As representative democracy has come under criticism from populists and advocates of ‘participatory democracy’, parliaments have responded by expanding their engagements throughout the governance process. Parliaments around the world are participating in the development of policy proposals including in dialogue with citizens, the shaping of draft legislation, debate and adoption of legislative proposals, in post-legislative scrutiny, and in government oversight and audit. The article explores the motivators for these enhanced roles, the opportunities and challenges entailed in a parliamentary full-cycle approach, and makes recommendations for parliaments and parliamentary development actors to enable successful implementation of an expanded and deepened role for parliaments as core institutions of representative democracy.

This chapter explores the challenges faced in the development of a new democratic constitution subsequent to Tunisia's Arab Spring revolution of 2011. It discusses not only that 'Western models' of the state are unsuitable for transfer to post-colonial states, but that, in the actual context of the international crisis of neoliberalism and the rise of atavistic populism, the 'learning' should travel in the opposite direction. The chapter argues that contextualised through situating Tunisia's development trajectory following independence within the broader geopolitical environment. It explains the challenge facing Tunisia in building a democratic state after the revolution and explores the key characteristics of the dialogic processes undertaken. The chapter discusses the significance of the Tunisian experience in the light of the existential challenges facing liberal democracy internationally, with growing discontent manifested at the same time by the rise of demagogic populism on one hand, and of nihilist movements committed to the destruction of Western civilisation on the other.

This study explores the intersection between accountability policies and anti-corruption measures. Transnational actors define acceptable governance and implement accountability policies on the assumption that corruption is a problem endemic to developing countries. Such accountability policies influence and help constitute transnational geographic and social spaces. However, the impacts of such assumptions and the resultant policies on developing countries and their citizens have not been widely investigated. This study uses a critical discourse analysis of the case of Tunisia before and after its 2011 revolution, to explore the politics and vested interests specific to anti-corruption policies promoted by transnational actors. The study's contribution is twofold: Firstly, we identify the highly fungible character of the emanant cycles of Western-driven corruption discourses, and indicate their consequences in Tunisia. Secondly, we propose a future research agenda towards non-exploitative anti-corruption and accountability policies.

The rise of modern corporations has been accompanied by an expansion of salaried executives who have replaced owner-managers. With this expansion, the new class of managers/executives came to regard themselves as stewards of large and complex corporations, and not principally or exclusively as agents for the owners. Emerging as a self- styled ‘profession’, there was a continuous debate around the necessity for the corporation to be responsible to the collective and to its stakeholders. During long parts of the twentieth century the professed intent was to balance and synthesize a plurality of interests in order to ensure the long term survival and success of the corporation, pursue national strategic interests, create employment, support networks of suppliers, develop new technology as well as create an adequate or satisfactory return for shareholders. The rise of agency theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s challenged this understanding of management. Arguing that markets rather than managers provide an efficient allocation of scarce resources, it pushed an agenda in which the corporation had to pursue one single goal – the maximization of shareholder value (MSV) and that managers should be incentivised to respond to (financial) market forces. This idea has today become a highly influential doctrine which infuses senior executive thinking, investors thinking, corporate governance theory and public policy and regulatory decision making. Backed by this belief, many managers now act on the basis of a folk wisdom that shareholders are the only important constituency, which leads them to deliver short-term strategic decisions, high executive remuneration, and offshoring strategies with regard to manufacturing and finance. This comes at the detriment of broader and longer-term perspectives on the purpose of the firm in modern societies and has created worse management and less competitive companies. It is ironic that the obsession with MSV has actually destroyed long-term shareholder value and that it has significantly decreased the average life span of corporations during the past 30 years. We provide this Summary of certain fundamentals of management in an effort to help prevent analytical errors which can have severe and damaging effects on corporations.

The paper adopts an organizational perspective to explore the conditions of possibility of the recent re-emergence of overt class-based discourse on one hand, epitomized by the 'We are the 99%' movement, and the rise on the other hand of a populist, nativist and sometimes overtly fascist right. It is argued that these phenomena, reflecting the increasingly crisis-prone character of global capitalism, the growing gap between rich and poor and a generalized sense of insecurity, are rooted in the dismantling of socially embedded organizations through processes often described as 'financialization', driven by the taken-for-granted dominance of neoliberal ideology. The paper explores the rise to dominance of the neoliberal 'thought style' and its inherent logic in underpinning the dismantling and restructuring of capitalist organization. Its focus is upon transnational value chain capitalism which has rebalanced power relations in favour of a small elite that is able to operate and realize wealth in ways that defy and often succeed in escaping the regulation of nation states.

Our aim in this paper is to examine and critically reflect the nature of the dialogic processes in the case of a national dialogue in a project of democracy construction. The case deals with development of a new democratic constitution subsequent to Tunisia's Arab Spring revolution of 2011, a process experienced and documented by the first author. We explore how dialogue did and did not take place in the constitutional process. Theoretical interest lies in the preconditions for dialogue, the fundamentals and functions of dialogue, and the questions of power and power asymmetries especially from the deliberative and emancipative perspectives.

We, organization researchers and participants, need to recognize and talk about the most fundamental issues of what it means to be human and part of a living planet. Only then can we hope for a healing of ourselves and our environment and address some of the most serious and damaging problems of our times. We are not helpless in the face on an impersonal omnipotent Invisible Hand, nor fated to live bleak lives where only standards, quotas, rates, indexes and other figures count, but such things as goodness, happiness, compassion and responsibility are irrelevant because of a lack of language and mindset. This language exists and is there for us to use. It is accessible and free for us to obtain—from the humanities. (p. 254)

Purpose – The paper's aim is to consider the effects of recurrent economic crisis on the management and organisational structures of transnational companies based in the UK by considering contemporary evidence and scholarly views of the processes involved, and especially to consider the contributions of the papers that follow in this special issue of the journal. Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides a summary overview of some of the key evidence and arguments concerning the origin of recent continuing crises in Western capitalism. The paper places in context and assesses the contribution of five papers especially selected by the editors to be included in this special issue which bear on different aspects. Findings – The paper suggests several key processes are at work in contemporary capitalism, which can be summed up as increasing financialisation. This is the process by which businesses are increasingly orientated to the extraction of value, and success is primarily assessed in terms of the rate of return to capital employed. In their different ways the papers in the special issue illustrate aspects of the process of financialisation, including: the operation of a new set of financial institutions including private equity and hedge funds, and the effects of these on the various policies and priorities of the executive leaders of large businesses in such areas as human resource management and the adoption of new organisational forms. The discussion extends to the consideration of the effects of change on international finance and argues for the origins of changes in changed class relations. Research limitations/implications – The implications of this work are that the character and reach of current economic change are further illuminated – including especially the underlying causes of the present economic crisis. Social implications – Financialisation represents both a reorganisation of the processes of capitalist production and a class strategy of international elites to entrench their advantages in the new conditions of international political economy opened through the intellectual and policy triumph of neoliberal thinking. Originality/value – The work brings together scattered insights and viewpoints and builds them into a coherent synthesis. It thus moves beyond limited conceptions and insights.

Critical management studies (CMS) is a vibrant and increasingly substantial subfield of management studies. From geographically and theoretically diverse seedlings in the last years of the 20th century, CMS has blossomed into an international movement with large biannual international conferences, a Division at the Academy of Management, and a burgeoning scholarly literature. The growth of CMS – particularly in the Anglo-American world – has fostered an intensive debate on the historical background, current research agenda, and the future of CMS over the past decade (see, e.g. Adler, 2002, 2008; Adler, Forbes, & Willmott, 2007; Alvesson, 2008; Clegg, Kornberger, Carter, & Rhodes, 2006; Cunliffe, 2008; Fournier & Grey, 2000; Ibarra-Colado, 2008; Parker, 2006; Phillips, 2006; Spicer, Alvesson, & Karreman, 2009; Thompson, 2004; Voronov, 2008; Willmott, 2008). Despite its share of doctrinal disputes, by and large CMS scholars have been willing to encourage the participation of those from different disciplines and research interests under the same umbrella (see, e.g. Adler et al., 2007; Alvesson, 2008; Cooke, 2008). One product of the relative openness of the CMS community, however, is that there is no common agreement on what is meant by CMS. Neither is there something that could be called CMS-theory (Adler, 2008). As Alvesson (2008) points out, different groups perceive criticality differently. While there are a number of accounts that explore the meaning(s) of CMS (see, e.g. Adler et al., 2007; Alvesson, 2008; Alvesson, Bridgman, & Willmott, 2009; Alvesson & Willmott, 2003; Fournier & Grey, 2000), the CMS project as a whole remains theoretically fragmented with no clearly dominant approaches and perspectives. This epistemological, ontological, and teleological diversity in turn is reflected in highly divergent attitudes towards the possibility of engaged practice, as the varying interpretations by the different authors in this collection demonstrate.

This symposium is organized in the context of global economic crisis and an increasingly bleak outlook for living standards and economic opportunities for working people internationally. The crisis has generated a variety of creative popular responses ranging from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movement. CMS has developed an impressive portfolio of critical approaches to business and management, but has thus far been less effective in engaging with movements for social change. The symposium will explore the possibility of a progressive and transformative management which, while grounded in the analytic tradition and values of CMS, also confronts practical demands of meeting social needs.

Leading business and management journals claim to be 'world-leading' but are dominated by Anglo-American scholars. The extent of this domination is demonstrated graphically in this article through cartograms based on 2010/2011 authorship and editorship data in top management journals. The dramatically skewed production of management scholarship is both ethically problematic in terms of Anglo-American domination of leading journals and the exclusion of many developing regions, and anachronistic given the shift of global production away from the North Atlantic in recent years. This continuing neo-colonial domination of intellectual production underpins the inequitable organization of the global economy and specifically the disproportionate realisation of wealth in the global North at the expense of the global South. The article proposes a series of measures to begin redressing the imbalance.

The article explores how participation in the transnational interactive services industry impacts on the social identifications of Indian call centre workers. The article's analytical framework builds from Bourdieu's work on social stratification, contemporary theorizations of aesthetic labour and conceptualizations of the commodification of self as integral to aesthetic labour. The research data are drawn from a large scale survey and in-depth interviews with Indian call centre workers, focusing on their lifestyles and social values. Comparison is made with Indian and international youth cohorts. The research findings demonstrate the extent to which this group has adopted transnational middle class values and lifestyles. The article concludes that Indian call centre workers can be characterized as part of an emergent global middle class sharing common lifestyles and values with their counterparts in western countries.