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The purpose of this paper is to contrast and to connect a transaction cost economics (TCE) perspective and an actor‐network theory (ANT) perspective on control of interfirm transactional relationships.

The paper outlines two theoretical perspectives on interfirm control: an ostensive TCE perspective and a performative ANT perspective. By contrasting these perspectives the different assumptions of each perspective are highlighted. By connecting them, potentially interacting research approaches become visible.

Ostensive research and performative research may be two sides of the same coin. Ostensive TCE‐based research produces intentional explanations for the choice of certain control structures, while performative research exposes the mobilization of control structures in specific episodes from practice. Interaction between the two potentially accelerates and enhances knowledge production on control in interfirm relationships. TCE‐based ostensive research produces conceptualizations that can be followed as actors, thus enabling a demonstration of their enactment. Conversely, ANT‐based research may challenge the stability of (con)text as it is perceived in TCE‐based research.

The paper offers a base for multi‐paradigm research into control of interfirm transactional relationships. Specifically, the paper offers a base for connecting TCE‐informed research and ANT‐informed research into interfirm control.

This paper aims to contribute to understandings of the dynamics of marketplace exclusion and explore the benefits of a performative approach to knowledge production.

Interactive documentary theatre is used to explore the pressing issue of marketplace exclusion in a deprived UK city. The authors present a series of three vignettes taken from the performance to explore the embodied and dialogical nature of performative knowledge production.

The performative mode of knowledge production has a series of advantages over the more traditional research approaches used in marketing. It is arguably more authentic, embodied and collaborative. However, this mode of research also has its challenges particularly in the interpretation and presentation of the data.

The paper highlights the implications of performative knowledge production for critical consumer learning. It also explores how the hitherto neglected concept of marketplace exclusion might bring together insights into the mechanics and outcomes of exclusion.

While theatrical and performative metaphors have been widely used to theorise interactions in the marketplace, as yet the possibility of using theatre as a form of inquiry within marketing has been largely neglected. Documentary theatre is revealing of the ways in which marketplace cultures can perpetuate social inequality. Involving local communities in the co-production of knowledge in this way gives them a voice in the policy arena not hitherto fully addressed in the marketing field. Similarly, marketplace exclusion as a concept has been sidelined in favour of marketplace discrimination and consumer vulnerability – the authors think it has the potential to bring these fields together in exploring the range of dynamics involved.

Despite increased emphasis on diversity marketing, much remains unknown about how brands should approach diversity. This paper aims to understand what constitutes a brand’s approach to diversity (BATD), establish a categorisation of such approaches, outline the effects on audience connectedness and establish a future research agenda.

This conceptual paper draws on critical theory and practical exemplars to present a conceptualisation of BATD.

Using two determinants, depth of diversity integration and order of entry, it is possible to categorise BATD into four types: transformative, adaptive, passive and performative. Early adoption and greater depth of diversity approaches (i.e. multidimensional to an intersectional representation of identities) provide optimal opportunities for evoking connectedness.

The conceptual typological framework for BATD helps delineate how varying levels of diversity depth and order of entry influence audience connectedness. A detailed agenda for further research can guide ongoing diversity research.

Creating a typology reduces complexity and helps marketers recognise the differing components, manifestations and effects of their diversity approach. To increase connectedness and reduce audience scepticism, marketers must seek deeper-level diversity integrations and adopt approaches earlier.

This study offers a novel conceptualisation of BATD by defining it, distinguishing it from related research themes and moving beyond single diversity dimensions and marketing mix elements. Further, audience connectedness is positioned as a critical consequence as it can instigate desirable brand outcomes, benefit those identities represented and promote a more inclusive society.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the narrative nature of organizational spaces and how these narratives influence human action. The study introduces a notion of “narrating space” that emphasizes a narrative construction of space that is dynamic and performative. The study joins the recent material and spatial turn in organization studies where spaces are not considered merely as a container or a context to organizational action, but as a dynamic and active force.

The study draws on the triadic conception of space of Henry Lefebvre (1991). Lefebvre developed three interconnected dimensions of space: conceived, perceived and lived space. Space can be conceived as an abstract architectural plan or perceived through the practice of space. The dimension that integrates these two is the lived space. Spaces are experienced through emotions, imagination and embodied sensations. Instead of being a passive object, spaces become active and performative through the human engagement. They carry narratives that change their form as time passes by. The study embraces aesthetic, embodied epistemology where sensuous perceptions are considered as valid knowledge.

The study applies an aesthetic and dynamic approach to space and illustrates how spaces carry performative and processual narratives. These narratives are based on lived experience through personal, embodied experience, memories and sensuous perceptions. The illustrations also show that narratives change over time.

A narrating space concept is characterized by being subjective, dynamic and temporal. Furthermore, it is pointed out that space is constructed through sense-based experiences. A metaphor of an amoeba is offered to depict the nature of the phenomenon. The amoeba metaphor points out that space narratives are dynamic and changing. The study adds to a better awareness of space as a sensuous narrative. Beyond being an isolated personal experience, the study and the illustrations enhance a material view to organizational narratives.

The study suggests that managers, architects and designers should take notice of spaces as narratives that involve temporal and sensuous experiences when planning and (re)designing work environments. Due to the subjective and temporal nature of organizational spaces they are manageable only to a limited extent. Therefore, to appreciate an active narrating nature of organizational spaces, employee involvement in planning and (re)designing spaces is encouraged.

First, the paper enhances the awareness of organizational spaces as sensuous narratives. Second, it adds a material aspect to narratives. Third, it advances an aesthetic and embodied approach to narrative organization research.

This paper aims to explore brand rhythm in a lyrical analysis. It aims to provide insights into the appropriation of temporal meaning in material, collective and individual contexts.

The design offers a structured advance in lyrical qualitative research and the complementary third alternative to story and drama as more frequent representational forms in interpretive projects. This project presents an aesthetic performance in the sequential constructs of mimesis, poiesis and kinesis.

The inquiry confirms the paradoxical evolution of a brand’s temporal aspects and the importance of rhythm perception as a performative act of semantic bootstrapping and evolving brand meaning in general.

This project shows the importance of brand rhythm and pace in a triangulated methodological sequence of poetic perspectives as an advance of the current qualitative poetic state of play in research. It has implications for the strategic style management of brands in general.

This paper proposes the importance of brand rhythm as a differentiating attribute. The project presents a repeatable case study which depicts managers a structured poetic approach to capture the temporal essence of brands.

This project is situated in the context of an area that has become to be known as the Timeless Land. The artistic (re-)appropriation of a temporal aspect has had an impact on the development of public attitudes and policy.

This project offers new insights into the temporal aspects of brands and the construct of brand rhythm in particular. It completes Altieri’s three literary approaches in a performative inquiry. The proposition of the lyrical third way in a theoretical framework should facilitate the acceptance and increasing currency of future poetic projects in marketing.

The purpose is to present proposals to foster what we call a socially meaningful transparency practice that aims to enhance public understanding of data-based systems through the production of accounts that are relevant and useful to diverse publics, and society more broadly.

The authors’ proposals emerge from reflections on challenges they experienced producing written and visual accounts of specific public sector data-based systems for research purposes. Following Ananny and Crawford's call to see limits to transparency practice as “openings”, the authors put their experience into dialogue with the literature to think about how we might chart a way through the challenges. Based on these reflections, the authors outline seven proposals for fostering socially meaningful transparency.

The authors identify three transparency challenges from their practice: information asymmetry, uncertainty and resourcing. The authors also present seven proposals related to reduction of information asymmetries between organisations and non-commercial external actors, enhanced legal rights to access information, shared decision making about what gets made transparent, making visible social impacts and uncertainties of data-systems, clear and accessible communication, timing of transparency practices and adequate resourcing.

Socially meaningful transparency aims to enhance public understanding of data-based systems. It is therefore a necessary condition not only for informed use of data-based products, but crucially for democratic engagement in the development of datafied societies.

The paper contributes to existing debates on meaningful transparency by arguing for a more social, rather than individual, approach to imagining how to make transparency practice more meaningful. The authors do this through their empirical reflection on our experience of doing transparency, conceptually through our notion of socially meaningful transparency, and practically through our seven proposals.

We must acknowledge the importance of intangibles in today’s economies and the controversy over the accounting and reporting of these assets. For this reason, the purpose of this paper is to synthesize the lessons learned from research to date and identify gaps in that research that would be useful to academics and practitioners.

The literature review was conducted after an analysis of the most important academic databases in the period of 1990-2013: ABI Inform Complete, CSIS, EconLit, ISOC, Journal Citation Reports, Scopus, Emerald, Springer, and Google Scholar.

The authors offer a summary of the main gaps in the literature on intellectual capital disclosures, among which the authors perceive a need for increased qualitative or explanatory research, which would allow further analysis of such decisions.

Specifically, the main problem encountered in the research on voluntary disclosure of intangibles appears to relate to the type of methodology used, which is usually quantitative or descriptive.

Given that the principal limitations in the field of the disclosure of intangibles have been discussed, the authors conclude by indicating the principal directions for future research.

Qualitative analysis is absent in the literature the authors reviewed, and considered it fundamental to understanding this type of disclosure. In fact, the development of future lines of research could provide better-quality intangible asset reporting.

Although there are previous studies on this topic, the authors believe that the main contribution of this study is to offer an integrated framework of existing findings concerning decisions by companies to disclose information on intangibles, a topic on which previous literature is sparse.

The purpose of this paper is to ask how forms of “performative” interventions can prompt processes of re-thinking, which can, in turn, instigate the critical production of public space. Most importantly, it also asks how this methodology can manifest within various cultural and political contexts. Today, public spaces tend to be controlled either by the state or by private corporations. Neoliberal policies promote commercial interests, which subsequently drives inequality and determines what can and cannot be accessed by the public. The public spaces that are currently present in the neoliberal cities are, in fact, “pseudo” public spaces.

In an attempt to form new understandings of this problem, the authors’ approach is rooted in feminist theories of performativity, which focus on how identities are persistently re-produced through performance. These theories consider how the “self” is always entangled within everyday life interactions and how it is shaped by both societal and bodily practices. Framing spaces as shapable, informed by the embodied dialectic relations between spaces and social relations, the study uses forms of performative methodology to create productive disruptions and “constructed situations” (Debord, 2012). This methodology consists of intervention within these spaces in order to produce alternative public space and forms of publicness. Based on research conducted at the Sheffield School of Architecture, as well as a four-day invited workshop at the Floating University Berlin, this study investigates applications of performative practice methodology in the cities of Amman and Berlin.

The paper will begin by exploring how the two cities are regulated through various political and planning policies that affect public spaces. This line of enquiry will also involve questioning physical, social and political access to public space in these contexts and analysing the various actants, performative actions and processes that were involved in producing performative interventions.

The paper will conclude by discussing the potential and limitations of applying and translating such approaches in public spaces within different cultural and political contexts. As such, the study proposes a new methodological framework for re-thinking and provoking the critical production of public space through forms of performative spatial practice.

This paper seeks to inquire into the theoretical assumptions that underpin much accounting‐strategy research and to develop an alternative way to approach such study.

Two theoretical lenses are discussed and contrasted. These are the ostensive and performative lenses.

Hitherto, most accounting‐strategy research has drawn on an ostensive lens, whilst only a few approach research from a performative perspective. Whilst the ostensive approach is beneficial and reduces the complexity and messiness of research sites, it also assumes that stability, orderliness and predictability characterise social life (e.g. strategy is “ready made” and remains constant during implementation). Furthermore, in this approach, accounting assumes a subordinate role and its main aim is to ensure “correct” implementation of predefined intents. This limits accounting to being an output of strategy, as opposed to, for example, an input and transformer. Greater diversity of definitions and new investigative approaches are needed. To this end, and as a key contribution, the paper develops an alternative approach drawing on Latour's performative theory. This proposes that strategy and accounting are somewhat fragile, even unstable, objects, which change depending on the hands through which they travel and the network within which they are located. Furthermore, accounting is not merely designed to follow or implement predefined intents. It is also a catalyst of expansion, transformation, even surprise.

The paper does not offer primary data.

The paper offers to scholars the possibility of studying accounting‐strategy as “relations” rather than “objects”, illustrates how this may be done, and proposes research questions to this end. It identifies a space of inquiry that needs further attention and that can provide new insights into the accounting‐strategy relationship.