The embedded construction of price fairness evaluations: a case study of Air Greenland
Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal
ISSN: 0951-3574
Article publication date: 5 April 2023
Issue publication date: 4 January 2024
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how fairness evaluations are constructed in a B2B context.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper conducts a field study of Air Greenland and its internal and external customers based on strong structuration theory (Stones, 2005). The authors employ context and conduct analysis to analyze how fairness evaluations emerge across four levels of structuration.
Findings
The paper finds that fairness evaluations emerge as a result of the interaction between external institutional pressures, agents' internal structures, and situated reflection and outcomes. The construction of fairness evaluations was embedded in contradictory institutional structures, where groups of actors constructed different evaluations of fair profits, procedures and prices. Actors furthermore worked on changing position-practice relations which shifted relations, external structures and affected outcomes and fairness evaluations.
Originality/value
This paper offers a conceptualization of embedded agency as emerging across the four levels of structuration. This contributes to debates in strong structuration theory through conceptualizing and analyzing how actors may be both be constrained and oriented by structures while reflexively adapting structures across the four levels of structuration. The paper extends extant pricing fairness research by illustrating how actors' construction of fairness flexibly develop fairness evaluations while responding to legitimacy and societal demands, including the needs of particular customer groups.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful for the constructive comments of the anonymous reviewers and editor Prof. Lee Parker. The authors would like to thank the Danish Innovation Fund for partial funding of the second authors industrial Ph.D. The authors would also like to thank the case organizations for their participation and Air Greenland for partial funding of the research. Finally, the authors are grateful for helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper from participants at seminars at the Department of Operations Management, CBS.
Citation
Thrane, S., Balslev, L. and Friis, I. (2024), "The embedded construction of price fairness evaluations: a case study of Air Greenland", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 37 No. 1, pp. 150-175. https://doi.org/10.1108/AAAJ-09-2018-3662
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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