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This paper aims to examine brand-generated communities from the community managers’ point of view and investigate how social media influences managerial perceptions, attitudes and practises around brand communities.

The literature review examines the most prominent constructs describing consumer groupings around brands. It then focuses on how the term “brand community” has evolved throughout the years and transformed in the social media environment. Research involving one survey and one focus group among agency-employed brand community managers was conducted to explore and interpret their views and their work.

Brand community managers aim to increase platform metrics. They encourage interaction between each user and the brand, but not between users. While they execute pre-planned content calendars handling comments, they do not have the experience and autonomy to foster a communal environment. Finally, managers rely on extrinsic incentives, and even antagonise users, regarding control over the community.

The sample covers the majority of agency-employed brand community managers in one country: Greece. The findings call for a re-examination of the construct of brand community, as well as for a new assessment of groupings consumers form around brands in social media.

For actual brand communities to emerge in social media, community managers should have more training, experience and initiative to tailor content and metrics, use intrinsic incentives and propose engaging activities. The quest for platform-imposed measurements inhibits this opportunity, and so do centralised processes that define global brand management.

The managerial aspect of brand-generated communities is understudied, especially when management is outsourced. This paper provides insight on how platform priorities and managerial practises dilute expectations that consumer-generated communities have created.

The purpose of this article is to improve our understanding of the nature of social responsibility in actual practices and, specifically, the influence of individuals on these processes.

An abductive approach is applied (Alvesson and Sköldberg 1994), i.e. theory is developed by moving between theory and four empirical cases. The stories highlight the importance of the individual and closeness to local stakeholders and the presence of overlapping rationales.

The individuals’ simultaneous roles – as owners, managers and community members – influence how they are held or see themselves as accountable and how they account for the firms’ engagement in the community. The activities are conducted in the name of the firm but originate from private as well as business-oriented concerns. Our conclusions encourage an extension of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) construct to approach it as an entangled phenomenon resulting from the firm and the individual embeddedness in internal and external cultures.

This study brings the individual managers and owner-managers into focus and how their interplay with the surrounding context can create additional dimensions of accountability, which impact on the decisions taken in regard to CSR. A micro-perspective is applied. Corporate community responsibility, particularly in smaller and rural communities, contributes to recognize and understand how individuals influence and are influenced by CSR.

The purpose of this paper is to identify how the factors associated with sense of community at work are connected with job satisfaction among the front-line managers and middle managers in social and health-care services in Finland.

A questionnaire prepared for this study was sent to 241 social and health-care managers (front line and middle managers) in Finland. A total of 136 of managers responded to the survey (response rate was 56 per cent). Data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis and multiple linear regression analysis.

Alongside job meaningfulness, open communication and good flow of information within the organization, sense of security provided by close relationships at work and managers’ own superiors’ appreciation of their leadership skills all are related to managers’ job satisfaction.

The study adds to our understanding of factors which are connected to the job satisfaction among social and health-care managers’. The findings of this study can be used in the development of leadership to support managers in coping at work.

This study examines how the collective construction of career sustainability takes place through a career community of interim managers.

We draw on 31 interviews with interim managers who are part of a career community in the form of a professional association of interim managers in France.

The findings show the importance of career communities as a vehicle through which to create a sustainable career. More specifically, we show that occupational career communities provide mutual and reciprocal career support, collective being and belonging through sense-making as well as collective learning leading to the collective creation of a sustainable career.

We add to the literature on sustainable careers by providing a collective community-level analysis and make a theoretical contribution by using the concept of career communities in shedding light on the career sustainability of interim managers. In the light of the increase in non-standard forms of employment, career communities might become an interesting vehicle for career management and development.

The concept of community leadership is examined, using a model with four arenas of leadership. Little attention has been paid to the capabilities which managers (as well as councillors and staff) need to perform effectively in this new leadership role. The paper is based on a case study of a highly innovative council. The paper examines three issues: the capabilities required for community leadership in terms of working with communities, in terms of working in partnerships, and the management development programme to support cultural change. The research shows that service delivery in the context of community leadership is increasingly complex, varied and outwardly focused. New skills include responding as well as directing, using lateral as well as vertical skills, having an impact on other organizations, not just one’s own. These have major implications for hierarchical organizations and professionally‐driven services. The development of a community leadership focus also contains tensions for the management of performance and motivation.

The purpose of this study is to ascertain how corporate social responsibility (CSR) managers are justifying the adoption of automation technologies in India, which is simultaneously creating job loss.

Indian firms to become and maintain superior levels of competitiveness in the marketplace had initiated the adoption, as well as usage of automation technologies such as robotics, additive manufacturing, machine learning and others. Such firm initiatives led to job loss in communities where the firm had a presence with its plants and offices. CSR managers primarily engaged with communities to undertake firm CSR initiatives. Job creation and its continuance have been a sacred component in this narrative. The adoption of automation technologies had altered this point of conversation. CSR managers had to justify both organizational actions from a firm perspective and reconcile the same to the community leaders. In this research, an exploratory study was conducted with a semi-structured open-ended questionnaire with 28 CSR experts. Data was collected through personal interviews and the data was content analysed based upon thematic content analysis.

The results indicated that CSR managers rationalized the adoption of automation technologies from a push-pull-mooring (PPM) perspective from a firm centric point of view. While for justification from a community (social) centric perspective, dominantly system thinking with fair market ideology than normative justification, utilitarian rather than deontological thinking (DT) and organizational economic egoism (OEE) rather than reputational egoism was applied.

The study applies the theories of the PPM perspective from a firm centric point of view. While for community-based theoretical justification – system thinking with fair market ideology than normative justification, utilitarian rather than DT and OEE rather than reputational egoism was used.

This study finding would help CSR managers to undertake community activities while their firms are adopting and implementing automation technologies that are creating job loss in the very community their firms are serving. Mangers would get insights regarding the steps they should undertake to create harmony.

This is one of the first studies that delve regarding how CSR managers are justifying the adoption of automation technologies in India, which is simultaneously creating job loss. Theoretically, this study is novel because the study question is answered based upon the adoption of automation technologies from a PPM perspective from a firm centric point of view. While, for justification from a community (social) centric perspective, dominantly system thinking with fair market ideology than normative justification, utilitarian rather than DT and OEE rather than reputational egoism was applied.

Organizations that adopt new practices employ managers to make decisions about how to materialize these practices. I examine how these managers move between the meanings and resources found in extra-local and local realms. I find that managers’ practices shift over time from adapting BPR practices to inhabiting BPR as an idea. Managers’ approaches are shaped by each organization’s history of efforts to introduce extra-local ideas. Rather than adapting BPR practices, managers draw on change tools, techniques, and methods that have worked in the organization and integrate BPR work into ongoing interactions, activities, and language in the local context.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the pressures to adhere to sustainability practices in an oil company in Sudan and its response to these pressures.

A qualitative case study research was conducted through interviews with the case company’s managers and various external stakeholders. The interviews were complemented by several informal conversations, observations and documentary materials.

There were external and internal pressures exerted on the company to adopt sustainability practices. However, the coercive pressures did not necessarily bring about a real change in the organisation. The forces of change were mainly the foreign partner’s audit pressure and the non-governmental organisation (NGO) allegations, which were given serious attention, due to the importance of reputation as an asset to the company.

Clear regulatory frameworks, more direct engagement with NGOs and meeting the expectations of the local communities were considered as crucial factors to ensure there is a pathway for sustainability in the oil and gas industry of developing countries.

Most previous studies on the motivation for corporate sustainability practices focussed on external pressures. This study examined the specific types of stakeholders’ group, among the internal and external stakeholders, that has most influence on the organisation’s sustainability practices, in the context of a developing country with weak regulatory governance.

To examine how an incomplete and biased legal/regulatory framework governing the allocation of property rights within a residential community in Hong Kong blocks the natural choice of a market contractual arrangement for the governance of the community as well as the management services.

This paper applies an institutional economic framework to examine the rationale of adopting different governance structures for different types of assets. A detailed case study is examined based on this framework and the governance structure of this community is analysed and the rationale behind the chosen structure is examined accordingly.

It is found that a unified governance structure has been adopted in this community, not by the residents in the community, but by the developer who has a controlling share of property rights and vested interests on the undeveloped part of the community.

The case study, though detailed, limits to one community, which itself is very unique in the physical environment. In the future, different communities should be compared under different management models to examine the effect of developers' vested interests in the community and the governance structure, and how would a fair delineation mechanism of property rights will provide a more efficient management model for the community.

It is suggested that an overall examination of the way property rights are delineated in Hong Kong is needed to protect the rights of individual property owners, so that a fairer and more efficient system can be in place.

This paper argues that the choice of governance structure in a residential community under some special socio‐political environments is also facilitated by the legal/regulatory framework delineating property rights.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which management control is enacted in a product development setting, to provide new insights into the different roles that control can play in this context.

A nine‐month, in‐depth field study was carried out at a subsidiary of an Australasian multinational firm which operates in the consumer foods industry. A participant observation approach was used to collect field notes and documents from the organisation, which were analysed through the lens of ethnomethodology.

The results indicate that the role of management control during product development is mainly focused on reducing uncertainty at each stage and promoting goal congruence at the decision gates. The authors argue that this helps explain why management control has a positive effect in a product development setting.

The implication of this finding is that the role of management control changes during product development due to the involvement of different organisational members (communities of practice) and the activities that they carry out. This helps build a more holistic understanding of control in product development. As this is a field study of a specific company, the findings are not generalizable to other companies or settings. Future research needs to investigate other possible roles which management control may play in this context.

The paper extends the research in this area by showing how and why management control can take on multiple roles in practice.