Search results

This study aims to investigate why and how shared service centres (SSCs) are implemented as well as how they affect audit firm practice and audit quality.

In this qualitative study guided by the theoretical framework of institutional theory, the authors conducted 25 semi-structured interviews in seven European countries, including 16 interviews with audit partners from Big 4 firms, 6 with audit team members, 2 with interviewees from second-tier audit firms and 1 with a member of an oversight body.

The authors show that the central rationale for audit firms to implement SSCs is economic rather than external legitimacy. The authors find that SSC implementation has substantial effects on audit practices, particularly those related to standardisation, coordination and monitoring activities. The authors also highlight the potential impacts on audit quality.

By exploring the motivation for and effects of SSC implementation amongst audit firms, the authors offer insights into the best practices related to subsequent change processes and audit quality.

Relational contracting is increasingly being applied to complex and uncertain construction projects. However, it has proved hard to achieve stable performance and industry-level learning in this field. This paper employs an institutional perspective to analyze how legitimacy for relational contracting has been produced and challenged in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, including implications for dissemination and learning.

A collaborative case study design is used, where longitudinal accounts of the developments in relational contracting over more than 25 years in four Nordic countries were developed by scholars based in each country. The descriptions are underpinned by literature sources from research, practice and policy.

The countries share similar problem perceptions that have triggered the de-institutionalization of traditional contracting practices. Models and policies developed elsewhere are important sources of knowledge and legitimacy. Most countries have seen pendulum movements, where dissemination of relational contracting is followed by backlashes when projects fail to meet projected outcomes. Before long, however, relational contracting tends to re-emerge under new labels and in slightly new forms. Such a proliferation of concepts presents further obstacles to learning. Successful institutionalization is found to rely on realistic goals in combination with broad competence development at the organizational and industry levels.

In seeking inspiration from other countries, policymakers should go beyond contract models to also consider strategies to manage industry-level learning.

The paper provides a unique longitudinal cross-country perspective on the field of relational contracting. As such, it contributes to the small stream of literature on long-term institutional change in the construction sector.

The service environment is becoming increasingly turbulent, leading to calls for a systemic understanding of it as a set of dynamic service ecosystems. This paper advances this understanding by developing a typology of service ecosystem dynamics that explains the varying interplay between change and stability within the service environment through distinct behavioral patterns exhibited by service ecosystems over time.

This study builds upon a systematic literature review of service ecosystems literature and uses system dynamics as a method theory to abductively analyze extant literature and develop a typology of service ecosystem dynamics.

The paper identifies three types of service ecosystem dynamics—behavioral patterns of service ecosystems—and explains how they unfold through self-adjustment processes and changes within different systemic leverage points. The typology of service ecosystem dynamics consists of (1) reproduction (i.e. stable behavioral pattern), (2) reconfiguration (i.e. unstable behavioral pattern) and (3) transition (i.e. disrupting, shifting behavioral pattern).

The typology enables practitioners to gain a deeper understanding of their service environment by discerning the behavioral patterns exhibited by the constituent service ecosystems. This, in turn, supports them in devising more effective strategies for navigating through it.

The paper provides a precise definition of service ecosystem dynamics and shows how the identified three types of dynamics can be used as a lens to empirically examine change and stability in the service environment. It also offers a set of research directions for tackling service research challenges.

There is still an ongoing debate on the value relevance of capital structure and its determinants. Recently the issue has been explored in family firms after being explored in mature firms. This paper investigates the role of institutional investors and the firm's innovation activity in influencing the firm's decision and ability to acquire debt capital.

A large sample of 700 privately-held family firms in Italy from 2010 to 2019. Two analysis techniques are used: panel analysis and path analysis. The value of debt and the debt ratio are used as leverage measures. The value of patent (as a proxy for innovation) and institutional investor are the explanatory variables.

The results show that institutional investors have no relationship with financial leverage measures except when controlling for an interaction variable (Institutional investors × Lombardy region). The patent value is positively correlated with debt; however, the ratio patent-to-asset is negatively related to financial leverage indicating higher risk exposure. The nonlinearity test demonstrates a turning point when the relationship between patent value and debt inverts.

Firms should monitor their innovation activity since excessive innovation increases risk exposure and affects financing opportunities and value. The involvement of institutional investors does not always enhance value.

Existing literature focuses separately on family firm innovations and financial leverage as outcome variables, emphasizing the role of institutional investors in both fields by adopting agency theory and socioemotional wealth framework. In this study, the authors go further by merging both relationships, investigating the dynamics of the institutional-family firm innovation relationship in influencing the firm's capital structure. The authors contribute to the ongoing debate by providing original findings on capital structure, governance and innovation, supported by rigorous methods to enhance family firms' decision-making.

This study aims to assess the spread of environmental literacy graduation requirements at public universities in the USA, and to highlight factors that mediate the adoption of this curriculum innovation.

The author analyzed the undergraduate general education curriculum requirements at all 549 public BA-granting higher education institutions in the USA between 2020 and 2022.

The study found that only 27 US public universities out of 540 have an environmental literacy graduation requirement, which represents 5% of universities and is substantially lower than previous estimates.

First, this study provides a more complete, more reliable and more current assessment of the graduation requirement’s presence at US tertiary institutions, and shows the number of universities that have implemented this innovation is lower than was estimated a decade ago. Second, it draws from the scholarship on the infusion of sustainability into the university curriculum to provide a comprehensive discussion of factors that mediate the pursuit and implementation of the graduation requirement. As well, it identifies factors that played a key role in one pertinent case.

This article aims to explore the potential of feminist phenomenology as a conceptual framework for advancing women’s entrepreneurship research and the suitability of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to the proposed framework.

The article critically examines the current state of women’s entrepreneurship research regarding the institutional context and highlights the benefits of a shift towards feminist phenomenology.

The prevailing disembodied and gender-neutral portrayal of entrepreneurship has resulted in an equivocal understanding of women’s entrepreneurship and perpetuated a male-biased discourse within research and practice. By adopting a feminist phenomenological approach, this article argues for the importance of considering the ontological dimensions of lived experiences of situatedness, intersubjectivity, intentionality and temporality in analysing women entrepreneurs’ agency within gendered institutional contexts. It also demonstrates that feminist phenomenology could broaden the current scope of IPA regarding the embodied dimension of language.

The adoption of feminist phenomenology and IPA presents new avenues for research that go beyond the traditional cognitive approach in entrepreneurship, contributing to theory and practice. The proposed conceptual framework also has some limitations that provide opportunities for future research, such as a phenomenological intersectional approach and arts-based methods.

The article contributes to a new research agenda in women’s entrepreneurship research by offering a feminist phenomenological framework that focuses on the embodied dimension of entrepreneurship through the integration of IPA and conceptual metaphor theory (CMT).

The build-up of large-scale COVID-19 testing required an unprecedented effort of coordination within decentralized healthcare systems around the world. The aim of the study was to elucidate the challenges of vertical policy coordination between non-political actors at the national and regional levels regarding this policy issue, using Sweden as our case.

Interviews with key actors at the national and regional levels were analyzed using an adapted version of a conceptualization by Adam et al. (2019), depicting barriers to vertical policy coordination.

Our results show that the main issues in the Swedish context were related to parallel sovereignty and a vagueness regarding responsibilities and mandates as well as complex governmental structures and that this was exacerbated by the unfamiliarity and uncertainty of the policy issue. We conclude that understanding the interaction between the comprehensiveness and complexity of the policy issue and the institutional context is crucial to achieving effective vertical policy coordination.

Many studies have focused on countries’ overall pandemic responses, but in order to improve the outcome of future pandemics, it is also important to learn from more specific response measures.

This research paper aims to evaluate the sustainability knowledge and background of students, staff and faculty regarding current university sustainability practices and individual behaviors at Central Michigan University (CMU); to compare sustainability background and knowledge based on academic discipline of enrollment or employment; and to assess sustainability awareness and interest of the campus community to guide future sustainability initiatives and resources at CMU.

An electronic cross-sectional survey was used to collect anonymous responses through Qualtrics, and then results were analyzed through SPSS. Analyses were performed based on the academic structures at CMU.

This research has found that students in STEM fields are more inclined to have pro-sustainability attitudes, knowledge and behaviors, compared to those studying the arts and business. Additionally, results indicate that there is a significant difference in knowledge between the students, and the staff and faculty respondents regarding sustainability knowledge and application, with the staff and faculty consistently demonstrating more pro-sustainability knowledge and behavior.

While research has previously been conducted on sustainability attitudes and behaviors, this research is unique because it ties sustainability knowledge to academic discipline. Additionally, it serves to gauge which sustainability programs and topics members of the campus community are most interested in, and which areas they are most willing to support.

This paper aims to identify the effect of environmental management systems (EMSs), commitment to stakeholders and gender diversity on corporate environmental performance (CEP) and the extent to which an economic crisis moderates these relationships.

A regression analysis was conducted on a sample of 14,217 observations from 1,933 firms from 26 countries from 2002 to 2010. The estimator used is ordinary least squares with heteroscedastic panel-corrected standard errors (PCSEs), which allows us to obtain consistent results in the presence of heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation.

The results show that EMSs and stakeholder engagement are mechanisms that drive CEP but lose their effectiveness in times of crisis. However, the presence of women on boards has a positive effect on CEP that is not affected by an economic crisis.

The study has some limitations that could be addressed in the future. We present board gender diversity as a governance mechanism because its role is strongly related to non-financial performance. Future studies could focus on other corporate governance mechanisms, such as the presence of institutional or long-term investors. In addition, other mechanisms could be found that can counteract poor environmental performance in times of crisis. Finally, it might be useful to contrast these results with the crisis generated by the coronavirus pandemic.

The results obtained have important practical implications at the corporate and institutional levels. At the corporate level, they highlight, as essential contributions, that environmental management systems and stakeholder orientation are not effective in times of economic crisis, except for with the presence of women on the board.

Following the crisis, the European Commission has promoted gender diversity on boards as a mechanism to improve the governance of entities – improving, among other aspects, sustainability. In this sense, another one of the practical implications of the study is support for the policies that the European Union has implemented over the last two decades.

The paper analyses how a crisis affects the moral and cultural institutional mechanisms that promote CEP. Gender diversity on the board of directors not only promotes environmental performance but also appears to be a governance mechanism that ensures this performance in times of crisis when the other mechanisms lose their effectiveness. The study proposes specific policies that help maintain environmental performance in an economic crisis.

This paper undertakes a structured literature review to analyse the literature on performance management and measurement (PMM) in universities over the last four decades. Over that time, PMM has emerged as an influential force in universities that impacts their operations and redefines their identity.

A structured literature review approach was used to analyse a sample of articles on PMM research from a broad range of disciplines over four decades. This was undertaken to understand the impacts of PMM practices on universities, highlight changes over time and point to avenues for future research.

The analysis highlights the fact that research on PMM in universities has grown significantly over the 40 years studied. We provide an overview of published articles over four decades regarding content, themes, theories, methods and impacts. We provide an empirical basis for discussing past, present and future university PMM research. The future research avenues offer multiple provocations for scholars and policymakers, for instance, PMM implementation strategies and relationships with various government programs and external evaluation and the role of different actors, particularly academics, in shaping PMM systems.

Unlike a traditional literature review, the structured literature review method can develop insights into how the field has changed over time and highlight possible future research. The sample for this literature review differs from previous reviews in covering a broad range of disciplines, including accounting.