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Strategy researchers have given very little attention to services, even though they now dominate the gross domestic product of almost all countries. We encourage more research focused on service as the basic mode of generating revenue today, especially as the economic landscape is being restructured by recent financial crises. This chapter suggests a basic framework for services research and then outlines issues in three areas that are particularly important to customer-oriented service innovation: individuation, standardization, and export. Illustrative examples from Germany provide more specific contexts for considering the range of activity in this under-researched domain.

This introductory chapter places the contributions in this volume in the larger picture of research on governance in markets and organizations and highlights the structure of the volume. We argue that including embeddedness arguments in a model for purposive behavior is a fruitful way to extend theoretical work on governance that allows for consistent derivation of hypotheses. We hope that this theoretical focus combined with “empirical pluralism” induces a cumulative body of evidence in the new economic sociology.

Rational choice theory has numerous implications for the analysis of organizational governance structures. This chapter reviews some of these applications. The main emphasis is on relational contracting. It will be argued that repeated games theory, that is, a variant of rational choice that deals with rational agents who repeatedly interact, can explain the outcomes of relational contracting. There is some controversy about the merits of rational choice explanations. Can they deal with inefficient structures and their (alleged) stability, with path dependence and mimetic processes? Many of these issues have been addressed by new sociological institutionalists. It is argued that rational choice analysis is in fact consistent with many of these observations. There is, in other words, some convergence between rational choice and institutionalist approaches.

Prior research identified conflicts in implementing performance measurement systems that include both financial and non-financial measures. Attempts to incorporate non-financial measures, for example, balanced scorecards (BSCs), have shown short-term success, only to be replaced with systems that rely on financial measures. We develop a theoretical model to explore evaluators’ choice and use of the most important performance measurement criterion among financial and non-financial measures.

Our model links participants’ prior evaluation experiences with their attitudes about relative accounting qualities and with their choice of the most important performance measure. This choice subsequently affects their evaluation judgments of managers who perform differentially on financial versus non-financial measures.

Experimental testing of our structural equation model indicates that it meets the accepted goodness of fit criteria. We conclude that experience has an influence on choice of performance measures and on decision heuristics in making such evaluations. We suggest that an “experience gap” must be considered when deciding which performance metrics to emphasize in scorecards or similar performance reports. We analyzed four accounting qualities, importance, relevance, reliability, and comparability and found that importance, relevance, and reliability have strong effects on how managers prioritize and use accounting measures.

We conducted our study in a controlled, experimental setting, including participants with diverse experiences. We provide direct evidence of participants’ experience and attitudes about the relative accounting qualities of financial and non-financial measures which we link to their choice of the most important performance measure. We link this choice to their performance evaluations.

This study extends prior research on accounting judgment and decision-making research by examining the effects of “new” and “complex” accounting standards on judgments of professional accountants. It examines whether there are differences in the judgments of professional accountants in Fiji when interpreting and applying selected IFRS. A significant within-country difference in such judgments has serious implications for the convergence of accounting standards. The results show that the interpretation and application of accounting standards is affected by the complexity of the accounting standard and the professional accountant's familiarity with that standard. The study also finds strong support for the existence of an interactive effect of familiarity with the accounting standards and their complexity on the judgments of professional accountants. Furthermore, the results show that differences in judgments exist between the Big 4 and non-Big 4 professional accountants when they are provided with new accounting standards that require complex judgments. The results of this study are of interest to stakeholders at a time when IFRS are increasingly being adopted throughout the world and standard setters are struggling to promote compliance with those standards.

Migrant workers are often concentrated in segments of the labour market characterised by low-paid and insecure work and which fall outside of the traditional ‘web of rules’ providing workers with protections. Institutional experimentation provides an opportunity to rectify this. This chapter examines the reasons why migrant workers are often subject to exploitation and marginalisation in the labour market. It then analyses the roles of the three main actors with the capacity to protect and improve migrant workers’ labour market position: governments, trade unions and community organisations. It proposes a ‘co-regulation’ approach based on collaborative institutional experimentation between these actors as the most effective way to address the exploitation and marginalisation of migrant workers.

This chapter addresses social embeddedness effects on ex ante management of economic transactions. We focus on dyadic embeddedness, that is the history of prior transactions between business partners and the anticipation of future transactions. Ex ante management through, for example, contractual arrangements is costly but mitigates risks associated with the transaction, such as risks from strategic and opportunistic behavior. Dyadic embeddedness can reduce such risks and, hence, the need for ex ante management by, for instance, making reciprocity and conditional cooperation feasible. The chapter presents a novel theoretical model generating dyadic embeddedness effects, together with effects of transaction characteristics and management costs. We stress the interaction of the history of prior transactions and expectations of future business. Hypotheses are tested using new and primary data from an extensive survey of more than 900 purchases of information technology (IT) products (hard- and software) by almost 800 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Results support, in particular, the hypotheses on effects of dyadic embeddedness.

The German evidence-based model of educational governance is bureaucratically regulated, but teachers and schools are autonomous in their way of implementing requirements in schools. Accountability is ensured by regularly monitoring educational outcomes with reference to national educational standards, e.g. in the form of mandatory comparative performance tests. In this context, it is worth determining the process stages of research engagement with which the available data or evidence is associated and which purposes they can serve in teacher education and practice. Building on that, an overview is provided of the state of (mainly German) research on teachers' and school leaders' research engagement and influencing factors. This research field has flourished in the wake of the Empirical Shift in German education. By now the understanding has emerged that ultimately the depth of inferential processes is vital for sustainable development and this in turn is influenced by data, context and user characteristics. On the individual level, in particular, positive affective-motivational dispositions and research literacy are deemed important, whereas the feeling of being controlled has detrimental effects. On the school level, school culture and leadership are of impact, whereas a certain continuity of measures on the governance level proves meaningful for the engagement with data and evidence in educational practice. With regard to the German experience, it is concluded that more (funded) dialogue opportunities between different actors and professional groups in education are needed and that initial and further training should strive even more to impart a meta-reflective stance or enquiry habit of mind.