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The purpose of this paper is to explore how Austrian public universities (APUs) respond to the challenge of maintaining academic freedom while complying with legal requirements and enhancing competitiveness by using Management Control Systems (MCSs). Specifically, it examines how APUs respond to the co-presence of academic, government and business logic.

The perspective of institutional logics as a theoretical lens and the framework of MCSs by Malmi and Brown (2008) serve to analyse how APUs respond to the existence of different institutional field-level logics. In-depth expert interviews from the perspective of APUs’ research management are conducted to identify the applied management control practices (MCPs) and APUs’ responses to the different institutional field-level logics.

This study identifies how academic, government and business logic are represented in field-level-specific MCPs and field-level-specific corresponding narratives. Reflecting upon APUs’ responses to the co-existence of academic and government logic, compliance or rather, selective coupling with government logic or decoupling from government logic became obvious.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study at higher education institutions representing academic, government and business logic in the applied MCPs in research management. The study reveals that APUs have developed specific responses and narratives regarding the existence of different institutional field-level logics.

To understand the context surrounding the sustainable supplier management (SSM) process (i.e. selection, development and evaluation), this paper aims to explore institutional logics existing in the Ecuadorian cocoa supply chain (SC). By considering local characteristics and sustainability practices, this study illustrates how competing logic influences SSM.

This paper uses a multiple-case study method for which the authors interviewed different cocoa SC members in Ecuador and used a ground-up approach to analyse the data and reveal singularities influencing sustainability management.

The analysis uncovered two main logics operating within the Ecuadorian cocoa SC SSM process: a commercial logic (e.g. potential for market access, product traceability) and a sustainability logic (e.g. local development and traditions/cultural issues). These logics address market demand requirements; however, some local producers’ needs that impact SSM remains unexplored such as the existence of a regional ancestral culture that poses sustainability as a dominant logic with meaning beyond the triple bottom line. While the two logics have influenced supplier sustainability performance, this paper finds that, of the three SSM sub-processes (selection, development and evaluation), supplier development was the most relevant sub-process receiving attention from SC managers in the studied context.

By understanding the differences in logic and needs, SC managers can better develop strategies for SSM.

The study highlighted in this paper investigated the underexplored topic of the effects that competing logic may have on SSM. This paper focusses on the supplier’s point of view regarding sustainability requirements, addressing a consistent research gap in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how, and by whom, institutional logics are determined in the action of sustainable organisation. The authors analyse a supply chain network structure to understand how multiple stakeholders' perceptions of sustainability emerge into a dominant logic and diffuse across an organisational field.

Stakeholder network theory provides novel insights into emerging logics within a chocolate supply chain network. Semi-structured interviews with 35 decision-makers were analysed alongside 269 company documents to capture variations in emergent logics. The network was mapped to include 63 nodes and 366 edges to analyse power structure and mechanisms.

The socio-economic organising principles of sustainable organisation, their sources of power and their logics are identified. Economic and social logics are revealed, yet the dominance of economic logics creates risks to their coexistence. Logics are largely shaped in pre-competitive activities, and resource fitness to collaborative clusters limits access for non-commercial actors.

Powerful firms use network structures and collaborative and concurrent inter-organisational relationships to define and diffuse their conceptualisation of sustainability and restrict competing logics.

This novel study contributes to sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) through presenting the socio-economic logic as a new conceptual framework to understand the action of sustainable organisation. The identification of sophisticated mechanisms of power and hegemonic control in the network opens new research agendas.

By using the lens of effectuation and causation, this paper aims at exploring how the team is formed in high-tech academic spinoffs, by looking specifically at decisional heuristics in an academic context. Indeed, the team composition is a critical issue for the subsequent growth of the academic new venture: on the one hand, the scientific-centred knowledge of the academic entrepreneurs is one of the main elements that lay the foundation for the new venture; on the other hand, it has been widely recognized that the lack of market-related knowledge and experience often has detrimental effects on performance. Decisive is then to explore how team decisions pertaining to the team formation process are taken.

A qualitative methodology based on multiple case studies is adopted under an abductive approach.

Results shed light on how decisions pertaining to team formation are taken by academic entrepreneurs and with what effects on team composition, a fundamental element to foster the growth of academic new ventures. Specifically, this study derives some propositions about the adoption of effectuation and causation in the team formation process, their occurrence and sequence in the light of the scientific context in which academic new ventures spin out and the effects on the team composition.

This study contributes to the debate on academic entrepreneurs’ decisional heuristic and the use of effectuation or causation in the early stages of an academic new venture, by focusing on the team formation process. This study specifically considers three temporal micro-phases – the selection of founders before inception, the appointment of top management teams, and the integration of early employees after the inception – and whether the academic context influences the decisional heuristics. Managerial implications are also derived.

In servitization research, there has been a call to move further toward the development of business models based on a service approach. This article aims to answer this call by adopting service logic (SL) and developing strategies and organizational resources and processes to create a service-centric business model called servification, defined as the process of identifying and developing strategies and organizational resources and processes to create a business model based on SL.

This article is conceptual and extends servitization in the direction of service-centric business model innovation by drawing on and extending SL.

The article defines service as a higher-order concept according to SL and develops the concept of a helping strategy as the foundation for a service-based business model. Further, it develops a typology of organizational resources and processes that must be developed for the emergence of such a business model.

Since this article is the first to conceptually develop servification, more both theoretical and empirical research is naturally required. The development of servification takes servitization in the direction of service-based business model innovation and also contributes to the research on SL.

Servification enables the development of service-centric strategies and organizational resources and processes and service-based business models.

This article is the first to adopt SL in studies of business model innovation.

Although the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model has been widely adopted throughout Europe, a thorough examination of the factors that contribute to the internalisation of the model (i.e. a substantive adoption) has been neglected in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to present a model that analyses the drivers of the real internalisation of the EFQM excellence model, with a focus on the role of motives for adoption, and appraisal and compensation systems.

An empirical study was carried out based on a sample of Spanish organisations that had been awarded EFQM recognition. Structural equation models, cluster analysis and ANOVA were used to examine the research questions.

Internal motives concerning the creation of a participative style are the main driver of internalisation. Moreover, having an appraisal system-oriented towards the development of employees helps the substantive adoption of the EFQM model. These findings reinforce the importance of the soft elements of the EFQM model.

This study enhances evidence about the motives for adoption and their influence on the internalisation of the EFQM model. It analyses internalisation in a novel context, EFQM recognised organisations, and contributes to the debate about the efficacy of the EFQM model to performance improvement, by unveiling the factors that could foster the internalisation of the model within the organisational routines.

This paper examines the relationship between marketing automation emergence and the marketers' use of heuristics in their decision-making processes. Heuristics play a role for the integration of human decision-making models and automation in augmentation processes, particularly in marketing where automation is widespread.

This study analyzes qualitative data about the impact of marketing automation on the scope of heuristics in decision-making models, and it is based on evidence collected from interviews with twenty-two experienced marketers.

Marketers make extensive use of heuristics to manage their tasks. While the adoption of new automatic marketing tools modify the task environment and field of use of traditional decision-making models, the adoption of heuristics rules with a different scope is essential to defining inputs, interpreting/evaluating outputs and control the marketing automation system.

The paper makes a contribution to research on the relationship between marketing automation and decision-making models. In particular, it proposes the results of in-depth interviews with senior decision makers to assess the impact of marketing automation on the scope of heuristics as decision-making models adopted by marketers.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) led most companies to redefine their sales channels, pushing toward e-Commerce. This increase in the online sales of products resulted in significant pressure on the logistics sector. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how express couriers responded to the pandemic period and allowed for business continuity.

A multiple case study involving five express couriers was conducted. Collected information was coded, then a framework is proposed to discuss the results with the support of the resource-based view and dynamic capabilities view concepts.

The study highlights how couriers leveraged most of their resources to respond to the pandemic threat. Four recurrent continuity enablers to foster the reconfiguration of resources were identified. Specifically, the study points out the key role of employees, digital technologies, visibility and knowledge as enablers that played a crucial role toward continuity. In addition, valuable lessons learned by practitioners to foster resilience in future disruption are highlighted.

Concerning academia, the present research aims to be among the first ones to provide empirical and practical insights on the impact of COVID-19 among express couriers. Considering practitioners, it identifies lessons learned that could be applied to the sector in future disruption.

The purpose of this paper is to identify whether the prior industry experience (IE) or industry leadership experience (ILE) of the head might influence the department’s publication output, the ability to acquire external research funds or its entrepreneurial activities (e.g. the commercialization of research results through patents).

The study is based on data from 208 Austrian university departments and combines data from different sources (CVs of the heads of departments, commercial register, funding data and publication data).

The results show a positive relationship between ILE and the patent output of the departments as one indicator for the commercialization of research activities. Low positive effects of IE on the extent of third-party funding were also found. Furthermore, the scientific experience of the head of department has a positive influence on the publication output of the whole department.

The findings suggest that the scientific ability of researchers should be key when selecting the head of a department, due to the fact that scientific performance is still essential for most of these units. However, when universities seek to focus more strongly on other, for example, entrepreneurial activities, then additional competencies come into play. As the actual focus of universities is currently subject to change, former IE and ILE will become increasingly more important and the heads of departments will play a decisive role in the transition toward becoming an entrepreneurial university. Therefore, universities are well advised to integrate these experiences in the job specifications and to establish processes that facilitate the change from an industrial to a university job or which allow “double lives” in university and industry.

Previous studies have mostly investigated the role of the scientific experience of academic leaders in the research performance of their institution in later decades. This study examines the actual relevance of previous entrepreneurial experiences of heads of departments to the departments’ research performance, the ability to acquire external research funds or their entrepreneurial activities.

Despite increasing interest in digital services and products, the emergence of digitalization in the logistics and supply chain (L&SC) industry has received little attention, in particular from organizational theorists. In response, taking an institutionalist view, the authors argue that the emergence and adoption of digitalization is a socially constructed phenomenon.

This paper shows how actor-level frameshifts contribute to an emergence of an overarching “digitalization logic” in the L&SC industry at the field level. Building on a longitudinal analysis of field actors' frames and logics, the authors track the development of digitalization over the last 60 years in the L&SC sector.

The authors classify specific time periods by key field-configuring events, describe the relevant frameshifts in each time period and present a process that explains how and why digitalization has emerged, been adopted and manifested itself in the L&SC industry.

The findings of the study provide insights about the evolution of a digitalization logic and thus advance the institutional view on digitalization in the L&SC industry.