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NZTrio is more than a traditional piano trio that performs music from the classical repertoire: it is a professional chamber ensemble with a difference. The members of the Trio, totalling three musicians and two administrators have a community orientation. Their vision is to forge links into other artistic, educational and business fields and in doing so they create and participate in events that evoke visceral encounters. In this way they confirm Esposito’s view that communitas is disruptive of stasis and that to belong is to change. In community, identity is disrupted and new possibilities of the self can emerge. This becomes possible through provocative performances that implicate the body. For instance, shouting commands through a megaphone in Jack Body’s O Cambodia and the repeated pattern of chords in the third movement of Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 are emotionally and physically encountered as audiences feel what it is like to be both perpetrators and victims of violence. NZTrio uses music like this as well as works from the standard repertoire to create aesthetic experiences rich in options for communion. Furthermore, through professional development events, business leaders and young people gain the opportunity to understand how the physicality of leadership works in a high performing team.

Contemporary working life highlights the challenge between exploitation and exploration both on a general and a more individual level. Here, we focus on the latter, and connect the critical debate regarding self-management to March's exploitation/exploration trade-off, as this forms a useful theoretical frame to understand how employees make sense of their self-management efforts. The employee is subjected to an individual responsibility to understand and manage an exploration of the self while handling the norms of self-exploitation that a self-management culture creates. Through an empirical study of a large group of management consultants, we explore how they perform and make sense of self-exploitation and self-exploration through three specific discourses: the discourse of workload, the discourse of aspiration, and the discourse of fun. Through these, the consultants try to identify optimal amounts of work, play, and ambition, all while handling the trade-off between self-exploitation and self-exploration. We show how this keeps failing, but how it reappears as a necessary condition for avoiding future failures. In all three discourses, the trade-off therefore presents itself as the problem of as well as the solution to self-management.

Contradictory accounts in empirical material are often perceived as deliberate “lies” or “misleading deceptions” performed in acts of impression management, or they are simply neglected. When observed in the material collected empirically, methods have been developed in order to identify and remove them from the analytical work. The purpose of this paper is to re-visit and re-introduce a dissensus-based management research strategy in order to analytically be able to work with what appear to be contradictions and misinformation in qualitative research accounts, and give them a more profound role in the understanding of management ideas, work and practices.

A literature review is presented on consensus and dissensus orientated theories on contradictions and multiple and conflicting identities in a single individual in an ethnographic inquiry. The purpose is to analyse and reflect upon the contradictory information gathered, and how it can shed light upon important aspects of the management work and practices performed by the informant. This is done by focusing on apparent contradictions in a single interview situation from an ethnographic case study through, respectively a consensus and a dissensus perspective.

The findings indicate that dealing with contradictions and inner conflicts between self-view and external demands and conditions, led the informant to the production of multiple narrative self-identities imaging multiple realities that all appeared real to the informant. Each of these realities had different and contradictory impacts on the ideas and management work and practices he presented and performed in the organisation. These findings challenge the notions of “lies”, “deception” and “misinformation” in management research, and call for a more reflexive approach to analysis work in ethnographic accounts.

By applying consensus and dissensus-oriented theories to a single account the authors point to conditions, phenomena and relations, which most current and historic management research streams fail to see. Multiple and conflicting identities surface in a single respondent during an interview situation, creating clearly self-contradictory and conflicting narratives and practices, that all appear to be oblivious to the respondent. These multiple and contradictory narrative identities all have significant impact on the management work performed by the respondent.

The purpose of this study is to further paradox research at the individual level through applying a framework of three phases of individual response to paradox – recognition, understanding and behaviour.

Critical and integrative review of previous studies of individual responses to paradox.

The role of individual understanding is limited in extant research on individual responses to paradox. Individual understanding tends to be equated with behaviour, and thus knowledge of understanding is not differentiated enough, neither is the link between understanding and behaviour sufficiently developed.

The review does not consider the relationship to interactional, organisational and environmental contexts. The recommendation for future research is to explore individual responses to paradox more entirely, to provide an adequate ground for extending paradox theory across individual and broader levels of analysis.

The review contributes to paradox theory by separating individual understanding and then providing a framework in which recognition, understanding and behaviour can be reintegrated in new ways. In addition to more accurate discernment of individual understanding and of combinations of responses across phases, the three-phase framework facilitates investigation of more intricate influences across phases and paths of evolution of such responses over time.

Taking into account the need to make a clearer distinction between traditional and new organizational controls, the purpose of this paper is to investigate similarities and differences between those two forms and explore the extent to which new forms of control can be operationalized from a quantitative point of view.

Suggesting that new organizational controls can be understood also in light of quantitative paradigms, the paper develops and tests a scale to measure the existence of this type of controls, examine its construct validity and evaluate its convergent validity.

The theoretical dimensions of new controls have empirical correspondence. Input and behaviour controls are strongly associated with the promotion of values and beliefs in organizations. New controls become responsible for employees’ acceptance of companies’ management, an aspect measured by perceived organizational support (POS).

The study presents two challenges linked to the lack of evaluation of the possible process mediators that measure the subjectification of the individual, and to the lack of data coming from the organizational level. Limitations can be addressed by multi-level studies using measures that would avoid single variance biases. The need for companies to pay more attention to organizational discourses and to the promotion of specific values (that can enrich traditional controls), and the impact this might generate on POS and future reciprocity, are the practical implications of the study.

– The impact of new organizational controls can be measured by scales rather than investigated only with qualitative approaches. Furthermore, it can be observed that the promotion of values and beliefs strongly increases POS. Such dimension can reduce employees’ resistance when compared to output controls or controls based on changes in surveillance technologies and structural change processes.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how taxi drivers understand the customer service relationship as “dirty work” by examining the strategies they use to manage the taint associated with their work.

An innovative qualitative approach is taken that focuses upon the analysis of metaphors elicited in interviews with 24 taxi drivers.

Four different metaphorical understandings of the customer service relationship are provided: heroes, confidante, the unworthy, and predator. These metaphors are explained through a series of “hidden transcripts” (Scott, 1990). The impact of these different metaphors and hidden transcripts as sensemaking devices is addressed.

The paper uses an innovative qualitative method to argue that the construction of work as “dirty” or otherwise is located within the customer service interaction.

The purpose of this paper is to explore identity work in response to various types of contradictions experienced by employees in outsourced software development in the initial stages of their careers.

A qualitative methodology is adopted. Data are generated primarily through in-depth interviews with participants who had less than five years of work experience in outsourced software development.

Four dimensions of contradictions in the setting are identified and behaviors associated with identity work driven by these contradictions are explored. While responses included regression, despair, resignation and disengagement, behaviors in the direction of adjustment and development were also reported. The importance of various kinds of resources for developmental identity work is pointed out.

This work contributes to discussions on identity work by bringing to light how contradictions influence it in the context of outsourced software work.

An empirical testing on IBM smart cities projects was applied so as to demonstrate that the combination between the use of Internet of Things (IoT) and the implementation of the Open Innovation (OI) model within smart cities which has been changed the development of urban areas and effected firms’ innovativeness. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A case study methodology on a leading multinational firms deeply involved in smart cities projects has been chosen.

From this study it emerged how IBM: has a clear vision of smart cities and IoT; adopt a worldwide OI approach to smart cities; delineate-specific strategies and create OI units ad hoc for smart cities’ projects.

The major limitation of this work is that the analysis presented has been developed only on one case of multinational firm that operate in smart cities contexts.

Recommendations will be made both to public and private actor in order to plan and implement efficient strategies to improve their performances.

The concept of smart city has become quite popular between scholars and practitioners in the era of digital economy. Cities become smart developing new urban area using new Information and Communication Technologies such as mobile devices, the semantic web, cloud computing, and the IoT. Smart cities make innovation ecosystem, joining together different forces like knowledge-intensive activities, institutions for cooperation and learning, and web-based applications collective intelligence. This research is of importance and significance to scholars, government, and firms who need to understand the relevance of smart cities in the current economy.

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.