Editorial

Citation

Pundziene, A. (2011), "Editorial", Baltic Journal of Management, Vol. 6 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/bjm.2011.29506baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Baltic Journal of Management, Volume 6, Issue 2

Welcome to the second issue of the sixth year of the Baltic Journal of Management! This issue consists of seven papers. We open with the paper “Interdependency management of projects: survey comparison between Estonia and Finland”, the purpose of which is to assess how Estonian as well as Finnish organisations manage interdependencies between the cross-border project activities that make them successful. The authors find that the main differences in the activities’ interdependencies come from historical as well as country culture issues, and are partly due to the maturity of the country’s economy. The second paper, “A snapshot of key information systems (IS) issues in Estonian organisation for the 2000s”, is presented by Canadian authors and aims to highlight changes in the key information system issues in Estonian organisations in the seven years from 1993 to 2000. The study shows the changes in the ranking of key issues of information systems for Estonia as well as the convergence of opinions between public and private sector. It also finds significant differences of opinions on key IS issues across IT and non-IT professional groupings. The article is followed by Slovenian authors’ paper “Developing and testing a multi-dimensional knowledge management model on Slovenian SMEs”. The paper tackles the very important question of knowledge management in SMEs, and is designed to build and test a knowledge management model for 168 Slovenian SMEs. As a continuation of the knowledge management topic the fourth paper presents research on “Organisational innovativeness in Estonian biotechnology organisations”. The paper discloses factors in Estonian biotechnology organisations that inhibit them from becoming more innovative. The findings of the study show that resource allocation is important to organisational innovativeness. The fifth paper is developed by Göran Svensson and Tore Mysen on the construct of META-RELQUAL and the authors find that the perceived satisfaction, commitment, trust, opportunism, cooperation, coordination, continuity expectance, formalization, dependence and specific assets are all essential constructs in a META-RELQUAL construct to organizations working with other organizations. The penultimate paper, “Portfolio use for documentation of personal and professional growth gained outside academia”, identifies four categories of personal qualities fostered by non-academic learning, including mental characteristics, attitudes and values, personality characteristics and spiritual qualities in the field of management, for which adults claimed academic credits. The results of the study show that the portfolio of one’s learning outcomes provides the employer with an HRM tool for documenting adults’ learning outcomes gained in different non-academic learning environments, which can be recognized as alternative to the learning outcomes gained through formal education. The last paper on “CSR in an emerging country: a content analysis of CRS reports in listed companies” is based on Chinese companies’ experiences. The study of the 81 CRS reports show that:

[…] in general, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have a higher propensity to address the majority of social issues, which may reflect that SOEs are more politically sensitive than non-SOEs because most of the social issues are just “political slogans” proposed by Chinese government in recent years. However, non-SOEs have better performance in addressing the interests of stakeholders than SOEs do.

This issue provides interesting insights on knowledge management and innovations and human recourse as well as CRS issues discussed by scholars coming from Estonia, Canada, Finland, Sweden, Lithuania and China. I commend it to you. Enjoy the papers!

Asta Pundziene