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This paper aims to report on a study that aimed at analyzing the relationships between information security and records management (RM), both as programs/functions established in organizations. Similar studies were not found in relevant literature.

The study used the classic grounded theory methodology. Pursuing the general curiosity about the information security-RM relationship in organizations, the study selected the United States (US) Federal Government as its field of entrance and followed the process of the classic grounded theory methodology that starts from the letting of the emergence of the research question to the formulation of a substantive theory that answered the question.

On the emergent question that why, despite the legislative establishment of agency RM programs and the use of the term records in their work, the US Federal Government information security community considered RM a candidate for deletion (CFD), the study coded the truncated application of the encompassing definition of records as the underlying reason. By this code, along with its three properties, i.e. limitations by the seemingly more encompassing coverage of information, insufficient legislative/regulatory support and the use of the terms of evidence and preservation in the records definition, the CFD consideration and the associated phenomena of unsound legislative/regulatory conceptualization, information shadow, information ignorance and archival shadow were explained.

The study results suggested the data for subsequent theoretical sampling to be the operational situations of individual agency RM programs.

The rationale presented in the study regarding the encompassing nature of records and the comprehensive scope of RM program can be used for building strong RM business cases.

The study appears to be the first of its kind, which examined the RM–information security relationship in a very detailed setting.

This paper aims to examine the role of information and communication technology (ICT) in the knowledge creation practices adopted by a health care organization. The organization is delivering care to patients of a genetic disorder, called the sickle cell, in tribal communities. The paper identifies how ICT intermediates knowledge creation practices across the organizational boundaries wherein tribal patients, front-line counselors and expert physicians interact, which then produces context-specific, evidence-based medicine (EBM).

The knowledge-in-practice approach is adopted to conduct an ethnographic study of sickle cell care practices in a non-profit health care organization in Western India. The analysis focuses on ICT-mediated interactional practices among the physicians, front-line counselors, tribal patients and their families, for more than a year-long observation. These are supplemented with informal and formal interviews, archival records and vignettes based on several episodes to explicate the key knowledge creation practices.

Technology-mediated informative interactions at organizational boundaries can bridge socio-linguistic and interpretive barriers between actors, while also providing a generative structure that leads to the creation of longitudinal clinical evidence about a rare genetic disorder. Three specific ICT-entwined knowledge creation practices emerge, namely, knowing the community, increasing interactional engagement and constructing gradients of socio-clinical history. These practices generate organization-wide knowledge about the social and clinical dimensions of the genetic disorder. The findings are presented through vignettes and a novel conceptual framework.

This study identifies various useful knowledge creation practices in health care delivery for resource-constrained emerging economy contexts. Further, the study suggests that the involvement of local front-line actors and ICT can become important resources in the delivery of health care in these settings.

A novel framework is developed which demonstrates knowledge creation at organizational boundaries wherein the actors use ICT-based practices for effective delivery of health care. The proposed framework may be used by health care organizations in similar contexts providing care to marginalized communities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the adoption of a time‐based activity‐based costing (ABC) information system in resource planning (ABP) in the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) of England and Wales, a public service organisation in the United Kingdom, for the period of 2000‐2005. The aims of the study are to provide a technical review of the ABP application and to explore roles of the ABP system in achieving a “fairer” internal resource allocation and an improved understanding of business processes.

The CPS's experience of adopting an ABP system is explained through the use of a case study involving interviews, observations, work shadowing and archival data over a period of six years, 2000‐2005. The longitudinal nature of the study has enabled the researchers to align the outcome of ABP adoption with concurrent organisational changes.

The study reveals that the growing understanding of the intrinsic links between business processes and the ABP information and its rationale, which remains unchanged throughout various phases of organisational changes, has promoted a sense of stability amongst CPS staff members.

This study provides an in‐depth understanding of the practical use of ABP and its evolving roles in the face of the changing organisational environment.

This research discusses the prerequisite of the ABP system, a time‐based ABC system, and the evolving roles of ABP from a cost‐effective planning tool to a stability mechanism in face of constant organisational changes. This experience is invaluable to companies and practitioners seeking to implement a cost‐effective planning tool.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and review the papers contained in this special issue on accounting and organizational change in the public sector and reflects on their key themes and findings.

The paper draws on general desk research and the papers in this special edition.

This paper finds that there is a variety of valid research approaches that can usefully be employed to investigate accounting change in the public sector.

This paper concludes that accounting change is more likely to achieve the objectives set for it if there is a high degree of local involvement in its implementation.

Drawing together a collection of papers that investigate the important topic of the involvement of accounting in organizational change.

Elite interviewing is a well-established area of interview research methods. Nevertheless, the actual casting of an “elite” has been generally conducted in a prima facie or broad manner. A consideration of entrepreneurs and owner-managers as “elites” has been less profiled and received less attention, therefore the paper views the entrepreneurs and owner-managers as constituting a form of “local elite” within given and varying sectorial, regional and community boundaries. The authors argue that a consideration of entrepreneurs as “local elites” and transferring knowledge from an elite interviewing perspective may strongly support scholarly research in the entrepreneurship field.

The study conducts a comprehensive narrative literature review of elite interviewing literature and transfers key methodological insights to the entrepreneurship field. The methodological contribution based on literature is complemented by experiences and observations from an extensive inductive interview study with over 30 entrepreneurs of German manufacturing Small and Medium-sized Entities (SMEs) and are used to reflect on, and refine, interview research approaches with entrepreneurs.

The reflections and discussions in this paper provide valuable insights for other researchers conducting research in entrepreneurship domains regarding the power dynamics of negotiating access, procedural issues of interviews and thereby enhancing the quality of data.

The contribution to knowledge is mainly of a methodological nature. While the paper takes a novel act of recasting elite interviewing in the SME and entrepreneurship context, the paper methodologically contributes to the entrepreneurship and elite interview literature thereby facilitating higher quality interviews.

Shadowing is becoming an increasingly popular method in management and organization studies. While several scholars have reflected on this technique, comparatively few researchers have explicated the specific practices that constitute this method and discussed their implications for research on processes of organizing. The purpose of this article is to address these issues by offering a conceptual toolbox that defines shadowing in terms of a set of framing practices and provides in‐depth insight into the methodological choices and challenges that organizational shadowers may encounter.

In this article, the authors explicate the specific framing practices in which researchers engage when taking an intersubjective approach to organizational shadowing. To demonstrate the value of viewing shadowing as framing, the paper grounds the theoretical discussion in actual fieldwork experiences, taken from three different ethnographic studies.

Based on a systematic and critical analysis of fieldwork experiences, the paper argues that organizational shadowing is constituted by three interrelated framing practices: delineating the object of study; punctuating the process/flow of a given organizing process; and reflecting on the relationship between researcher and the object(s) or person(s) being observed. These analytical constructs highlight specific activities with which shadowers are confronted in the field, namely foregrounding and backgrounding particular aspects in defining a given object of study, trying to keep this object in focus as the fieldwork unfolds, and making decisions about the degree to which the relationship with shadowees should be taken into account in understanding this object.

This article provides an in‐depth reflection on the subtle practices that constitute organizational shadowing. It offers a useful conceptual toolbox for researchers who want to use this method and demonstrates its operational value to help them understand how knowledge construction is the outcome of a coconstructive process that depends on a series of decisions negotiated in ongoing interactions with the actors under study.

Existing studies of the finance of English Association Football (soccer) have tended to focus on the sport’s early years, or on the post-1992 Premiership era. The authors examine a case from the turbulent 1980s charting the struggle for economic survival of one club in a rapidly changing financial, economic, political and demographic landscape. The purpose of this paper is to examine not only the financial management of a football club during this time, but also the interventionist role of the local authority during this turbulent period.

The authors investigate the financial difficulties of a sport business, Middlesbrough Football and Athletic Company Limited, examining the broader economic context, drawing on unseen archival sources dating from the 1980s to analyze the relationship between club, local and national government and the regional economy.

They not only examine the financial management of the football club but also analyse the interventionist role of the local authority in supporting the club which had symbolic value for the local community.

This paper is relevant to policymakers interested in the provision of local sports facilities and the links between elite sport and participation.

The authors show that professional sports clubs are driven by a different institutional logic to state organizations and the findings enable them to define these differences, thereby refining Thornton et al.’s (2012) typology of institutional orders. Furthermore, the case study highlights practices involving informal partnership between state and sport that the authors label as shadow hybridity.

Social media posts have been an integral part of our society’s communication and serve purposes from the personal to the national, from the mundane to the silly to the momentous. This study aims to examine social media posts as records, discussing how social media technology serves, perhaps unexpectedly, to reinforce traditional archival understandings of issues such as provenance, custody, access, disposition and preservation.

This study follows a four-step methodology. First, this study analyzes literature for a matching definition of the social media record. In the second step, we appraise three social media postings previously curated and cited in news articles by journalists to determine their characteristics – Are these social media posts “records?” Third, this study evaluates the sample records against two dominant theoretical record models, the life cycle and the continuum and attempt to apply the model specifications to the data samples. Finally, this study proposes appropriate records management solutions to address governance issues from the study findings in the conclusion section.

This study shows that, even by the most traditional of definitions, social media posts are records. The paper also demonstrates that platform mediation transforms simple narrative documents into records whose provenance, custody and control are dictated by platform logics and governance, outside of the control of their creators. Through appraisal of a small sample of “important” social media posts, this study illustrates that, rather than obsolete, traditional records management concepts and approaches are necessary to ensuring the ongoing accessibility, usability and evidentiary character of social media posts in the broader “platformized” context.

This is exploratory, theoretical work. In future works, this study plans to expand and validate aspects of this study.

This paper tests existing theoretical frameworks, namely, the Records Life cycle and the Records Continuum for applicability to the social media record. The paper also offers a view of the potential for traditional archival and records management concepts in service of a just and inclusive recordkeeping, because such concepts allow us to demonstrate the centralized, elite-serving, bureaucratic structures which underpin social media records are obscured by the seemingly decentralized, participatory nature of social media.

Since the late 1970s, US employers have increasingly drawn upon legal temporary labor under the H-2 visa to address their labor needs in low-waged sectors. Ever since, what Clark calls migrant labor activism and conflict in the courts has similarly erupted. However, as she argues in this chapter, making “adversarial legalism” the H-2 way of law has also been a story of comparative state formation. For, the litigation largely reflects the structure of labor migration created after the demise of government-run migration. In this regard, activists wrestle with the problems created by the new role of global labor intermediaries in the recruitment process, absolute employer control over hiring and firing, and the coercion produced in the shadow of a now minimally interventionist state. Drawing upon archival research, interviews with legal professionals, and the entire case law docket in this area, this chapter puts “adversarial legalism” under the H-2 visa in its historical and political context.