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The primary purpose of this paper is to critically explore managers' experience of work identity in the National Health Service (NHS).

This paper is unconventional in that it uses an auto‐ethnographic approach and poetry as the empirical data from which the conceptual framework evolves. The concepts of identity, power and self are analysed in relation to the narrative utilising a post‐structuralist, critical management lens, particularly drawing from Foucault.

The paper reflects and critiques the challenges of undertaking auto‐ethnography, not least the publication and exposure of a “vulnerable aspect” of the author but also identifies this as a powerful method to explore how one uses narrative to create meaning and constitute oneself; the challenges of such textual representation and the various ways one adapts, resists and survives the challenge of the “multiphrenic” world.

The contribution this paper makes is an “outing” of the dynamics of being a manager in the NHS and an opening of a debate on current management discourse and practice. The further value of this paper is the experimentation of critically evaluating an auto‐ethnographic approach to researching management identity work.

This paper aims to examine the role in tax evasion and corruption played in Ukraine by money-laundering organisations called “conversion centres”: networks of sham firms and banks implementing “black cash” schemes that facilitate tax evasion by the private sector and embezzlement by the state sector. The paper describes their embedding both in a post-Soviet state as well as in the international political economy.

It draws on scholarship, journalist investigations, court records, government agency reports and other open source data and interviews with market participants. It first describes “conversion centres” as an ideal type and then presents three case studies, focusing on international financial flows and the domestic political setting.

Ukraine’s conversion centres generate significant international flows of dirty money handled by specialised foreign banks mostly in the Baltic states. Domestically, conversion centres thrive through state capture, resulting from their facilitation of embezzlement by state actors.

Open source data and investigative methods make it possible to conduct empirical research in crime and corruption in the post-Soviet context. As open sources expand, the scope for such enquiry will increase.

This is the first empirical description of “black cash” money-laundering platforms in terms of embedding in a post-Soviet state and in the international financial system.