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The purpose of this paper is to explore the everyday tasks and activities undertaken by retailer entrepreneurs and owner/managers when they strategize. Specifically, it interrogates the nature of the intuitive, idiosyncratic strategic agency of a retail owner/manager.

Through adopting a combination of phenomenological and narrative approaches, focussing on illuminating the everyday operational and strategic practices of one retail entrepreneur and owner/manager, a richly contextualized, ideographic account of the procedures and outcomes of their strategizing is provided.

By revealing narratives that are seldom obvious – often kept behind the counter, and not on display – the authors are able to unravel the social reality of the retailer's decision-making, and the influences of identity, connections with customers and community, emotions and the spirit, and love and family. This study also illuminates how entrepreneurs retrospectively make sense out of the messiness of everyday life particularly when juggling the melding of personal and business realities.

This paper explores the experiences and reflections of the decision-making of one retail entrepreneur manager within a particular business setting. However, the use of an ideographic approach allowed for an in depth investigation of the realities of strategic practices undertaken by a retail owner that may be extrapolated beyond this immediate context.

This paper develops original insights into the retailer as an individual, vis-à-vis an organization, as well as nuanced understanding of the actual nature of work undertaken by retail entrepreneurs and owner/managers. To this end, this paper contributes to the “strategy-as-practice” debate in the strategic management literature, and to narrative analysis and advances insights to the perennial question: “what is a retailer?”.

Increasingly, product managers and promotional strategists weigh the impacts of homogeneous products and uniform promotion coupled with the unique character of specific market segments. This is especially crucial in an era when many products are advertised in identical ways and consumed in analogous manners over diverse cultural areas. In order to explore the influence of cultural variations on marketing, discusses the conflicting ways in which an international advertising icon, “the Marlboro man”, is interpreted in three different cultural settings. The resulting analysis has both theoretical and practical value.

This study examined the dual roles of supervisor-directed surface acting (SDSA) and unfairness talk emerging from low overall justice judgments and the impact of these variables on subordinates' job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion.

Working professionals (n = 203) were sampled from online panel services in a time-separated data collection design.

SDSA was found to mediate the relationships of overall justice with emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction. Additionally, unfairness talk reduced the debilitating effect of SDSA on emotional exhaustion, not job satisfaction.

The paper highlights the importance of supervisors understanding the problematic nature of ongoing interactions with subordinates after unjust events occur.

This study helps to better explain why overall justice assessments influence subordinates' job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. Additionally, the findings show that unfairness talk may not be as detrimental as suggested in recent studies, and it acts as a coping mechanism when contending with high SDSA, especially when emotional exhaustion is considered.

This paper investigates the usefulness of textbook and company approaches to developing managerial skills and competencies. It suggests that textbooks, based on an “experiential” approach to skill building, are contradictory in that they ultimately privilege predispositions over training in the practice of behaviours. The development of managerial skills therefore, is restricted by the individual's predispositions towards behaving in a certain way. In addition, the paper argues that the managerial competency approach used by many organizations, and also reflected in textbooks, fails to appreciate the predominance of the situation or context in determining how managers behave. Ultimately, the education of business students and managers, on courses at university and in‐company, dealing with managerial skills are deficient because “skills” cannot be abstracted from either the person or the context. The idea of managerial competence as a fact of being is illusory, managers are always and constantly being competent or incompetent.

This article will explain why training is so important to the success of internal audit. Several new initiatives will be outlined covering the IIA’s new internal audit competencies, the NVQ scheme, learning and the so called “expert”, along with a newly developed three circles model. The material is intended to allow audit management to assess where its audit shop stands in terms of its current strategy. The next step is to carry out a formal assessment of the staff development strategy by using the enclosed checklist. Keeping up to date is essential since no audit shop can afford to be left behind. We are concerned with developing your staff. The top and bottom line revolves around this all‐important concept. The next step is to establish whether you are in a position to live up to your contention. Test your position – if you mean to do more than merely pay lip service to staff development, you might consider the material in this article and work out how much you are already doing and how much further you may need to go.

In this chapter, we purport that “excessive entitlement” is directly linked to concepts of self/identity with the belief that how we come to regard self in relation to the Other is implicitly and explicitly taught. We view excessive entitlement as a manifestation of the privilege and infallibility of educators who take for granted the correctness of their actions. Through a critical examination of personal stories, theoretical literature, and common school practices, we create a collage of thoughts that highlight some of the complex factors that intersect with excessive entitlement, albeit considering what may be determined “excessive” and by whom.

We use a dialogic format, in this chapter, but do not engage in an actual duoethnography. We address the following questions: How does one (a) create an ethical habitus, constantly being aware of one's responsibility toward the Other, (b) reflexively and humbly practice self-accountability in a manner that recognizes one's positionality and status that is grounded in historical privileged, personal power dynamics, and systems of oppression, (c) develop dialogic ways of being in a neoliberal ethos of systemic accountability within prescriptive curricula, and (d) as teacher educators, assist students in understanding and practicing such dispositions.

We discuss how developing dialogic ways of being, treating others with respect, practicing humility in the face of other people, and learning to respect and build on difference disrupt excessive entitlement. We also explore complexities around the attempt to create “safe spaces” for students, given risks of self-deception and appropriation of students' meaning-making.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of stories in a mental health environment. It includes an account of learning to read and recognise stories as a particular form of organizational narrative in the National Health Service (NHS).

The study involved a retrospective search for stories contained within ethnographic data collected from a mental health organization. A small number of stories were analysed in an attempt to discover how stories were used in one particular organizational setting.

The stories told by staff ranged from heroic action on behalf of a patient and in spite of the organization, to tragic stories of staff coming to harm. Stories told by patients concerned their experiences of meaningful relationships with the staff. Alongside this small collection of stories, two particular phenomena associated with storytelling are described; the first involves counter‐stories, which involved either discrediting accounts of patient as storytellers or offered different stories to suggest competing interpretations. The second involved collapsed story forms exchanged between staff as a means of convergent sense‐making.

The paper works with stories as a particular narrative form in one particular mental health setting. These stories have the potential to draw attention to aspects of organisational life such as fears about harming patients or coming to harm and possibilities for relationships between patients and staff. Two forms of exchange related to storytelling are detailed and are described as counter‐ and collapsed stories.

Countless organisations have developed “lists” of management competencies based on behavioural criteria. The objective of this competency development is to build a more competent managerial group in the context of a rapidly changing environment. This paper argues that most sets of “management competencies” are developed without recognition of their inherent contradictions and without due regard to their contextuality. Through the use of storytelling as a methodology, two case histories are outlined to show how competence is subject to, firstly, subjective interpretation and preference and, secondly, to the specific context in which behaviour takes place. The implications for management and organisational development are then discussed.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to encourage strategy and management researchers to undertake research that captures the relational, unfolding and emergent processes of organizational life.

Methodology/Approach – The wayfinding method weaves concepts from traditional navigation with the wider body of strategy and management research literature. An illustrative case example is presented.

Findings – Six orientations informed by an Indigenous Māori research experience are presented under a trilogy of compass, conduct and contours. These orientations are dynamic dwelling, perceiving process, applying values, making connections, layering up, and expanding validity.

Practical implications – This study will aid researchers’ cultivation of greater methodological dexterity through insights that can assist with adopting a relational approach.

Social implications – The chapter shows how a holistic and relational mode of strategy and management research can help address the rising demand for more sustainable enterprises that create wealth and well-being.

Originality/Value – The chapter provides valuable insights from Indigenous wayfinding for strategy researchers and the organizations they work with.

A conceptual framework or model of the sensemaking practices, cultural objects and “programmatically constructed entities” used to produce meaningful stories of succession and organisational change are presented. The framework is elaborated and tested through an expansion analysis of a story about the termination of a “deviant” college president. It is discussed how the present framework can help managers and researchers better understand and manage organisational storytelling and organisational change.