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Purpose: This paper aims to uncover the influence of copyright holder/digital media policies on digital piracy behavior using the brand hegemony rejection (BHR) theory. Design/methodology/approach: Content analysis of in-depth personal interview data from active digital pirates is analyzed using BHR theory. Findings: BHR is found useful in understanding pirating motivations, which vary greatly across time and across digital mediums. Piracy is often motivated by profit enhancing policies of big media copyright holders, which are deemed unfair and not customer-oriented, but such motivations are greatly reduced when copyright holders offer attractive legal means to obtain digital content. Pirates generally do not feel sympathy for large media companies, but some pirates feel guilt that their actions may hurt digital content creators. Research limitations/implications: The relatively small sample of pirates is primarily from Norway and hence may not be representative of other media markets. Practical implications: A large portion of digital piracy can potentially be eliminated if copyright holders are customer focused and offer desired content with a format and price that are deemed fair. The technical skills of pirates are high, and they can resort to piracy whenever they feel rights holders are not customer-oriented. Originality/value: To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first application of BHR theory to the digital piracy arena, and it is found to provide useful insights in explaining the rise and fall of piracy. This application of the BHR theory also suggests it might be usefully applied to the study of other ethically questionable consumer activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to reveal the contribution of counter-hegemonic communications towards the origins of anti-colonialism in French India during the years 1935-1937 and thereby to illuminate the relationship between press, economics and ideology in a colonial context. Design/methodology/approach - The paper presents a qualitative study of local archives in Tamil and French, including indigenous print communications such as the workers' paper Swandanthiram. These are used as a prism for analysis of the development of a workers' public voice during major textile strikes, and assessed in the light of John Downing's definitions of advocacy journalism. Findings - Communications were directly connected to disempowerment and lack of civil, political and economic rights. The formation of legal worker organisations for the first time and a new political party provided the context in which activist leaders adopted a twofold vertical and lateral strategy in their publications, to promote their formative anti-colonial ideas. Research limitations/implications - This research illuminates the relationship between press, economics and ideology in a colonial context, demonstrating the importance of economic factors in rise of nationalist movements and the way press usage is connected to basic civil, political and economic rights. Originality/value - The paper traces a forgotten episode in the history of a neglected corner of French empire, significant for the emergence of the indigenous population - including peasant women - for the first time from the private to the public sphere as an organised force - a factor that has previously been ignored by historians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Focusing on a community organisation, the purpose of this paper is to unravel the process through which infringing contested practices that threaten or compromise the community’s sense of distinction are transformed into acceptable symbolic markers.Design/methodology/approach An ethnographic study comprising participant observation, in-depth interviews and secondary data was conducted in the context of a non-profit community cinema.Findings Taking a longitudinal approach and drawing from practice theory, this paper outlines how member-driven, customer-driven and necessity-imposed infringing practices settle in new contexts. Further, this paper demonstrates that such practices are filtered in terms of their ideological “fit” with the organisation and are, as a result, rejected, recontextualised or replaced with do-it-yourself alternatives. In this process, authority shifts from the contested practice to community members and eventually to the space as a whole, ensuring the singularisation of the cinema-going experience.Practical implications This paper addresses how the integration of hegemonic practices to an off-the-mainstream experience can provide a differentiation tool, aiding resisting organisations to compensate for their lack of resources.Originality/value While the appropriation practices that communities use to ensure distinction are well documented, there is little understanding of the journey that negatively contested practices undergo in their purification to more community-friendly forms. This paper theorises this journey by outlining how the objects, meanings and doings that comprise hegemonic practices are transformed by and transforming of resisting organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The subject of leadership in Africa is an increasingly pertinent one that has been approached from various stand-points. Mainstream theoretical perspectives have shaped contemporary learning interventions on the continent, but are increasingly challenged by African renaissance views that critique this approach as a form of western ideological hegemony and an extension of the colonial project. However, alongside this debate, the issue of how to effectively address the issue of leadership "under-development" in African organisations remains salient. Moving beyond renaissance criticisms of western hegemonic thought formations, the purpose of this paper is to broaden the discourse by exploring several relevant options for a more pragmatic approach to leadership capacity building in contemporary African organisations. Design/methodology/approach - This is a conceptual paper that takes a critical look at the existing debate on leadership development in Africa. In this, it examines two separate existing knowledge frameworks and considers the implications of each of these for praxis in context. The analysis presented here focuses on means of navigating between these thought formations in a much more circumspect and critical manner that leaders can learn from. Findings - This paper highlights the important relationship between context, mainstream theory and indigenous knowledge. Its critical analyses suggest that engaging carefully with indigeneity in an experimental hybrid space may enable creative adaptation and appropriation through contextualisation, leading to more reflexive organisational practice. It subsequently proposes a conceptual model for constructive engagement with leadership development in practice. Originality/value - The paper makes an important conceptual contribution to the debate by moving a step beyond the important theoretical criticisms and counter-criticisms that have so far shaped the discourse and more crucially, focusing on the salient practical question of "where we go from here" with respect to leadership capacity building in African organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - This paper intends to discuss the effect of social and institutional mechanisms in allowing network governance embedded in non-contractual and social relations to emerge and persist. Design/methodology/approach - Building on the extant theoretical literature on network governance of varied research strands and drawing empirical observations from research on East Asian network governance, the paper explores the effect of social and institutional mechanisms in allowing network governance embedded in non-contractual and social relations to emerge and persist. Findings - It is argued that social and non-contractual mechanisms reinforce, substitute, or undermine contractual mechanisms, but the degree to which this occurs is contingent on institutional environments in which transaction occurs. Originality/value - The paper revisits some of the important theoretical concepts such as trust and social capital that have been invoked across divergent literatures so as to illuminate underlying factors of economic governance based on social relations and networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Gramsci's theory of hegemony to analyse the development of the public sector accounting profession and accounting practices in the UK since the nineteenth-century. Three periods of hegemony and accounting development are identified and the relationship between the two phenomena is discussed The analysis emphasises the non- teleological development of the public sector accounting profession and accounting techniques and clearly places them within an ideological framework which is itself the outcome of a complex interrelation between economic crises, class interests and the state. The paper concludes that the public sector accounting professional body in the UK has played an important hegemonic role in constituting and reflecting ideologies and in reflecting the coercive and consensual approaches adopted by the state. The paper also sets an agenda for a research programme which looks at specific crises and hegemonies in more depth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information on a processual analysis of the responses of the Australian audit office to the dilemmas of efficiency auditing 1978-84. Audit reports, which have been highly critical of executive decisions and operating methods have alienated governments and made them determined to limit the activities of their outspoken auditors. Increasingly, governments see it as their right to transact business with the private sector without answering to the auditor-general or even to parliament. They protest that their negotiations for the construction and management of roads, hospitals and tunnels give them access to commercially sensitive information, which should not find its way into the public domain. The secrecy of the executive in its dealings with the private sector has not received a sympathetic hearing from auditors-general in Australia. By examining the responses of the state auditor under stress during the introduction of efficiency auditing by the Commonwealth Auditor-General between 1978-1984, the aim of this article is to expose some of the methods used by the executive to limit state audit and to maintain the executive's hegemony in state audit which has been carefully and strategically crafted over many a years.

Purpose — This article provides a critical appraisal of the relevance of conventional management inquiry to management, and a proposal to use the critical management paradigm to develop genuinely relevant management studies. Design/methodology/approach — Discusses the relevance of conventional management inquiry to management. Findings — Conventional management inquiry closely mirrors scientific inquiry, with strict adherence to scientific method in pursuit of "objective" and rigorous empirical evidence or "proof' of specific and universal managerial truths. The products of this research are published via a machine bureaucracy that reinforces the hegemony of science. However, some academics have expressed concern that there is little uptake in commerce of "new" management ideas, and that practising managers have little or no interest in academic research. Based on 20 years experience of commerce and academe the author explores the underlying reasons for the failure of management academe to be taken seriously by managers. Research limitations/implications — The article proposes the need for a more applied and critical direction to management research. Some ideas for research are presented at the end of the piece, but the main message is that all management research should be more timely and relevant to practitioners' issues in the daily task of management. Practical implications — The article is a commentary on the principles on which management should be studied (and to a lesser degree on how these studies should be published). As such it is difficult to suggest any implications for management practitioners. That said the author would advise management practitioners involved in the funding of research to question the relevance of research themes and conventional responses to them. There guidelines drawn for academic practitioners. Originality/value — Similar ideas on "relevance lost" have been presented previously. However, the arguments have been lost in an academic hegemony that reinforces the requirements for a strictly scientific approach to the study of management. The original proposition of this article is one of the outliers of this approach, critical management theory, should take centre stage in ensuring relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]