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While the formal structures of universities may predominantly reflect ceremonial rather than functional purposes, attempts at changing them are usually a fertile ground for academic conflicts. Taking this apparent contradiction as a starting point, the aim of this article is to explore the intriguing role of formal structures in academic settings. Drawing on a case study of a merger and organizational restructuring process in an academic research centre, it shows how symbolic responses to institutional pressures may have actual consequences on research practices, beyond myth and ceremony.

The purpose of this paper is to examine peer production (P2P) conceived as an ecosystem for value co-creation. First, this paper provides information on the specific P2P method for value co-creation, which is based on distributed technologies, cognitive slack and search for quality, to provide outputs that are open to continuous improvement. Second, aiming to fill the extant literature gap, this paper discusses the efficient dimension of P2P, providing a framework for the net benefit analysis of the economies and diseconomies that affect the value co-creation processes.

The paper identifies three main literature clusters that are focused on P2P, namely, economical, sociological and organizational clusters, and integrates them with the economics of organizational perspective to elicit information on the efficient dimension of P2P. This efficient dimension is expressed by a net benefit analysis of the economies and diseconomies that affect the P2P value co-creation processes.

The P2P ecosystem is characterized by the intensive interaction among cognitive slack and distributed technologies. This complex interaction presents interesting implications in terms of efficiency that, until now, have not been analyzed in the literature. Aiming to fill the extant literature gap, this paper provides a consistent analytical framework that simultaneously takes into account the economies of knowledge integration and potential diseconomies, that is, the costs of coordination and loss of control that arise from the adoption and diffusion of distributed technologies.

This paper provides an original explanation of P2P as an emergent ecosystem that serves as a service logics amplifier of value co-creation. In this regard, analysis of the key features of P2P not only sheds new light on P2P, but also allows for the reflection on the ecosystem’s framework, which promotes a virtuous interaction between the conceptual speculation and understanding of reality. Moreover, the proposed framework for the net benefit analysis of the P2P value co-creation model draws the attention of managers and decision makers as they consider the following issue: value co-creation jointly considers not only its benefits, but also its associated costs.

As the restaurant industry is a representative service industry, long-living restaurants could carry the secrets of key factors that are needed to establish “sustainable business models” in service industry. The authors aim to answer the following question: How can restaurants innovate business model sustainably to last for more than 50 years through the era of digital transformation with open innovation dynamics?

Five long-lived restaurants from Daegu, Kyoto and Naples were selected separately by using the snowballing approach, and were analyzed through in-depth interviews and participatory observations.

Restaurants in Daegu have lived long mainly because of adding value to their recipes. Restaurants in Kyoto have lived very long, primarily by decoupling their original services, ingredients and recipes. Restaurants in Naples have enjoyed long lives by coupling or recoupling their ingredients, services and recipes.

The implication is that long-living restaurants or service firms could maintain their own sustainability by dynamically circling the following services: (1) adding and boning recipes (focusing on special menus or products), (2) coupling of ingredients (creative recoupling of original ingredients) and (3) decoupling of services (disconnecting the value chain and rebalancing it).

The objective of this research was to identify organizational strategies used by rural retailers to balance conflicting demands of social norms and business performance standards to achieve success.

In‐depth interviews with 12 community leaders and nine locally owned retailers in eight resilient rural communities in six different US states were conducted.

The data suggest that operational strategies of local retailers in rural communities follow internal and external scripts and specific scripts are associated with decoupling and/or recoupling strategies and business survival. Decoupling occurs with internal scripts relating to business strategy and external scripts relating to community involvement and customer value. Recoupling was evident with internal scripts related to business strategy, attitude toward future business growth and attitude toward planning and survival; it was also evident with external scripts relating to community change and the local economy.

Future research should include the development of an instrument to assess a larger sample of rural retailers to determine if the findings of this study are consistent with other retailers. This would lead to the need to develop education materials to help rural retailers improve their survival and continuance.

Rural retailers need to improve their survival and continuance by building reciprocal relationships with the community and consumers, and can do so by seeking training to improve these marketing strategies.

The current research uniquely examines rural retailer ability to balance conflicting norms of the social and task environments and the impact it has on retailer success.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to firms’ capabilities of digital transformation through the identification of strategies for digital decoupling and recoupling.

This paper reports from multiple studies using a combination of methods such as case studies and clinical studies. The method of analysis involves the revisiting of vignettes from interactions with practitioners with the purpose of analyzing patterns in responses to digital transformation.

The findings consist of four strategies used by organizations and individuals in the decoupling of digital from their existing operations. Digital decoupling affords the organization the possibility of remaining largely unaffected by digital transformation. The authors also present four digital recoupling strategies that are used to succeed with digital transformation.

This study is limited by the analytical approach of drawing from multiple previous studies. The research implications consist primarily of a contribution to a better understanding of why and how digital transformation is constrained.

The four strategies of digital decoupling can be used to identify behavior in organizations that limit digital transformation. The four strategies of digital recoupling can be used to instigate a more successful digital transformation.

According to the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to identify digital decoupling strategies as a micro-foundation for organizational resistance to digital transformation.

To study the use of budgeting in the uncertain and unpredictable context of seasonal logistics in the Arctic. Specifically addresses the question of why and how budgeting turns out to be the main management control tool in an extremely unstable environment.

Built on a case study of a Russian oil-producing company operating in The High North, this chapter reports on the rationales for use of budgetary slack by different divisions within the company.

Inflexible budgeting better fits into the (natural/geographical) context than into the business process. In this respect, excessive budget detalization and informational update may be not facilitating the operational process but confusing. Decoupling demonstrated by a budgetary slack is the normal condition for stable organizational performance.

Instead of setting up fences between the divisions, budgeting may be considered a converging and an adjusting factor to assess collective performance. Social embeddedness of budgetary slack in contemporary organizations sets the scene for other types of budgeting games based on trust, norms of reciprocity and collective performance.

The new – cultural – dimension introduces decoupling in a new perspective by demonstrating the integrating or coupling meaning of cultural practices.

In his 2022 paper, in the Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting and Financial Management, Sven Modell reviews and reflects on the public sector's institutional research dealing with performance measurement and management (PMM) over the past decade. Modell suggests potential extensions of this body of research. This paper seeks to contribute to the path that Modell initiated. It offers directions in which institutional theory might contribute further to research on agentic aspects of PMM in the public sector.

The paper is a rejoinder emphasizing how institutional theory could further nurture reflection on PMM research in the public sector. The authors draw upon Modell's article and ongoing research in the institutional theory field.

Modell insists that institutional research on PMM in the public sector should explore the constitutive effects of PMM practices while conceiving such practices as institutionally embedded phenomena. The authors seek to extend this approach by considering the role of agency in institutional processes. To do this, the authors build on recent institutional research on agency, discussing how those new conceptualizations could nurture and develop the understanding of PMM practices in the public sector. The authors further discuss implications for coupling and decoupling as sites of agency. Such literature is relevant for examining emerging themes in public-sector accounting because it allows the authors to better conceptualize the underlying mechanisms of agency in the context of public service provision characterized by institutional complexity.

This paper details several implications of the current developments in new institutional theory in examining agency in the relationship between institutions and PMM, pointing at the case of decoupling. In so doing, the authors seek to stimulate a constructive exchange between public-sector accounting and a broader institutionalist body of research and suggest ways of extending the PMM research agenda.

The predominant narrative is that contemporary organisations, motivated by economic-rationalist aspirations, adopt cloud applications on the premise of achieving cost-savings and efficiency gains. However, how they actually adopt and rollover such new or emerging technologies may be influenced by acts, patterns and processes of institutional legitimacy. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the dynamics surrounding decisions on how specific cloud applications are adopted from the context of institutional theory, with a particular focus on the concepts of coupling and decoupling.

To examine this phenomenon, two qualitative case studies, using a reflexive research approach, of an Australian and a Swedish university have been undertaken, both of which adopted commercial cloud applications for e.g. e-mail, collaboration and storage (as examples of software as a service) at different points in time. One of the universities was known for its early adoption of cloud applications, but had decelerated further deployment of such services, while the other, despite its conservative reputation, has made rapid strides in this regard.

The findings of the dual case studies reveal that organisations, contrary to economic-rationalist claims, may or may not decide to adopt particular commercial cloud-based offerings for the support of core operations, on the basis of how they perceive their institutional legitimacy being affected by a complex network of influential actors, both internally and in the external spaces. Therefore, this paper offers an institutional theory-based discourse and rich illustrations on how the role of technology is played out in enhancing relationships between an organisation and such actors in terms of legitimacy focusing acts of coupling and decoupling.

In the analysis and findings the authors, in a novel way, illustrate how organisations strive for: institutional legitimacy through acts of coupling, and the revelations of consequential decoupling. The value is based on a rich case description, analysis and application of institutional theory.

This paper aims to synthesize the corporate social responsibility decoupling (CSRD) literature, CSRD's causes and consequences and discuss other organizational attributes examined by CSRD scholars during 2010 and 2020. The authors provide suggestions for a future research agenda in this domain.

The authors' systematic literature review (SLR) uses the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework to extract CSRD studies. The authors filter collected articles against quality and relevancy criteria and finally review 175 published articles.

A theme analysis identifies and structures the many themes related to CSRD. The authors discuss the drivers of CSRD and reveal the consequences companies face after CSRD. The authors also provide a comprehensive CSRD discussion in the context of developed and developing economies. CSR communication is also identified as a tool for decoupling and recoupling.

The identified themes provide a thorough illustration of CSRD literature for new CSRD scholars. The authors also provide suggestions for future research, such as examining country-level policy-making and implications of CSRD variance and identifying cultural and economic hurdles to achieving core CSR purposes.

Policymakers and scholars may adopt the approach that CSRD is a misreporting of information similar to accounting fraud. This is particularly relevant given that an increasing number of CSRD scandals indicate that the purpose of bringing change through corporate CSR has not been adopted well by corporations.

The authors' study offers a comprehensive literature review for the period of 2010–2020. The studies identified are structured into meaningful themes which can provide groundwork for future researchers.

This paper aims to focus on distributed technologies with the aim of highlighting their economic-organizational dimensions. In particular, the contribution first presents a deeper understanding of the nature and the dynamics of the economies and diseconomies that arise from the adoption and diffusion of distributed technologies. Second, it aims to shed light on the increasing tension between the hierarchy-based model of production and peer-to-peer (p2p) production, which involves the pervasive diffusion of distributed technologies.

Adopting an economic-organizational perspective, which is deeply rooted in the related extant literature, an analytically consistent model is developed to simultaneously take into account the following variables: adoption density independent variable) and economies of knowledge integration and organizational diseconomies (the costs of a loss of control and the costs of organizational decoupling and recoupling) as dependent variables.

Distributed technologies allow access to a large quantity and a wide variety of cognitive slacks that have not been possible until now. In doing so, they are leading the transition towards p2p. This is an emerging production paradigm that is characterized – with respect to mass production – by a shift in the relative importance of cognitive slack in comparison with tangible slack. Nevertheless, the unrestrainable diffusion of distributed technologies is not neutral for organizations. On the one hand, these technologies allow for the integration of economies of knowledge, and on the other hand, they involve organizational diseconomies that should not be ignored by managers and researchers.

This paper fills a gap in the literature by developing a consistent analytical framework that simultaneously takes into account the economies of knowledge integration and potential organizational diseconomies (the costs of coordination and the loss of control) that arise from the adoption and diffusion of distributed technologies.