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This paper examines the rhetorical strategies of two Indian microfinance organizations as they transformed from non-profit to commercial format. They shifted forms at a time (year 2010), when commercialization had been criticized severely. The purpose of this paper is to understand “How does a microfinance organization justify its action of transformation to retain legitimacy?”

The paper adopts a qualitative case study method to understand the phenomena. Interview, archival documents, and field observations are the major source of data for the study. Data analysis is carried out through coding method.

Drawing from Suddaby and Greenwood’s (2005) work on rhetorical strategies, the paper suggests that these organizations have used two types of rhetorical strategies – cosmological and teleological. These strategies operate in a performative role and link deviant practices with routines. It focuses on institutional maintenance rather than change.

The paper acknowledges two important limitations. First, the rhetorical focus may be influenced by the history of organization. So depending on organization selected, the focus may vary. Second, the paper is constricted by the low-documentation practices prevailing in many civil society organizations.

The paper contributes to the literature on hybrid organization by unpacking the process of sense making in a hybrid form. The paper also reinforces the argument that language operates in a performative role. The paper provides a new context (India) to understand the process of rhetorical strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to explain that corporate citizenship refers to the specific activities that an organisation engages in to meet social obligations, and which has become an issue of growing importance within the business community. A key area in academic literature concentrates on justifying corporate citizenship initiatives to the corporate sector by illustrating a range of strategic benefits that a firm can achieve. This study is located within this body of work and aims to illustrate the strategic benefits that a football club can gain from the implementation of corporate citizenship activities through the community trust model of governance.

The study draws from qualitative primary and secondary data gathered from Charlton Athletic and Brentford football clubs.

Analysis of the data resulted in the identification of six strategic benefits that a football club can realise through the creation of a community trust model of governance. These are the removal of commercial and community tensions; reputation management; brand building; local authority partnerships; commercial partnerships; and player identification.

The paper considers the importance of these findings for a generic business audience, discussing how organisations can also benefit from the creation of partnerships with football clubs focused on the delivery of corporate citizenship initiatives.

The paper provides information regarding the application of management practice evident in football to other forms of business organisation.

The paper is the first to consider how corporate citizenship initiatives in football can assist firms in other sectors to achieve a range of strategic benefits.

Argues that the general area of commercial sponsorship activity, while attracting increasing interest from marketing practitioners as an important strategic option in marketing communications, has not been the subject of sufficiently rigorous and comprehensive investigation by theoreticians. States the purpose is to establish and consolidate the available body of knowledge combining an overview of the standard conceptual approaches to marketing communication with an examination of the recent academic research in sponsorship, while maintaining a focus on current marketplace practice. Argues for a coherent and structured approach to the management of sponsorship expenditure through the application of a ‘management by objectives’ approach. Parameters are established in terms of a working definition of sponsorship, a review of its commercial development and an overview of current activity. Develops a commercially ration framework within which sponsorship activity may be undertaken. Views objective‐setting as the cornerstone of sponsorship management and outlines a classification of sponsorship objectives that subsumes current practice clarifies the range of potential benefits. Examines the criteria that govern rational sponsorship selection and proposes an evaluation strategy based on stated criteria. Methods of evaluating effects of marketing communications (sponsorship particularly) are examined and new evaluation techniques are advanced to facilitate the implementation of this rigorous scientific approach.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how, and by whom, institutional logics are determined in the action of sustainable organisation. The authors analyse a supply chain network structure to understand how multiple stakeholders' perceptions of sustainability emerge into a dominant logic and diffuse across an organisational field.

Stakeholder network theory provides novel insights into emerging logics within a chocolate supply chain network. Semi-structured interviews with 35 decision-makers were analysed alongside 269 company documents to capture variations in emergent logics. The network was mapped to include 63 nodes and 366 edges to analyse power structure and mechanisms.

The socio-economic organising principles of sustainable organisation, their sources of power and their logics are identified. Economic and social logics are revealed, yet the dominance of economic logics creates risks to their coexistence. Logics are largely shaped in pre-competitive activities, and resource fitness to collaborative clusters limits access for non-commercial actors.

Powerful firms use network structures and collaborative and concurrent inter-organisational relationships to define and diffuse their conceptualisation of sustainability and restrict competing logics.

This novel study contributes to sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) through presenting the socio-economic logic as a new conceptual framework to understand the action of sustainable organisation. The identification of sophisticated mechanisms of power and hegemonic control in the network opens new research agendas.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore the orientations of consumer and company participants who participate in online crowd-sourced communities.

Methodology/Approach – Using a netnographic approach, we analysed the Nokia Design by Community (NDbC) crowd-sourced information contest, which was organised by Nokia in order to co-create a vision of the community's ‘dream’ Nokia device.

Findings – The findings reveal that community members' social orientations were dramatically different from the host organisation's narrow commercial focus, which led to unresolved tensions and as we posit, the ultimate failure of the initiative.

Research implications – The contemporary discourse on collaborative value co-creation potentially overemphasises the commercial objectives of organisations by failing to acknowledge the need for organisations to address the complex communal objectives and motivations of members of crowd-sourced communities.

Practical implications – Organisations need to acknowledge and address the complex and dynamic communal and commercial tensions that inherently emerge in online crowd-sourced communities. They need to adopt a tribal marketing approach and respectfully engage with community members if the diverse objectives of community members and the host organisations are to be satisfactorily met.

Originality/Value – Organisations and researchers need to recognise and acknowledge that crowdsourcing both begets communal conflict and fosters collaborative behaviour due to contested commercial and social orientations. While mindful of their commercial objectives, organisations will succeed in implementing online crowd-sourcing initiatives if they make a sincere effort to understand and respect the diversity, culture and social norms of the particular crowd-sourced online community concerned.

The purpose of this paper is to compare performance measurement in the humanitarian relief chain with performance measurement in the commercial supply chain, develop performance metrics for the humanitarian relief chain, and present a framework that can be used as a basis for a performance measurement system in the relief sector.

The performance measurement analysis is developed through extensions on an existing performance measurement framework. Details regarding relief chain system were obtained through off‐site and on‐site interviews with relief professionals from World Vision International.

The paper finds that this work yielded: a comparison of performance measurement in the humanitarian relief chain with performance measurement in the commercial supply chain, new performance metrics for the humanitarian relief chain, and a performance measurement framework for the relief chain.

The paper shows that future work includes performance measurement in community involvement and empowerment, performance measurement in community development, performance measurement in the combined relief and development mission, and understanding the role and impacts of cooperation and coordination in the relief chain.

This paper provides a practical procedure for developing effective performance measurement systems for relief logistics processes.

The paper presents to humanitarian relief professionals a new approach to performance measurement for relief logistics and to researchers in supply chain performance a comparison and contrast between performance measurement for relief and performance measurement in the commercial chain, new performance metrics for the relief chain, and implications for modern, quick‐response supply chains.

Service development and outsourcing are growing trends in humanitarian logistics (HL). Humanitarian organizations (HOs) have developed specialized units to perform logistics activities on behalf of other aid organizations, as a commercial logistics service provider (LSP) would do. The purpose of this paper is to explore the characteristics of HOs acting as LSPs and the differences with their commercial counterparts.

This research uses a two-level content analysis of 149 annual reports from 50 local and international HOs, performed with the help of qualitative data analysis software. First, a manifest content analysis identified the number of occurrences of logistics-related words and later, a latent content analysis studies the use in context of such words to characterize the nature of HOs as LSPs.

Evidence shows that some international HOs – in some cases through specialized logistics units – perform the same activities as commercial LSPs, providing similar services. However, due to the characteristics of the humanitarian context, HOs acting as LSPs can offer a wider range of value-added and dedicated services to clients (other HOs) than commercial LSPs.

Exploring the activities performed by HOs on behalf of other aid organizations and characterizing them as service providers constitutes a first attempt to grasp the unique features of these particular humanitarian LSPs. The results open the discussion about the services HOs offer, thus contributing to theory development in HL.

The identification of HOs acting as LSPs introduces a new actor to the humanitarian network, which the authors refer to as humanitarian service provider (HSP). This supposes two main managerial implications. First, the results support the idea of seeing servitization as a competitive difference, having a substantial impact on the way HOs build their strategies and achieve competitive advantage. Second, HSPs can push their commercial equivalents to identify new activities or services to offer and maintain their competitive advantage with regard to the newcomers.

This paper furthers the discussion on the concept of HSPs and demonstrates its uniqueness, thus contributing to the ever-growing body of knowledge of HL research.

The purpose of this paper is to explore sourcing strategies for facilities management services using core-competency theory of outsourcing. The aim is to develop a screening framework for deciding the suitability of outsourcing versus in-house delivery for these services based on three levels of managerial functions prevalent in a typical commercial organization.

A questionnaire survey was administered for facilities managers in Sri Lanka to investigate the relative importance of these managerial functions for facilities management services and obtain their opinions on the best delivery mode. The managerial functions were derived from a literature review and verified using three semi-structured interviews prior to the questionnaire survey design.

The findings showed that facilities management services that are aligned to strategic functions are suitable for in-house delivery, while those that are aligned to tactical and operational functions for outsourcing.

Further studies should be conducted and extended to other types of organizations beyond commercial ones. Secondly, the quantitative study employed a smaller sample (n = 40), and the survey items were based on the review of literature which was verified using a very small number of interviews (n = 3).

The proposed framework can be utilized when choosing the best facilities management approach for commercial organizations in developing countries such as Sri Lanka.

This study contributes to the body of knowledge on the subject of facilities management by exploring the context in Sri Lankan which has not previously been done.

In a globalized world where emerging markets are more important than ever, there is an increasing pressure on international businesses and governments to work together. The set of facilities known as commercial diplomacy combines the interests of both by highlighting new markets and investment opportunities.

In this chapter, we present a literature review based on 56 relevant publications to assess what we currently know of this important activity.

The results indicate that research on commercial diplomacy consists of many subtopics, resulting in a patchy understanding of the topic as a whole.

We discuss why integrative research focusing on the business–government relationship and the organization and the value of commercial diplomacy are needed from an international business perspective.

Recent theory and research suggests that local relational networks among business organizations play an important role in establishing and preserving a locale's identity. Such networks facilitate the development, dissemination, and enforcement of norms and cognitive frames that guide local business behavior. They also provide a vehicle for the consolidation of local business interests and for the coordination of local business strategic action. We examine the factors that influenced the likelihood that the CEOs of large corporations sat on the board of directors of large locally headquartered commercial banks in the 1960s. We focused on the 1960s because doing so allows us to make use of an exceptional comprehensive data set on the attributes and relationships of large firms and their leaders. We examine connections to commercial banks because these banks played a crucial role in community development in the 1960s. We find that both the class attributes of corporate CEOs (as reflected in their ownership of the firm and their affiliation with elite educational, social, and policy-making institutions) and the organizational attributes of their firms (as reflected in their financial structure, geographic reach, and age) influenced a CEO's propensity to sit on the board of a locally headquartered bank. These results suggest that future research on participation in local relational networks should take into account both class and organizational theories. They also suggest that future research on the class and organizational underpinnings of relational networks should pay closer attention to spatial relations.