Sébastien Stenger

Institut Superieur de Gestion | ISG · School of Business

The working elite - whether lawyers, investment bankers, strategy consultants or auditors – is prone nowadays to particularly intensive work rates to the point of “living to work”. The artistic elite is similarly characterised by the way it commits itself “body and soul”. The article compares the forms and roles that these commitments assume in two...

In this article, we provide a nuanced perspective on the benefits and costs of covert research. In particular, we illustrate the value of such an approach by focusing on covert participant observation. We posit that all observational studies sit along a continuum of consent, with few research projects being either fully overt or fully covert due to...

How do individuals choose to conceal a stigmatized attribute and what are the consequences of such choice? We answer this question by looking at how gay and lesbian employees make sense of their homosexuality in the highly normative context of audit firms. As a first step, we unveil the subtle pressures exerted on those who possess concealable stig...

Covert participant observation has often been discarded as a research method in the social sciences on the grounds that deceiving research subjects is unethical. This article reviews the benefits and costs of the method to argue that the ethicality of covert observation is more ambiguous. It posits that all observational studies sit along a continu...

Is it better to accept stigma or hide the reasons for which one can be negatively labeled? We answer this question by looking at how gay and lesbian employees make sense of their homosexuality in the highly normative context of audit firms. Most gay and lesbian auditors conceal this negatively perceived attribute, as they suspect it might hamper th...