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This paper expands theory on strategists by investigating how non-executive strategy professionals in multi-business firms strategize. In focus is the strategizing of two groups of non-executive strategy professionals: a corporate strategy team and eleven business strategists employed in each of the incorporated units.

A case study design was employed to explore privileged accessed data to gain first-hand in-depth qualities of strategists' work. The design was characterized by phenomenon driven immersed participatory insider research with retrospective reflection and theorizing. Data includes strategies, interview data, calendars, meeting minutes, workshop material and observational field notes.

Non-executive strategy professionals in multi-business firms are either employed at the corporate center or in the peripheral businesses. Based on this location and their individual experiences they assume an exclusive content or an inclusive process strategizing orientation. In practice, the groups strategize tightly together.

Case studies are useful in explorative research providing thick descriptions. While empirically rich, the results of this study are limited by the context of one single case. Future research is encouraged to confirm, contradict and refine the results presented.

The insights from this study can help organizations regarding how to employ strategy professionals in multi-business firms.

This paper contributes to a recognized need to explore strategists' work. In contrary to the majority of existing research, focusing on senior management and/or strategy formulation, this paper highlighted non-executive strategy professionals' strategizing.

Despite best intentions, mergers and acquisitions often do not live up to the expectations for performance. This study examined how the salience of multiple identities creates dynamics in postmerger integration processes and how these dynamics influence the acquisition of the target's capabilities.

The authors conducted an in-depth case study of a large American consumer goods multinational corporation's acquisition of a family-owned German beauty business and examined responses to decisions and events during the postmerger integration process.

The results show how and why efforts to acquire unique target capabilities might not deliver the hoped-for results. The authors discovered multiple identities that became salient during the postmerger integration process which subsequently influenced interpretations and reactions to decisions and events and which created intergroup dynamics. The authors also noted the role of language in making these identities salient. Such dynamics pose challenges to managing the postmerger integration process and to acquiring sought after capabilities.

This study reveals how different identities become salient in the interpretation of particular events and decisions, resulting in emotional and behavioral reactions and intergroup dynamics. Furthermore, it uncovers the role of language in making identities salient. This study offers further insight into identity dynamics when the capability of the target firm is the motive of the acquisition.

The objective of the paper is to explore and evaluate practical accounting education to find its weaknesses and suggest avenues to build strengths which will provide the market with effective accountants from the universities (the primary source of accountants).

The study uses semi-structured interviews to understand and extract the study problem and build the questionnaire; the final step is to analyse and interpret the questionnaire results based on structured interviews, dividing the research community into professors and market elements, business managers and university graduates.

The market has provided a negative evaluation of practical education. Reasons include a shortage of instructors with professional experience; curriculums that lack the topic of professional and ethical skills; and internships if provided, with unsatisfactory results. The study suggests accounting simulation labs as a reasonable substitution for the placement year (internship) if the labs are qualified and the internship results unsatisfactory.

This article is based on a multiregional research community, making results transferable to any country that faces a lack of professional accounting education. The applied evaluation method is capable of use by any other field in the business industry since accounting is part of this industry.

Employing institutional logic and institutional work as its theoretical framework, this study analyzes scholars' reactions to performance measurement systems in academia.

Large datasets were collected over time, combining both quantitative and qualitative elements. The data were gathered from a two-wave survey in 2010 (966 respondents) and 2015 (672 respondents), conducted among scholars performing teaching- and research-oriented tasks in three Finnish universities.

The analysis showed statistically significant changes over time in the ways that the respondents were positioned in three major groups influenced by different institutional logics. This study contributes to the international debate on institutional change in universities by showing that in Finnish universities, emerging business logics and existing professional logics can co-exist and be blended among a growing group of academics. The analysis of qualitative open-ended answers suggests that performance measurement systems have led to changes in institutional logic, which have influenced the scholars participating in institutional work at the microlevel in academia.

While most scholars remain critical of performance measurement systems in universities, the fact that many academics are adapting to performance measurement systems highlights significant changes that are generally occurring in academia.

While most extant studies have focused on field- and organizational-level analyses, this study focuses on understanding how the adoption of performance measurement systems affects institutional logic and institutional work at the microlevel. Moreover, the study's cross-sectional research setting increases society's understanding of institutional evolution in academia.

Intelligence level of a crowd network is defined as the expected reward of the network when completing the latest tasks (e.g. last N tasks). The purpose of this paper is to improve the intelligence level of a crowd network by optimizing the profession distribution of the crowd network.

Based on the concept of information entropy, this paper introduces the concept of business entropy and puts forward several factors affecting business entropy to analyze the relationship between the intelligence level and the profession distribution of the crowd network. This paper introduced Profession Distribution Deviation and Subject Interaction Pattern as the two factors which affect business entropy. By quantifying and combining the two factors, a Multi-Factor Business Entropy Quantitative (MFBEQ) model is proposed to calculate the business entropy of a crowd network. Finally, the differential evolution model and k-means clustering are applied to crowd intelligence network, and the species distribution of intelligent subjects is found, so as to achieve quantitative analysis of business entropy.

By establishing the MFBEQ model, this paper found that when the profession distribution of a crowd network is deviate less to the expected distribution, the intelligence level of a crowd network will be higher. Moreover, when subjects within the crowd network interact with each other more actively, the intelligence level of a crowd network becomes higher.

This paper aims to build the MFBEQ model according to factors that are related to business entropy and then uses the model to evaluate the intelligence level of a number of crowd networks.

Professional service firm (PSF) performance depends on the accumulation and application of specialist knowledge to find customised solutions to customer problems. However, available research has not examined whether knowledge acquired from external sources affects PSF outcomes by strengthening professionals’ beliefs rather than only by increasing technical competency. Drawing on self-efficacy theory, this study tests a model that links the quality of content acquired from external sources and the credibility of those sources to professionals’ self-efficacy and, in turn, to PSF outcomes (solution quality and firm performance). In particular, this paper aims to consider the case of professional content exchanged through professional social media.

A cross-sectional research design was applied. Data were collected from a sample of 208 accountants, auditors and lawyers who used professional social media and were analysed using covariance-based structural equation modelling.

When accessing professional content from external sources, source credibility and content quality are significant antecedents of professionals’ self-efficacy, which, in turn, has positive effects on PSF outcomes (solution quality and PSF performance).

Self-efficacy plays a key role in the link between knowledge acquired from external sources (professional content) and PSF outcomes.

This study provides recommendations and actionable insights for PSFs, professionals and other actors who create and exchange professional content. Professional associations may also take an active role by contributing and sharing credible and high-quality content, using, for example, professional social media.

This paper advances the current understanding of the effects of professionals’ access to content from external sources on PSF outcomes. It provides an explanation of these effects based on the enhancement of professionals’ beliefs instead of their technical competencies, as indicated in previous research. In addition, it is the first research effort to consider professional social media as a communication channel to exchange content that affects the self-efficacy of PSF professionals.

This paper aims to identify the knowledge and practice gap in accounting education and propose an alternative teaching method to align accounting education to meet the needs of the practical world.

A total of 500 questionnaires were circulated among four stakeholders (academics, accounting students, accountants in business and accountants in practice) and received an overall usable response rate of 27%.

It was found that to reflect the current accounting practices, accounting students should be exposed to accounting specific experiential learning and industry specific training at an early stage of their academic education. Universities and professional institutes can work together to develop a curriculum to create an elite league of accounting professionals.

The insights of this study would provide guidance to educators on how to develop an advance experiential learning structure for students that reflects the current accounting practices and technologies involved.

This study contributes to the existing literature by means of providing an alternative teaching method for undergraduate accounting degree program.

As logistics talents in both Taiwan and Hong Kong are expanding their work area to Greater China, it is best to understand the competencies that logistics talents should possess. With this in mind, this study takes Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan as the study scope, as well as logistics teaching and research experts and scholars as the study objects. The research findings can not only serve as informative references for universities intent on cultivating logistics talents, but as well as enhance the scope of both Taiwan and Hong Kong talents’ competence that can pave the way to the development of the logistics business in Greater China.

Privilege is often silent, invisible and not made explicit, and silence is a key question for theorizing on organizations. This paper examines interrelations between privilege and silence for relatively privileged professionals in high-intensity knowledge businesses (KIBs).

This paper draws on 112 interviews in two rounds of interviews using the collaborative interactive action research method. The analysis focuses on processes of recruitment, careers and negotiation of boundaries between work and nonwork in these KIBs. The authors study how relative privilege within social inequalities connects with silences in multiple ways, and how the invisibility of privilege operates at different levels: individual identities and interpersonal actions of privilege (micro), as organizational level phenomena (meso) or as societally constructed (macro).

At each level, privilege is reproduced in part through silence. The authors also examine how processes connecting silence, privilege and social inequalities operate differently in relation to both disadvantage and the disadvantaged, and privilege and the privileged.

This study is relevant for organization studies, especially in the kinds of “multi-privileged” contexts where inequalities, disadvantages and subordination may remain hidden and silenced, and, thus, are continuously reproduced.

Education has been shown to have myriad effects on people, from increasing their incomes to changing their views of the world. In the area of entrepreneurship, education creates opportunities and increases the rate of entrepreneurial activity. This study explores educationʼs effects on the immigrant entrepreneurship development processes and outcomes in the context of Korean-Americans by comparing a national sample of Korean-Americans with differing amounts of education. The sample is part of the National Minority Business Owners Surveys (NMBOS) carried out by the Lawrence N. Field Center for Entrepreneurship at Baruch College between 2003 and 2005. The authors hypothesize that high-education Korean-Americans will have larger and more successful businesses, have more varying types of businesses, and follow differing paths to business formation. In addition, the authors hypothesize that motivations, goals, and attitudes toward their businesses, families, and their lives generally will be different. Among other things, confidence and level of satisfaction with their business will be higher for the high-education group. The study finds that while the low- and high-education groups vary in their types of businesses, the paths followed into those businesses, and the size of their businesses, they are very similar as to their attitudes, motivations, and family interactions. Implications for future research are discussed.