This paper explores how political institutions use language in social policy to control and naturalise understanding of key social issues and practices. Specifically, I address the impact of blurred discourses and the exploitation of a cultivated ambiguity surrounding social entrepreneurship...

This paper presents the findings from a small study of social enterprise governance in the United Kingdom, taking a case study approach to uncover the experiences of internal actors who are involved in their board-level management. The study took a qualitative constructionist approach, focusing...

Research is needed to unlock the mysteries of ethical culture and investigate the ways in which it impacts on employees (Collier and Esteban, 2007). Our paper responds to this call. Its focus on codes of ethics recognizes the increasing importance of the topic (Svensson et al., 2006) – and the...

The paper explores the barriers to regional collaborative public procurement. It reports the results of an empirical study of five public sector authorities in the emergency services sector in the UK. Exploring the barriers to collaborative procurement through the lens of institutional theory we...

The paper’s unique contribution is to confirm the rationale for and the benefits of applying constructs from the psychological contract literature to generate deeper insights into the service provider-consumer relationship. Findings confirm the need for providers to target value propositions...