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This study aims to analyse the differences between professional interaction mediated by video conferencing and direct professional interaction. The research identifies diverging interests of office workers for the purpose of addressing work ethical and business ethical issues of professional collaboration, competition, and power in future hybrid work models.

Based on 28 qualitative interviews conducted between November 2020 and June 2021, and through the theoretical lens of phenomenology, the study develops explanatory hypotheses conceptualising four basic intentions of professional interaction and their corresponding preferences for video conferences and working on site.

The four intentions developed on the basis of the interviews are: the need for physical proximity; the challenge of collective creativity; the will to influence; and control of communication. This conceptual framework qualifies a moral ambivalence of professional interaction. The authors identify a connectivity paradox of professional interaction where the personal dimension remains unarticulated for the purpose of maintaining professionality. This tacit human connectivity is intertwined with latent power relations. This plasticity of both connectivity and power in direct interaction can be diminished by transferring the interaction to video conferencing.

The application of phenomenology to a collection of qualitative interviews has enabled the identification of underlying intention structures and the system in which they affect each other. This research identifies conflicts of interests between workers relative to their different self-perceived abilities to persevere in competitive professional interaction. It is therefore able to address consequences of future hybrid work models at an existential and societal level.

The purpose of this article is to address research gaps relating to agency and institutionalism in new institutional theory (NIT) and institutional work (IW) and use the critical sensemaking (CSM) approach to bridge the debates around agency, especially on issues of language and discourse, actor network theory (ANT) and history.

A conceptual analysis of the literature is performed to discuss issues of agency in IW and CSM in organizations, and examples of empirical studies are used to illustrate connectivity, contrast and fusion.

The analysis illustrates points of distance (rather than disconnect), but most importantly, connectivity and the potential for further developments between the literature on IW and CSM.

Discussion around new possibilities to focus on agency has the potential to contribute to humanist thinking about the (agentic) character of organizations and the potential for social change.

The article contributes to the discussion of agency in the organization through a starting point (i.e. CSM) outside of NIT.

This paper aims to explore the manoeuvring room of higher education institutions to take action to reduce emissions from academic flying. In particular, this study investigates how university staff and central actors in university management evaluate potential measures in this area.

The authors applied a single case study design encompassing an online survey directed at staff (N = 338) and 11 semi-structured interviews with key actors from management at an Austrian university. The authors used descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis to examine the data.

This study found considerable support among university staff in principle for implementing measures to reduce academic flying, but also serious concerns about the fairness and viability of some restrictive measures, especially disincentives and caps on flying. However, bans on short-haul flights were largely supported. Actors from university management saw their manoeuvring room limited by the potential resistance and non-compliance of staff, as well as by framework conditions external to the university.

Dedicated leadership is needed to facilitate broad commitment within the university and to avoid shifting the responsibility between different governance levels. Restrictive measures to reduce academic air travel will be more readily accepted if perceived as fair and viable.

Although several papers have addressed the behavioural and institutional factors that sustain extensive flying in academia, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first contributions to investigate the potentials and challenges of introducing measures to reduce air travel in higher education institutions.

This study aims to explore the serendipitous discovery of integrated reporting (IR) by Alpha, an Italian small and medium-sized enterprise (SME). Alpha piqued the curiosity when the authors discovered that it experimented with IR alongside other management accounting practices, such as the Balanced Scorecard. As the authors reflected on Alpha’s experiences, the authors had to opportunistically develop a new framework to understand the change that was taking place at Alpha fully. Thus, the authors developed the serendipitous drift framework. This study contributes to addressing the gap between management accounting research that sees change as a planned, ordered process versus research that sees it as an unmanageable drift.

The authors ground the research on a qualitative methodology based on a single case study. This methodology allows us to focus on understanding what has happened at Alpha to discover new themes and provide theoretical generalisations. The authors developed the framework using middle-range thinking and fleshed it out using empirical findings from the case study. Middle-range thinking implies going back and forth between the theory and the empirical material. Therefore, the authors develop the serendipitous drift framework from prior theories and use it to inform the empirical study. In turn, the empirical material collected in Alpha helps refine and flesh out the serendipitous drift framework. The framework explains how Alpha leveraged serendipity to steer change towards favourable outcomes for them.

The authors find that the search for change undertaken by Alpha’s managers was non-specific but purposeful. Their dispositions were sagacious enough to recognise the potential value found in management accounting practices, such as IR and the Balanced Scorecard. They chanced upon new and unforeseen practices through trial and error, iteration, internal engagement and networking.

Overall, the results indicate that Alpha’s managers shaped the disorder of management accounting changes, even though it followed unexpected, uncertain and messy paths. Indeed, appropriate informal controls can act as a frame of reference for choosing, adapting and implementing new management accounting practices to shape the disorder. Informal controls can both guide and bound the experimentation process towards desirable outcomes.

The authors contribute to management accounting change theory by developing a framework rooted in serendipity and drifting theories. The framework identifies how searching, sagacity and chance are essential for making positive, unexpected discoveries. Therefore, the authors provide novel insights on how and why IR and other management accounting practices are eventually translated and adopted in the case company. Moreover, the serendipitous drift framework has the potential to help managers frame cultural controls to actively seek opportunities for valuable serendipitous eureka moments through networking and experimentation.

Reality breakdowns generate reflexivity and awareness of the constructed nature of social reality. These pivotal moments can motivate institutional inhabitants to either modify their social worlds or reaffirm the status quo. Thus, reality breakdowns are the initial points at which actors can conceive of new possibilities for institutional arrangements and initiate change processes to realize them. Studying reality breakdowns enables scholars to understand not just how institutional change occurs, but also why it does or does not do so. In this paper, we investigate how institutional inhabitants responded to a reality breakdown that occurred during our ethnography of collegial governance in a large North American university that was undergoing a strategic change initiative. Our findings suggest that there is a consequential process following reality breakdowns whereby institutional inhabitants construct the severity of these events. In our context, institutional inhabitants first attempted to restore order to their social world by reaffirming the status quo; when their efforts failed, they began to formulate alternative possibilities. Simultaneously, they engaged in a distributed sensemaking process whereby they diminished and reoriented necessary changes, ultimately inhibiting the formulation of these new possibilities. Our findings confirm reality breakdowns and institutional awareness as potential drivers of institutional change and complicate our understanding of antecedent microprocesses that may forestall the initiation of change efforts.

This study aims to examine the factors that influence the relationship between sustainability and financial performance (FP) of the European listed companies.

This study analyzed data from 795 companies in 21 European countries by applying linear mixed-effects multilevel regressions, a two steps system generalized method of moments and quantile regression models to uncover the links between sustainability and FP.

The past four decades have witnessed abundant research to determine the relationship between corporate sustainability and FP. Thus, conducting further research in 2023 could be seen as “reinventing the wheel.” Yet, earlier research considered firms as isolated entities with sustainability and FP being dependent only on that firm’s actions. By contrast, with the help of network governance theory, this study shows that a firm’s sustainability and FP depend on an interplay among interorganizational actors, such as institutional qualities, macroeconomic factors and an embrace of sustainability. Here, large firms play an essential role. Three significant findings are drawn. First, sustainability performance has a significant impact on FP in the European context. Second, the institutional quality (IQ) of the rule of law and control of corruption plays a crucial role in enhancing sustainability and FP, and finally the interaction of IQ and economic growth helps to increase companies’ market value (Tobin’s Q). The consistent and empirically robust findings offer key lessons to policymakers and practitioners on the interplay among multiple actors in corporate sustainability and FP.

A synergetic multifaced relationship between governmental institutions and corporations is inevitable for ensuring sustainable development. The degree of intimacy in the relationship, of course, will be determined by the macroeconomic environment.

In this research, this study theoretically and empirically identified that corporate sustainability and FP are not solely dependent on corporate operation. Rather, it is transformed, modified and shaped through an interaction of multiple actors’ trajectories in the macro business environment.

The research study provides empirical insights on the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership (EL), entrepreneurial passion for founding (EPF), entrepreneurial bricolage (EB) and project success (PS), in the case of freelancers. The study aims to get a better understanding of whether freelancers, who behave like entrepreneurial leaders, can successfully complete projects through EB.

The study collected data from 209 freelancers through snowball sampling, in two waves, with a time-lag of fourteen days, to better examine the causality of variables. Data were analyzed by Model No. 4 and 7 (i.e. mediation and moderation, respectively) of Process macro.

Drawing on the effectuation theory, the results show that EB mediates the relationship between EL and PS and EPF moderates this relationship.

The freelancers can formally establish businesses later, after knowing whether they can complete these new types of projects. These online freelancing platforms can provide special services to freelancers who first want to test their skills on unrelated projects. In sum, the paper suggests that freelancers can be successful entrepreneurial leaders.

The EL, EPF, EB and PS are studied in the context of the informal sector, i.e. freelancing, which is the emerging working style in the world. It provides an in-depth understanding of phenomena in freelancers that lacks background literature.

All entrepreneurs interact simultaneously with multiple entrepreneurial contexts throughout their entrepreneurial journey. This conceptual paper has two central aims: (1) it synthesises the current literature on gender and entrepreneurship, and (2) it increases our understanding of how gender norms, contextual embeddedness and (in)equality mechanisms interact within contexts. Illustrative contexts that are discussed include entrepreneurship education, business networks and finance.

This conceptual paper draws upon extant literature to develop its proposed conceptual framework. It provides suggestions for systemic policy interventions as well as pointing to promising paths for future research.

A literature-generated conceptual framework is developed to explain and address the systemic barriers faced by opportunity-driven women as they engage in entrepreneurial contexts. This conceptual framework visualises the interplay between gender norms, contextual embeddedness and inequality mechanisms to explain systemic disparities. An extra dimension is integrated in the framework to account for the power of agency within women and with others, whereby agency, either individually or collectively, may disrupt and subvert the current interplay with inequality mechanisms.

This work advances understanding of the underrepresentation of women entrepreneurs. The paper offers a conceptual framework that provides policymakers with a useful tool to understand how to intervene and increase contextual embeddedness for all entrepreneurs. Additionally, this paper suggests moving beyond “fixing” women entrepreneurs and points towards disrupting systemic disparities to accomplish this contextual embeddedness for all entrepreneurs. By doing so, this research adds to academic knowledge on the construction and reconstruction of gender in the field of entrepreneurship.

The authors examine how performance measurement systems (PMSs) and academic agency influence the meaning of research quality in practice. The worries are that the notion of research quality is becoming too simplistically and narrowly determined by research quality's measurable proxies and that academics, especially manager-academics, do not sufficiently realise this risk. Whilst prior literature has covered the effects of performance measurement in the university sector broadly and how PMSs are mobilised locally, there is only little understanding of whether and how PMSs affect the meaning of research quality in practice.

The study is designed as a comparative case study of two university faculties in Finland. The role of conceptual analysis plays a notable role in the study, too.

The authors find that manager-academics of the two examined faculties have rather similar conceptual understandings of research quality. However, there were differences in the degree of slippage between the “espoused-meaning” of research quality and “meaning-in-practice” of research quality. The authors traced these differences to how the local PMS and manager-academics’ agency relate to one another within the context of increasing global and national performance pressures. The authors developed a tentative framework for the various “styles of agency”. This suggests how the relationship between the local PMS and manager-academics’ exerted agency shapes the “degrees of freedom” of the meaning of research quality in practice.

Given that research quality lies at the heart of academic work, the authors' paper indicates that exploring the three matters – performance measurement, the agency of manager-academics and the meaning of research quality in practice – in combination is crucial for the sustainability of the academe. The authors contribute to the literature by detailing the way in which local PMS and manager-academics' agency have material impacts on what research quality means in practice. The authors conclude by highlighting the pressing need for manager-academics to exercise the agency in efforts to safeguard a broad and pluralistic understanding of research quality in practice.

This study aims to investigate how highly ranked business schools portray ideal students in terms of their attributes and their agency. Understanding how these higher education institutions (HEIs) discursively construct their present and prospective students also shed light on the institutions’ self-representation, the portrayal of the student–institution relationship and eventually the discursive construction of higher education’s (HE) role.

To understand this dynamic interrelationship, this study uses mixed methodological textual analysis first quantitatively identifying different modes of language use and then qualitatively analysing them.

With this approach, this study identified six language use groups. While the portrayal of the business schools and that of the students are always co-constructed, these groups differ in the extent of student and organisational agency displayed as well as the role and purpose of the institution. Business schools are always active agents in these discourses, but their roles and the students’ agency vary greatly across these six groups.

These findings can help practitioners determine how students are currently portrayed in their organisational texts, how their peers and competitors talk and where they want to position themselves in relation to them.

Previous studies discussed the ideal HE students from the perspective of the students or their educators. Other analyses on HE discourse focused on HEIs’ discursive construction and social role This study, however, unveils how the highly ranked business schools in their external organisational communication discursively construct their ideals and expectations for both their students and the general public.