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This paper aims to examine how board evaluations have emerged as an important tool in public policy and corporate practice for enhancing board effectiveness.

The authors review the extensive literature on effectiveness and the emerging literature on board evaluation to identify ways to assess the current policy direction for external evaluation of corporate boards.

The paper develops an integrated framework of effectiveness that can be used as a tool for board evaluation, in particular for externally facilitated exercises.

Through its integration of prior conceptual work this paper advances our theoretical understanding of this emerging part of policy and practice, with to-date lack much empirical basis.

The framework that is developed shows ways to focus how the practice is conducted by boards and external evaluators alike.

It can also help policy formation by pointing out the limitations as well as benefits of various policy options.

In pointing to ways to develop study of the field through empirical research, it provides direction for future academic research. It also identifies a need for and direction toward the professionalization of practice.

This paper aims to examine the puzzles of “ownership”, the legal and psychological commitment of directors, through the experience of the work of boards at non-profit organisations.

An exploration of the literature on charity governance leads to a first-person reflection on the tensions in directing two common types of non-profit organisations.

In the UK as in other countries, charities are companies, bound by company law as well as regulatory constraints of the non-profit sector. This creates responsibilities of ownership without the material benefits. In contrast to corporate share ownership, a sense of psychological ownership may pre-date appointment as a director, facilitating stewardship behaviour, facilitating stewardship and accountability.

This paper calls for expanded empirical work on boards of non-profit organisations, giving a focused agenda of aspects to highlight the differences between charities and the corporate sector.

The focus on psychological ownership can influence recruitment, induction and organisation of the work of charity boards, helping to ease resource deficits.

With pressure mounting in deliver of public services, the charity sector needs to fill growing gaps in provision. The constitution of boards plays a valuable role.

By incorporating psychological ownership in a framework of accountability, this paper points towards both a research agenda and practical considerations for charity boards.

This article explicates the notion of using a “theoretical lens” to interpret research data, which has grown increasingly common in recent decades, often without a second thought about the implications of use of a mere metaphor in the pursuit of truth. Poets may not question that metaphors reveal truths, but should social scientists accept that?

It looks first at what theory means, then – and in greater detail – what the metaphor of a lens entails.

Drawing on the base analogy in optics, it identifies four mechanisms through which theory might act as a lens – adjustment, correction, distortion and augmentation-suppression, with examples based on theories of business strategy and organisation studies.

These four mechanisms involve two different ways of seeing – better and differently. With adjustment and correction see better what is, or perhaps what was. With distortion and especially augmentation-suppression, we see differently, which helps us imagine what might be, or what we might have overlooked. They help us escape narrow silos of thinking. Researchers and students alike need to be aware of all four lenses of theory and be ready to experiment.

It argues that if some theories try to help us see better, others push us to see differently, with implications for the practice and teaching of research methods.

The passage of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002 followed hard on the collapses of Enron and WorldCom. Waste makes haste. Official reports for US government agencies worried that the legislation may have impaired New York's competitiveness as a venue for international capital transactions. But a threat from a seemingly different direction – the subprime shakeout – exposed bigger issues. This paper aims to raise questions about many of the assumptions made in the discourse about the relative competitiveness of US and European capital markets.

Building on Healy and Palepu's analysis of Enron, it compares the root issues at Enron with a preliminary view of the sources of the subprime crisis to build an outline for regulatory response.

Remedies in Sarbanes‐Oxley failed to address several of the ailments in evidence in Enron. The haste of making “Sarbox” may have led us to waste an opportunity to prevent or reduce the impact of the subprime debacle.

The comparison of the seemingly unrelated cases reveals similar ethical gaps and regulatory lapses, suggesting a different type of legislative and regulatory response may be needed. It makes suggestions for further research to guide future policymaking.

The purpose of this “viewpoint” is to consider developments in the governance practices in UK public organizations, showing how ideas from the governance of listed companies have translated into public bodies.

It discusses the literature of corporate governance and public service motivation and reflects it against practice evidenced in documentation for the UK Corporate Governance Code, codes for boards of different levels of public organizations, and both formal and informal evaluations of practice.

The use of independent, non-executives directors in public bodies encapsulates the tension in the private sector between the service role of directors and how they control managers. The paper gives a preliminary investigation of three public bodies, comparing how reform of their governance has affected tensions in accountability and director motivation. The changes involve greater emphasis on extrinsic goals, potentially at the cost of the intrinsic ones.

The paper suggests avenues for future research, linking notions of the tensions between the service and control functions in corporate governance with the balance between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.

Directors in both public and private bodies face a need to hold at bay forces that push in opposing directions to accommodate demands for greater accountability while sustaining the altruism social mindedness.

The area of public sector boards is undergoing considerable change in the UK and this paper, although preliminary, is one of the few to examine the links to motivation.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the articles presented in the Special Issue on the topic of “Marketing and flexibility”, and to discuss key issues associated with major debates relating to flexibility in order to position the articles within a wider context and highlight some key issues for further research.

Themes in prior research relating to “Marketing and flexibility” are documented and the growth of research interest into strategic flexibility is tabulated. The contributions of each article are briefly discussed.

There has been a steady growth of research interest into flexibility. To provide an example of this growth, the increase in the number of articles published on the topic of strategic flexibility in scholarly journals is highlighted over a 20‐year period. Key issues in prior research such as alternative definitions and the different postulated relationships between market orientation and strategic flexibility are revealed, as are issues for future research.

Key issues relating to research into flexibility for marketing scholars are revealed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine what counts as knowledge in the organization/management field.

Conventional, legitimated knowledge is analyzed through research into representations of an influential management text. Management and management accounting textbooks and research papers are investigated to establish the types of knowledge produced.

Mainstream representations of this book are partial, focusing on a “model” of what is likely to ensure successful organizational change – structural and systemic adaptations. What has been ignored is the problematization of structural change and the role of human agency. The foci and omissions of these representations cohere with divisions in the social sciences more generally – between “objectivist” and “subjectivist” ontologies and epistemologies.

There is a need for further research into representations of texts about organizational change, the way the objectivist/subjectivist divide is played out, and its significance for organization/management studies and more widely for the social sciences.

Questions arise as to the validity and sustainability of such knowledge. Omissions about the difficulties in implementing structural change raise epistemological and practical difficulties for students, managers and consultants.

Omissions of human subjectivities and agency from mainstream knowledge is problematic regarding successful organizational change and social issues more widely.

The paper's value lies in the in‐depth analysis of representations of a text in the organization/management area and the linking of the type of knowledge produced with broader epistemological and methodological issues in the social sciences.

Focuses on the direct and indirect impact of environmental abuse on human wellbeing. In some instances, the impact of environmental abuse on human health is not still unknown, merely being subject to scientific suspicion. This would suggest caution and the need for preventive measures to be applied. The threat to human health from environmental factors is not an isolated problem that exists on a national level. There are environmental factors that affect human health on a global level or are so widespread as to be considered global problems. Other environmental problems cross national boundaries and achieve regional importance.

Following Bakhtin, organizational discourse scholars have examined ways in which organizational actors draw on and negotiate historical texts, weave them with contemporary ones, and transform them into future discourses. This paper examines how this practice occurs discursively as members in a high‐tech corporation conduct an organizational change.

This paper interprets discourse excerpts from meetings of a project team in the western US. Through participant‐observation and discourse analytic methods, the data gathered consists of field notes, over 33 hours' worth of team meeting conversation and five hours of interview data.

Through the use of represented voice, organizational members work out how an action or practice has sounded in the past as spoken by another member, and they articulate how proposed organizational changes might sound in the future. By making these inferences, members are able to discursively translate between a single situated utterance and organizational practices.

The analysis suggests that organizational change occurs when people temporarily stabilize the organization through the voicing of current practices (as references to what “usually happens” via what is “usually said”) and new practices (as references to what might be said in the future). It is when these practices are solidified and made real through these translations between identity, voice, and organizational practices that members are able to draw comparisons and transformations between “past” and “future” language, and thereby experience and achieve organizational change.

The paper furthers our knowledge of how organizational members discursively negotiate meanings during the process of organizational change through a specific discourse pattern.