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The purpose of this paper is to propose a definition for dialogic performance management and investigate the managerial choices that dialogic performance management necessitates from public managers.

The research strategy was based on a narrative analysis grounded in relativism and constructivism. Multiple data collection methods were used in this case study to examine a local government in Finland.

The paper proposes a definition and provides practical illustrations of the concept of dialogic performance management. The empirical findings are a set of managerial choices used to orchestrate dialogic performance management.

The concept of dialogic performance management encourages practitioners to ask themselves whether their current performance management practices are based on managerial monologues, rather than dialogues that incorporate staff into the performance management. The results also show that managerial choices shape the form of dialogic performance management.

The previous accounting and performance management literature has not examined the managerial choices that are used to shape dialogic performance management. In this research, the authors identify these types of managerial choices in the case organisation. The research is valuable because only after explicating managerial choices can one start to examine why dialogic performance management either fails or succeeds when public managers orchestrate it.

The literature acknowledges the importance of interpretative processes, discussion, and organizational learning in public performance management, but a knowledge gap remains concerning the mechanism of performance dialogue. To fill this gap, the purpose of this paper is to study the principles of performance dialogue and collaborative performance management in public administration.

The study utilizes a longitudinal research setting and analyzes the evolution of performance management practices in one city organization in Finland.

The study suggests that performance dialogue needs to be integrated with management practices and explains how this can be done. Three guiding principles of performance dialogue and collaborative performance management are derived. These underline the role of “referees of the information game”, a supportive and encouraging environment and a focus on the use of performance information.

Performance information is too often provided as a back-office function, and dialogue with information users is either completely lacking or somehow disturbed. The performance dialogue provides a platform for collaborative sense making and helps managers to better understand the complex phenomena and processes they are responsible for.

The literature dealing specifically with the change from centralized and vertical performance management practices toward decentralized and horizontal practices is still scarce. This paper provides a new perspective on management control and organizational learning in public administration based on performance dialogue.

Lack of knowledge and performance information sharing between actors is one manifestation of fragmentation in public performance management. This study aims to understand what managerial means are used for connecting performance dialogues and how these means affect fragmentation in performance management.

In this cross-sectional research design, the authors reviewed documents, interviewed public managers, observed workshops and held thematic discussions with public managers in one Finnish municipality. To analyze the empirical data, the authors used thematic analysis and both inductive and deductive research approaches.

The analysis revealed nine managerial means that public managers use for connecting performance dialogues to decrease fragmentation. These were (1) defining the division of labor between different dialogues, (2) assigning resources for performance dialogues, (3) generating convincing narratives for promoting collaboration, (4) providing the same performance information to collaborators, (5) building joint information systems, (6) establishing integrative performance dialogue hubs, (7) naming the gatekeepers, (8) offering training for dialogues and (9) synchronizing performance dialogues. Based on our findings, most of these means can preserve, increase or decrease fragmentation depending on their design.

The results of the study are valuable because the performance management literature has not investigated what managerial means are used to connect performance dialogues and how these means can preserve, increase or decrease fragmentation.

Dialogue has been an elusive concept for academics when it comes to its definition within organisational contexts. In spite of the vast amount of academic research, it is not easy to find concrete proposals – both from theoretical and empirical standpoints – that analyse how companies manage dialogue processes with their stakeholders. The aim of this chapter is to fill this gap by highlighting the role of dialogue in strategic decision-making processes. In order to achieve this purpose, this work is structured into two parts. Firstly, multidisciplinary literature regarding how Public Relations and Management studies research on dialogue is reviewed. Secondly, the chapter presents a managerial proposal of dialogue for decision-making processes called the IDEA model. This chapter aims to scale back the theoretical fragmentation of the concept of dialogue while looking into its practicality based on an original proposal for scholars and practitioners.

This paper aims to understand performance management as a social phenomenon by investigating the challenges of performance dialogue, a phenomenon where participants jointly interpret performance information and discuss it while identifying the actions needed to manage the performance according to this information.

The research aim is achieved by conducting an interview study. Empirical data were collected by interviewing 30 public managers in three Finnish municipalities and subjecting it to content analysis using inductive category development.

The research provides empirical evidence from challenges in engaging in performance dialogue. It moreover derives a comprehensive conceptual model categorizing factors inhibiting performance dialogue.

Difficulties in conducting organizational performance dialogues are better explained. The findings support the management of performance dialogue by helping practitioners to identify challenges associated to these dialogues.

This study contributes to current conversations on performance management by showing that performance dialogues are no miracle cure for problems in performance information use. Moreover, the authors demonstrate that complications in performance information use are intertwined in many ways.

The aim of this paper is to develop and test a theoretical framework, grounded in managerial and organisational theories of dialogue, through which organisations can take decisions in relation to the most appropriate crisis response strategies for handling social media stakeholders.

The theoretical framework is developed through a conceptual analysis of literature on dialogue, social media and crisis communication. The theoretical framework is then tested in eight different international organisations experiencing a crisis. For each case, different web contents, such as organisations' status updates/posts, links, videos published on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, were analysed using a rhetorical research approach.

The analysed organisations apply different online dialogue strategies according to crisis types and in combination with specific crisis response strategies. Most of the organisations investigated carry on those dialogue strategies suitable to develop consensus (concertative), guide conversations on specific topics or issues (framing), find solutions to the crisis collectively (transformative). Concertative strategies were often associated with informative crisis response strategies, framing strategies with denial and justification crisis response strategies and transformative strategies with corrective actions.

By using a dialogic perspective in setting up online conversations with their external stakeholders, the paper proposes a theoretical model to explain companies' decisions in carrying on online dialogues during critical situations and thus contribute to the body of knowledge on online crisis communications.

The proposed model can support crisis communicators to manage dialogue's aims and dimensions differently by taking into account both contextual and situational conditions.

By integrating management studies on dialogue into crisis communication and social media literature, the authors intend to offer an alternative thinking of organisations' decision-making in relation to crisis response strategies and social media stakeholders.

The purpose of this paper is to provide guidelines for improving performance dialogue with a specific process and framework, leveraging existing literature.

Building upon Mengis and Eppler’s (2008) framework for conversation management, this study follows an action research approach, involving a process of co-creation, split into several distinct stages including two series of 20 semi-structured interviews with top executives of a major pharmaceutical company. These executives were directly involved in using the performance measurement system (PMS) in order to provide guidelines for improving performance dialogue. The data were analysed using content analysis, and the authors helped to develop a solution.

The analysis reveals a variety of recurrent communicative challenges and practices, which all appear to be characteristic for the performance dialogue process. The proposed framework consists of four separate phases, namely: data collection and identification of the main under and over-performance gaps, root cause analysis and action plans formulation, dialogue and solution implementation and dissemination of best practices.

This research contributes to the literature by introducing work on organisational communication into the field of PMS, by proposing a communication model for performance dialogue implementation. Furthermore, it addresses companies’ issues on how to successfully use their PMS and proposes a framework with specific prerequisites to be put into practice. Finally, this study offers a different explanation in the form of the lack of performance dialogue for the failure of PMS, compared to the current explanations found in the literature.

Project communication is overwhelmingly viewed as the proper and timely delivery of pertinent project information. The view of communication in this way misses the constitutive nature of communication. Communication is more than message exchange but a way that project managers generate the grounds for a project. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the communicative practices of project managers creates a dialogue with stakeholders that ultimately impacts the content, direction and outcome of a project.

Semi-structured interviews were performed with project managers from the Project Management Office of a large international bank. The project managers were responsible for their own projects of varying size with scopes that included everything from marketing initiatives to heavily oriented technology projects.

Overall, the project managers interviewed for the current project do not subscribe to the belief that communication is part of a constitutive dialogue. Instead, when discussing their overall views of communication, 82 percent of the interviewees took a transmission approach to the action. To that end, they believe that the goal of communication is to send clear, unambiguous and complete information.

Unlike other studies about communication within the field of project management, the current study looks to uncover how communication is part of a constitutive dialogue between a project manager and project stakeholders. The researchers did not look just to understand the micro-level exchanges between project managers and stakeholders but how those exchanges enabled a sustained dialogue that shapes the scope and trajectory of a project.

This paper aims to give an overview of a dialogue manager and recent experiments with multimodal human‐robot dialogues.

The paper identifies requirements and solutions in the design of a human‐robot interface. The paper presents essential techniques for a humanoid robot in a household environment and describes their application to representative interaction scenarios that are based on standard situations for a humanoid robot in a household environment. The presented dialogue manager has been developed within the German collaborative research center SFB‐588 on “Humanoid Robots – Learning and Cooperating Multimodal Robots”. The dialogue system is embedded in a multimodal perceptual system of the humanoid robot developed within this project. The implementation of the dialogue manager is geared to requirements found in the explored scenarios. The algorithms include multimodal fusion, reinforcement learning, knowledge acquisition and tight coupling of dialogue manager and speech recognition.

Within the presented scenarios several algorithms have been implemented and show improvements of the interactions. Results are reported within scenarios that model typical household situations.

Additional scenarios need to be explored especially in real‐world (out of the lab) experiments.

The paper includes implications for the development of humanoid robots and human‐robot interaction.

This paper explores human‐robot interaction scenarios and describes solutions for dialogue systems.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the Association for Strategic Planning Conference.

The paper provides a conference report for the 2012 Association for Strategic Planning Conference, held in Lincolnshire, Illinois, USA from May 30‐June 2, 2012.

The paper reveals presentations of practitioners and veteran consultants who share what is working in their practice of strategic management.

The paper provides reviews of papers presented at the 2012 Association for Strategic Planning Conference provided by practitioners and veteran consultants who share what is working in their practice of strategic management.