Search results

The purpose of this study is to diagnose the trajectory of influential conceptual articles in developing a research stream. The authors uncover the knowledge diffusion through influential conceptual articles and identify characteristics that make conceptual articles influential in their field.

This study draws on scientometrics, specifically an integrated approach combining quantitative citation counts with qualitative citation practices analysis that offers a comprehensive understanding of the nature and context of citations. The authors use the case of customer engagement – a prominent contemporary marketing and service research stream – to explore the trajectory of influential articles in shaping a new research stream.

This research shows that influential articles contribute to the reciprocal knowledge diffusion within and outside their home discipline. They provide anchor points for conceptual framing, conceptual refining and conceptual reconciliation – three application patterns of citations that are pivotal to navigate theory discovery and theory justification in a research field.

The study analyzes the early impact period of two influential customer engagement articles to understand the developments leading to the establishment of a new research stream. Future research drawing on automated citation and bibliometric methods may consider extended time periods.

This study traces the trajectory of influential articles in marketing and service research. The authors identify characteristics of influential conceptual articles, and recommend practices to develop a conceptual paper with the potential for an influential trajectory. It shows that while marketing and service research has a tradition of “borrowing” theories from other fields, seminal articles “lend” theories to other fields.

The purpose of this paper is to develop conceptual understanding in the area of customer brand co-creation. The research considers the factors influencing customers to co-create and the impacts of customer co-creation on the brand.

Theoretical development is progressed through conceptualisation of a series of research propositions which consider the antecedents and consequences of brand co-creation. Conceptualisation entails analysing and synthesising previous studies and reasoning new relationships between relevant concepts. Customer brand co-creation theory is improved by operationalizing the concept in a theoretical model.

The Customer Brand Co-creation Model expresses the influence of brand engagement, self-congruity and involvement as antecedents to brand co-creation. Further, the model identifies the moderating effect of brand interactivity and brand communities. Finally, the model actualises the impact of brand co-creation upon brand value and brand knowledge.

The conceptual paper explores an emerging area of research interest. The study provides a level of clarity by defining the brand co-creation construct and developing several research propositions and a conceptual model for advancing knowledge of co-creation.

The research provides new insight for brand managers who may be investing in co-creation programs and exposing their brand, but without understanding the impact of customer brand co-creation. Conceptual development of theory provides initial insight for practitioners and explores outcomes of co-creation.

This work brings together disparate but highly relevant branding theories to progress the co-creation literature and improve understanding of the influence of co-creation upon the brand and customer.

Theories are crucial for addressing research questions and advancing the boundaries of knowledge. However, in the field of strategic management, the existence of diverse schools of thought from various disciplines, including economics, politics, and sociology, poses significant challenges for researchers seeking to develop theories for argumentation and theorization. In this study, we have conceptualized a novel approach to selecting an appropriate theory for addressing specific research questions.

Thought experiment, disciplined imagination, and a conceptual examination of a diverse set of theories.

Because the central focus in the field of strategic management revolves around how firms achieve sustainable high performance, a research question should initially clarify the fundamental phenomenological issues it aims to address. Subsequently, the process of problematization should identify the ontological assumptions and premises that establish a connection between the research question and existing theories. Finally, the identification and abstraction of rhetorical concepts derived from these assumptions and premises lead to theory selection criteria, namely connectedness, reliability, parsimoniousness, and falsifiability.

Although we believe that our model for theory selection is generalizable to a wide range of management disciplines, we have primarily focused on its application in the field of strategic management. Future work could validate and further explore the applicability and effectiveness of this model in selecting appropriate theories for conceptual development in other domains.

While many researchers have proposed methods for writing theoretical papers, few have provided suggestions specifically focused on theory selection. This paper stands out as one of the few that not only attempts to address this gap but successfully develops a comprehensive model for theory selection.

The purpose of this paper is to comprehensively review the vast literature on sustainable supply chain management (SSCM), with the specific objective of a thematic exploration of the literature in order to explicate the principal facets of SSCM development.

This comprehensive review follows the systematic literature review approach.

The authors find SSCM to develop around five principal facets. The first facet is adoption, which accounts for the development of preparatory grounds – for facilitating the generation of a SSCM philosophy to gradually seep into the frame of traditional supply chain management (SCM). The second facet of implementation accounts for the manifestation of a SSCM-oriented transformation for producing gradual upgrades in the traditional SCM environment. The third facet of extension signifies the broadening of the scope of implementation at a more wider (supply chain) level. The fourth facet of maintenance outlines the need for ensuring the continuity of progress in the course of SSCM development. The fifth facet of outcomes focuses on the yields of SSCM’s pursuit.

These principal facets are built across the multiple levels and unique conceptual standpoints as propagated by 13 themes and 34 sub-themes. These themes are generated based upon 419 articles (2000-2017) from more than 40 leading journals. The authors discuss the facet-specific key implications for guiding the literature in its further advancement, and thus propose a rigorous thematic landscape of the SSCM literature with a unique approach. Overall, the outcomes of this review provide a fundamental organization of the SSCM literature – from the perspective of a journey involved in the transition from traditional to sustainable supply chains.

Agency involves dynamic socio-cultural processes that facilitate development. This paper is written in three parts. In Part 1, there are two purposes, the first purpose is to intimately connect agency and institutional theory, and the second purpose is to explore the relationship between agency development and growth and globalisation. In Part 2, the purpose will be to explore development with respect to the political context by explaining in terms of culture under what conditions political groups may come to power. Using political frames intended to define their nature and realities, political groups seek to attract agents in their political sphere to gain administrative power. In Part 3, the purpose will be to model, using cybernetic agency theory, the nature of development and its reduction to instrumentality.

In this part of the three-part paper, development theory is explained as a multidisciplinary field in which research and theories are clustered together and set within an adaptive institutional activity system framework. An adaptive activity system has a plural membership of agents represented by agency. Agency represents an activity system that will be argued to operate through its institutional metasystem. This enables activity system development to be explained as a process of institutional evolution. In Part 1, the problem will be addressed of how the relationship between agency and institution enables institutional change. To resolve this agency will be shown to be institutional in nature, and agency development as a process of institutional evolution. To distinguish between development and growth/globalisation, agency will be taken to have an internal and external context. Distinction will then be made between development as an internal attribute of agency and its consequences, which may include the external attributes of growth/globalisation. It will also be explained that development may have a less desirable condition when it becomes liquid.

The three-part paper develops a political development theory that identifies the conditions under which formal political groups are able to promote frames of policy to attract support from autonomous agents that constitute the membership of the activity system, and hence gain agency status. Furthermore, Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity is connected to Sorokin’s theory of socio-cultural dynamics and cultural stability. One result is the notion of liquid development, an unstable condition of development in adaptive activity systems.

The implication of this research is that, given additional appropriate measurement criteria, it will allow conceptual and empirical methods to be used that will potentially enable political outcomes in complex socio-political environments to be anticipated.

The implication of this research is that it will allow empirical methods to be used that potentially enables political outcomes in complex socio-political environments to be anticipated, given additional appropriate measurement criteria.

The synergy of agency and institutional theories to explain the process of development is new, as well as its application to the political development process in a political landscape. As part of this synergistic process, Bauman’s concept of liquidity is shown to relate to Sorokin’s ideas of socio-cultural change.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to solving the complexity problem as increased complexity is a main reason why projects fail to reach their goals, and it is unclear what complexity is.

Conceptual development integrating theories of materiality, teleology, and complexity, decision-making theory, communication theory, coordination theory, and qualitative, quantitative and participatory approaches are used in this paper.

To understand complexity, it is necessary to develop a material-systemic process approach and to distinguish structured from unstructured complexity. The social actors construct a complex material-systemic process between themselves and nature to handle unwieldy outer nature. The material-systemic approach reveals how materiel life-world arenas are developed through increased complexity and specialization. Handling complexity is possible by materiality in general and structural material in special, the interplay between inner time (planning) and outer time (production), and between human subjects and an underlying coordination mechanism. It is a systematic organizational blockade that reproduces internal complexity as unstructured and incomprehensible complexity.

The practical models of organizing are tested to the highest degree in construction industry. It is a task to try and examine the models in other types of projects.

The paper offers a proposal to a theoretical solution to the complexity problem going back to the roots in Enlightenment and shows at the same time through practical models how increased complexity may be the most important productive force in future projects.

The purpose of this paper is to articulate propositions on how collaborating multi-national corporations (MNCs) can manage their supplier base in order to reduce the risk of suppliers’ non-compliance with shared codes-of-conduct.

The study utilises a conceptual theory development approach. In doing so, it utilises key tenets of agency theory that are applied in a multi-principal–supplier relationship context and synthesised in a series of propositions.

The study shows that MNCs have a variety of mechanisms for reducing the risk of suppliers’ non-compliance by decreasing information asymmetry, increasing their bargaining power and simultaneously use of both rewards/sanctions, and reputation-based safeguards.

This is a conceptual theory development study, offering testable propositions, which have then to be empirically validated.

The study showcases that managers of MNCs who find themselves in relationships with non-compliant suppliers have at their disposal a variety of mechanisms to reduce the risk of suppliers’ non-compliance.

This is one of the first studies that explore suppliers’ non-compliance with codes-of-conduct at the level of a relationship, rather than a single firm. In this way it proposes a theoretical framework grounded in agency theory on managing relationships between multi-principal collaborators and their suppliers.

Despite the relevance of academic advising to the college student experience, there is little research to define the role of academic advisors in leadership education. This study uses qualitative case study research to explore the role of the academic advisor in the leadership education process within institutions of higher education. The findings and resulting implications provide context for creating a more holistic approach to leadership education through the maximization of advising relationships. Academic advisors can leverage their knowledge of student development theory, leadership education, and their role in the higher education process to maximize their advising relationships and facilitate student leadership development.

Traditionally, organizational theory has been a receptacle of methods and mechanisms from network theory. In this paper, we argue that organizational theory can also be an active contributor to network theory’s conceptual development. To that end, we make explicit a theoretical strategy that has only been used informally by network theorists so far, which – following Vaughan (2002) – we refer to as analogical theorizing. Using the basic correspondence between dyadic relationships as the most minimal form of “organization,” we show that processes and mechanisms extracted from various theoretical strands of organizational theory can be mapped onto the dynamics of social relationships. This allows us to build novel theoretical insight as it pertains to issue of relationship emergence, maintenance, and decay in social networks.