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The purpose of this paper is to present a framework – the Relationality Framework – for elaborating relational behaviour, in response to calls to address the ontological weaknesses identified in the extant value and value creation literature.

The social philosophical understanding of interaction as an organic mode of social organisation, upon which the Relationality Framework is based, supersedes the economistic (mechanistic) understanding of interaction as a means of connecting otherwise independent actors. In foregrounding the relationality of interaction, the authors are inspired by Grönroos and Voima’s (2013) conceptualisation of spheres of value generation to conceptualise the intersubjective dynamics and domains invoked in direct interaction.

The Relationality Framework identifies distinct relational concepts that build on service logic’s specificity and conceptualisation at the level of direct interactions between service providers and customers. In particular, this paper develops the concept of “relationality” using the three domains in any interaction of I, Other and We.

The Relationality Framework provides sound conceptual support for extending the theoretical and practical analysis of the value creation processes of the customer and of the firm and for the purposeful management of relationships to enhance value creation by both.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically review and analyze the important, yet under-researched, topic of relationality in negotiations and propose new directions for future negotiation research.

This paper conducts a systematic review of negotiation literature related to relationality from multiple disciplines. Thirty-nine leading and topical academic journals are selected and 574 papers on negotiation are reviewed from 1990 to 2014. Based on the systematic review, propositions regarding the rationales for relationality in negotiations are developed and future research avenues in this area are discussed.

Of 574 papers on negotiations published in 39 peer-reviewed journals between 1990 and 2014, only 18 papers have studied and discussed relationality in negotiations. This suggests that relationality as a theoretical theme has long been under-researched in negotiation research. For future research, this paper proposes to incorporate the dynamic, cultural and mechanism perspectives, and to use a qualitative approach to study relationality in negotiations.

This paper presents the first systematic review of the negotiation literature on relationality, and identifies new research topics on relationality in negotiations. In so doing, this research opens new avenues for future negotiation research on relationality.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the role of relationality in buyer–supplier negotiations and how it varies across cultural settings.

Using a multisession simulation design, this study recruited research participants (n = 82) from diverse cultural backgrounds to play the role of either buyer or supplier for two negotiation tasks. Regression analyses were used to test the relationships among relational constructs as well as the moderating role of relational culture.

Results show that negotiators’ relational self-construal enhances their relational commitment to the ongoing negotiations, which leads to a higher level of relational capital accumulated at the end of negotiations. The impact of relational self-construal on relational commitment and that of relational commitment on counterparts’ relational capital are stronger for negotiators from a high (as opposed to low) relational cultural background. Furthermore, intercultural negotiation context, when compared with intracultural context, weakens the impact of relational commitment on relational capital.

This research is among the first to empirically examine the culturally varied relationality in negotiations. The findings offer important theoretical and practical implications regarding how relationality, when interacting with cultural factors, has varying impacts on business negotiations.

This paper aims to advance an integrative perspective of dynamic relationality in negotiation research by providing a symbiotic solution to modeling the cultural adaptation process in intercultural negotiations.

Based on a solution-oriented symbiotic approach, the authors analyze negotiators’ combination strategy to propose the dynamic convergence of dyadic relational negotiation behavior (RNB) both as a descriptive framework and a prescriptive solution to behavioral congruence in intercultural negotiations. The authors use spreadsheet platform with artificial data input to simulate various RNB dynamics between negotiators.

The authors identify the research gap between the arelational, static paradigm in negotiation literature and the relational, dynamic reality in negotiation practices, develop a fourfold typology of the existing negotiation research and propose the construct of RNB. The authors simulate the dyadic dynamics of RNB in a symbiotic framework. Results illustrate varied dyadic patterns of convergent RNB dynamics, demonstrating the effectiveness of the symbiotic solution to achieving behavioral congruence under multiple conditions. Propositions are then presented to predict negotiators’ initial relational behavior, describe dyadic coevolution of RNB in intercultural negotiations and explicate the relevant chronic consequences regarding relational and economic capital.

This paper fills a significant knowledge gap in the extant cross-cultural negotiation literature by addressing dynamic behavioral adaptation through a relational lens. This symbiotic framework is both descriptive in its predictive capacity to simulate the complexity of non-linear negotiation environment, and prescriptive in its directive capacity to guide negotiators’ plan of action given each other’s observed behavior with a probability estimation.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to theorise difference as encountered by a team of six diverse researchers interested in addressing cultural and religious diversity in sexuality education. Drawing Todd's (2003, 2011a, b) concepts of “the crossroads”, “becoming present” and “relationality” in conversation with Barad's (2003, 2007, 2012) ideas around relationality and intra-activity, the paper explores how “difference” in team research might be re-conceptualised. The aim is to theorise difference, differently from Other methodological literature around collaborative research. Typically, this work highlights markers of difference based on researcher identity (such as gender and ethnicity) as the source of difference in research teams, and examines how these differences are worked through. The aim of this paper is not to resolve difference, but understand it as occurring in the relational process of researchers becoming present to each other. Difference that is not understood as the product of the individual (Barad, 2012), may engender an orientation to ethical relationality, whereby research teams might hold in tension a conversation between the individual and the collective.

This paper is philosophical and methodological. It draws on conceptual understandings from feminist educational philosophy and new materialisms. Findings are based on empirical experiences of a team of researchers exploring cultural and religious difference in sexuality education. Its aim is to re-think the ontology of “difference” as conventionally understood in qualitative methodological literature around team research.

The contribution to conceptualising difference in research teams is to apply Todd's (2011a) theoretical work around “becoming”, “relationality” and the “crossroads” and further delineate it with Barad's (2012) concept of intra-activity. Combining these theorist's ideas the paper offers a conceptualisation of difference that is not the product of individual researcher identities that manifests at the point of collision with (an)other identity. Rather, difference becomes intra-actively in meeting at the crossroads where the “who” is formed. The author argues it is a configuration that cannot be known in advance, and that blurs individuals (and contingent identities) in its uniqueness.

Although conceptual in nature, this paper can be seen as having implications for working with difference in research teams. Drawing on Todd (2003, 2011a) what becomes important in attending to difference in research teams is being openly receptive to the Other. For instance, that the differences of perspective in relation to a research project are not melted into consensus, but that the singularities are always held in relation to each-other.

This paper takes new and emerging ideas in educational philosophy and new materialisms around relationality and applies them to a re-thinking of “difference” in qualitative methodological literature. The result is to offer a new ontology of “difference” as experienced by members of a qualitative research team. It also brings the work of Barad and Todd into conversation for the first time, in order to think ethically about how researchers might work with difference.

While recent theoretical discussions around discourse–material relationality have facilitated important conceptual and analytical advancements within the broader field of CMS, less progress has been made methodologically with regard to innovating empirical methods and data modes. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to contribute to strengthening the methodological focus in the literature when grappling with the relationality of discourse–materiality and co-constitution. This includes a method-retooling framework inspired by new materialism.

In this article, the authors engage at the methodological level by developing a method-retooling framework that combines insights from organizational discourse studies and new materialist thinking. This framework enables a retooling of existing methods to become sensitive to multimodality and offers two concrete examples that were developed during fieldwork for a multi-sited and multi-method case study in 2018.

Based on the framework for retooling methods for multimodality, two illustrations are offered. These include retooling interviews by employing multimodal vignettes and retooling observations by using multimodal mappings. They are unfolded and discussed regarding their appropriation of discourse–material relationality.

This paper includes original research and method developments – adding a critical focus on the methodological aspects and potential advancements that are necessary in the wake of the ongoing debates around discourse–materiality across CMS and specifically within studies of organizational discourse and CCO. By suggesting a framework, the authors stimulate methodological explorations and contribute to furthering method developments that are equal to the rich conceptual progress made within the field.

This study aims to offer a better understanding of supply side of bribery and corruption in an international business perspective by conceptualizing it in the narrower concept of misconduct in business (MIB) derived from the deontological perspective to business ethics.

The authors use a case study methodology of professionals working within Canadian mining multinational corporations operating in Africa. The authors conducted 2 focus groups, 25 in-depth interviews, document search and an open-ended questionnaire to 15 professionals. Further, they drew on a combination of the classic relationalist sociological framework and its recent revision, that they named the relationalism-substantialism framework to analyze the data.

The triangulated empirical data show that the reason why MIB in the form of bribery supply occurs is not exclusively tied to any given perspective, whether the individual, the organization or the wider societal context. Rather, these different layers are tightly intertwined and interact with each other for the supply of bribery to occur.

Although the three siloed perspectives of MIB have been studied in the literature, they have not been addressed in relation to one another, and even less with a relationalism-substantialism framework. Yet, this perspective contributes compellingly to the understanding of the supply side in bribery. The authors propose a net of conceptually related constructs that intervene in the process of bribery supply occurrence, namely relationality influenced by institutional dysfunctionality and conflation and substantiality through agency and culture.

Examines the hypotheses that high instrumentality, adaptive coping, and low work/family pressure are predictive components of women’s managerial advancement. A profile analysis demonstrated that the managerial profile was characterized by high instrumentality and low relationality accompanied by high adaptive work coping. On the other hand, the non‐managerial profile was characterized by low instrumentality and high relationality accompanied by low adaptive work coping and high maladaptive work coping. A LISREL path analysis was tentatively used to test the causal influence of internal (instrumental and relational) traits, work/family pressure, and coping on women’s managerial advancement. The results showed that the strongest predictor of managerial emergence was the instrumental factor, while work/family pressure and coping style had no impact.

The purpose of this paper is to expand upon prior debates on reconceptualising reflexivity in order to encompass research communities and prospective thinking, based upon an analysis of the development of a research question (RQ).

Ontologically, the author regards the development of a RQ as an inter-subjective process; epistemologically, the author regards investigating such processes as possible by identifying their relationality and dialogism “from within”; methodologically, the author constructed and abductively analysed data by performing an auto-ethnography as a PhD student.

The author suggests that developing an RQ evolves as relational learning and academic rationality. While the former concerns relations within a research community, the latter concerns prospective thinking. The author introduces the notion of an academically accepted RQ to suggest that this part of knowledge construction is shaped as much by research communities and prospective thinking as it is by the researcher.

The author introduces and discusses the notion of social reflexivity as a possible way forward in the debate on reconceptualising reflexivity. Such notion encourages the exploration of relational learning and academic rationality in the construction of knowledge. It implies exposing issues related both to processes of assimilating prevailing academic literature and to contextual pressures faced when writing new ones.

While introducing social reflexivity, the author suggests a possible way to overcome the challenges of reconceptualising reflexivity. Also, the author provides a detailed description of how the author crafted the analysis of an inter-subjective process.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of leadership in management accounting change processes and outcomes.

The paper draws on an ethnographic study in a Southern European company and mobilizes leader–follower relations as a method theory to analyse the observations.

The findings show how a leadership dispute between two top managers can be amplified during the management accounting change process and percolate throughout an organization. The authors identify five contested areas where the role of accounting amplifies the leadership dispute by unfolding its reach to other organizational actors. The leadership dispute can shape and reinforce a fragmented organization, with some organizational members creating convergent leader–follower relations while others divert and fragment with an increased turnover. This amplification can lead to unexpected outcomes of the change process in terms of how and by whom accounting is performed.

The authors propose the study of leadership and followership as an important but, to date, largely neglected theme in management accounting research.

In contrast to the prior management accounting literature, the paper departs from a leadership-centric and role-based approach and employs a co-constructionist and relational approach to leadership and followership to analyse management accounting change. In addition, it applies and extends Alvesson's (2019a) theory on “divergent relationalities” between the presumed leaders and followers. In doing so, the paper also adds to the leadership field by theorizing and integrating the situation of a leadership dispute in this novel theoretical framework.