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The purpose of this conceptual paper is twofold. The first objective is to introduce a multi-stakeholder power perspective to the discourse on repatriate retention, which has, to date, treated issues of career agency without considering whether other stakeholders might be capable of responding constructively. The second objective of the paper is more prescriptive, conjecturing that social media, which has also been completely overlooked by the repatriation literature, has the potential to empower repatriation stakeholders.

Following a review of the literature on repatriate turnover, this paper uses Hardy and Leiba-O’Sullivan's (1998) framework on empowerment to examine the nature and significance of powerlessness on the part of key stakeholders in the repatriation process – repatriates, HQ managers, and HQ HR professionals. It uses the same framework to investigate how social media might help to empower these stakeholders.

The analysis finds that social media has the potential to empower repatriation stakeholders in four key ways: first, by triggering expatriates’ awareness of the need to proactively manage different aspects of their own impending repatriation; second, by providing access to supportive mentoring resources; third, by strengthening access to key HR and managerial decision-making arenas; and fourth, by enabling HQ managers and HR representatives to more judiciously direct potentially scarce organizational resources (including their own time) toward key repatriation supports.

Although this conceptual paper has no empirical data, it offers considerable value to the repatriation literature by introducing the topics of power and social media and explaining their relevance to repatriation (and indeed, to the field of international HRM).

Repatriate turnover is problematic, both for repatriates who would have liked to remain with the organization that sent them on assignment, and for the organizations that would like to have retained (and utilized) repatriates’ global competencies. Thus, the main practical implication of this paper is that it offers an innovative contemporary solution (e.g. the use of social media) to this problem of repatriate turnover.

The paper demonstrates that the topic of power has been completely neglected by the repatriation literature. Similarly, the topic of social media, has also been completely overlooked by the repatriation literature. This paper introduces these two topics to the repatriation literature, and, in so doing, broadens the understanding of constraints on repatriate agency as a means of repatriate retention, and offers innovative contemporary solutions (e.g. social media).

The purpose of this paper is to explain how sustainability reporting and stakeholder engagement processes serve as vehicles of dialogic accounting (DA), a form of critical accounting that creates opportunities for stakeholders to express their opinions, and the influence of dialogic interactions on the content of sustainability reports.

Content analysis is used to investigate reports published by 299 companies that have adopted Global Reporting Initiative guidelines. This paper studies how organizations engage stakeholders, the categories of stakeholders that are being addressed, the methods used to support stakeholder engagement, and other features of the stakeholder engagement process. Companies that disclose stakeholder perceptions, the difficulties met in engaging stakeholders, and actions aimed at creating opportunities for different groups of stakeholders to interact were subjects of discussion in a series of semi-structured interviews that focus on DA.

Companies often commit themselves to two-way dialogue with their stakeholders, but fully developed frameworks for DA are rare. However, signs of DA emerged in the analysis, thus confirming that sustainability reporting can become a platform for DA systems if stakeholder engagement is effective.

The findings contribute to the accounting literature by discussing if and how sustainability reporting and stakeholder engagement can serve as vehicles of DA. This is accomplished via a research design that is based on in-depth interviews and content analysis of various sustainability reports.

While corporate social responsibility (CSR) research and practice has expanded and evolved rapidly in recent years, little is known about how MNC subsidiaries develop their CSR strategies and how they reconcile global and local demands and pressures from both institutions and stakeholders. The paper aims to understand how institutions and stakeholder pressures interact at both national and international levels and how these interactions shape MNC subsidiaries' CSR in Bangladesh.

Multiple case studies were used to investigate the CSR practices of 10 MNC subsidiaries operating in Bangladesh. To collect data, twenty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted. For supplementing primary data, secondary data from annual reports and websites were collected.

The article demonstrates that the practice of CSR in Bangladesh is a result of pressures exerted by parent companies, international institutions and international stakeholders. The article reveals how lack of pressure from local stakeholders and institutions enables subsidiaries to gain traction and use their agency to apply globalised CSR conceptualisations not necessarily applicable to the localised context.

The study has synthesised existing approaches to develop a multilevel framework for understanding how the intricate interactions between institutions and stakeholders from different levels (i.e. national and international levels) determine the trajectory of CSR adopted by subsidiaries in developing countries. This interaction undoubtedly plays a key role in determining the types of CSR strategy being enacted, the potential agency of different actors to shape change and the extent to which such pressures are likely to lead to CSR strategies that actually reflect and respond to the needs of local stakeholders.

The aim of this paper is to examine how crises can be triggered online, how different social media tools escalate crises, and how issues gain credibility when they transit to mainstream media.

This exploratory study uses the multiple case study method to analyze five crises, generated online, throughout their life-cycles, in order to build analytic generalizations (Yin).

Crises are often triggered online when stakeholders are empowered by social media platforms to air their grievances. YouTube and Twitter have been used to raise issues through its large user base and the lack of gatekeeping. Facebook and blogs escalate crises beyond the immediate stakeholder groups. These crises are covered by mainstream media because of their newsworthiness. As a result, the crises gain credibility offline. Mainstream media coverage ceases when traditional news elements are no longer present.

If crises are increasingly generated online, this study aims to apply a framework to manage the impact on organizations.

How practitioners can use different new media tools to counter crises online and manage the transition of crises to mainstream media.

This is one of the first few studies that analyses how organizational crises originate online, gain traction and get escalated onto mainstream media. Understanding what causes crises to trigger online and gain legitimacy offline will enable practitioners to engage in effective crisis management strategies.

Widespread forces of cultural rationalization have combined with parallel expansions in the legitimated actorhood of human persons. The result has been an explosion of formalized organization. Empowered organizations, filled with empowered actors, rise and expand in every social sector and every society. The expanded cultural principles involved lead many actors to play roles as “others,” helping individual and organizational actors to fill their often implausibly expanded roles. The chapters of this volume reflect the processes involved.

Federal agencies are relying increasingly on contractors to perform their missions. With hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent each year on goods and services, it is essential that federal acquisition be handled in an efficient, effective, and accountable manner. The Government Accountability Office (GAO), however--as well as other accountability organizations, inspectors general, and the agencies themselves--continue to identify systemic weaknesses in key areas of acquisition. In fact, the acquisition function at several agencies has been on GAO's high-risk list, which identifies areas in the federal government with greater vulnerability to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. In January 2005, we added interagency contracting to this list. Far too often, the result of poor acquisitions has been an inability to obtain quality goods and services on time and at a fair price. We can no longer afford such outcomes. Given current fiscal demands and the fiscal challenges we are likely to face in the 21st century, the federal government must improve its ability to acquire goods and services in a cost-effective manner. GAO developed this framework to enable high-level, qualitative assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of the acquisition function at federal agencies. Such assessments can help senior agency executives identify areas needing greater management attention, and enable accountability organizations (including GAO) to identify areas requiring more focused follow-up work. The framework consists of four interrelated cornerstones that our work has shown are essential to an efficient, effective, and accountable acquisition process: (1) organizational alignment and leadership, (2) policies and processes, (3) human capital, and (4) knowledge and information management. The framework supports an integrated evaluation approach, but each of these cornerstones can stand alone so users of this framework may tailor evaluations to an agency's specific needs.

This paper aims to respond to recent calls to rethink the concept of managerial capture as it has been used to date to explore and explain the limited impacts of new forms of stakeholder engagement.

The paper explores the grounding of views of managerial capture in the Habermasian ideal of participative democracy. It then attempts to re‐conceive the understanding of capture by drawing on Foucault's account of disciplinary power and its constitutive effects on subjectivity.

Capture appears as a managerial mindset constituted by the pervasive demand for shareholder value. When stakeholder issues are considered within this frame they must be recast in ways that pose no moral or emotional challenge to the dominant logic of shareholder maximisation. This moral distancing or amoralisation can be traced to the accounting practices that make management visible to their superiors (board of directors or more senior levels of management) in terms of their utility. In seeking the recognition of their superiors, individual managers make themselves subjects of this deeper form of capture.

A less restricted lens for conducting future research in managerial capture is offered. While in practice stakeholder engagement fails to live up to the Habermasian ideal, it still holds some promise for delivering management accountability.

The paper shows that ideas of power and subjectivity are key to an understanding of environmental accountability and open the social and environmental accountability literature to a new set of interesting problematics.

Institutional, economic, social and technological advancements enable openness to cope with wicked public management issues. Although open innovation (OI) is becoming a new normality for public sector entities, scholarly knowledge on this topic is not fully systematized. The article fills this gap, providing a thick and integrative account of OI to inspire public management decisions.

Following the SPAR-4-SLR protocol, a domain-based literature review has been accomplished. Consistently with the study purpose, a hybrid methodology has been designed. Bibliographic coupling permitted us to discover the research streams populating the scientific debate. The core arguments addressed within and across the streams were reported through an interpretive approach.

Starting from an intellectual core of 94 contributions, 5 research streams were spotted. OI in the public sector unfolds through an evolutionary path. Public sector entities conventionally acted as “senior partners” of privately-owned companies, providing funding (yellow cluster) and data (purple cluster) to nurture OI. An advanced perspective envisages OI as a public management model purposefully enacted by public sector entities to co-create value with relevant stakeholders (red cluster). Fitting architectures (green cluster) and mechanisms (blue cluster) should be arranged to release the potential of OI in the public sector.

The role of public sector entities in enacting OI should be revised embracing a value co-creation perspective. Tailored organizational interventions and management decisions are required to make OI a reliable and dependable public value generation model.

The article originally systematizes the scholarly knowledge about OI, presenting it as a new normality for public value generation.

The purpose of this paper is to trace the trajectory of the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project, an electronic tolling (e-tolling) programme based in South Africa, to argue for the importance of taking advantage of similar public project opportunities to introduce the concept of Transformational Government (t-government).

The research uses an interpretive perspective and utilizes actor–network theory (ANT) to identify the roles and interests of the various stakeholders within the project and assess how each stakeholder could have better influenced the project’s sustainability using a t-government approach.

The findings suggest that in the midst of waning global actor interest, and strong local displeasure about specific public projects, public participation offers an ideal opportunity to introduce the notion of t-government, the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to transform government for citizen benefits. The research allowed the authors to posit that public participation projects are solid and indispensable avenues for introducing t-government. Part of this claim is hinged on the view that the specific e-toll project carries a visible ICT artefact, which has embodied its own patterns of use characterized by various viewpoints, values, opinions and rhetoric.

The paper elevates the importance of t-government as a means to bring about practical transformation in government using public projects. The paper suggests how governments can use public participatory approaches to assimilate a new way of working in government.

This paper contributes to research on the emerging discourse on t-government. The paper also highlights the utility of ANT as a tool for understanding the dynamic public sector ICT programmes, their associated complexities and unintended consequences.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an empirical account of how a group of financial professionals uses intellectual capital (IC) information, and the value that the group imputes to IC reporting. The paper also aims to understand the group's ability to privately access information that might help them determine the value of a company's IC in support of their decision‐making.

Survey administered to a group of financial professionals in Hong Kong.

Respondents would like companies to be more transparent and provide more information on their IC. Respondents believe that greater IC disclosure would be rewarded with an increase in the company's share price – even though few respondents thought that they would pay more themselves for enhanced disclosure. Further, most respondents seem to be currently addressing their IC information needs through private information channels, and rate the publicly provided information as poorly suited to their needs.

Greater regulatory control may be needed to ensure that information being communicated privately also enters the public domain in a timely fashion. It is also suggested that making market participants more aware of the positive effects of voluntary disclosure on stock prices may lead to an increase in voluntary disclosure.

The paper provides empirical evidence on the value relevance of IC information from a user's perspective.