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This article explores theoretical assumptions regarding negative consequences of social capital in the empirical case of a failed cooperation project, and how these consequences are related to processes involving people, structures and environments.

The article is based on a case study of a cooperation project within municipal labor market services. The methodology followed a theorizing process, where data were collected through ethnographical methods and analyzed in relation to existing concepts from theories describing negative effects of social capital and shadow organizing.

The results highlight how the development of negative social capital in the project can be understood through three relational processes, namely the social dynamics of insulation, homogenization and escalating commitment. The authors conclude that the quality of social capital is conditional upon complex interactions within social structures. Moreover, the results highlight the importance of studying organizing practices outside explicit structures, in order to identify the development of non-canonical practices and their consequences.

Organizing cooperation projects that aim to bridge professional competencies or organizational boundaries have to be attentive toward informal organizing practices which if remaining unrecognized may grow and threaten the original intentions.

The study makes a theoretical contribution by combining a shadow organizing approach with literature on social capital. This combination proves especially useful for analyzing how organizational dynamics can influence the development of social capital into producing negative effects.

While localized small-series production is a significant opportunity, various tensions challenge implementation in high-cost contexts. This paper explores how managers view and respond to different tensions in small-series production implementation by adopting a paradox-based perspective.

The paper presents a multiple case study addressing small-series production within EU's apparel industry, as key context to address managerial awareness, and responses to tensions regarding location and supply network configuration decisions. Seven cases were selected for variation in customization and implementation (early/established), ownership, location and company size, to identity commonalities.

The study highlights performing tensions related to sustainability, and risk, in addition to confirming traditional goal-related tensions predominantly impacting small volume production. With on-demand/custom production, tensions include costs in conflict with process scale, and several process-related tensions (flexibility, expansion/development, risk management). Identified multidimensional responses do not include location or structural decisions, instead focusing on synthesis, through product-operations efficiency, knowledge development and process innovation and supply chain collaboration. Temporal separation is found with customization, including reducing product/process complexity short-term with enhancing process development, which suggests latent learning tensions and limited awareness.

Future research should address the extent to which tensions can be resolved or remain paradoxical, as well as dynamic decision-making and latent tensions.

The paper shows how paradox theory facilitates a deeper understanding of complex network configuration decisions, including reshoring/localization. The findings identify organizing tensions/elements and elaborate upon performing/performing-organizing tensions suggested with small-series production, location decisions and supply chain management.

This study aims to analyze how startups organize their purchasing activities to improve operative excellence and become attractive customers.

The authors use a two-phase exploratory approach with semistructured interviews and a World Café. In total, 20 startup purchasers and suppliers participated. It is an international study with participants from eight countries (Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands, the UK and the USA).

The authors find that startups organize the purchasing function in five ways: partial outsourcing, transactional-oriented, strategic only, outsourced purchasing and full department. Each type has advantages and disadvantages regarding operative excellence. The authors identify type-specific antecedents to operative excellence: forecasting, payment habits, ordering process, contact accessibility and quick decision-making.

The value of this paper is that it offers entrepreneurs a framework to organize startup purchasing activities, including outsourcing options. Furthermore, it provides theoretical contributions that expand the topic of purchasing and supply organization and operative excellence to the startup context.

The value of this paper is that, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first to explore purchasing organization and operative excellence in startups.

Due to the “European Union Framework Directive on Safety and Health at work” (Directive 89/391/EEC, 1989), every employer is obliged to avoid psychosocial hazards when designing work. Little is known empirically about the barriers that workplace actors experience while developing and implementing OSH measures that prevent psychosocial hazards. The purpose of this paper is to explore barriers, causes and attempts to overcome them and discusses them with reference to relevant theoretical concepts and models that help to explain how these barriers hinder the development and implementation of OSH measures.

Semi-structured interviews with workplace actors in charge of psychosocial risk assessment (PRA) were conducted in 41 business cases, and transcripts were analysed using a thematic analysis approach. Barriers, causes and attempts to overcome them were extracted inductively and discussed with reference to relevant theories and explanatory models.

The complex nature of psychosocial risks, hindering general beliefs, lack of a perceived scope for risk avoidance, lack of assumptions of responsibility among players on all hierarchical levels, discrepancies between formal responsibility and decision authority, and low reflexivity on processes of development and implementation of interventions were described as barriers. Causes and attempts to overcome these barriers were reflected upon by workplace actors.

Recommendations on the organisation of PRA will be given with respect to the reported results and relevant research in this field.

This qualitative study explores the barriers to developing and implementing OSH measures to eliminate psychosocial hazards, from the perspective of actors in charge of PRA, and why they might fail.

The aim of this research was to understand how governmental stakeholder engagement facilitates the sustainability of industrial engineering (IE) projects. A model for governmental stakeholder engagement activities is presented.

The authors relied on a single-case study of a mining project in Northern Europe, where a novel collaboration and engagement approach with governmental stakeholders was piloted in the project's front-end phase. The analysis focused on the collaborative practices through which the IE project investor engaged governmental stakeholders during the project's front-end phase and how the engagement contributed to solving challenges in the early planning and permitting process and achieving project plans that balanced economic, social and environmental aspects.

The findings show how four collaborative engagement practices reduced uncertainty and equivocality related to the legal sustainability requirements, enabled the development of sustainable design solutions and overall accelerated the permitting process without compromising the quality of final project plans.

The findings can be used to plan governmental stakeholder engagement and understand related challenges that need to be overcome. The study highlights the need to develop established practices and guidelines for governmental stakeholder engagement.

This study complements prior research on stakeholder engagement and project sustainability by developing an understanding of how governmental stakeholder engagement can be a key mechanism enabling the sustainability of IE project's end product. This research contributes to stakeholder theory by elaborating on a new stakeholder role, intermediary stakeholder.

Following the lead of neighboring fields such as strategy and organization studies, entrepreneurship is gradually joining in the adoption of a practice perspective. Entrepreneurship as practice (EaP) is thus a nascent domain of investigation where the methodological debate is still unsettled and very fluid. In this paper, the authors contribute to this debate with a focus on family entrepreneurship.

The authors develop a conceptual paper to discuss what it entails to look at family entrepreneurship through a practice lens and why it is fruitful. Moreover, the authors propose a research strategy novel to the field through which such investigation can be pursued, namely process tracing, and examine its inferential logic.

Process tracing is a strategy of data analysis underpinned by an ontology of causal mechanisms. The authors argue that it complements other practice methods by inferring social mechanisms from empirical evidence and thereby establishing a connection between praxis, practices and practitioners.

Process tracing helps the articulation of an “integrated model” of practice that relates praxis, practices and practitioners to the outcome they jointly produce. By enabling the assessment of impact, process tracing helps providing prima facie evidentiary grounds for policy action and intervention.

Process tracing affinity with the practice perspective has been so far acknowledged only to a limited extent in the social sciences, and it is, in fact, a novel research strategy for the family entrepreneurship field.

Educational management's main task is to achieve learning quality outcomes in acquiring knowledge, scientific skills and social values. This study aims to provide a background on Egyptian thought development in educational management from 1990 to 2020.

In this study, we used the descriptive method to collect and interpret data. This method aims to describe an object of phenomena after data collection, analyze it, identify the conditions and relationships between variables and monitor the challenges arising from Egypt's educational system's problems.

The results showed the following: (1) the trend toward decentralization of educational management is not fulfill during that period and (2) the district and directorate administration continued to receive administrative instructions from the managerial ladder's highest authorities. The Ministry of Education was in control of policy decision-making processes and administrative and financial responsibilities. Many decisions and laws hinder decentralization, such as centralizing examinations, curricula and teachers' recruitment and transfer.

The challenges of developing educational management are related to the shortage of modern management methods in administrative leadership, organizational behavior and decision-making, such as human relations and decentralized administration. Also, the insufficient material resources, managerial competencies and educational, intellectual stagnation among many leaders and administrators.

This paper aims to analyze and examine how an organization from the financial sector prioritizes its business processes and what criteria are adopted to select the most appropriate process for improvement projects.

This descriptive research is based on an exploratory approach. Qualitative methodology was applied to a case study through on-site observation, documentation analysis and semi-structured interviews.

The results confirm criteria mentioned in the literature, such as financial aspects and strategic impacts, but also raised a new critical issue: automation potential of manual processes, reflecting the current movement of process automation.

As a limitation of this study, it is worth mentioning the application in only one organization in the financial market and the small number of respondents, even though they occupy leadership positions in the organization.

As a practical implication, the present work offers a direction for managers of the financial sector in structuring and applying models for prioritizing processes aimed at organizational efficiency.

Automation solutions for process improvement need careful study to minimize impacts in human resources reduction. In this sense, the eligibility of a process for automation must be carefully considered.

This paper presents the evolution of the process prioritization model adopted by a large institution in the financial market, which has a significant presence in the Brazilian and international markets as a commercial and wholesale bank.

Since Weick’s (1993) seminal Mann Gulch paper articulated a collapse of sensemaking, scholars have repeatedly investigated sensemaking downstream of enactment. Motivated by another wildland firefighting tragedy, the tragic loss of 19 firefighters in Arizona in 2013, this study aims to look at enactment itself and reveals that the endogenous creation and re-creation of the wildland fire caused a fatal feedback loop of “trigger traps” leading to perpetual enactment that short-circuited sensemaking. Wildland fires can have unpredictable consequences, which triggers in individual sensemakers a fatal and continuous return to the beginning of the sensemaking process.

This paper’s approach is a case study based on a textual analysis of sources investigating the 2013 Yarnell Hill fire. The authors also carefully compared the Yarnell Hill and Mann Gulch disasters in search of breakdowns in sensemaking that could help us understand why we continue to lose firefighters in the line of duty.

The simultaneously volatile and complex environment at Yarnell illustrates sensemaking antecedents to the study of enactment. The findings suggest ways that organizations – those fighting wildfire or those fighting a global pandemic – can avoid getting trapped in the early stages of enactment and can retain resilience in their sensemaking.

This paper introduces the concept of “trigger traps” to help explain the fatal feedback loop of repeated environmental triggers in the early stages of sensemaking in volatile environments.

Recruiting and retaining staff to work with elderly people in social care is a global issue. The quality of leadership is considered important because it influences employees’ job satisfaction, job turnover and health. This paper aims to identify leadership that employees in residential elderly care facilities in Sweden consider as contributing towards a healthy work environment.

The authors interviewed 14 persons employed in facilities organized in different ways. The data from these interviews was analysed using qualitative content analysis..

The results showed that the employees felt that their health partly depended on the attributes that leaders possessed, what leaders do and how leaders do it. This study confirms that leadership influences the perception of a healthy workplace. It also shows that questions about leadership are complex.

Research about factors that increase health risks is wide-ranging; however, research that examines factors that promote health, especially how leadership influences employees’ well-being, is not as comprehensive.