Search results

Infrastructure forms a basis for the operations and sustainability of the modern society. This paper aims to recognize value creation from the infrastructure procurement ecosystem perspective to achieve those goals. The pursuit of enhancing value creation involves an examination of infrastructure procurement challenges, boundaries as well as boundary spanners that facilitate effective knowledge transfer and interaction.

The qualitative study is based on content analysis of 25 thematic interviews. Data was transcribed and coded via Atlas.ti software.

Infrastructure procurement value creation challenges appear complex and related to boundaries that hamper collaboration, coordination and knowledge sharing. Our results show that these boundaries locate within and between different levels of procurement ecosystem. Therefore, value creation in infrastructure procurement requires boundary spanners for leveraging knowledge sharing and interaction. Artifacts, discussion, processes and brokers as identified boundary spanners are strongly nested and interrelated in the industry. Special attention should be given to supporting individuals to act as brokers, since they play the key roles in trust building, culture steering and usage of other boundary spanners.

Promoting value creation in infrastructure procurement helps to achieve socio-economic development goals.

This study offers a unique perspective on value creation in the context of infrastructure by adopting an ecosystem lens and examining boundary crossing mechanisms. The results support future development of collaboration and knowledge sharing practices fostering procurement productivity.

Effective use of data across public health organisations (PHOs) is essential for the provision of health services. While health technology and data use in clinical practice have been investigated, interactions with data in non-clinical practice have been largely neglected. The purpose of this paper is to consider what constitutes data, and how people in non-clinical roles in a PHO interact with data in their practice.

This mixed methods study involved a qualitative exploration of how employees of a large PHO interact with data in their non-clinical work roles. A quantitative survey was administered to complement insights gained through qualitative investigation.

Organisational boundaries emerged as a defining issue in interactions with data. The results explain how data work happens through observing, spanning and shifting of boundaries. The paper identifies five key issues that shape data work in relation to boundaries. Boundary objects and processes are considered, as well as the roles of boundary spanners and shifters.

The study was conducted in a large Australian PHO, which is not completely representative of the unique contexts of similar organisations. The study has implications for research in information and organisational studies, opening fields of inquiry for further investigation.

Effective systems-wide data use can improve health service efficiencies and outcomes. There are also implications for the provision of services by other health and public sectors.

The study contributes to closing a significant research gap in understanding interactions with data in the workplace, particularly in non-clinical roles in health. Research analysis connects concepts of knowledge boundaries, boundary spanning and boundary objects with insights into information behaviours in the health workplace. Boundary processes emerge as an important concept to understand interactions with data. The result is a novel typology of interactions with data in relation to organisational boundaries.

The adoption of social procurement, the emerging practice of using a firm's spending power to generate social value, requires buying firms to navigate conflicts of institutional logics. Adopting an institutional work perspective, this study aims to investigate how buying firms change their existing procurement institutions to adopt and advance social procurement.

The authors conducted an in-depth case study of a social procurement initiative in the UK. This case study comprised of 16 buying firms that were actively participating in the social procurement initiative at the time of data collection (2020–2021). The data were largely captured through a set of 41 semi-structured interviews.

Four types of institutional work were observed: reducing institutional conflicts, crossing institutional boundaries, legitimising institutional change and spreading the new institutional logic. These different types of institutional work appeared in a sequential way.

This study contributes to various strands of literature investigating the role of procurement in generating value and benefits within societies, adopting an institutional lens to investigate the buying firms' purposeful actions to change procurement institutions. Secondly, this study complements the existing literature investigating the conflicts of institutional logics by illustrating the ways firms address such institutional conflicts when adopting and advancing social procurement. Finally, this work contributes to the recently emerging research on institutional work that examines the creation and establishment of new institutions by considering the existing procurement institutions in the examination of institutional work.

The aim of this study is to investigate how educational researchers work together with practitioners in practical research projects.

Mixed-method.

Our findings suggest that researchers recognize their own limitations as well as those of practitioners and policy makers and learn from collaboration, but that they lack ideas on what activities they can undertake to overcome limitations. Furthermore, educational researchers emphasize the importance of continuous and systematic organized exchange with educational practitioners. We discuss the needs and challenges of educational researchers interacting with educational practitioners during their research.

We believe that sustainable research and practice partnerships (RPPs) provide a more effective platform for collaboration between researchers and practitioners. This is because long-term engagement in cross-boundary work within these partnerships promotes the development of new knowledge, routines and methods, thereby improving educational practice. Unfortunately, there are few RPPs in Germany (the context of the researchers interviewed). Consequently, it is critical that funding policies, particularly outside the United States, provide greater support for RPPs and the necessary resources for these partnerships. Even if funding for RPPs is not always possible, our research suggests that short-term collaborative agreements in research-practice projects are preferable to relying on informal transfer channels.

This paper analyzes the ways in which accounting enables operations managers to enter and perform multiple roles in their interplay with organizational groups on the shop floor and in management, and the associated negotiations that operations managers have with “the self.”

Using field-based studies in a mining organization, the study draws on Goffman’s backstage–frontstage metaphor to analyze how operations managers enter and perform several roles with the aid of accounting.

The findings show that accounting legitimizes operations managers when they cross organizational boundaries, as accounting gives them an “entry ticket” that legitimizes their presence with the group. Accounting further allows operations managers to embrace more than one role by “putting on a mask” to become an outsider or insider in relation to a group. In performing their roles, operations managers exhibit varying attributes and knowledge. Accounting can thereby be withheld from, or shared with, organizational groups. The illusion of accounting as deterministic presented frontstage is not necessarily negotiated that way backstage. Rather, alternatives discussed backstage often become silenced in the frontstage performance. The study concludes that operations managers cross boundaries, embrace roles and exert agency as they navigate with accounting, enrolling it into their performance simultaneously as they backstage reflect upon accounting and its role for their everyday work.

This study relies on the frontstage/backstage metaphor to visualize the discrepancies in how accounting is enrolled into role performances and how seemingly categorical fronts do not necessarily share that dominant position backstage.

This study aims to explore the mechanism of boundary-spanning search on firm’s innovation performance under environmental dynamics from the perspective of strategic knowledge integration.

A survey was conducted among Chinese firm managers and R&D personnel, resulting in the collection of 315 valid samples. Hierarchical regression analysis was mainly adopted to demonstrate the hypothesized relationships, while the Sobel test and bootstrap method were used to further validate the mediating effects.

The results demonstrate that boundary-spanning search in different dimensions is a critical factor in the improvement of firm innovation performance (FIP). Two types of strategic knowledge integration are the main factors causing FIP and mediate the influence of boundary-spanning search on FIP. Furthermore, environmental dynamics moderate the relationship among boundary-spanning search, strategic knowledge integration and FIP.

Managers need to strengthen the boundary-spanning search for market and technical knowledge, which will promote firm innovative performance. Managers also need to implement strategic knowledge integration, which specifically includes using planned strategic knowledge integration to compensate for knowledge deficiencies, thereby achieving predetermined objectives; and using emergent strategic knowledge integration to update their understanding of internal and external environments, and to reset strategic objectives. In dynamic environments, managers should emphasize strategic knowledge management activities more.

From a strategic management perspective, this study categorizes strategic knowledge integration into planned and emergent forms. By applying the logic of knowledge acquisition, integration and creation, it explores how boundary-spanning search affects FIP through strategic knowledge integration as the intermediary and the boundary conditions of environmental dynamics. This not only provides a deeper understanding of the nature and effects of boundary-spanning research but also enhances the theory of strategic knowledge management.

Illicit financial flows are targeted by the United Nations’ (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs). However, these illicit flows are not entirely understood. Furthermore, they can benefit from economic norms, laws and regulations that lack mechanisms to detect and penalize them. This paper aims to investigate whether a recent test, the embezzler test, can be used to identify regulatory architectures that facilitate illicit financial flows and related financial crimes.

This paper develops a more advanced version of the embezzler test in terms of definitions and practical implementation methodology.

In this test, the definition of embezzlement can be understood to be the occurrence of illicit financial flows crossing the boundaries of organizations and/or countries. This is a multistage test, which intentionally simulates illicit financial flows to observe how well equipped is the regulatory architecture to deal with other financial offences that are related with these flows, such as theft, money laundering, fraud, corruption, market manipulation and tax evasion.

Future research can use the version of this test to stress test a large range of economic norms, laws and regulations.

This test’s new version can assist achieve the UN SDGs’ illicit financial flow reduction target. Furthermore, it can be used to study both existing and proposed norms, laws and regulation.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first explicit test that has been presented to identify norms, laws and regulations that facilitate illicit financial flows and related financial crimes.

Social media is booming in the digital age, and its rich availability provides many opportunities for companies to innovate across borders. In reality, how enterprises use social media to achieve cross-border innovation also faces important challenges such as breaking path dependency.

This paper explores how social media can facilitate cross-border innovation from the perspective of strategic capability, combined with the path dependency theory and attention-based view. Hierarchical regression analysis and bootstrap method are adopted to test the hypotheses based on survey data provided by 173 firms in China.

The findings show a positive relationship between social media strategic capability and cross-border innovation, with path dependency playing a mediating role. In addition, two internal and external contextual factors, namely customer embeddedness and competitive pressure, play moderating roles, with customer embeddedness negatively moderating the negative relationship between social media strategic capability and path dependency and competitive pressure negatively moderating the negative relationship between path dependency and cross-border innovation.

These findings provide not only new insights into social media and cross-border innovation but also theoretical guidance on how companies can effectively use social media in practice.

The study focuses on influential factors of collaboration on government data security by the Chinese government.

The article explores the case of e-government in the Chinese centralized unitary state system context, using a structured–pragmatic–situational (SPS) approach and the boundary theory as an analytical lens.

The findings indicate that e-government operates in highly interconnected environments where the safe flow of government data requires collaborative and cross-boundary strategies. Any organization is a potential “weakest link”. In addition, collaboration is fragmented by ambiguous accountability and organizational inertia across government departments, resources differences and limited visibility and measurability of security efforts across government levels and conflicts and uncertainties in principal–agent relationships. The solutions for those obstacles are also discussed from the multi-function, multi-level and multi-actor dimensions, respectively. A multi-dimensional overarching security model for the flow of government data is proposed.

The study advances the technology-oriented micro-analysis of previous studies on government data security to cross-organizational revealing at the macrolevel by connecting streams of research in information systems and public administration. These findings will contribute to making the safe flow of government data more resilient in the transformation of e-government.

This paper deconstructs the boundary-spanning technology innovation (BSTI) of manufacturing enterprises based on dual-meta and dual-degree perspective. We aim to explore the impact of differentiated internal reconfigurations on networking capabilities and, thus, different BSTIs and then reveal the optimal transformation paths of different BSTIs.

We use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to conduct an empirical study on 128 manufacturing enterprises in China to reveal the heterogeneous combinatorial path of internal reconfigurations on BSTI through the networking capability, and the case analysis in specific technology fields of Haier, Gree, Midea and TBEA is used to verify our results. The transfer entropy (TE) method is used to reveal the best transformation paths of different BSTIs.

The results show that the manufacturing enterprises follow the “I,” “T,” “⊥” and “|” reconfiguration logic to effectively realize multiple boundaries breakthrough (MBB), tick boundaries breakthrough (TBB), multiple boundaries reproducing (MBR) and tick boundaries reproducing (TBR) BSTI, respectively. The BSTI has two adjacent transformations named “dual-meta transformations” and “dual-degree transformations.” Nonadjacent transformations follow the “clockwise” transformation law. In “quality transformation,” “degree” transforms first and then “meta” follows, while in “feature transformation,” “meta” transforms first and then degree follows.

Firstly, the scientific classification of BSTI is carried out to guide enterprises to carry out accurate BSTI. Secondly, the “internal reconfiguration-networking capability-BSTI” paths of manufacturing enterprises are explored. Finally, the different laws of different BSTIs’ transformations are revealed.