control and subordination mechanism to reproduce existing power relations in the Colombian social order. Indeed, the generation of opportunities for civilians and ex-combatants, victims reparation, security and reconciliation remains unresolved structural issues. Hence, the use of corporate economic resources and their strategic visual representation in reports is just one business way of representing firms as aligned with government initiatives to obtain tax incentives.

This study is centered on Colombian CSRs for the period 2016-2017; however, 2017 reports by some companies have not yet been published. This study also explored the messages contained in the images that include people. Images that do not depict persons were not examined.

This study provides evidence on visual representations of corporate peace actions aimed at gaining corporate legitimacy. Furthermore, this research examines a unique scenario that promoted more significant corporate social participation, following the signing of the peace agreements between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, Ejército del Pueblo).