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Business ethics (BE) professors play a crucial role in sensitizing business students toward their future ethical responsibilities. Yet, there are few papers exploring the ethical challenges these professors themselves face while teaching BE. In this qualitative paper, we rely on the lenses of ethical sensemaking and dramaturgical performance, and draw from 29 semi-structured interview conducted with BE professors from various countries and field notes from 17 h of observation of BE classes. We identify four kinds of rationalities that professors rely on for making sense of in-class ethical challenges, eventually leading them to engage in one of four corresponding types of performances. By juxtaposing high and low scores of two underlying dimensions (degree of expressivity and degree of imposition), we offer a framework of four emerging performances. Additionally, we show that professors can shift from one performance to another during the course of their interactions. We contribute to performance literature by demonstrating the plurality of performances and explaining their emergence. We also contribute to sensemaking literature by offering support to its recent turn from an episodic (crises or disruption-based) to a relational, interactional, and present-oriented understanding. Since professors' performances have an impact not only on their own teaching experiences but also on students' learning experiences, undermining these would result in compromising the efforts that business schools have been making toward sensitizing future managers to their ethical responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does speaking up ruin one's life? Organizational and whistleblowing research largely accept that "whistleblower" is a negative label that effects one's well-being. Whistleblowing research also emphasizes the drawn-out process of speaking up. The result is a narrative of the whistleblower as someone who suffers indefinitely. In this paper, I draw on theories of stigma, labelling, and identity, specifically stigmatized identity, to provide a more nuanced understanding of whistleblower stigma as relational and temporary. I analyse two cases of whistleblowing, one where the label "whistleblower" was accepted, and one where it was eventually rejected. By comparing how the whistleblower responds to stigmatizing and non-stigmatizing others, I explore how whistleblower stigmatization emerges, or does not, in interactions. This paper makes two important contributions. First, I add to the growing research on whistleblower stigmatization a more nuanced and developed framework: one that sees the interaction between whistleblowers and others as relational. Second, I provide an understanding of the identity "whistleblower" as one that can be temporary and revisable. Research has highlighted how whistleblowing is a process, but little attention has been paid to how one "moves on" from being a whistleblower and the potential stigmatization associated with the role. Rather than assuming a whistleblower is stuck with this identity—and the associated stigma—for life, I provide insight on how "whistleblower" can be a positive label that opens one up to support, and even when it is stigmatized, it does not have to be an end state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Setting out to understand "indexicality" and its significance in Ethnomethodology, it is first necessary to trace the history of the ideas of Harold Garfinkel. From his early commitment to find "order" in his Harvard dissertation, Garfinkel finds himself in California defending Parsons' Structural Functionalism while confronting Goffman and Symbolic Interactionism, based in Simmelian, Schützian Sociology. From the audience of students shared with Goffman, Garfinkel puts aside the "situation" of Symbolic Interaction in favour of a process, "Indexicality", abandoning theorising in favour of ethnomethodology as the means to understand "order*". This paper, then, demonstrates how indexicality works and proposes completing the tasks that Garfinkel set out in the Studies to disclose the taken-for-granted, the left out, bounded by caveats like No-Time-Out and For-all-practical purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although tenure denial is a familiar feature of the faculty profession, the dearth of specific research on the subject indicates that it is a phenomenon not sufficiently understood. The analyses that do exist are largely a-theoretical and unsystematic. In this qualitative study, we employed Goffman's social psychological concepts of stigma and moral career to examine whether tenure denial is stigmatizing, and if so, how individuals navigate the personal, social, and professional implications of this undesirable label. Findings highlight the implicit burden of responsibility placed solely on individuals for their tenure denial, the challenge of managing social and professional situations, and the factors that contribute to or mitigate against the establishment of a new sense of self. We argue that just as the profession is learning that non-tenure track faculty should be treated with respect without regard for their non-traditional professional status, so tenure denial, although painful, need not be stigmatic. Rather, individuals may become advocates, activists, and employees (faculty or otherwise) who are able to serve with greater professional clarity and self-understanding as a result of their tenure denial experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this research is to provide a framework for studying the key stakeholders who play a role in the process legitimation of an innovation. Specifically, we combine Foucault's discourse on power, Latour's Actor Network Theory and Goffman's frame analysis to present a theoretical framework for the process of innovation legitimation (PIL). To demonstrate its usefulness, we apply the PIL framework to the context of nanotechnology. We ultimately determine that there are four key stakeholders trying to frame nanotechnology: 1) Advancement (i.e., government), 2) Management (i.e., industry), 3) Development (i.e., academia), and 4) Reflection (i.e., NGOs). The trajectory of market formation and legitimation for nanotechnology will depend largely on the cultural discourses that are disseminated by these four actors and the way other peripheral actors interpret the dominant frames. By conceptualizing the current frames for an innovation in the process of legitimizing, the future of each key discourse can be envisioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While proponents of sustainability reporting believe in its potential to help corporations be accountable and transparent about their social and environmental impacts, there has been growing criticism asserting that such reporting schemes are utilized primarily as impression management tools. Drawing on Goffman’s (The presentation of self in everyday life, Doubleday, New York, 1959) self-presentation theory and its frontstage/backstage analogy, we contrast the frontstage sustainability discourse of a sample of large U.S. oil and gas firms to their backstage corporate political activities in the context of the passage of the American-Made Energy and Good Jobs Act, also known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) Bill. The ANWR Bill was designed to allow oil exploration within the most sensitive environmental areas in the Refuge and this bill was vigorously debated in the United States Congress in 2005 and 2006. Our results suggest that the firms’ sustainability discourse on environmental stewardship and responsibility contrasts sharply with their less visible but proactive political strategies targeted to facilitate the passage of the ANWR Bill. This study thus contributes to the social and environmental accounting and accountability literature by highlighting the relevance of Goffman’s frontstage/backstage analogy in uncovering and documenting further the deceptive nature of the discourse contained in stand-alone sustainability reports. In addition, it seeks to contribute to the overall understanding of the multifaceted nature of sustainability reporting by placing it in relation to corporate political activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to their professional social media accounts, individuals are increasingly using their personal profiles and casual posts to communicate their identities to work colleagues. They do this in order to ‘stand out from the crowd’ and to signal attributes that are difficult to showcase explicitly in a work setting. Existing studies have tended to treat personal posts viewed in a professional context as a problem, since they can threaten impression management efforts. These accounts focus on the attempts of individuals to separate their life domains on social media. In contrast, we present the narratives of professional IT workers in India who intentionally disrupt the boundaries between personal and professional profiles in order to get noticed by their employers. Drawing on the dramaturgical vocabulary of Goffman (1959) we shed light on how individuals cope with increased levels of self-disclosure on social media. We argue that their self-presentations can be likened to post-modern performances in which the traditional boundaries between actor and audience are intentionally unsettled. These casual posts communicate additional personal traits that are not otherwise included in professional presentations. Since there are no strict boundaries between formal front-stage and relaxed back-stage regions in these types of performance, a liminal mental state is often used, which enables a better assessment of the type of information to present on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to prepare fully competent health care professionals, health professions education must be concerned with the relational space between patients and providers. Compassion and compassionate care are fundamental elements of this relational space. Traditionally, health professions educators and leaders have gone to two narrative sources when attempting to better under constructs of compassion: patients or providers. Rarely have there been explorations of the perspectives of those who consider themselves as both patients and providers. In this study, we interviewed nineteen health care providers who self-disclosed as having had a substantive patient experience in the health care system. We engaged with these participants to better understand their experience of having these dual roles. Anchored in Foucault's concepts of subjectivity and Goffman's symbolic interactionism, the interviews in this study reveal practices of moving between the two roles of patient and provider. Through this exploration, we consider how it is that providers who have been patients understand themselves to be more compassionate whilst in their provider roles. Rather than describing compassion as a learnable behaviour or an innate virtue, we theoretically engage with one proposed mechanism of how compassion is produced. In particular, we highlight the role of critical reflexivity as an underexplored construct in the enactment of compassion. We discuss these findings in light of their implications for health professions education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued here that large-scale organization and networked computing enable new divisions of communicative work aimed at shaping the content, direction, and outcomes of societal conversations. The challenge for argumentation theory and practice lies in attending to these new divisions of communicative work in constituting contemporary argumentative realities. Goffman's conceptualization of participation frameworks and production formats are applied to articulate the communicative work of organizations afforded by networked computing that invents and innovates argument in all of its senses-as product, process, and procedure. Communicative work, however, may be scaffolding argumentative contexts and practices that are quite different than what has constituted past argumentative realities. The computerization of argument happens as organizations invent and innovate argument practice relative to the demands and opportunities of interorganizational communication. The cases and examples examined here suggest that argument practice is evolving around the logic of conversation and the principle of personalization. The analysis challenges argumentation theory to seriously engage with the construction of communicative contexts and the realization of ideas about disagreement management in organizational practice and information infrastructures. Directions for integrating insights from a design perspective on argument with insights from organizational and information systems theory are proposed for coming to terms with an era of large-scale organization and computerization, in particular the evolution of argument practice, the inscription of argument in the built environment, and the absorption of socio-cultural argument practices by organizations and computation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-presentation is a term that indicates conscious and unconscious strategies for controlling or managing how one is perceived by others in terms of both appearance and comportment. In this article, I will discuss the phenomenology of self-presentation with respect to the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl and Merleau-Ponty regarding the visibility of the body within intercorporeal relations through 'behaviour' and 'expression.' In doing so, I will turn to the work of the Canadian sociologist and social theorist Erving Goffman. Goffman's account of self-presentation suggests why embodied subjects adopt certain styles of ordered bodily behaviour as determined by the broader social order, giving existential and social significance to the ontological structures of intercorporeal bodily communication. Following Goffman, I will suggest that the embodied subject is continuously-and constitutionally-engaged in implicit and explicit strategies to manage how the body is presented to others. In articulating self-presentation as a feature of intercorporeality, my aim in this article is to use Goffman's insights to extend Husserl's and Merleau-Ponty's accounts of bodily communication by demonstrating that bodily communication that is instantiated at the level of intercorporeality is always expressed through social life with its various historical, cultural and linguistic dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]