Chris Carter

Contemporary society is characterised by constant change with an ever-increasing feature of interconnection, having clear implications for healthcare professional learning and role identity. It is proposed that active participation and coproduction for learning can provide options to understand contemporary challenges and opportunities in the development of personal and professional identity. This research aimed to explore the value of learning and development of identity through participation in co-produced practical workshop activity involving service users and students across a Year 1 (level 4) undergraduate BSc(Hons) Physiotherapy module. Co-production was also reflected within the research project design and operationalisation. Following delivery of the workshops, data were collected and analysed from a series of individual semi-structured interviews (n = 11) and a focus group. Six emergent themes were identified. A central theme of identity and self-worth was deconstructed within five interdependent sub-themes; real and safe, person-centred, backstage learning, good to talk and staging of curriculum. A process of open dialogue within co-produced workshop design and delivery would appear to enhance learning and a contextual appreciation of a broader 'whole' for all participants. Future research is aimed at building on this project, to explore co-produced learning opportunities across levels and settings that provide further insight into personal and professional identity development.

Purpose: The paper provides a theoretical framework for interdisciplinary accounting scholars interested in performances of accountability in front of live audiences.Design/methodology/approach: This is a processual case study of “Falkirk in crisis” that covers the period from September 2021 to September 2022. The focus of this paper is two-fan-Q&A sessions held in October 2021 and June 2022. Both are naturally occurring discussions between two groups such as are found in previous research on routine events and accountability. This is a theoretically consequential case study.Findings: A key insight of the paper is to identify the practical and symbolic dimensions of accountability. The paper demonstrates the need to align these two dimensions when responding to questions: a practical question demands a practical answer and a symbolic question requires a symbolic answer. Second, the paper argues that most fields contain conflicting logics and highlights that a complete performance of accountability needs to cover the different conflicting logics within the field. In this case, this means paying full attention to both the communitarian and results logics. A third finding is that a performance of accountability cannot succeed if the audience rejects attempts to impose an unpalatable definition of the situation. If these three conditions are not met, the performance is bound to fail.Research limitations/implications: An important theoretical coontribution of the study is the application of Jeffery Alexander’s work on political performance to public performances of accountability.Practical implications: The phenomenon explored in the paper (what the authors term “grassroots accountability”) has broad applicability to any situation in organizational or civic life where the power apex of an organization is required to engage with a group of informed and committed stakeholders – the “community”. For those who find themselves in the position of the fans in this study, the observations set out in the empirical narrative can serve as a useful practical guide. Attempts to answer a practical complaint with a symbolic answer (or vice versa) should be challenged as evasive.Social implications: This paper studies an engagement of elite actors with ordinary (or grassroots) actors. The study shows important rules of engagement, including the importance of respecting the power of practical questions and the need to engage with these questions appropriately.Originality/value: This paper offers a new vista for interdisciplinary accounting by synthesizing the accountability literature with the political performance literature. Specifically, the paper employs Jeffery Alexander’s work on practical and symbolic performance to study the microprocesses underpinning successful and unsuccessful performances of accountability.

This chapter argues that while Organization and Management Theory (OMT) appears in good health it stands on the precipice of a crisis of its own making. This stems from an overly self-referential and narrow focus on theoretical contribution, at the expense of a broader set of societal commitments. Paradoxically, this is particularly the case if a researcher is putatively engaging with broader societal issues. The central thesis advanced in this chapter is that researchers should be more socially reflexive about what they are researching, why they are researching it, and for whom. As a corollary, the chapter calls for researchers to interrogate the research that they are undertaking critically and to work out the broader social significance of their work. The chapter unfolds with concise analyses of two branches of OMT: the sociology of the professions and institutional theory. The chapter highlights how research into the professions runs the danger of being captured by the objects of its research: as researchers busy themselves examining pre-existing concepts, rather than exploring the power struggles that take place in particular fields. The chapter argues for a re-framing of research into the professions. The chapter highlights the rise of institutional theory to its current position of dominance within OMT. Institutional theory’s recent move to study ‘Grand Challenges’ is welcomed but also problematised. The chapter closes with reflections on a course of action for making OMT matter.

In Manufacturing the Employee, Roy Jacques examines, through Foucauldian method, the discursive and practice based shifts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which precipitated the development of modern American Management Knowledge. This chapter seeks to complement Jacques' work by extending his arguments about the construction of management knowledge, and extending his method to examine the live talk of an executive in a newly privatized public utility who explicitly constitutes his practice through the language of new managerialism. The chapter examines P. A. Clark's representation of the process of forging 'a separate metering business', and explores the discursive resources he uses in legitimating his position and reality in CoastMeter. The CoastMeter case highlights how an executive in an organization constructs an identity as someone who cunningly and entrepreneurially leads through change, surfing the environment for opportunity. He uses themes pertaining to Charisma, Anachronism, Inevitability, External Alliances, and Empowerment to position his narrative.

This chapter examines many Anglo-Saxon assumptions about the importance of objective knowledge, the scientific method and individualism which do not sit easily in a Japanese context. Within Japan's institutional framework, close community relationships amongst long-term colleagues lower the marginal cost of information transfer and enable insiders to act as a group, able to ostracize and retaliate against those who break their code. The power relations that embed Japanese organizations in their social context are dominated by Japan's pre-industrial precepts that privilege the collective over the individual. Japan's pre-industrial history and approach to industrialization emerged from more than two-centuries of relative international isolation that saw the evolution of an extraordinarily resilient steady state hierarchical administrative and social system. Whereas Europe's older universities pre-dated industrial society, Japan's university system has developed in tandem with its plan-rational transition from late-feudalism to economic and technological superpower.

This chapter outlines the main features of Foucault's concept of 'governmentality', a term that he introduced only in lectures and never in a finalised text. It focuses on the two conceptual developments that have used Foucault's governmentality as a point of departure. The chapter considers the development of the concept of 'mediating instruments' to suggest that all sorts of social scientific techniques – including accounting – do not simply reflect some underlying, already existing reality but serve to create objects to be understood and, so, managed. It also considers the related notion of 'management at a distance'; that mediating instruments allow the government of a diverse range of individuals. The will to govern does not necessarily precede or cause the development of a particular accounting technique. That calculation does not necessarily – or, indeed, rarely – answer the functional requirements of institutional objectives is well established in organisation studies.