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The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical model elaborating on the type of conditions that can inhibit (or at least temporarily hold back) “reactive conformance” in the wake of an increasing reliance on quantitative performance evaluations of academic research and researchers.

A qualitative study of a research group at a Swedish university who was recurrently exposed to quantitative performance evaluations of their research activities.

The empirical findings show how the research group under study exhibited a surprisingly high level of non-compliance and non-conformity in relation to what was deemed important and legitimate by the prevailing performance evaluations. Based on this, we identify four important qualities of pre-existing research/er ideals that seem to make them particularly resilient to an infiltration of an “academic performer ideal,” namely that they are (1) central and since-long established, (2) orthogonal to (i.e. very different from) the academic performer ideal as materialized by the performance measurement system, (3) largely shared within the research group and (4) externally legitimate. The premise is that these qualities form an important basis and motivation for not only criticizing, but also contesting, the academic performer ideal.

Extant research generally finds that the proliferation of quantitatively oriented performance evaluations within academia makes researchers adopt a new type of academic performer ideal which promotes research conformity and superficiality. This study draws upon, and adds to, an emerging literature that has begun to problematize this “reactive conformance-thesis” through identifying four qualities of pre-existing research/er ideals that can inhibit (or at least temporarily hold back) such “reactive research conformance.”

The authors examine how performance measurement systems (PMSs) and academic agency influence the meaning of research quality in practice. The worries are that the notion of research quality is becoming too simplistically and narrowly determined by research quality's measurable proxies and that academics, especially manager-academics, do not sufficiently realise this risk. Whilst prior literature has covered the effects of performance measurement in the university sector broadly and how PMSs are mobilised locally, there is only little understanding of whether and how PMSs affect the meaning of research quality in practice.

The study is designed as a comparative case study of two university faculties in Finland. The role of conceptual analysis plays a notable role in the study, too.

The authors find that manager-academics of the two examined faculties have rather similar conceptual understandings of research quality. However, there were differences in the degree of slippage between the “espoused-meaning” of research quality and “meaning-in-practice” of research quality. The authors traced these differences to how the local PMS and manager-academics’ agency relate to one another within the context of increasing global and national performance pressures. The authors developed a tentative framework for the various “styles of agency”. This suggests how the relationship between the local PMS and manager-academics’ exerted agency shapes the “degrees of freedom” of the meaning of research quality in practice.

Given that research quality lies at the heart of academic work, the authors' paper indicates that exploring the three matters – performance measurement, the agency of manager-academics and the meaning of research quality in practice – in combination is crucial for the sustainability of the academe. The authors contribute to the literature by detailing the way in which local PMS and manager-academics' agency have material impacts on what research quality means in practice. The authors conclude by highlighting the pressing need for manager-academics to exercise the agency in efforts to safeguard a broad and pluralistic understanding of research quality in practice.

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.

This paper examines the qualities of situations wherein hybrid professionals in knowledge-intensive public organizations (KIPOs) vary in their displays of conflicting institutional logics. Specifically, it examines the situations when individual researchers vary in their displays of a traditionalist academic- and an academic performer logic.

Analysis is grounded in an institutional logics perspective and founded on qualitative interviews with university researchers recurrently exposed to performance measurement and management.

The findings show that individual researchers display a traditionalist academic- and an academic performer logic in situations of lower or higher “perceived control exposure” (i.e. perceptions of (not) being exposed to “what the performance measurement system wants to/can ‘see’”). In more detail, that a traditionalist academic logic is displayed more in situations of lower “perceived control exposure” whereas an academic performer logic is displayed comparatively more in situations of higher “perceived control exposure”.

These findings add insight into when there is room for resistance to pressures to perform in accordance with increasing performance measurement and when researchers more so tend to conform. While previous research has mostly studied such matters by emphasizing variation between researchers, this study points out the importance of situations of lower or higher “perceived control exposure”. Such insight is arguably also more broadly valuable since it adds to our understanding about hybridity of professionals in KIPOs and how to design and use performance measurement systems in relation to them.

This study aims to better understand how academics-in-the-making construe doctoral performance and the impacts of this construal on their positioning in relation to doctoral performance expectations.

This study is based on 25 semi-structured interviews with PhD students from Canadian, Dutch, Scottish and Australian business schools.

Based on Decoteau’s (2016) concept of reflexive habitus, this study highlights how doctoral students’ construal is influenced by their previous experiences and by expectations from other adjacent fields in which they simultaneously gravitate. This leads them to adopt a position oscillating between resistance and compliance in relation to their understanding of doctoral performance expectations promoted in the academic field.

The concept of reflexivity, as understood by Decoteau (2016), is found to be pivotal when an individual integrates into a new field.

This study encourages business schools to review expectations regarding doctoral performance. These expectations should be clear, but they should also leave room for PhD students to preserve their academic aspirations.

It is beneficial to empirically clarify the influence of performance expectations in academia on the reflexivity of PhD students, as the majority of studies exploring this topic mainly leverage auto-ethnographic data.

Drawing upon Sternberg's theory of mental self‐government, this paper aims to investigate the thinking styles and workplace experiences of 152 human resource (HR) practitioners pursuing Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) membership. It seeks to explore whether their thinking styles complemented their jobs and consider the implications for the CIPD's notion of the “thinking performer”.

A two‐part questionnaire, including the Thinking Styles Inventory‐Revised II (Sternberg et al.) is completed by the research participants to identify their Type I (creativity‐generating) and Type II (norm‐favouring) thinking styles. Six focus group sessions are also conducted to gather insights about the participants' workplace experiences.

On average, participants scored more highly on Type I thinking styles. Although this suggested their thinking styles are consistent with the “thinking performer” ideal, focus group participants doubted whether the creativity‐generating attributes of Type I suited the reality of the HR function, which is described as being awash with rule bound behaviours. Particularly, this is the experience of junior staff, who felt unable to challenge senior management or contribute to the bigger picture. Correlation coefficients revealed that age, length of service with current organization and perceived autonomy at work are the most significant socialisation variables.

Emphasis on strategic matters in CIPD courses needs to be balanced with a greater recognition of the operational and routine reality of much HR practice.

This represents the first known attempt to test thinking performer construct amongst HR practitioners. The study combines questionnaire and focus group methods.

Since the 1950s, the closet has been the chief metaphor for conceptualizing the experience of sexual minorities. Social change over the last four decades has begun to dismantle some of the social structures that historically policed heteronormativity and forced queer people to manage information about their sexuality in everyday life. Although scholars argue that these changes make it possible for some sexual minorities to live “beyond the closet” (Seidman, 2002), evidence shows the dynamics of the closet persist in organizations. Drawing on a case study of theme park entertainment workers, whose jobs exist at the nexus of structural conditions that research anticipates would end heterosexual domination, I find that what initially appears to be a post-closeted workplace is, in fact, a new iteration: the walk-in closet. More expansive than the corporate or gay-friendly closets, the walk-in closet provides some sexual minorities with a space to disclose their identities, seemingly without cost. Yet the fundamental dynamics of the closet – the subordination of homosexuality to heterosexuality and the continued need for LGB workers to manage information about their sexuality at work – persist through a set of boundaries that contain gayness to organizationally desired places.

This paper aims to explain a celebrity’s deep resonance with consumers by unpacking the individual constituents of a celebrity’s polysemic appeal. While celebrities are traditionally theorised as unidimensional semiotic receptacles of cultural meaning, the authors conceptualise them here instead as human beings/performers with a multi-constitutional, polysemic consumer appeal.

Supporting evidence is drawn from autoethnographic data collected over a total period of 25 months and structured through a hermeneutic analysis.

In rehumanising the celebrity, the study finds that each celebrity offers the individual consumer a unique and very personal parasocial appeal as the performer, the private person behind the public performer, the tangible manifestation of either through products and the social link to other consumers. The stronger these constituents, individually or symbiotically, appeal to the consumer’s personal desires, the more s/he feels emotionally attached to this particular celebrity.

Although using autoethnography means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the depth of insight this approach garners sufficiently unpacks the polysemic appeal of celebrities to consumers.

The findings encourage talent agents, publicists and marketing managers to reconsider underlying assumptions in their talent management and/or celebrity endorsement practices.

While prior research on celebrity appeal has tended to enshrine celebrities in a “dehumanised” structuralist semiosis, which erases the very idea of individualised consumer meanings, this paper reveals the multi-constitutional polysemy of any particular celebrity’s personal appeal as a performer and human being to any particular consumer.

The relationship between supply chain management (SCM) competency and firm performance is not well established empirically. This is largely because proven metrics for quantifying the effects of SCM are scarce. Drawing on the strategic managerial concept of supply chain orientation as a source of competitive advantage, this paper aims to apply three independent sources of secondary data to examine the influence of SCM competency on two important firm performance metrics: customer satisfaction and shareholder value.

SCM competency is assessed with data from the expert opinion element of Gartner Supply Chain Group's (formerly AMR Research) supply chain top 25 rankings; the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) database and the recently developed Economic Value Added (EVA) Momentum financial metric are utilized as outcome measures.

Firms recognized by peers and experts for superior SCM competency exhibit higher levels of customer satisfaction and shareholder value than their respective industry averages.

Further evidence is required to prove causality does exist between these variables. Limitations associated with the use of secondary data restricted the number of top performer firms available for this analysis. Nevertheless, the strong correlations found between SCM competency and two critical firm performance metrics may help senior managers and managers from other functional areas to better understand potential advantages associated with developing greater SCM competency.

The assessment of two metrics that differentiate top SCM performers from their industry competitors may also help SCM professionals to better convey the impact of SCM competency to non‐supply chain managers and external participants in the supply chain whose support and cooperation are critical to the success of process improvement initiatives.

In addition to the study findings, blending qualitative expert opinion, formal customer satisfaction and quantitative financial performance secondary data represents a relatively novel and informative method that responds to contentions that different approaches should be employed to develop a more holistic understanding of SCM.