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The purpose of this paper is to present a critical literature review on design management.

The map of the field is based on the analysing the chain of associations between the papers (Latour, 1987). The strategy for this review is informed by the methodology described by Callon et al. (1986) on following the construction of the arguments. The first search was conducted in EBESCO and Web of Science looking for papers dealing with design management; “design management”; innovat* and design* in the management, including title, keywords and abstract. It resulted in 8,216 articles that were exported and downloaded in a database.

Five groups emerged: design as rational decision making, industrial design, managing as designing, design as proposals of new meaning and design as a network construction.

This paper maps the role of designers in innovation and design management literature. Design management is a variegated field of research, and the focus of this paper has been on product design in business and management literature. To begin with, the research philosophy which was inferred by analysing the preferred methodology in the papers belonging to five perspectives was analysed, and the ontology, essence, metaphysics delineated. Then, a map of the field of on the role of designers was proposed. The author concluded with a reflection of a possible research agenda in design management, focussing on investigating the role of designers in transformational economies, such as Vietnam.

This paper aims to offer a perspective to interpret qualitative data drawing on the introduction of the notion of “embodied practice-based research”.

Drawing on a comprehensive literature review to support a meta-theoretical approach, we developed a theoretical essay.

The body is not only a field of studies but a mean of study as well. The embodied practice-based research is an inquiry style to access the tacit texture of social action and cognition.

Embodied practice-based research may impact qualitative researchers’ education and the way to report methodological proceedings and data report.

The core contribution of the paper is the introduction of a new research style able to change how researchers’ bodies may be used in qualitative management research.

One of the urgent questions in the field of diversity is the knowledge about effective diversity practices. This paper aims to advance our knowledge on organizational change toward diversity by combining concepts from diversity studies and organizational learning.

By employing a social practice approach to organizational learning, the author will be able to go beyond individual learning experiences of diversity practices but see how members negotiate the diversity knowledge and how they integrate their new knowledge in their day-to-day organizational norms and practices. The analysis draws on data collected during a longitudinal case study in a financial service organization in the Netherlands.

This study showed how collective learning practices took place but were insufficiently anchored in a collective memory. Change agents have the task to build “new” memory on diversity policies and gender inequality as well as to use organizational memory to enable diversity policies and practices to be implemented. The inability to create a community of practice impeded the change agenda.

Future research could expand our knowledge on collective memory of knowledge on diversity further and focus on the way employees make use of this memory while doing diversity.

The current literature often tends to analyze the effectiveness of diversity practices as linear processes, which is insufficient to capture the complexity of a change process characterized with layers of negotiated and politicized forms of access to resources. The author would argue for more future work on nonlinear and process-based perspectives on organizational change.

The contribution is to the literature on diversity practices by showing how the lack of collective memory to “store” individual learning in the organization has proven to be a major problem in the management of diversity.

While quantification and performance measurement have proliferated widely in academia and the business world, management and organization scholars increasingly agree on the need for a more in-depth focus on the complex dynamics embedded in the construction, use and effects of quantitative measures (pertaining to the thread of research called ethnostatistics). This paper develops a pluralistic method for conducting ethnostatistical research in organizational settings. Whilst presenting practical techniques for conducting research in live settings, it also discusses how historical approaches which focus on source criticism and contextual reconstruction could overcome the limitations of ethnostatistics.

The methodological approach of this paper encompasses an in-depth discussion of the ethnostatistical method, its underlying assumptions and its methodological limitations. Based on this analysis, the authors propose a pluralistic method (model) for conducting ethnostatistical research in organizational settings based on the integration of 1) research practices employed by one of the authors conducting ethnostatistical research in a large multinational organization and 2) best practices from ethnographic and historical research.

This paper suggests how historical approaches can successfully join ethnostatistical enquiries in an attempt to overcome some limitations in existing conventional methods. The developed framework explores four levels of analysis (ethnography, statistics at work, rhetoric of statistics and history of statistics) and suggests practical approaches for each level that can contribute to strengthening the research output and overcoming limitations when using ethnostatistics.

This paper contributes to the ethnostatistical field by discussing the intersection between history and ethnography and the ways for their complementary use in organizational and management research on quantification processes. As such it offers unique insights and hands-on experience from conducting ethnostatistical enquiries in live organizational settings.

This study aims to make visible the dynamic nature of leader–member exchange (LMX) in the changing realm of health-care leadership.

The qualitative study used an open questionnaire, which was distributed amongst nursing staff and managers at a Finnish public university hospital.

The participants described partly LMX theory, but the leader-member relationship was also influenced by the organizational culture and the existing management practices. Nursing staff were found to have a more variable and dynamic role in the LMX relationship than has previously been reported. The research therefore provided novel information for the field of health-care research.

The presented research was limited by the content of the data, as the collected single narratives were rather short; however, the fact that a large number of narratives were collected from diverse participants strengthened the ability to reliably answer the research questions.

Although the participants described partly LMX theory, the leader–member relationship is also influenced by the organizational culture and existing management practices; the finding that nurses have more variable roles in LMX relationships in the health-care context was new insight in this field. Therefore, the presented findings can help decision-makers change the current, perhaps antiquated, leadership practices at health-care organizations.

This study provides new insight into the field of LMX research in terms of the important role of nursing staff, the organizational factors that influence the LMX relationship and the dynamic nature of LMX relationships.

Sharing information about work processes has proven to be difficult. This applies especially to information shared from those who participate in a process to those who remain outsiders. The purpose of this article is to increase understanding of how professionals document their work practices with a focus on information making by analysing how archaeologists document their information work in archaeological reports.

In total 47 Swedish archaeological reports published in 2018 were analysed using close reading and constant comparative categorisation.

Even if explicit narratives of methods and work process have particular significance as documentation of information making, the evidence of information making is spread out all over the report document in (1) procedural narratives, (2) descriptions of methods and tools, (3) actors and actants, (4) photographs, (5) information sources, (6) diagrams and drawings and (7) outcomes. The usability of reports as conveyors of information on information making depends more on how a forthcoming reader can live with it as a whole rather than how to learn of the details it recites.

The study is based on a limited number of documents representing one country and one scholarly and professional field.

Increased focus on the internal coherence of documentation and the complementarity of different types of descriptions could improve information sharing. Further, descriptions of concepts that refer to work activities and the situation when information came into being could similarly improve their usability.

There is little earlier research on how professionals and academics document and describe their information activities.

This paper details how we adapted a critically informed third-year career management and development course to address an identified gap in our Human Resource Management students learning at both practical and theoretical levels. In order to address this gap, we explored and challenged the aims of our critically informed pedagogy, and alongside our campus career development services, collaboratively redesigned the course to enhance theoretical and practical learning outcomes of students.

We detail changes made through three stages of curriculum redesign and provide an exploratory analysis of 106 student reflections on the third iterative redesign. This exploratory analysis focuses on student learning outcomes resulting from their engagement with the career practitioner and the revised course content.

Students found the course theoretically challenging and practically relevant and were readily able to incorporate career theory into descriptions of their own careers. However, more significantly, students were also able to situate themselves within a wider critique of the context of careers, demonstrating the development of critical reasoning skills and moving towards practical and critical action, demonstrating praxis.

Our experience provides an example of bridging the seeming paradox of critical pedagogy and practice. Specific details of curriculum design may be of interest to those looking to improve both theoretical and practice engagement.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of accountability in times of exception. The Italian government's account-giving practices are critically analysed with respect to the distinct modes in which duties of accountability are discharged for the exceptional measures taken during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in early 2020.

This paper draws on an exploratory case study. The case analysis draws primarily on data obtained through publicly available documents and covers the period between January 1 and August 7, 2020.

The paper reveals that the Italian government employed various accountability styles (rebuttal, dismissal, reactive, proactive and coactive). Each style influenced both how the government justified its conduct and how it sought to form distinctive relationships with social actors.

The paper uses the notion of “styles of accountability” to empirically illustrate how an unprecedented public governance challenge can reveal broader accountability trends. The paper contributes to accountability research by elucidating how governments tackle ambiguity and uncertainty in their systems of public accountability in extraordinary times.

In this study, the authors develop knowledge and insights on how the perception of interestingness influences the structure and focus of conversations in entrepreneurial education (EE) research. In particular, the authors elaborate on what is perceived as interesting among different subgroups of EE researchers, and not least, how EE researchers can identify and engage in scholarly conversation within the field.

The study is based on a unique database with web-based responses from 465 EE researchers from around the world. The authors conduct analyses of both open-ended and closed questions. The open-ended questions are analyzed by inductive categorization. The closed questions are subject to factor and cluster analyses.

The findings suggest that EE research is a topic-oriented field, characterized by a strong focus on novel and challenging research issues. In addition, the field is individualistic and fragmented, and the perception of interestingness differs between five subgroups of EE researchers, whose members have a somewhat different perception of interestingness. Accordingly, the authors also find different core conversations going on within the field. Obviously, these conversations tend to be triggered by the field's obsession with novelty and challenging research, but several conversations are related to practically relevant research, as well as methodological and theoretical discussions.

This is the first study to elaborate on the perception of interestingness among EE researchers and the conversations going on within the field. In the study the authors have explored the characteristics of EE research based on the perception of interestingness among the researchers within the field. In this respect, this study contributes insights on how current and aspiring EE researchers can find and build scholarly conversations embedded in passionate interest, while concurrently disseminating and accumulating knowledge on EE together with like-minded peers.