Hanging up our coat, tidying our desk, classifying our books, what meanings do these mundane practices convey? Extending Mary Douglas’s work, this article investigates tidiness from the angle of symbolic pollution. Based on photo-elicitation, it shows that, similarly to symbolic pollution...

This article analyzes the different phases the Information Systems--Sociology relationship has gone through and points out some specific features of sociologists and Information Systems scientists in their conceptualization of Information Technology (IT). It shows that both academic fields...

This paper has a methodological purpose, as we are aiming to show practices of accounting research designing. In that heuristic, we are basing our argument on Burrell’s and Morgan’s (1979), Feyerabend’s (1975), Quattrone’s (2000, 2004b) and Lowe’s (2004a, b) epistemo-methodological...

The purpose of this paper is to show the possible contributions of the history to management. In a first part, through imaginary dialogue founded on the respective works of two historians, the points of cohesion, discussion and rupture are exposed which characterize the epistemological and...

Grounded Theory (GT) methodology was originally proposed as an alternative to hypothetic deductive methods, aiming at creating new knowledge on the basis of the emergence of latent social patterns. While this ambition of creating fresh knowledge seems appropriate, there are difficulties inherent...

Management research and history have begun a fruitful dialogue. Management research may now follow history in a methodological and epistemological path in order to reconcile theory and action through a pragmatic approach. Two actual and recent researches will help to understand it.

The objective of this paper is to answer six main questions. Question one: what are the words that are actually used to denote “accounting” in the different nations that exist across the globe? Question two: can we classify these words into families and do these families correspond to the...

A case study starts with a problem and seeks to solve it. But is solving always what matters most? Isn’t it also the problem, tensing the situation, which ought to be at the study horizon? This ill be discussed based upon the case of management control cybernetics problematisation by Anthony.

As influential as Michel Foucault may be in organization theory, several critics have seriously questioned the epistemological foundations of the Foucauldian philosophical project (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1995, 1999; Caldwell, 2007; Habermas, 1990; Newton, 1994, 1998; Reed, 2000; Thompson, 1993). If these remain...