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While the potential for digital innovation (DI) to transform organizational practices is widely acknowledged in the information systems (IS) literature, there is very limited understanding on the socio-political nature of institutional interactions that determine DI and affect organizational practices in social cash organizations. Drawing on the neo-institutionalist vision, the purpose of the study is to examine the unique set of institutional exchanges that influence the transition to digital social cash payments that give rise to new institutional arrangements in social cash organizations.

The paper draws on an in-depth case study of a government social cash organization in Pakistan. Qualitative data were collected using 30 semi-structured interviews from key organizational members and stakeholders.

The results suggest that DI is determined by the novel intersections between the coercive (techno-economic, regulatory), normative (socio-organizational), mimetic (international) and covert power (political) forces. Hence, DI is not a technologically deterministic output, but rather a complex socio-political process enacted through dialogue, negotiation and conflict between institutional actors. Technology is socially embedded through the process of institutionalization that is coupled by the deinstitutionalization of established organizational practices for progressive transformation.

The research has implications for government social cash organizations especially in the Global South. Empirically, the authors gained rare access to, and support from a government-backed social cash organization in Pakistan (an understudied country in the Global South), which made the data and the consequent analyses even invaluable. This made the empirical contribution within this geographical setting even more worthy, since this case study has received little attention from indigenous scholars in the past. The empirical findings showcased a unique set of contextual factors that were subject to BISP and interpreted through an account of socio-cultural sensitivities.

The paper provides practical implications for policymakers and practitioners, emphasizing the need to address institutional challenges, including covert power, during the implementation of digitalization projects in the public sector. The paper has certain potential for inspiring future e-government related (or public sector focused) studies. The paper may guide both private and government policy-makers and practitioners in presenting how to overcome certain institutional challenges while planning and implementing large scale multi-stakeholder digitization projects in similar country contexts. So while there is scope of linking the digitization of public sector organizations to anti-corruption measures in other Global South countries, the paper may not be that straightforward with the private sector involvement.

The paper offers rich social insights on the institutional interchanges that occur between the social actors for the innovation of technology. Especially, the paper highlights the social-embeddedness nature of technology that underpins the institutionalization of new organizational practices. These have implications on how DI is viewed as a socio-political process of change.

This study contributes to neo-institutional theory by theorizing covert power as a political force that complements the neo-institutional framework. This force is subtle but also resistive for some political actors as the force shifts the equilibrium of power between different institutional actors. Furthermore, the paper presents the social and practical implications that guide policymakers and practitioners by taking into consideration the unique institutional challenges, such as covert power, while implementing large scale digital projects in the social cash sector.

The purpose of this study is to assess the significance of employee work flexibility and the policy of the organization for survival during any crisis. This study also investigates the moderating role of leadership support (LS) during such turbulent conditions.

This study has used literature from the fields of organization performance, human resources and organization policy (OP), along with the theories of resource-based view (RBV) and dynamic capability view (DCV) to develop a conceptual model. Later, the conceptual model is validated using the structural equation modeling technique. The study used a survey method with a sample of 311 participants. These participants are employed as human resource managers (HRM) and other supportive workforce at different levels in the organizations.

The study shows that innovativeness and employee flexibility (EFL) are critical toward organizations’ survival during any crisis. Also, the study highlights the importance of OP and LS for the survival of organizations during and after any turbulent condition.

This study provides valuable inputs to the leadership teams of organizations, especially HRM. This research also provides food for thought for policymakers and researchers in the field of organizational performance. This study also contributes to the overall body of literature on organization analysis and extends the literature on RBV and DCV.

The study adds value to the overall body of literature on organization performance and capabilities along with human resource management. Few studies have nurtured issues on EFL during turbulent conditions. Also, there are limited studies in the areas of OP such as favorable and unfavorable policies toward employees. Thus, this study can be considered unique. Moreover, the study investigates the moderating role of LS which adds value toward the body of literature on organizational leadership capability.

Knowledge-intensive public organizations (KIPOs henceforth) rely heavily on knowledge as the primary resource to provide public services. This study deals with a specific kind of KIPO in the judiciary system: the courts. The paper aims to explore the court’s managerial and organisational change resulting from the national recovery and resilience plan (NRRP) reform in response to Covid-19, focussing on how this neglected KIPO responds to change, either by showing acts of resistance or undergoing a hybridisation process.

The paper adopts a qualitative research design, developing an explorative case study to investigate the process of a court’s managerial and organisational change caused by NRRP reform and to shed light on how this neglected KIPO reacts to change, showing resistance acts and developing the hybridisation process. Thirty-one interviews in six months have been conducted with the three main actors in Courts: judges, clerks and trial clerks.

The paper shows that in this understudied KIPO, judges fiercely resist the managerial logic that decades of reforms have been trying to impose. The recent introduction of an office for speeding up trials (Ufficio Per il Processo (UPP)) was initially opposed. Then, the resistance strategy changed, and judges started to benefit from UPP delegating repetitive and low-value tasks while retaining their core activities. Clerks approached the reform with a more positive attitude, seeing in UPP the mechanism to bridge the distance between them and the judges.

Considering their relevance to society, courts must be more addressed in KIPOs' studies. This paper allows the reader to enter such KIPO and understand its peculiar features. Secondly, the article helps to understand micropractices of resistance that may hinder the effectiveness of managerial reforms.

Diversity and inclusion is a key focus of the profession. This paper investigates the ecological inherited niche of Indonesia and which employers accounting students choose and whether this will result in a diverse and inclusive profession. The authors conceptualise diversity as the demand-from the profession encompassing professional accounting firms, and inclusion as the supply of individuals wishing to enter the profession.

The 1377 responses to a questionnaire survey of students deciding on their career paths were analysed using a multinomial logistic regression and path model.

The findings show that a lack of diversity in the profession is caused by the ecological background, constructing a local niche, that prevents diversity. This is manifest in ethnicity, gender and education, whereby the local niche consists of Chinese males recruited from B-rated private universities. To bring diversity and inclusivity into the workplace, the profession needs to entice people from multi-faceted groups and match ecological niche underpinnings to expectations of the professional landscape. Non-Chinese females are needed to become role models and trail blazers to establish a diverse profession. The public interest will then be better served.

This study uses niche construction as the theoretical framing and demonstrates that the profession needs to take action to become truly diverse and inclusive.

The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into how management accountants can become relevant business partners out of respect for existing locally developed accounts of economic performance for decision-making.

The paper is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews with local business actors, in this case, families from seven financially successful Danish dairy farms. The casework and the analysis have been informed by pragmatic constructivism.

The local business actors do not use the official accounting system for ongoing cost-management-related decision-making. Instead, they use several epistemic methods that include locally developed decision models, experiences, rules of thumb and intuition. The farmers use these vernacular accountings to compensate for the cost management illusion that the formal accounting system tends to create. What the study suggests is that when management accountants engage as business partners, they are likely to enter a space where accounting is already present.

This paper argues that local business actors practice epistemic methods where they develop and use vernacular accountings to support their managerial practice, also in the absence of a professional management accountant. These vernacular accountings may lead the local actors into an illusion because the vernacular accountings do not necessarily have an inherent economic logic and theoretical reliability. The role of the management accountant in such a setting is hence to understand, support and advance local epistemic methods. Becoming a business partner requires a combination of management accounting analytical skills and a sense of empathy and sensitivity regarding what is already at play and how this can become an object of discussion without violating the values of the other.

The purpose of this study is to frame the dimensions of the external institutional environment, namely, cultural-cognitive, normative and regulative dimensions as the main actors in the organisational field. More precisely, Libyan commercial banks have been identified as empirical evidence, to identify constraints of the institutional environment governing the behaviour and decision-making of commercial banks, when adopting Islamic financial transactions.

A questionnaire has been designed for 14 Libyan commercial banks which is distributed to the Board of Directors, managers, directors of departments, and personnel. The exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and the measurement model by using the first-order and second-order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) have been applied as essential steps to embody the conceptual framework and test the research hypotheses.

The results of the EFA indicated sufficient correlation among the dimensions of the external environment. The CFA supported this study’s hypotheses. The modelling showed that the cultural-cognitive, normative and regulative dimensions are institutional constraints impeding Libyan commercial banks’ adoption of Islamic financial transactions. Interestingly, the findings of the CFA align with the EFA findings in supporting the conceptual framework of the research. They portrayed that the cultural-cognitive dimension has been identified by explicit and implicit cognition.

This study systematically embodies the dimensions of the external institutional environment, namely, cultural-cognitive, normative and regulative dimensions, as the main factors in the organisational field to be conceptually rich lenses to investigate social considerations to reinforce institutional thought broadly. The results of this study were consistent with extant Islamic financial literature, reflecting symmetry and similarity across commercial banks, particularly at the first stage of adopting Islamic financial transactions.

Neo-institutional theories and their constructs have so far only received limited attention in supply chain management literature. As recent supply chain disruptions and their ripple effects affect actors on a broader institutional level, supply chains are confronted with multiple new and emerging, often conflicting, institutional demands. This study aims to unpack the notion of institutional complexity behind supply chain disruptions and present a novel institutional framework to lower supply chain susceptibility and increase supply chain resilience.

The authors identify the patterns of complexity that shape the supply chain susceptibility, namely, distance, diversity and ambiguity, and present three institutional responses to susceptibility to increase supply chain resilience, namely, institutional entrepreneurship, institutional alignment and institutional layering.

This paper analyses the current situational relevance to better understand the various and patterned ways how logics influence both supply chain susceptibility and the supply chain resilience. The authors derive six propositions on how complexity can be reduced for supply chain susceptibility and can be increased for supply chain resilience.

By expanding and extending research on institutional complexity to supply chains, the authors broaden how researchers in supply chain management view supply chain susceptibility, thereby providing managers with theory to think differently about supply chains and its resilience.

This research paper generates new insights into the challenges of implementation in women’s enterprise policy. It argues that organisations involved in policy implementation need to be understood as operating in a context of institutional pluralism and answers: How do organisations involved in the implementation of women’s enterprise policy manage the challenges of institutional pluralism?

Addressing the need for women’s enterprise policy to learn from the past, the research adopts a historical approach to the study of policy implementation through examination of the UK’s Phoenix Development Fund (1999–2008). It analyses a wide range of secondary sources to examine 34 projects funded and supported by the Phoenix Development Fund that targeted women entrepreneurs.

Potentially conflicting institutional logics associated with central government, mainstream business support and local communities were managed through four key processes: dominance; integration; constellation and bridging. The management of institutional pluralism was effective in delivering support to communities but not in providing an effective platform for learning in government or establishing sustainable, long-term mechanisms.

The paper develops an empirical contribution to practice through identification of processes to manage the challenges of institutional pluralism and lessons for community-engaged policy implementation. A theoretical contribution to academic debates is provided by the conceptualisation of these challenges in terms of institutional pluralism and the novel concept of institutional bridging. The study also demonstrates the value of historical methods for women’s enterprise policy to learn the lessons of the past.

Despite agreement on the importance of adopting governance structures for developing competitive advantage, we still know little about why or how governance mechanisms are adopted in the first place. We also acknowledge that family businesses with formal governance mechanisms in place still resort to informal means to make decisions, and we lack knowledge about why certain governance mechanisms are sometimes, but not always, effective and functional. Given these research gaps, and drawing on institutional theory, we aim to explore: How are governance structures adopted and developed in family firms? Once adopted, how do family businesses perceive these governance structures?

Using Mokken Scale Analysis, a method suitable to uncover patterns/sequences of adoption/acquisition over time, we analyze a dataset of 1,488 Spanish family firms to explore if there is a specific pattern in the implementation of governance structures. We complement the analysis with descriptive data about perceived usefulness of such structures.

Our findings highlight two important issues. Family businesses follow a specific process implementing first business governance (board of directors, then executive committee), followed by family governance (family council then family constitution). We suggest they do so in response to institutional pressures, given the exposure they have to business practices, and their need to appear legitimate. Despite formal adoption of governance structures, family businesses do not necessarily consider them useful. We suggest that their perception about the usefulness of the implemented governance structures may lead to their ceremonial adoption, resulting in a gap between the implementation and functionality of such structures.

Our article contributes to the family business literature by bringing novel insights about implementation of governance structures. We take a step back to explain why these governance mechanisms were adopted in the first place. Using institutional theory we enrich governance and family business literatures, by offering a lens that explains why family businesses follow a specific process in adopting governance structures. We also offer a plausible explanation as to why governance structures are ineffective in achieving their theorized role in the context of family businesses, based on the family's perception of the unusefulness of such structures, and the concept of ceremonial adoption.

There is no single recipe that can serve the multiple needs of different family businesses. This indicates that family businesses may need diverse levels of development and order when setting up their governance structures. Accordingly, this study constitutes an important point of demarcation for practitioners interested in examining the effectiveness of governance structures in family firms. We show that an important pre-requisite for examining the effectiveness of governance structures is to start by investigating whether these structures are actually being used or are only adopted ceremonially.

Our paper expands current knowledge on governance in family firms by taking a step back hinting at why are governance structures adopted in the first place. Focusing on how governance is implemented in terms of sequence is novel and relevant for researcher and practitioners to understand how this process unfolds. Our study uses institutional theory, which is a strong theory to support the results. Our paper also uses a novel method to study governance structures in family firms.

This study aims to examine how digitalization affects the work efficiency of the Shariah Supervisory Board (SSB) in Islamic banks.

This study uses panel data analysis of annual report disclosures over the past 10 years. The authors have selected 79 Islamic banks for the period ranging from 2012 to 2021. The criteria for SSB efficiency used in this research are disclosure of Zakat and disclosure in the SSB report.

The econometric results show that digitalization has a positive effect on improving the work efficiency of the SSB in Islamic banks. Accordingly, the authors provide evidence that the higher the bank's digital engagement, the higher the quality of the SSB.

The findings highlight the need to improve the current understanding of SSB structures and governance mechanisms that can better assist Islamic banks in engaging in effective compliance with recent governance and accounting reforms. Moreover, Islamic banks are the most capable and appropriate to implement and activate digitalization because they are based on a vital root calling for development if there are executives believing in it, as well as legislation supporting and serving them.