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The purpose of this paper is to critically study the implementation and contextualization of the human resource transformation (HRT) management model within the human resources (HR) function of a global industrial company group.

A qualitative case study that includes two data collections.

Implementation of the HRT model led to tensions and conflicting interpretations of the mission of the HR function, and a “tug of war” about the distribution of work both within HR and between HR and line management. Splitting the HR function into three legs made the HR function's learning cycles more difficult. The corporate group had a decentralized and diverse business culture, and contextualization of the HRT model to this setting highlighted the model's embeddedness in the American business culture of centralization and standardization. Implementation of the model also entailed a transition from an employee to an employer perspective within HR.

For an assessment of HR's total work other parts of the HRT model (Ulrich and Brockbank, 2005) need to be involved since HR professionals in the insourced or outsourced shared service center (SSC) and Center of Expertise (CoE) and the e-HR tools are equally important for executing the total HR's mission. Further studies of the problematic human resource business partner (HRBP) role are needed and also what the development of e-HR solutions means for the HR profession.

The authors argue for a continuous development of HR work, along with closer professional contact both with line managers (LMs) and within the HR function, for improved learning cycles and a need for contextualization when implementing management models.

The paper discusses the HRT model's impact on HR practitioners’ and LMs’ work practice.

This article shows the need for contextualization when implementing management models. The lack of such contextualization led to severe tensions, and the intentions of an efficient and respected HR function were not achieved. The study contributes an evaluation of the tensions between HRT as a normative and standardized model in business settings accustomed to variety and decentralized decision-making.

The purpose of this study is to address a significant gap in the understanding of entrepreneurship at the microfoundation level. It focuses on how individual entrepreneurs, specifically Hongbang entrepreneurs in China from 1896 to 1949, shape and transform their contexts. The aim is to provide a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that facilitate entrepreneurial success.

The study adopts a microhistorical approach, investigating the case of Hongbang entrepreneurs in China during 1896-1949. It involves an in-depth examination of historical records to explore the strategic interactions between these entrepreneurs and core stakeholders such as consumers, financial intermediaries, government regulators, and human resources. The research methodology emphasizes a process-oriented view, examining the evolution of personalized networks into extensive connections.

The research reveals that Hongbang entrepreneurs successfully reshaped their unfavorable embedded contexts by strategically collaborating with key stakeholders. They influenced consumer tastes, allied with financial intermediaries, negotiated with governments on regulation policies, and developed human resource stocks. The transformation was facilitated by the evolution of their networks from personalized to extensive connections. These findings highlight the localized strategies such as cronyism in resource acquisition within China’s private property development industry.

This study contributes to the field by offering insights into entrepreneurial contextualization and networking. It sheds light on the complex interplay between entrepreneurs and their contexts, providing a nuanced understanding of localized strategies in the Chinese context. The findings add value to the discourse on entrepreneurship by elucidating the strategic and processual acts through which entrepreneurs engage with stakeholders and reshape their environments.

Research on employee non-/compliance to information security policies suffers from inconsistent results and there is an ongoing discussion about the dominating survey research methodology and its potential effect on these results. This study aims to add to this discussion by investigating discrepancies between what the authors claim to measure (theoretical properties of variables) and what they actually measure (respondents’ interpretations of the operationalized variables). This study asks: How well do respondents’ interpretations of variables correspond to their theoretical definitions? What are the characteristics of any discrepancies between variable definitions and respondent interpretations?

This study is based on in-depth interviews with 17 respondents from the Swedish public sector to understand how they interpret questionnaire measurement items operationalizing the variables Perceived Severity from Protection Motivation Theory and Attitude from Theory of Planned Behavior.

The authors found that respondents’ interpretations in many cases differ substantially from the theoretical definitions. Overall, the authors found four principal ways in which respondents interpreted measurement items – referred to as property contextualization, extension, alteration and oscillation – each implying more or less (dis)alignment with the intended theoretical properties of the two variables examined.

The qualitative method used proved vital to better understand respondents’ interpretations which, in turn, is key for improving self-reporting measurement instruments. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is a first step toward understanding how precise and uniform definitions of variables’ theoretical properties can be operationalized into effective measurement items.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the relevant literature to gain deeper insights into understanding what directions of research are needed with reference to entrepreneurial orientation and competitive aggressiveness in the oil and gas sector of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region.

This paper is a conceptual evaluation of literature.

The extant body of research on both entrepreneurial orientation and competitive aggressiveness is based on quantitative studies without previous systematic, exhaustive and comprehensive grounded theory-based theorizing processes rooted in qualitative approaches. This accounts for inconsistencies and controversies of findings reported in the field.

The grounded theory-based approach advocated by this paper is likely to generate a more precise estimation of the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation, competitive aggressiveness and firm performance. Consequently, an accurate understanding of the interplay between these factors can empower managers to make finely-tuned strategic decisions, achieve sustainable competitive advantage and optimally adapt to dynamic and unforeseen environments.

The paper reports on important limitations of the existing literature indicating that current findings may be an artifact of studying a small number of industries.

This study operationalizes risks in stakeholder dialog (SD). It conceptualizes SD as co-produced organizational discourse and examines the capacities of organizers' and stakeholders' practices to create a shared understanding of an organization’s risks to their mutual benefit. The meetings and online forum of a German public service media (PSM) organization were used as a case study.

The authors applied corpus-driven linguistic discourse analysis (topic modeling) to analyze citizens' (n = 2,452) forum posts (n = 14,744). Conversation analysis was used to examine video-recorded online meetings.

Organizers suspended actors' reciprocity in meetings. In the forums, topics emerged autonomously. Citizens' articulation of their identities was more diverse than the categories the organizer provided, and organizers did not respond to the autonomous emergence of contextualizations of citizens' perceptions of PSM performance in relation to their identities. The results suggest that risks arise from interactionally achieved occasions that prevent reasoned agreement and from actors' practices, which constituted autonomous discursive formations of topics and identities in the forums.

This study disentangles actors' practices, mutuality orientation and risk enactment during SD. It advances the methodological knowledge of strategic communication research on SD, utilizing social constructivist research methods to examine the contingencies of organization-stakeholder interaction in SD.

Catering services play important role in the Spanish economy, accounting for 6.2% of GDP in 2021. To overcome the adverse economic impacts of COVID-19, catering services are considered one of the drivers to stimulate economic growth. Hence, the main aim of this paper is to analyse the sociodemographic profile of the family's main breadwinner who allocates most of his expenditure budget on different catering services before and during the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 in Spain.

The official Family Budget Survey in Spain was used. This offers information on expenditure by families in 2019 and 2020. CHAID multivariate analysis was employed. This has proved a valuable tool in predicting expenditure, as well as determining the cause–effect relationship of this expenditure.

Findings establish the main breadwinner's expenditure on catering services based on predictors such as “year” affected by the pandemic; “type of employment contract”; “gender”; and “age”. A gender “pub-gap” in consumption in bars and cafes has been revealed, and families with a male breadwinner, on a permanent contract, between the age of 40 and 60 spent the most on catering services.

This research presents a new interdisciplinary approach to family breadwinners as a company whose spend on catering is shaping the economic recovery and leading to new answers for hospitality management. Identified factors can lead to improved decision-making and contextualisation of economic models for food service providers in a post-pandemic future.

Management and leadership in health care are described as complex and challenging, and the span of control is known to be a key component in the manager’s job demands. The implementation of change can be a challenge in health care, and managers often have roles as implementation leaders. Little attention has been given to how managers perceive the process of implementation. Thus, this study aims to explore second-line managers’ perceptions of, prerequisites for and experiences from the implementation of changes in their manager’s work conditions.

A grounded theory–based qualitative design was used. Data were collected from a purposive sample of nine second-line managers by individual semi-structured interviews. The three stages of initial coding, focus codes and axial coding were used in data analysis.

Three thematic areas were identified: engagement, facilitation and achievement. The second-line managers’ descriptions suggest that the change work entails a complex challenge with an unclear result. Involvement, consideration for the context and facilitation are needed to be able to conduct a cohesive implementation process.

This study findings outline that to succeed when implementing change in complex organizations, it is crucial that managers at different levels are involved in the entire process, and that there are prerequisites established for the facilitation and achievement of goals during the planning, implementation and follow-up.

This study investigates the communication behavior of public health organizations on Twitter during the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in Brazil. It contributes to the understanding of the organizational framing of health communication by showcasing several instances of framing devices that borrow from (Brazilian) internet culture. The investigation of this case extends the knowledge by providing a rich description of the organizational framing of health communication to combat misinformation in a politically charged environment.

The authors collected a Twitter dataset of 77,527 tweets and analyzed a purposeful subsample of 536 tweets that contained information provided by Brazilian public health organizations about COVID-19 vaccination campaigns. The data analysis was carried out quantitatively and qualitatively by combining social media analytics techniques and frame analysis.

The analysis showed that Brazilian health organizations used several framing devices that have been identified by previous literature such as hashtags, links, emojis or images. However, the analysis also unearthed hitherto unknown visual framing devices for misinformation prevention and debunking that borrow from internet culture such as “infographics,” “pop culture references” and “internet-native symbolism.”

First, the identification of framing devices relating to internet culture add to our understanding of the so far little addressed framing of misinformation combat messages. The case of Brazilian health organizations provides a novel perspective to knowledge by offering a notion of internet-native symbols (e.g. humor, memes) and popular culture references for misinformation combat, including misinformation prevention. Second, this study introduces a frontier of political contextualization to misinformation research that does not relate to the partisanship of the spreaders but that relates to the political dilemmas of public organizations with a commitment to provide accurate information to citizens.

The findings inform decision-makers and public health organizations about framing devices that are tailored to internet-native audiences and can guide strategies to carry out information campaigns in misinformation-laden social media environments.

The findings of this case study expose the often-overlooked cultural peculiarities of framing information campaigns on social media. The report of this study from a country in the Global South helps to contrast several assumptions and strategies that are prevalent in (health) discourses in Western societies and scholarship.

This study uncovers unconventional and barely addressed framing devices of health organizations operating in Brazil, which provides a novel perspective to the body of research on misinformation. It contributes to existing knowledge about frame analysis and broadens the understanding of frame devices borrowing from internet culture. It is a call for a frontier in misinformation research that deals with internet culture as part of organizational strategies for successful misinformation combat.

This conceptual, multi-voiced paper aims to collectively explore and theorize family entrepreneuring, which is a research stream dedicated to investigating the emergence and becoming of entrepreneurial phenomena in business families and family firms.

Because of the novelty of this research stream, the authors asked 20 scholars in entrepreneurship and family business to reflect on topics, methods and issues that should be addressed to move this field forward.

Authors highlight key challenges and point to new research directions for understanding family entrepreneuring in relation to issues such as agency, processualism and context.

This study offers a compilation of multiple perspectives and leverage recent developments in the fields of entrepreneurship and family business to advance research on family entrepreneuring.

This paper aims to investigate the current state of knowledge in key reporting aspects in relation to sustainability reporting in general and to reflect on their relevance to Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) in particular. In doing so, the major gaps in that knowledge are identified, and the paper proceeds to suggest further research avenues.

The authors conduct a review of papers published in leading journals concerning sustainability reporting to analyse the progress in the literature regarding three important reporting topics: materiality, comparability and assurance.

The review conducted in this study shows that there is still work to be done to ensure high-quality and consistent sustainability reporting. Key takeaways from the review of the extant literature are as follows: there is ongoing debate about the nature of sustainability reporting materiality, and single versus double materiality. Clearer guidance and better contextualisation are seen as essential for comparability, and, as GRI suggests, there is an important link to materiality that needs to be considered. Finally, assurance has not been mandatory under the GRI, but the current development at EU level might lead to the GRI principles being incorporated in the primary assurance standards.

In this paper, the authors review and synthesise the previous literature on GRI reporting dealing with three key reporting aspects.

The authors extract some takeaways from the literature on materiality, comparability and assurance that will all be key challenges for GRI in the future.

This paper provides an updated review of the literature on GRI reporting dealing with three key reporting aspects.