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Purpose – This paper considers the role of relationality as an interpretive strategy in the workplace, asking how one group of low-wage workers interpret their jobs in the service economy.

Methodology – Qualitative interviews with 25 female retail workers.

Findings – I argue that these retail workers use a relational ethic to interpret various aspects of their work. Relationality colors workers’ understanding of their job responsibilities, their own accounts of self-development in the workplace, and their strategies for resolving conflict on the shop floor.

Practical implications – These findings are particularly relevant for current labor union activities, and thus I conclude by discussing the implications of this relational ethic for attempts to organize workers in the retail sector. Workers who prioritize relationships ahead of material gains in the workplace may be particularly uncomfortable with more confrontational styles of labor organization.

Originality/Value of paper – Economic sociologists increasingly stress relational aspects of the economy, such as the role of networks in enabling market transactions; the significance of social ties in shaping economic exchange, and the importance of economic activity in constituting relationships themselves. This paper builds on that framework by arguing that workers also use a relational ethic to interpret their activity within the workforce itself.

Since the establishment of ecocriticism, the traditional Western dualistic categories of spaces and places have become objects of increasing pluralistic refigurations in light of the challenges posed by current environmental crises. More and more scholars have discussed how rooted dichotomies, including country/city and nature/culture, should be reconsidered for better acknowledging the sense of connectedness occurring between humans and the surrounding nonhuman world. Consequences of this approach in literary and cultural studies have been pivotal: new environmentally oriented hermeneutic practices have developed, which allow for reevaluating phenomena linked to old-fashioned understandings of the natural world. Among them, the pastoral, traditionally conceived as the contrast between the rural and the urban, has been reexamined by ecocritics through new concepts, starting from the “post-pastoral” (Gifford, 1999). By stressing the investigation of the relationship between the human and the environment in pastoral representations, the post-pastoral has become a favorable tool (Gifford, 2006) for enhancing ethical considerations in response to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene.

This transdisciplinary chapter is also inspired by “geocriticism,” which reflects on how literary narratives influence spatial practices in the real, material world. Specifically, this chapter discusses how the neologism “cittagna” – blending the Italian terms città (city) and campagna (country) – which first appeared in Stefano Benni's novel Prendiluna (2017), allows critics to reflect on the development of similar combinatory processes in contemporary urban spaces. When considering this process in parallel with the notion of post-pastoral, “cittagna,” becomes a useful concept for observing how, in current cityscapes, the emergence of new spaces and places negotiates the conventional country/city split, while highlighting the sense of intertwining between the two terms. Hence, attention is placed on how two possible examples of rising “cittagnas” – roof gardens and off-leash dog parks – can be read as evidence of the increasing attentiveness toward issues of human-nonhuman relationality in today's urbanism, which becomes a hope on the horizon for facing current environmental concerns.

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.

This paper aims to investigate small and medium-sized upstream suppliers' and downstream distributors' understandings of supply chain finance (SCF) arrangements and their decisions to adopt such schemes.

In this paper grounded theory-informed methods are employed, involving 56 in-depth interviews with informants from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), banks and subject experts in the United Kingdom (UK) and Thailand. A category structure for the data is developed. The findings are then examined systematically from both a transaction cost economics (TCE) and non-TCE perspective.

SME members made sense of SCF through a core distinction between dyadic and triadic SCF arrangements. The former maintains independence between physical and financial supply chains, whereas the latter causes them to be closely coupled or even entangled. The SCF adoption decisions of SMEs were based on a consideration of four related aspects: relationality, awareness, control and context. The authors demonstrate the limits of TCE in explaining the findings, leading to a proposed combined theory of the transactional and, importantly, non-transactional influences on how SMEs make decisions about SCF.

Focal firms wanting their SME suppliers and distributors to participate in triadic SCF (TSCF), i.e. reverse factoring and distributor finance, need to understand that transitioning to such schemes involves the unwinding of existing financing arrangements, which may be problematic for SMEs. Moreover, it is important to be aware of SMEs' concerns, such as about what accessing TSCF might signal to the focal firm about their financial health and about the potential loss of control that might result from entangling the physical and financial aspects of supply chains.

This paper unpack the perspectives of both SME suppliers and distributors of large focal firms in supply chains. These firms appear less concerned with the economic advantages (transaction costs) of SCF and more concerned with the relational consequences or non-transactional costs of participation in a TSCF arrangement. The dyadic-triadic distinction provides a new and meaningful way of categorising SCF mechanisms, which also broadens the service triads’ literature from a focus on outsourcing services for a focal firm's customers to outsourcing financing for its suppliers or distributors. The paper also addresses gaps identified by Gelsomino et al. (2016) regarding the need for a general theory of SCF, for empirically-based holistic studies of SCF applications, and a tool for selecting SCF mechanisms.

The purpose of this study was to pilot an undergraduate teaching assistantship for Emirati students, an area of scholarship underexplored in the Middle East. The teaching assistantship was developed to better prepare students for the workforce, amidst the push for Emiratization.

Over the course of one semester, four undergraduate teaching assistants documented their experience through reflexive journals that were analysed using a reflexive thematic analysis.

Undergraduate teaching assistants characterised their experience as providing professional development and learning to connect with student learners. Findings suggest that relationality may be an important factor in student engagement and learning.

Understanding the experience of undergraduate teaching assistants can help develop targeted opportunities to enhance career readiness. Exploring the role of relationality could be important in the training and development of the Emirati workforce and help address some of the gaps in skills. Understanding the way in which undergraduate teaching assistants perceive their teaching experience can also provide faculty with insight into their teaching practices.

This exploratory study shows that students are able to acquire skills that may be applied in a variety of work settings (e.g. balancing multiple responsibilities). However, undergraduate teaching assistants expressed wanting to connect with student learners; this may be more culturally rooted and is less explored within the Emirati context. Given the socio-cultural context of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), female Emiratis may benefit from work-type opportunities, which to the authors’ knowledge has not been explored previously.

This chapter offers a selective review of the emerging Indigenous Pacific educational research from 2000 to 2018. The Pacific region is home to many and various cultural groups, and this review is an opportunity to celebrate the consequent diversity of thought about education. Common threads are used to weave this diversity into a set of coherent regional patterns. Such threads include the regional value to educational research of local metaphor, and an emphasis on relationality or the state of being related as a cornerstone of education, both in research and as practice. The relationship between indigenous educational thought and formal education in indigenous contexts is also addressed. The review pays attention to educational research centered in home islands and that which focuses on the education of those from Pacific Islands in settler societies since connections across the ocean are strong. Because of the recent history of the region, developments are fast paced and ongoing, and this chapter concludes with a sketch of research at the frontier. Set within the context of an area study, the chapter concludes by suggesting what challenges the region has to offer in terms of re-thinking the field of international and comparative education.

The chapter accounts for the process of becoming of a changed practice within the area of disability care in the Municipality of Aalborg in Denmark.

Across a period of a few months in the fall of 2015, a group of employees across the organization and an action researcher from Aalborg University (the author) met and formed a research-practice group, and across this period a revised model for cooperation emerged that – upon realization – would reconfigure the intra-play of all relevant areas of the organization involved in disability care. The model included the grasping of disability as dis/ability and thereby the model opened the possibility for reworking the binary of ability/disability to the benefit of restorying the citizen’s ability in the practices of changing the disability care.