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This paper contributes to discourse about complex disasters by applying cultural lenses to the study of coastal infrastructure (such as seawalls and dikes), thus departing from studies that focus on characterising, assessing, and predicting the physical resilience of hard structural forms that dominate knowledge about coastal infrastructure.

This ethnographic study nuances Philippine coastal infrastructure through examining the material registers of a seawall bordering an island inhabited by artisanal fisherfolk. By “material registers”, this research refers to the socially informed ways of regarding and constructing material configurations and how the latter are enacted and resisted. Data collection was accomplished through focus groups with community leaders, on-site and remote interviews with homeowners, and archival research to further understand the spatial and policy context of the structure.

The discussion focuses on the seawall’s three material registers (protection, fragility, and misrecognition) and reveals how infrastructure built for an island community of fisherfolk simultaneously fulfils, fails, and complicates the promise of disaster resilience.

This research demonstrates the potential of “material registers”, a term previously used to analyse architecture and housing, to understand the technopolitics of infrastructure and how materially informed tensions between homeowners' and state notions of infrastructure contribute to protracted experiences of disaster and coastal maladaptation.

This research signposts the need for disaster risk reduction, climate adaptation, and sustainable development policies that legitimize the construction of infrastructure to recognize the latter's relationship and impact on multiple sphere of coastal life, including housing and citizenship implications.

This research highlights how infrastructure for coastal disaster risk management implicates geographically informed power relations within a community fisherfolk and between their “small” island community and more politically and economically dominant groups.

Whereas studies of coastal infrastructure are focused on quantitative and predictive research regarding hard structural forms in megacities, this study apprehends disaster complexity through examining the cultural and contested nature of infrastructure for coastal flood management in an island community of fisherfolk.

Using “on justification” theory, this article explores the rationality and justification of the West-African military migrants for joining the British Armed Forces.

We utilise an interpretive qualitative research methodology in this study. We undertook semi-structured interviews with 42 military migrants who joined the British Armed Forces between 1998 and 2013.

We identify various factors that influenced the participants’ decision to join the British Armed Forces, such as individual aspirations, the need to find a “path” at a crossroad in life (e.g. a career dilemma or the loss of a parent), economic opportunities and institutional incentives. Military migrants’ career motivations are shaped by their deep affection for the Crown and their desire to give back to the country with which they share a colonial history.

The UK’s Ministry of Defence, government and policymakers could gain valuable insights from this study. The findings could significantly shape their recruitment and retention policies, thereby enhancing the attractiveness of the military profession. This could be a crucial step in addressing the recruitment challenges and personnel deficit currently faced by the British Armed Forces.

This study provides a fresh perspective on the dynamics of the military service of foreign-born veterans. The article focuses on an underrepresented group (West-African military migrants) to enhance our understanding of their career motivations in the British Armed Forces. We identify and categorise the motivations and justifications for military migrants’ enlistment in the British Armed Forces according to seven justifications, each depicting a career pattern informing the participants’ motivations and justifications for their enlistment.

This research seeks to examine the mitigating effect of religiosity on the relationship between abusive supervision and unethical behavior in employees, with moral disengagement serving as a mediating factor. Drawing on social cognitive theory, the study proposes an overarching moderated mediation framework to analyze this complex dynamic.

The testing of the model was based on hierarchical data obtained from 70 work units in services sector. Within this framework, 70 supervisors evaluated the unethical conduct of employees, while 700 employees assessed the abusive supervision they experienced and reported on their own moral disengagement and religiosity. For the analysis of both the measurement and the hypothesized models, multilevel modeling techniques in the Mplus software were utilized.

The study's findings indicate a direct positive link between abusive supervision and employees' unethical behavior, with moral disengagement mediating this relationship. Furthermore, the research discovered that abusive supervision leads to unethical behavior in employees through moral disengagement only in instances where their religiosity is low.

This research delves deeper by elucidating the role of moral disengagement in the dynamic between abusive supervision and unethical behavior. Diverging from prior research, this study uniquely highlights the moderating role of religiosity, showing its potential to weaken the impact of abusive supervision on unethical behavior in employees through moral disengagement.