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Reality breakdowns generate reflexivity and awareness of the constructed nature of social reality. These pivotal moments can motivate institutional inhabitants to either modify their social worlds or reaffirm the status quo. Thus, reality breakdowns are the initial points at which actors can conceive of new possibilities for institutional arrangements and initiate change processes to realize them. Studying reality breakdowns enables scholars to understand not just how institutional change occurs, but also why it does or does not do so. In this paper, we investigate how institutional inhabitants responded to a reality breakdown that occurred during our ethnography of collegial governance in a large North American university that was undergoing a strategic change initiative. Our findings suggest that there is a consequential process following reality breakdowns whereby institutional inhabitants construct the severity of these events. In our context, institutional inhabitants first attempted to restore order to their social world by reaffirming the status quo; when their efforts failed, they began to formulate alternative possibilities. Simultaneously, they engaged in a distributed sensemaking process whereby they diminished and reoriented necessary changes, ultimately inhibiting the formulation of these new possibilities. Our findings confirm reality breakdowns and institutional awareness as potential drivers of institutional change and complicate our understanding of antecedent microprocesses that may forestall the initiation of change efforts.

The relationship between research pursued in sociology as an academic discipline and sociological research undertaken as a contribution toward social policy formation is a somewhat uneasy one in the USA. The author undertakes to examine the evolving relationship between the disciplinary and professional thrusts of the American sociological enterprise.

An episode in the development of accounting for Private Finance Initiative (PFI) scheme transactions is explored from a social constructionist perspective. The “carrying” of meanings between sub‐worlds of the financial accounting world through social processes, principally by means of the standard‐setting body’s conceptual framework, is shown to be implicated in the social construction, maintenance and modification of accounting meanings. The social constructionist model is developed in several ways, some of which respond to particular characteristics of the financial accounting world.

The efficacy of the processes by which social reality is created and reproduced is largely attributable to the fact that these processes are screened from scrutiny by taken‐for‐granted assumptions which are embedded in language, thought and social practices such as accounting and accounting research. A number of taken‐for‐granted assumptions which are embedded in predominant modes of accounting research, commonsense reasoning, and accounting practice, which function to protect the processes of reality construction from scrutiny, are discussed. These assumptions result in a conceptualisation of the role of accounting information as communicating a reality which exists independently of financial accounting practices. As such, these assumptions obscure, or gloss over, accounting′s sociopolitical role in constructing social reality. As these assumptions are critiqued and set aside, it becomes clear that the social practices of accounting and accounting research both play an important part in the social construction of reality.

Although the case for case studies is now well established in accounting and management research, the exact nature of their contribution is still under discussion. This paper aims to add to this debate on contribution by arguing that case studies explore not one reality but several.

This is a theoretical paper that discusses ontology using a deductive approach.

The paper argues that reality is differentiated into physical, structural, agential, cultural and mental realms.

The paper begins to draw out some of the implications of “differentiated realities” for case studies, but there is much more that could be said.

Because case studies encompass differentiated realities, the paper discusses how expectations about the contribution of case studies should be intimately linked to the nature of the differentiated realities being researched.

“Differentiated realities” provides a fresh look status of case study findings and challenges the idea of a single social reality – as portrayed by both social positivism and social constructivism.

The use of dialectics and social construction theory can help expose rationalized institutional myths used to create useable knowledge. This discussion presents a popular technique, advocated and used among public officials when establishing pay scales, called a salary survey. Salary surveys appear rational because they use logical positivist (quantitative) methods to illustrate a “truth” that is actually “symbolic.” This process is institutionalized when pay discussions and decisions are required to proceed on the basis of salary surveys. Salary surveys take on the role of myth when they become accepted by officials as an “objective reality” without a thorough examination of the biases and assumptions. This study uses the ritual, validity, reality dialectic to illustrate how administrators construct and shape reality through social interaction. Through this dialectic, some officials may want to question their acceptance of salary survey practices and consider the recommendations offered in this article.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect theoretically on a quarter-century of attempts to codify “best practice” standards related to oversight of and reporting on executive remuneration. Issues around the regulation of UK executive remuneration are analysed focussing on decision making by elite actors, informed by corporate governance codification artefacts and theoretical considerations inspired by notions of the social construction of reality.

Using documentary materials to trace evolution of executive remuneration regulation in the UK, consideration is given to the social antecedents of processes governing corporate board remuneration committee practices. The paper reconstructs the social construction of the UK Corporate Governance Code and draws on relevant theoretically inclined literature to help make sense of processes involved.

Shaping the problems, to be addressed as “legitimate problems”, is core to efforts intended to create “persuasive narratives” around how UK executive remuneration should be regulated.

The paper sketches an agenda for subsequent empirical “field” investigation to assess the social antecedents of UK executive remuneration outcomes.

Offering an alternative way of thinking about executive reward and on-going controversy as to how it may be legitimately regulated, informed by contextual considerations.

A novel look at executive remuneration from a social construction of reality perspective. Adding value to public debate on organisational effectiveness at a time of warnings from luminaries such as the Bank of England governor about the adverse social impact of “stateless companies” and calls for action against unfairness in income distribution.

It’s been thirty years since the original articulation of “Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life” was written in collaboration with my remarkable mentor Suresh Srivastva (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987). That article – first published in Research in Organization Development and Change – generated more experimentation in the field, more academic excitement, and more innovation than anything we had ever written. As the passage of time has enabled me to look more closely at what was written, I feel both a deep satisfaction with the seed vision and scholarly logic offered for Appreciative Inquiry, as well as well as the enormous impact and continuing reverberation. Following the tradition of authors such as Carl Rogers who have re-issued their favorite works but have also added brief reflections on key points of emphasis, clarification, or editorial commentary I am presenting the article by David Cooperrider (myself) and the late Suresh Srivastva in its entirety, but also with new horizon insights. In particular I write with excitement and anticipation of a new OD – what my colleagues and I are calling the next “IPOD” that is, innovation-inspired positive OD that brings AI’s gift of new eyes together in common cause with several other movements in the human sciences: the strengths revolution in management; the positive pscyhology and positive organizational scholarship movements; the design thinking explosion; and the biomimicry field which is all about an appreciative eye toward billions of years of nature’s wisdom and innovation inspired by life.

This article presents a conceptual refigurationy of action-research based on a “sociorationalist” view of science. The position that is developed can be summarized as follows: For action-research to reach its potential as a vehicle for social innovation it needs to begin advancing theoretical knowledge of consequence; that good theory may be one of the best means human beings have for affecting change in a postindustrial world; that the discipline’s steadfast commitment to a problem solving view of the world acts as a primary constraint on its imagination and contribution to knowledge; that appreciative inquiry represents a viable complement to conventional forms of action-research; and finally, that through our assumptions and choice of method we largely create the world we later discover.

This paper aims to explore articulations of how individuals internalise official demands on handling COVID-19 and the function of social media in this process, and further to discuss this from a human rights’ perspective.

A thematic analysis of qualitative data from an international survey on COVID-19 and social media. The analysis was inspired by Berger and Luckmann's theory of reality as a social construction.

Articulations expressed an instant internalisation and externalisation of the officially defined “new normal”. However, negotiations of this “new normal” were articulated, whereby everyday life activities could proceed. Resistance to the “new normal” appeared, as routines and common sense understandings of everyday life were threatened. Health-care professionals were put in a paradoxical situation, living in accordance with the “new normal” outside work and legitimately deviating from it at work. The “new normal” calls for individuals’ “oughtonomy” rather than autonomy. Social media were used to push individual’s re-socialisation into the “new normal”. The latter both promoted and challenged human rights as the individual's right to self-determination extends beyond the self as it risks threatening other people's right to life.

With the means of a theoretically based thematic analysis inspired by Berger and Luckmann, the current study shows how articulations on COVID-19 and social media can both support and challenge human rights and reality as a facticity as dictated by dominant organisations and discourses in society.

The main purpose of this essay is to reflect on the nature of justification. To this end, the analysis draws on Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s De la justification. Les économies de la grandeur ¹ [On Justification: Economies of Worth ² ]. More specifically, the article aims to examine the extent to which Boltanski and Thévenot’s conceptual framework, widely known as ‘the sociology of critical capacity’, ³ permits us to demonstrate that processes of justification ⁴ are vital to the symbolically mediated construction – that is, to both the conceptual and the empirical organization ⁵ – of social life. In order to prove the validity of this contention, the inquiry explores the meaning of ‘justification’ in relation to the following dimensions: (1) existence, (2) ethics, (3) justice, (4) perspective, (5) presuppositions, (6) agreement, (7) common worlds, (8) critique, (9) practice and (10) justification itself. By way of conclusion, the article maintains that processes of justification constitute an essential ingredient of human reality.