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A significant autism employment gap persists in many countries. This study examines how the traditional job interview might form an obstacle to autistic people obtaining employment. It then offers a range of strategies that could make the traditional job interview more effective in allowing employers to identify and hire those who have an “autism advantage”.

A triangulated, qualitative approach is employed, comprising (1) five focus groups with a total of 23 students at a UK university who identity as autistic, and (2) semi-structured interviews with five of their support practitioners. Thematic analysis was then applied to identify causes, effects and possible solutions.

The analysis identified three main strategies, and two sub-strategies, for refining the traditional job interview by reducing or removing the obstacle it presents to autistic people seeking employment. These comprise abandoning the traditional interview, adapting it (divided in to adjusting and augmenting sub-strategies) and accepting it.

Three conclusions were developed from the analysis: first, that while the traditional interview tends to be biased against autistic people, it is not in itself a particularly acute method for selecting job candidates; second, that the application of universal design would be beneficial not only to neurodivergent people, but also to neurotypicals and employers; third, that the fear of disclosure represents a major obstacle to autistic people trusting in schemes intended to assist them.

This chapter presents a conceptual framework to understand the role of multinational enterprises in the process of environmental standard setting in the global economy. Inside the multinational, we discuss the impact of path-dependency and irreversibility on environmental investment, and the importance of the integrated network structure of the multinational in enabling the transfer of standards within the firm. Outside the firm, we discuss the impact of regulation and market forces, and particularly the role of NGOs, in triggering change in firm behavior both at home and abroad. We conclude by considering the impact of supranational institutions on the environmental behavior of multinationals.

In crises like natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic, public actors might have to take over responsibility for the population’s supply when the market fails to meet the demand for essential goods. Companies can be valuable collaboration partners for public actors. However, conditions under which companies are willing and able to support public crisis management need to be better understood. This paper aims to empirically investigate expectations and motivation to better understand the motives leading companies to participate in public–private emergency collaborations. To enable successful collaboration, the paper develops crisis preparedness guidelines for state institutions and companies.

The authors develop and conduct a survey and statistically analyze the responses of 398 German companies from the food, health-care and logistics sectors.

Most companies have already engaged in crisis management and are willing to engage collaboratively. While their preferred contribution to collaborative crisis management is providing resources (e.g. goods or equipment) instead of coordination tasks, they also want to ensure that their business processes are sustained. Among the most promising incentives to increase company engagement are monetary compensation for provided resources and an improved communication policy. Logistics companies are motivated more by relaxing regulations, whereas health-care companies prefer reputation measures.

The insights provide the basis for public and private actors to foster public–private collaboration and raises awareness of its potential during crises. Moreover, this study promotes the systematic implementation of public–private emergency collaborations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to empirically investigate the perspective of companies operating in the fields of logistics, food and health-care industries toward public–private collaboration in crisis management.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the deviant behaviour of individuals in organisations. Deviants are those who depart from organisational norms. A typology of perceived deviant behaviour is developed from the deviance literature, and subsequently tested.

Star Trek: Into Darkness text is qualitatively analysed as a data source. Three different character arcs are analysed in relation to organisational deviance. Starfleet is the specific, fictional, organisational context.

We found that the typology of deviance is conceptually robust, and facilitates categorisation of different types of deviant behaviour, over time.

Deviance is socially ascribed; so better categorisation of such behaviour improves our understanding of how specific behaviour might deviate from organisational norms, and how different behaviours can mean individuals can be viewed positively or negatively over time.

Further research might determine management responses to the different forms of deviance, and unpack the processes where individuals eschew ‘averageness’ and become deviants.

The typology advanced has descriptive validity to describe deviant behaviour.

Social institutions such as organisations ascribe individual deviants, both negatively and positively.

This chapter extends our understanding of positive and negative deviance in organisations by developing a new typology of deviant behaviour. This typology has descriptive validity in understanding deviant behaviour. Our understanding of both positive and negative deviance in organisational contexts is enhanced, as well as the utility of science fiction literature in ethical analysis.

This study aims to integrate social identity and leader–member exchange (LMX) theory to investigate the processes and boundary conditions around LMX–performance relationships. Through the application of two leader–follower subsamples, the authors test three main objectives. What is the effect of multi-dimensional dyad value-congruence on LMX and how does congruence on these dimensions differentially influence leader and follower perceptions of LMX? In a subsample of followers including supervisor-rated performance, the authors develop a model that examines how individual values moderate the effect of dyad contact on supervisor-rated job performance mediated by follower LMX.

The participants for this study include graduate and undergraduate social work students who were taking part in a one-year work placement within a social work organization as well as their immediate supervisors. Across a four-month period, participants filled out measures of their supervisor contact, work values and LMX. Supervisor-rated performance was also included.

Findings from the dyadic subsample show that growth value congruence is a predictor of follower-rated LMX, with value congruence across all values having no effect on leader-rated LMX. Within a subsample of followers, findings suggest that follower-rated LMX mediates the relationship between dyad contact and supervisor-rated job performance, with individual work values moderating this effect.

The current study offers several contributions to the literature on LMX and job performance. First, in this study’s dyadic leader–follower sample, the authors extend propositions made by social identity theory around value congruence and LMX by offering support for a multi-dimensional and multi-target approach to questions of values and LMX. Second, within this study’s larger non-dyadic sample, the authors offer insights into previous conflicting findings around dyad contact and LMX, by offering support for the indirect effect of dyad contact on supervisor-rated performance via LMX. Third, within this second sample, the authors also extend the literature on values and LMX to show that the process through which LMX influences job performance is dependent on follower values.

This paper delineates the proprietary contest developed around a highly valued prestige item: a silver roofed tankard owned by a Romanian, Gabor Roma man.

The author applies “methodological fetishism” (Appadurai, 1986, p. 5), the perspective of things-in-motion, as well as the biographic method to interpret data collected during 31.5 months of multi-sited anthropological fieldwork carried out in the Transylvanian Gabor and Cărhar Roma groups.

As the tankard in question crossed the borders of three Transylvanian Roma groups, and thus went through the processes of de- and re-contextualization three times, it is characterized by a transethnic/transcultural biography. This paper pays special attention to the agency associated with the tankard (the social and economic practices, processes and emotions it caused or influenced), the transformations concerning its symbolic properties, and its movement between various social contexts and value regimes. Furthermore, it examines how the analysis of these issues contributes to a deeper understanding of prestige relations and consumption, morality and business ethics, and measures of success in two Transylvanian Roma groups.

This paper reveals how subjects create, manipulate, and represent their identities, and social and economic differences through the construction of commodity biographies and ownership histories interpreted as symbolic pantheons. By combining the terms of Marcus (1995) and Fowles (2006), it argues that analyses based on multi-sited fieldwork focusing on commodities crossing cultural or social boundaries, and their transnational/transcultural biographies, should be defined as multi-sited commodity ethnographies.

Venture capital’s role in clean energy (CE) technologies can be transformative in creating a sustainable society. Yet there are limitations on how far venture capitalists (VCs) can go in supporting these technologies. These limits exist because of the performance expectations of the main stakeholder group who hold VCs accountable. The financial backers of VCs expect an exceptional return on their investment, given the high level of risk they take on when they invest in unproven startups. This chapter explores the constraints that the financial obligations VCs have to their main backers put on their role in bringing about a more sustainable global society. It investigates VC firms’ responses to CE exits (initial public offerings (IPOs) and acquisitions) and shows how prior CE exits affect CE investment growth when we compare VCs exit records to that of their peers. This chapter demonstrates that VCs only increase CE investments when the cumulative number of exits substantially exceed that of their peers, while they decrease these investments when the cumulative number of their exits only moderately outpace that of their peers. The chapter suggests that the reason VCs respond in this way is the financial pressure VCs experience because of their dependence on their financial backers.

In recent years, there has been a growing desire to more fully integrate informants into the overall research process. In response to this trend, the purpose of this paper is to scrutinize the usage and outcomes of the member checking technique for enabling more participatory interpretive research practices. Information systems (IS) research has utilized this technique, but it has not yet undergone a thorough analysis in this context. Additionally, interpretive IS research is in need of means and tools for engaging with informants during the data analysis and interpretation process.

The data for this study originated from an inquiry into the position of usability work within its cultural context, and this study has adopted a hermeneutic lens to make sense of the member checking technique, which positions informants as co-analysts and co-interpreters to make sense of both their organizational realities and researchers’ interpretations of those realities.

The analysis shows that during the research process, the informants reproduced, questioned, and cultivated the researcher-crafted texts that they were given to interpret, both individually and collaboratively. The study shows that member checking contributes to fulfilling the criteria set for interpretive IS research in a variety of ways.

The study contributes to interpretive IS research method practice by offering IS researchers insights into and guidelines on the usage and potential outcomes of the member checking technique.

The examination of the member checking technique through a hermeneutic lens is a novel approach. For IS research, the study explicates the usages and outcomes of member checking in more participatory interpretive research practice. Also novel in this study is that member checking is examined as a collective endeavor.

Numerous empirical studies have been conducted to analyze the impact of board gender diversity (BGD) on firm performance without being able to establish a clear relationship. In this paper, we reassess the relationship between BGD and firm performance by using a quantile regression approach. Our results indicate that BGD matters only across a subset of the firm performance distribution. Moreover, when the possible endogeneity of the relationship between BGD and firm performance is taken into account, there are some conditions under which a positive and significant relationship is observed for the eight lowest quantiles.

Organizations’ increasing concern for environment shows the interest in appropriate mechanisms that account for relevant flows of environment-related information. Today managers and researchers are promoting environmental management accounting (EMA) systems mechanisms as a means to incorporate the full spectrum of ecological data into day-to-day business decisions and foster green management execution. However implementation remains a challenge and many of the difficulties are associated with conceptual and practical problems in integrating ‘green’ information and providing guidance on effective implementation. In this context academics might investigate on further explanations on how to achieve excellence in both environmental and financial performance. Hence this chapter substantiates the need for more theoretical and empirical studies on EMA practices and proposes avenues for future research.

We review the growing body of EMA research to inform the reader of what has been studied to date and indicate the necessity for further investigation. In addition, we suggest areas for future research.

Our synthesis highlights the relevant aspects of EMA examined in prior studies. The review reveals unexplored facets that need to be investigated to complement existing knowledge. In particular researchers might explore the concept of environmental performance and the application of different forms of EMA within organizations. Moreover academics have the opportunity to further examine the role of EMA mechanisms in companies that do not pursue environmental results for economic benefits.

The chapter sheds some light on EMA literature and emphasizes the opportunities that new theoretical developments and appropriate research designs offer in the investigation of the remaining gaps in the literature.