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The purpose of this paper is to increase the transparency of the value‐creation chain in the stock market. It aims to: conceptualize the value‐added through the relational capital, inductively develop models on how values are created, and discuss the values created for the analyst firm, the clients and investors in the stock market in general.

The paper is based on a case study of sell‐side analysts at a big Swedish investment bank and their work with real life situations of changes in recommendations.

The findings of the case study indicate that analysts, through their relational capital, access competitive advantages needed for remaining on a highly competitive market. They get access to value‐added information and knowledge and also business for the firm. This helps them to fulfill the three roles played, i.e. as information intermediaries, knowledge builders and businessmen. However, the analysts' dependencies, due to their relational capital and the analysts' conflicting roles, result in ambiguous or even biased information. The values added to clients differ between prioritized clients who receive value‐added information through the relational capital with the analysts and non‐prioritized clients with limited, or no access, to the analysts' services.

Value created through relational capital within organizations has been intensively studied within the area of intellectual capital. However, the sell‐side analysts' value‐creation chain linked to their relational capital with company representatives and clients, considered in the present study, has been neglected.

The paper reports on the implementation of the Revised Elderly Persons' Disability Scale use – a 53‐item, seven sub‐scale functional assessment tool – in a range of older adult care institutions. Staff education on the instrument's use is provided; patient assessments collated centrally; and results fed back to respective care facilities. This study explores the views of qualified and unqualified staff on the use of the scale in their respective UK National Health Service, Local Authority or Private Residential older adult care facilities.

An action research mode was adopted where the researcher was a member of a team responsible for planning, development, and co‐ordination of community care projects for adults leaving hospital care. Structured and semi‐structured interviewing was employed to explore personal experience of the instrument's use in older adult care institutions. A total of 20 care staff qualified in nursing or social work and nine unqualified staff participated in this research.

Participants reported that scale use contributed positively to the planning and delivery of care. Its use influenced the admission of individuals for care by the institutions studied and improvements in the quality of the transfer of clients between settings were reported. It proved straightforward to use and unqualified staff reported their greater involvement in the care planning process as a result of its implementation. Participants reported that instrument use contributed to the identification of staff training needs.

Evidence for functional assessment scale effectiveness is equivocal and little has been published on the experience of scale use by a range of elder care staff. This experience forms this study's sole focus and scale use is shown to have the potential to contribute to care improvement.

The main objective of this article is to present an empirically based reformulation of our models of the organisational change process. In Part 2 this reformulation will be developed and illustrated with reference to an extended case study. In this first part of the article I will attempt to demonstrate that this reformulation is necessary because current empirical data on the practice of OD is not consistent with the conceptual models of the organisational change process presented in the literature. The evidence suggests that models are used regularly in the practice of Organisational Development and are important to consultants and clients alike, because they enable a complex and uncertain process to be better understood, It is therefore vital that such models are accurate representations of reality.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the configurations of working capital and customer and supplier diversification employed by successful small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study employed a combinatory methodology to analyze how 124 Brazilian SMEs configured – before and during the pandemic – the size of their working capital and their levels of dependency on clients and suppliers.

High levels of working capital and supplier diversification were found to be key to SMEs' ability to thrive before and during the pandemic. However, while SMEs that were growing prior to the pandemic depended on a few major customers, firms flourishing during this time have divided their sales among many clients.

This study focuses on what configurations SMEs have adopted during the crisis. Qualitative studies are needed to identify how SMEs reconfigure themselves in the face of a major crisis.

The results of this study indicate that SMEs hit by the pandemic should avoid retrenchment strategies. They might have better chances of success if they embrace their vulnerability and take risks to foster growth.

The results of the study can help SMEs respond to the economic crisis caused by COVID-19, which has already caused the failure of millions of businesses worldwide.

This is the first empirical investigation of SMEs that are weathering the pandemic, and in this study, the authors have analyzed the three aspects of their operations, which have been struck the hardest by the crisis.

Clients engage consultants for many reasons, not always successfully. Based on a literature review and client and consultant interviews, this paper suggests six universal factors ‐‐ stated as testable propositions ‐‐ to help explain consulting engagement success. The factors are consultant integrity ‐‐ in particular in putting the client’s interests first, client involvement and readiness to change, a clear agreement concerning requirements and expectations, client control of the engagement ‐‐ partly via clear and limited assignments, consultant competence, and a good fit along a number of dimensions ‐‐ including models of consultancy, client expectations, consultant capabilities, and consultant type. The paper also addresses the distinction between organisation development consultation and other types of management consulting and concludes that the distinction need not be so sharp.

In considering the alternative strategies for change in Part I of this article, and the strategy of OD in particular, the definitions of OD suggested that the consultant played an essential role in facilitating change. Despite this, there is no widely accepted definition of the role of consultant. Indeed, it may be argued that several roles are currently subsumed under the title, for example the role of “change generator” and “change implementor” as defined by Ottaway and Cooper. There is also some evidence that internal and external consultants, apart from working from different bases, are capable or equipped to perform different tasks. External consultants are able to create and sustain a belief that change is possible, whilst internal consultants are the disseminators and implementors of change.

The purpose of this paper is to further extend research (Fan et al., 2012a) examining the attitudes of Chinese certified public accountants with respect to independence aspects of their professional codes of conduct and their influence on ethical judgement. These attitudes are compared with those of Australian public accountants Particular attention is given to refining a pre-existing instrument to determine measurement invariance.

A field survey of 81 Australian and 516 Chinese public accountants was conducted including the distribution of a questionnaire. Statistical analysis included confirmatory factor analysis and measurement invariance.

An analysis of data established the existence of a stable model for identifying the dimensions of independence of mind and independence in appearance within the context of the codes of conduct relevant to both cultures. Chinese accountants demonstrated significantly less concern about audit-client relationships affecting independence in appearance compared to their Australian counterparts. Interestingly, independence of mind was found to positively influence ethical judgement for both groups taken together, although Chinese accountants were the significant contributors to this model outcome.

The relatively small sample of Australian accountants drawn from a limited population base could influence the quality of data analysis. This paper provides a further research direction for re-examining the relationship between Australian public accountants’ attitudes towards their code of professional ethics and their ethical judgements in a significantly larger sample.

This paper is particularly useful to the profession in that it will provide members with better insights into how accountants in different cultural settings view audit independence issues and their relationships with audit clients. Second, this study offers a scale for measuring attitudes towards codes of professional ethics for further cross-cultural studies.

An exploratory research exercise that indicates that accounting practitioners in divergent cultures demonstrate similar concerns about independence issues, although it is believed that guanxi is likely to explain why Chinese accountants are less concerned with independence of appearance issues. The research also presents a validated instrument for examining attitudes towards codes of ethics.

This study compares and contrasts the clients of two domiciliary care services delivered to elderly people in Darlington, Durham, UK, in terms of their living circumstances, dependency levels and the service inputs they receive. The two services are the Home Help Service managed by the local authority social services department and a Home Care Service managed by the Darlington Health Authority which offers an alternative to long‐stay hospital care for elderly people. The study examined only a sample of the most dependent home help clients and all of the home care clients. The instruments used to measure dependency were found to be limited in their ability to detect crucial differences in the two client groups and suggestions are made about how these might be improved. The main distinguishing characteristics of the Home Care Service clients were that they were, on average, younger and frailer than the home help clients and were far more likely to need help with toiletting, dressing, getting in/out of bed, walkng and making hot drinks. In contrast the main predictor of Home Help Service membership was living alone. It was concluded that although some home help clients were as incapacitated as home care ones, the latter scheme was far more consistently targetted on very frail, and often ill, people.

In the now global business environment, SMEs are being subjected to increased pressures. In the manufacturing sector in particular, increased requirements for information and knowledge management, innovation, quality, and flexibility within new organisational forms such as the network enterprise entail organisational developments that can affect critical business processes, R&D in particular, and business performance. Hence, the customer dependency of manufacturing SMEs on certain important customers or the absence of diversification in their customer base can have significant impacts on the R&D activities, the productivity, and eventually the profitability of these organisations. Through an empirical study of 179 Canadian SMEs, it was found that more commercially dependent firms allocate more financial and human resources to product R&D. These firms are also less productive in that they have relatively fewer sales per employee. While customer dependency seems to negatively affect the SMEs’ profitability, firms whose product R&D activities are more intense report significantly higher gross margins. R&D activities could allow manufacturing SMEs to counter the influence of their major customers, by reversing the direction of commercial dependency, and thus to reduce their vulnerability.