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Faraoyść is a translinguistic portmanteau neologism that describes the moment when oppressive systems are shaken and appear to be coming to an end, and joyful, liberated worlds feel within reach. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate that faraoyść helped participants helped participants to expand their situated imaginings, which increased their capacity to imagine decolonized worlds.

This research was guided by faraoyść as a conceptual framework that explores the empirical experience of joy through collaborative world-building activities. These praxis-based exercises were tested in a series of workshops both at the 2020 UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit and in collaboration with Negligence Refugees from Lebanon.

When activated by collaboratively designed speculative objects and stories generated through the lens of faraoyść, participants created spaces of rhizomatic world-building that allowed them to imagine beyond the boundaries of their situated imaginings. Once participants had mapped the ways their imaginations were limited by current colonial systems of power, they were able to reorient their roles and develop new means to act within decolonized systems.

Faraoyść is a novel conceptual framework that contributes to current movements to decolonize futuring and foresight. This paper also introduces the concepts of rhizomatic world-building – an emergent approach to co-imagination, and situated imaginings, which are the systemic frameworks within which one imagines the ways the world has, is, will and must work. In practice, faraoyść is grounded in abundance and the power of liberatory joy to strengthen and celebrate local traditions, storytelling, world-building and community power.

Using Hirschman's Exit–Voice–Loyalty–Neglect (EVLN) framework, this study examines the dual-moderating role of the big five personality traits in shaping workers' behavioral responses to psychological contract breach. Building from calls for research on individual differences in psychological contract dynamics, the current study applies the theory of purposeful work behavior to delineate how the higher-order goals prescribed by one's personality jointly guide interpretation processes in forming emotional and behavioral responses. In doing so, we map how certain big five traits shape felt violation and EVLN responses following breach events, while others seem to only moderate emotional or EVLN responses.

A scenario-based experimental study asked participants (N = 610) about their reactions to a breach event. We tested a dual moderated mediation model, in which agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness and neuroticism moderated the intensity of felt violation, and the likelihood of each EVLN behavior following from felt violation.

We found evidence for the dual moderating effect of agreeableness on voice responses to breach. Additionally, neuroticism strengthened felt violation following breach, and extraversion weakened endorsement of neglecting work to cope with felt violation. Our results suggest that certain traits are particularly important for individual differences in emotional responses to breach (e.g. neuroticism), while others are important for shaping differences in behavior (e.g. extraversion). Additionally, results shed light on the importance of taking a person-by-situation perspective in understanding work behavior, such that extraversion, while conceptualized as general emotional tendencies, does not significantly influence felt violation in breach contexts.

While previous research has looked at how personality traits moderate either the breach–felt violation relation or the breach–EVLN relation, research has yet to test the moderating effect of personality simultaneously. Excluding one or the other overlooks important individual differences in the process, as interpretation processes guiding emotional and behavioral responses happen concurrently. In doing so, we examine responses to a specific breach event (rather than general breach perceptions), as this better aligns with the conceptualizations of breach (as specific occasions of broken promises) and felt violation (as an emotional state).

The article considers the utility of a pluralist perspective in the context of current debates around UK corporate governance reform. Oxford School pluralism advanced both a description of how industrial relations (IR) operated in practice plus a prescription for how it should operate. Whilst economic conditions are different today, a pluralist framing provides not only a useful way of understanding interests in firm governance (description) but also a solid grounding for a pragmatic reform agenda (prescription).

Drawing from key texts in the field, the article considers core concepts within pluralist discourse and discusses their relevance to contemporary policy debates.

The article provides a short outline of recent economic and political developments and considers how a pluralist framing helps explain firm-level interests, challenging the dominant narrative of shareholder primacy. It then asks what policy interventions might flow from this analysis of capital and labour investments, and how feasible they are in the current UK context. This allows a discussion of levels of analysis (evident in materialist theories such as “radical pluralism” and the “disconnected capitalism thesis”). Finally, it reflects briefly on the links between corporate governance and wider patterns of inequality, suggesting the pluralist position is consistent with a Durkheimian sociology focusing on the potential in state-led regulatory interventions to tackle anomie and strengthen social solidarity.

The article brings together literature from what are often treated as relatively discrete areas of enquiry (employment relations and corporate governance) and also considers the public policy implications of these connections.