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The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework (pragmatic constructivism) for a new paradigm for accounting practice. The paradigmatic base of practice is an important element in explaining, understanding, justifying and defending practice.

The paper is designed to argue the case for the use of pragmatic constructivism as a basis for the development of a paradigmatic foundation of accounting practice. To achieve this, pragmatic constructivism is explained and its application to accounting is illustrated and contrasted with the traditional paradigm of realism.

The analysis shows how the use of a less reductionist paradigm than realism can assist accountants both in the creation of a rationale and a defence for practice.

The analysis is exploratory in the sense that a new paradigmatic framework is outlined and used to illustrate its potential to develop a paradigm for practice. The creation of a full practice paradigm for accounting is beyond the scope of one paper. Hence this analysis should be viewed as only a first step towards developing a paradigm of accounting practice.

The proposal of pragmatic constructivism for this purpose is novel to the accounting literature. The value of its application lies in its potential to explain and defend accounting practice.

Uses data collected from a sample of expatriate managers on assignments in Turkey to attempt to examine the dimensionality of expatriate adjustment. Suggests that the results offer support to earlier findings that expatriate adjustment is a multifaceted construct. Shows that the measure developed to capture the different dimensions demonstrate satisfactory internal consistency reliability and concurrent validity. Discusses strategies to facilitate the adjustment of expatriate managers to their assignments.

This study explores the phenomenon of compassionate leadership, a promising concept in management literature. Despite significant contributions towards the understanding of its antecedents and consequences, the specific role of compassion concerning the leader behavior under extreme pressure remains unexplored.

Drawing empirically on the case of three banks under three different logics, the authors trace how heads of banking branches, namely, middle managers, deal with the paradoxical phenomenon of integrating their human nature with the coetaneous need to achieve aggressive objectives. The authors analyzed interviews using the interpretive research method (Hatch and Yanow, 2003).

The authors identified that the logic of savings banks and credit cooperatives, together with specific human elements, created a healthier environment to develop compassionate behaviors compared to commercial banks. The authors found coherence when linking the institutional message of putting the spotlight on a personalized treatment of customers, and the middle manager compassionate actions towards customers and subordinates.

Suggestions for future theorizing and research are advanced, along with constructive practical implications to rehumanize the dark side of banking for both employees and customers.

The findings provided in this paper are original because they provide further evidence of linking business logics with compassionate leadership of middle managers and its impact on employees and customers.

Social media (SM) has been heavily criticised in recent years for its damaging effects on societies globally. Tasked with empowering those same societies, libraries’ continued use of SM is considered ethically contentious. This study presents the findings of a University of Sheffield study that investigated the ethical tension between libraries and their use of SM by aiming to establish whether: (1) libraries’ use of SM is ethically motivated; (2) ethically informed; (3) and compatible with codes of ethics in the Library and Information Science (LIS) sector.

A phenomenographic approach was employed to gather and analyse the data for this study, which is drawn from the transcripts of seven online interviews with Bodleian Libraries staff who used Twitter, now X, in a professional capacity.

Three categories of description were identified among participants: (1) Collectivist conception; (2) Settled conception; (3) Questioning conception. The categories are bound by a shared context of conceptualisation made up of a small set of internal and external influences discussed in the interviews which affected all participants to varying degrees.

The findings were used to support the following determinations: (1) Libraries’ use of SM is ethically motivated. (2) Libraries’ use of SM is ethically informed, in part. Due to lack of evidence, no determination was made about whether libraries’ use of SM is compatible with codes of ethics in the LIS sector. Recommendations for LIS professions and professional bodies are offered based on these determinations.

This paper aims to focus on accounting for human rights. It explores the validity of conflicting theoretical perspectives on accounting and their ability to reduce the gap between accounting and accountability for human rights.

This study relies on the notion of topos to develop a pragmatic constructivist perspective on conventional accounting and social accounting with respect to human rights. Applying pragmatic constructivism permits a better understanding and assessment of the ethics underpinning the conventional and social accounting approaches.

The ethics underpinning the topos of conventional accounting offer a reductive explanation of the agency of organizational actors, so inhibiting moral and social responsibility. Furthermore, the calculative logic that dominates this topos promotes a monovocal form of communication (to shareholders) and translates values per se into instrumental values. By contrast, the social accounting topos sheds new light on the role that accounting may play in detecting human rights violations, by focusing more on communication and social values. However, for this topos to be valid, alternative management practices that go beyond voluntary social reporting need to be further developed.

Human rights accountability is an urgent challenge for companies in today’s society. However, scholars have largely disregarded the role of accounting in the process of holding companies accountable for human rights violations. By questioning the relationship between accounting and human rights, this paper takes a first step towards resolving this issue.

Traditionally, the main goal of empirical research has been to test theories. Yet, theory-testing is problematical in the social sciences. Findings from empirical studies have proven hard to replicate and there is a lack of progress in creating a coherent and cumulative knowledge base. There are both practical and epistemological issues that prevent effective empirical tests. It is difficult to operationalize constructs and design decisive tests of theories. The laws and regularities posited in theories in the natural sciences are independent of human actors, while theories in the social sciences describe systems and structures that are created and maintained by human actors. Nonetheless, human actors are sometimes guided by theories. They may change their behavior or make different decisions based on academically produced knowledge. This relationship is usually mediated by the use of tools of various sorts (i.e., design principles, diagrams, or stories). I discuss why scholars should conduct empirical research to test the pragmatic validity of tools that are derived from theories rather than testing the scientific validity of the theories themselves.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a response to a comment written by Richard Laughlin on a previous paper by the authors, which appeared in Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Volume 23 Number 6.

The paper addresses three issues central to the analysis of the comment on their past paper.

In addressing each of the issues in turn the authors clarify their analysis.

The paper provides an argument for the development of a paradigm for accounting practice derived from the use of pragmatic constructivism.

This paper aims to develop a methodology of business knowledge creation based on a synthesis between the perspective of reality informed by pragmatic constructionism (PC) and critical approaches to narrative analysis informed by antenarrative concepts.

The paper identifies commonalities and contrasts between narrative and PC. Interpreting an original case study of a hotel by deploying both methodologies, the paper shows how a synthesis of the two approaches can help to construct management control knowledge.

PC and narrative have many overlaps and complementarities. Practitioners like stories both to make sense of their own roles and to develop personal strategic agendas. Antenarrative concepts demonstrate the potentially generative properties of organizational storytelling. The PC approach also constructs corporate narratives but, additionally, provides a set of criteria against which we can evaluate the stories of practitioners on the basis of “does it work?”.

More interpretive field study processes are called for as a way of testing the robustness of the research design developed in the paper.

A successful management control topos has to be business-specific and co-authored with contributions from participants both inside and outside the organization. Narrative and PC research methodologies both encourage reflexivity, in which the researchers explicitly explore not just the positions of their interviewees, but also their own position and reactions. The creation of business knowledge is seen as a co-production between the researchers and the researched, as they share concepts and reflections during the fieldwork process.

The paper compares and contrasts two interpretive research methodologies, narrative and a pragmatic constructivist perspective. Especially when the concept of antenarrative is deployed, the two methodologies offer fruitful possibilities for dialogical conversation, as they espouse slightly different views on the nature of actor reality.

The concept of switching costs or transaction‐specific investments has been widely used in theoretical models of industrial buyer‐seller relationships. Yet there are few empirical studies that have examined the dimensionality of switching costs. The purpose of this study is to investigate empirically the dimensions of switching costs. Different typologies, or dimensions, of switching costs are identified from a review of the literature. Measures of these dimensions are developed and empirically tested for construct and pragmatic validity using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling. Two switching cost dimensions are identified and validated: hard assets and soft assets.