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The past two decades have witnessed little, if any, growth in the numbers of small firms with employees in the UK. At the same time, a substantial growth in the numbers of self‐employed without employees as a component of the UK national labour force has been witnessed. The current article reports on a recent study into direct selling that accounts for around 500,000 “independent contractors” at any one time, albeit, in this case, operating often as part of an invisible economy, though linked with household‐name direct selling companies. With the advent of more large companies, such as the recently privatised utilities, using direct selling as a distribution format, there is a strong case for achieving a wider understanding of the dynamics of this system.

The four members of Airbus Industrie, Aerospatiale of France, MBB through Deutsche Airbus of West Germany, British Aerospace and CASA of Spain, have approved new statutes for the aircraft manufacturing consortium with effect from 1 April 1989.

The purpose of this paper is to apply the concept of framing in the field of risk governance and risk management research.

A five-constituent approach to framing – cognitive, strategic, action, emotional and institutional framing – is applied to contrastively analyze the multifaceted character of the two concepts of risk governance and risk management.

This paper analyzes the multifaceted utilization of risk governance framing and the conscious demarcation between risk governance and risk management. Risk governance framing strengthens the proactive control of strategic risks with regard to business model adaptation to changing risk landscapes. The verbal imagery of risk governance already sets the agenda for the sustainability-oriented as well as value-oriented steering of the risks of a business model. Following the analysis of the different framing areas, propositions are presented.

Although framing is applied in various academic disciplines, there is limited research relating to corporate risks. While risk governance provides companies with a concept to ensure the sustainability of their business models in the complex risk landscape, the related framing brings the appropriate interpretation and the deliberate tone into focus.

Purpose – Informed by Chinese mothers from four villages, the purpose of this chapter is to address the old issue of feminization of family survival, but situated within the landscape of neoliberalism. This study investigates the interplay between Chinese patriarchal values and neoliberal ideas that have shaped the Happiness Project – Action to Aid Impoverished Mothers – an official population control program that has been combined with poverty reduction “Action.”

Methodology – This research began in 2001 in Sichuan Province, Southwest China. Over a period of three years I interviewed 48 women who were participants in the Happiness Project.

Findings – The goal of the Happiness Project is to bring “happiness” to poor mothers through the introduction of microcredit, literacy programs, and the improvement of reproductive health. Three maternal aspects of the Happiness Project, as the study indicates, coincide with three particular patriarchal values. These include an official construction of a good mother image, targeting women's bodies as objects of the state's population control, and reinforcing gender stereotypes through market activity. The findings of this research suggest that feminization of family survival coincided with achieving the goal of the Project. Mothers thus have carried a double burden on behalf of the Chinese state and their families: the goals of declining fertility and increasing family prosperity.

Social implications – Based on this outcome, the study not only calls for reevaluating this “women-only” economic development model, but also calls into question whether bringing Chinese women into public production/market activity is a path to women's emancipation under neoliberalism.

This double volume presents a collection of 23 papers on how institutions matter to socio-economic life. The papers delve deeply into the practical impact an institutional approach enables, as well as how such research has the potential to influence policies relevant to critical institutional changes unfolding in the world today. In Volume 48A, the focus is on the micro foundations of institutional impacts. In Volume 48B, the focus is on the macro consequences of institutional arrangements. Our introduction provides an overview to the two volumes, identifies points of contact between the papers, and briefly summarizes each contribution. We close by noting avenues for future research on how institutions matter. Overall, the volumes provide a cross-section of cutting edge institutional thought and empirical research, highlighting a variety of fruitful directions for knowledge accumulation and development.

To examine the recent popularity of the tiny house movement with a critical eye toward the growing commodification of sustainability in a market that continues to shelter economic and class privilege, despite that the movement itself emerges from a desire to consume less and contribute to community more.

Written from the position of a tiny house builder and dweller, this study reads a range of recently published accounts of the tiny house movement, informed by contemporary work in environmental sociology. Investigates current rhetoric surrounding the movement with special attention to issues of mobility, consumption, and the movement’s romanticism, with particular attention to the movement’s invocations of Henry David Thoreau.

Tiny house living can cultivate correctives to possible oversights or entitlements in environmental thought, challenge representations of the movement itself, and encourage those inside the “tiny” house movement to openly discuss the difficulties and capabilities endemic to tiny living.

Tiny houses, while still bound to forms of privilege, hold potential to be what some social science researchers have seen as best practice. Practices that link the practicality of realism with the zeal of romanticism can contribute to what has been found to be a positive correlation between conscious consumption and political activism.

This critique offers a gentle corrective to unmitigated praise of the current tiny house phenomenon in order to highlight the movement’s potential for addressing more pressing social justice and environmental issues.

While scholars have developed increasingly well-developed accounts of institutional change, little attention has been paid to how change is resisted and, in particular, how efforts to marketize fail. We draw on the institutional logics perspective to guide analysis of an empirical case of the failed attempt by the Dutch state to marketize childcare organizations and create a market for childcare. We document that even though the existence of logics that were antithetical to the market logic did not catalyze organized collective resistance to marketization, the market logic never took root, and marketization has even been rolled back. We argue that the failure to create a childcare market in the Netherlands was caused by individual-level cognitive dissonance that cumulated into profound field-level ambivalence that undermined efforts to implement market practices. We develop several propositions that could usefully guide future research on how cognitive dissonance might underlie the failure to construct markets. By theorizing failure to change a field, we contribute to the limited body of work that has looked at failed attempts to change institutions, arguing for more attention to individual-field cross-level dynamics.

We draw on an in-depth investigation into the phenomenon of community radio in India to identify the emergence of an institutional logic in a field. We delineate five stages of emergence, starting with problematization of dominant logics and ending with formation of an institutionally complex field. Further, we highlight how such a process results in organizational forms that reflect ongoing struggles among dominant logics and the emerging logic. We contribute to neoinstitutional studies on the emergence of social objects and also draw the attention of emergence theorists to the contested manner in which emergence takes place in the social world.

The datafication of teaching and learning settings continues to be of broad interest to the learning sciences. In response, this study aims to explore a non-traditional learning setting, specifically two Golf Teaching and Research Programs, to investigate how athletes and coaches capture, analyze and use performance data to improve their practice. Athletic settings are well known for spurring the proliferation of personal data about performance across a range of contexts and ability levels. In these contexts, interest in athletes’ experiences with data has often been overshadowed by a focus on the technologies capturing the data and their capabilities.

This ethnographic research focuses on the data-rich experiences of golf coaches and students during two pedagogical encounters. Using Balka and Star’s (2015) concept of shadow bodies, this article explores how golfing bodies can become infused with data, creating partial representations of a lived experience that can be augmented and manipulated for pedagogical purposes, depending on the context and the individuals involved.

Interaction analysis helps the authors to examine the embodied and interactional nature of coach-golfer pedagogical encounters across two sites, a local Professional Golf Association golf course and a Swing Analysis Lab. The authors also split these encounters into two episodes to identify how coaches and golfers use partial representations of their bodies to analyze performance and interpret data.

This research suggests that as data-driven practices continue to engulf athletic settings, and teaching and learning settings broadly, emphasis needs to be placed on ensuring that athletes (learners) – from the most recreational to elite users – have an embodied understanding of their performance to improve their ability. Furthermore, this article raises questions about what data gets shared between instructors and athletes and how that data is used.

Recent research develops theory and evidence to understand how organizations come to be seen as “actors” with specified features and properties, a core concern for phenomenological institutionalism. The authors use evidence from changes in research designs in the organizational study of institutional logics as an empirical strategy to add fresh evidence to the debates about the institutional construction of organizations as actors. The case is the research literature on the institutional logics perspective, a literature in which organizational and institutional theorists grapple with long-time social theory questions about nature and context of action and more contemporary debates about the dynamics of social orders. With rapid growth since the early 1990s, this research program has elaborated and proliferated in ways meant to advance the study of societal orders, frames, and practices in diverse inter- and intra-organizational contexts. The study identifies two substantive trends over the observation period: A shift in research design from field-level studies to organization-specific contexts, where conflicts are prominent in the organization, and a shift in the conception of logic transitions, originally from one dominant logic to another, then more attention to co-existence or blending of logics. Based on this evidence, the authors identify a typology of four available research genres that mark a changed conception of organizations as actors. The case of institutional logics makes visible the link between research designs and research outcomes, and it provides new evidence for the institutional processes that construct organizational actorhood.