Search results

This paper aims to offer insight into how strategies within the accounting profession, which has been becoming more global, might be changed by the recent outbreak of the Second Cold War between the West and the Rest of the World.

We explore the strategies of those who called themselves “Confucian accountants” in China, a country which has recently discouraged its state-owned enterprises from using the services of the Big 4. We do this by employing qualitative research methods, including reflexive photo interviews, in which Big-4 accountants, recognised as the most Westernised accounting actors in China, and Confucian accountants are asked to take and explain photographs representing their professional lives. Bourdieu’s notions of “economy of practices” and “vision-of-division strategy” are drawn upon to understand who the Confucian accountants are and what they do strategically in their pursuit of a higher revenue stream and improved social standing in the Chinese social space.

The homegrown Confucian accountants share cultural-cognitive characteristics with neighbouring social actors, such as their clients and government officials, who have been inculcated with Confucianism and the state’s cultural confidence policy in pursuit of a “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics”. Those accountants try to enhance their social standing and revenue stream by strategically demonstrating their difference from Big-4 accountants. For this purpose, they wear Confucian clothes, have Confucian props in their office, employ Confucian phrases in their everyday conversations, use Confucian business cards and construct and maintain guanxi with government officials and clients.

This paper is the first attempt to explore Confucian accountants’ strategies for increasing their revenue and social standing at the start of the Second Cold War.

The purpose of this paper is to report findings from the first stage of a study that focusses on research in the domain of entrepreneurship as a process of knowledge creation and exchange. It seeks to discover what entrepreneurship scholars really believe that they contribute. Focusses on the entrepreneurship academic community and examine two issues: the value scholars perceive, in terms of both how an individuals’ work can be seen to be a contribution to knowledge, and what “contribution to knowledge” means to the individual researcher.

The authors employ a qualitative approach within which 20 entrepreneurship professors were asked to complete a semi structured research instrument to express their opinions on the value of the authors’ research and the extent to which the authors’ work contribute to knowledge and practice. The sample was drawn from full entrepreneurship professors from the UK, USA, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia.

Suggest that entrepreneurship scholars publish for a plurality of reasons including personal fulfilment, interest, and necessity. It was also noted that the motivations for academic scholarship have changed with increased internal and external pressures and a drive to publish in certain journals.

This is a novel study not undertaken previously in the entrepreneurship discipline. The results will inform research practices within the entrepreneurship discipline and represent the basis for an ongoing large scale global quantitative study of the entrepreneurship discipline.

The outcomes of this research inform higher education stakeholders in the construction of valid research strategies thus providing a suitable impact upon academia and society. It provides an initial insight into drivers for academic research within the entrepreneurship discipline, and the opportunities, challenges and paradoxes which various approaches to research contribution entail.

This research project aims to investigate Amish small businesses in North America to determine their success rate and the factors that explain their vitality. Amish entrepreneurs have developed some 10,000 small businesses despite taboos on motor vehicles, electricity, computers, the internet, and education. A theoretical model consisting of five types of socio‐cultural capital (human, cultural, social, religious, and symbolic) was conceptualized to explain and interpret the success of Amish enterprises. The model includes capital deficits that identify the hurdles that successful enterprises must overcome.

The research employed qualitative ethnographic methods that included participant observation, face‐to‐face interviews with business owners in eight states, and document analysis.

The paper finds that Amish businesses have a success rate above 90 percent, which is much higher than that of other American small businesses. Five types of socio‐cultural capital (human, cultural, social, religious, and symbolic) account for the high success rate of Amish enterprises.

The qualitative methods do not permit quantitative analysis or tracking the performance of businesses over an extended period of time.

Understanding the importance of socio‐cultural capital assets and deficits for business success is critical for entrepreneurs, consultants, and scholars.

The five concepts of socio‐cultural capital assets and deficits are a significant expansion of traditional social capital theory. These concepts offer a rich resource for understanding small business failure and success and merit inclusion in future research. Religious and symbolic capitals are especially pertinent for understanding enterprise building in religious and ethnic communities.

Using a Bourdieuian perspective, the purpose of this paper is to analyse how highly skilled migrants (HSMs) from transition economies develop their careers by accumulating and using career capital upon migration.

An interpretative approach was chosen to depict the career patterns of 18 HSMs from Southeast Europe. Semi-structured interviews were used to gather data about their career experiences in Western Europe and their home countries.

Findings reveal four different career patterns that show how individuals develop their careers and adjust to the work environment by accumulating and using career capital. Building up country-specific work-related social contacts and gaining work experience in local companies were found to represent key elements in their adjustment process. Additionally, the findings show that organisational support facilitates the processes of individual adjustment.

This paper emphasises that individuals do not always have to assimilate to the work environment of the host country but can also bargain over the value of their career capital in their adjustment process. Contrasting with previous literature this perspective presents a novelty.

Technological firms increasingly depend on open innovation to compete in hypercompetitive markets. To openly engage the creativity of a multitude of private actors, firms can rely on crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing challenges global companies as they span organizational boundaries to attract multiple local partners. Global companies must engage in boundary spanning to successfully communicate and create a sense of community with smaller local partners despite status and cultural differences. The collaboration between Google and developers in China deserves to be studied in particular, because it operates within a restricted market.

This paper argues that crowdsourcing for innovation on a global scale requires effective boundary spanning capabilities. These boundary-spanning practices ensure smooth cooperation with the crowd and solve problems relating to differences in status and organizational contexts. This study applies Bourdieu's theory of practice including the concept of capital (economic, intellectual, social and symbolic) to understand the social relationships between Google and a growing community of Chinese developers. It also draws on a case study including ten semistructured interviews, which have been triangulated with internal documents and data from selected websites.

Four types of capital (symbolic, intellectual, social and economic) have been identified as important devices to understand the sources of power and the stakes of Googlers and developers in the joint field. These types of capital contribute to structure the social fields in which developers and Google cooperate and their practice. The success of the collaboration between Google and Chinese developers can arguably be attributed to Google's ability to create boundary-spanning activities in order to reduce the endowment differential in the four types of capital and improve their communication. Therefore, this research provides a deep and conceptualized description of boundary-spanning practices, as well as providing a useful contribution for managers involved in crowdsourcing via platform in culturally different markets.

The main limitation of this study is methodological in nature, relating to the absence of interviews with board members of Google China who are reluctant to speak about Google activities in China for political raisons. This restriction is partly counterbalanced by the analysis of publicly available secondary data such as news and communications.

This research has generated practical recommendations for managers of organizations, which require optimal boundary spanning for crowdsourcing. Managers must understand the different sources of social boundaries between their organization and the crowd. The crowd should be segmented into smaller groups with distinctive identities, and organizations should systematically design boundary-spanning activities to address each boundary of each segment. The boundary-spanning activities involve a specific set of tools, programs and platforms to address the target group. Efficient boundary spanning depends on the necessity to select boundary spanners with high cultural intelligence and communication skills.

This paper draws on Bourdieu's theory of practice to investigate the role of boundary spanning in crowdsourcing for innovation, specifically in the joint field between Google and Chinese developers. This research reveals how boundary objects such as developer documents, websites, programs and events are essential for developers to be able to participate on Google's platform. Companies should be prepared to invest in the design and delivery of boundary-spanning activities and objects, knowing that these are also a locus for negotiation with local partners.

This research contributes to the literature by applying the boundary-spanner theory to Google crowdsourcing practices within a restricted market. Bourdieu's theory of practice has proven to be a potent perspective with which to better understand the positive role of boundary spanners in the joint field between Google and Chinese developers. Moreover, this practice perspective has not been used in prior research to highlight power relations in crowdsourcing for innovation. This study has shown that, in addition to boundary objects, boundary spanners can also contribute in the transfer of intellectual capital, which is the pivotal resource for boundary spanning in this field.

The purpose of this paper is to propose Bourdieu's theory of practice (TOP) as a useful framework for conceptualizing agents' strategizing by considering players' strategizing as based on their habituses and capitals as well as their assessments of their relevant field(s).

The paper draws on Bourdieu's theory to better understand the strategizing of some of China's major players. The basic concepts of the model – strategy, field, habitus, and capital – are defined and developed for the major players studied.

This paper conceptualizes the strategizing as a dynamic set of players playing within and between multiple fields. It applies the fractality – in social space – of Bourdieu's TOP into specific agents or fields not only encompassing but going beyond isolated cognitive, cultural, and institutional considerations of one or more players to offer the possibility of taking into account structure and agency, variability and commonality and diverse degrees of granularity and heterogeneity.

Most strategy research considers strategizing from either a structuralist or a rational perspective. The paper adds comprehensiveness to strategy studies and improves strategy's identification by applying Bourdieu's TOP. In addition, the paper expands the level of attention previously given by Bourdieu's TOP to commonality and diversity as well as to multiple levels by visualizing Bourdieu's TOP in a fractal fashion.

Previous research in sociology, psychology and fashion studies has investigated the concept of diversity in the fashion context, but the topic remains largely understudied within the realm of consumer research. This study aims to examine the reactions of underrepresented women to the fashion industry’s lack of diversity.

A total of 38 semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted among a sample of female consumers who were diverse with respect to racial and ethnic background, socioeconomic class, religion, sexual orientation, age, body type and physical appearance.

Using Bourdieu’s forms of capital – social, cultural, economic and symbolic – the findings shed light on the process of virtual community formation on social media in response to the lack of diversity in fashion; reveal fashion consumers’ power to enact institution-level change, compelling the industry to become more diverse and inclusive; demonstrate the outcomes of capital accumulation and illustrate how all forms of capital are produced by and reproduce each other.

This study proposes a new outcome of capital accumulation on virtual communities, termed “transformative value,” in addition to the social and information values identified in earlier scholarship.

This study offers a Bourdieu-oriented analysis of the tax compliance practice for indigenous entrepreneurs in New Zealand. It examines the intersection of accounting and tax for Māori entrepreneurs and their relational interactions with the Inland Revenue Department (IRD)/state/Crown and accountants by considering the contextual factors of history, culture and society of Māori.

Qualitative research was adopted using face-to-face in-depth interviews with 34 participants and reviewing government documents. The authors analyse the tax compliance practice by drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital and habitus to conceptualise the tax field as a site of struggle for power and control by the IRD, accountants and indigenous entrepreneurs.

This study demonstrates how the tax field is structured as a game between tax reporting, taxpaying and monitoring functions. The position within the field is determined by the actor's access to the relevant capitals and habitus. It identifies how accounting, given its centrality to tax compliance, facilitates the power relations between the IRD, accountants and Māori entrepreneurs. The Eurocentric accounting-based tax reporting and the contextual factors illuminate how indigenous entrepreneurs are being dominated in the tax field. They experienced cultural dissonance with conflicting responsibilities when traversing the collectivistic indigenous and tax fields. Their collectivism involves sharing resources as they cherish whanaungatanga (relationship, kinship) and manaakitanga (kindness, generosity), which are at odds and are not valued in the tax field.

It is an empirical illustration of the connection between accounting, tax and power for indigenous taxpayers and their relationship with the IRD/Crown and accountants. It has practical implications for developing and enhancing tax compliance in jurisdictions with indigenous taxpayers. Such an understanding is helpful for policymakers, government, business agencies and the accounting professions when assisting, empowering and educating indigenous groups regarding tax compliance.

This paper responds to the call for accounting research with modern-day indigenous peoples rather than historical ones. The paper fills a gap in the accounting and tax literature by examining the tax compliance practice of indigenous small and medium enterprise (SME) entrepreneurs using Bourdieu's framework. It identifies how the role of accounting creates, maintains and reinforces power structures in the tax field. Tax/accounting reporting based on Eurocentric rules disempowers and alienates indigenous entrepreneurs. They misrecognise their actions in reproducing the existing power structures in the tax field due to deeply held historical and cultural factors about the fear of the Crown/state and their practice of rangitaratanga (esteeming authorities).

This paper aims to explore Chinese female international students’ construction of global citizenship identity by examining their accumulation of cultural capital in different forms from transnational higher education in the UK.

Participant observations and in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with Chinese female international students at a British university to explore their experiences with transnational higher education, cultural identities, the construction of global citizenship and perceived future job opportunities.

In this research, participants revealed that accessing a global elite university helps them accumulate institutionalised cultural capital. Embodied cultural cultivation acquired from transnational higher education is justified by students’ experiences in the context of transnational higher education. Rising confidence is shown by the participants’ narration and global-oriented awareness, which is their ability to understand and respect people from diverse cultural backgrounds, which was developed during their studies in the UK. However, they still realise the potentially difficult conversion of cultural capital to real job competitiveness. Recognition of global citizenship identity may be complicated if students plan to return home after studying.

This study provides further insight into the single-child generation of globally mobile Chinese female international students. Participants were aware of the positive accumulation of cultural capital in its embodied and institutionalised forms obtained from the UK higher education system and its contribution to the construction of global citizenship identity. However, the newly constructed global citizenship identity remains complex. Participants question the extent to which the new identity fits into the Chinese social context if they decide to return home.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, the originality of the paper lies in expanding the global citizenship framework with the specific application of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital to show Chinese female international students’ study experiences in UK transnational higher education, rather than addressing the Chinese international student experience in general.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce Bourdieu’s social theory, and its “thinking tools” of habitus, doxa, field and capital, as a sensemaking theory.

The emic research studied, for a particular group, the firm-wide implementation of a new system. The study used data occurring naturally in the organization (executive newsletters), and externally (third-party surveys), as well as 23 participant interviews to structure the social space (field) and determine what is of interest (identity). Interviews were coded for habitus, doxa, field, capital, symbolic violence and strategies to re-assert interviewees’ own doxa versus logic imposed by the powerful.

A unique, esteemed identity was being erased through executive attempts to introduce a new culture at the firm, and the new systems represented a challenge to this valued identity. Participants used strategies to re-assert their identity through not participating in the logic of the new tool: discussing misuse, lack of use, relative unimportance and low priority of the new tool.

Change that threatens an esteemed, valued identity is more likely to be resisted. The logic of an established practice or system (beyond merely gathering user requirements) is beneficial in understanding potential reactions to a new system. Change in systems that occur simultaneously with the imposition of a new culture, particularly where the system is seen as being a representation of that imposed culture, may be resisted through non-practice (misuse or lack of use) of the new system.

The paper demonstrates the applicability of Bourdieu’s social theory to organizational studies, providing a sensemaking of change and acts of resistance.