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Taking a set of studies about business action as the empirical starting-point, this paper looks at the various ways in which action is represented. The overall research question can be stated as follows: how is business action reconstructed in our narratives? The texts analyzed are collected from research on exchange relationships in the field of marketing. To analyze how these texts depict business action, four narrative constructions are focused: space, time, actors, and plots. The categorization and analysis are summarized and followed by a set of concluding implications and suggestions for narrative practice aiming to reconstruct business action in the making.

The purpose of this paper is to show that despite the critical importance of using accurate data when identifying geographic patterns and studying hotspots, few have explored the data quality issues introduced by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software applications. While software manufacturers provide some information about the address matching process, critical details are left out or are buried in technical, and sometimes proprietary, jargon. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

The paper demonstrates, with three datasets of 100 cases each, how the assumptions built into popular GIS software produce systematically missing data during the data importing process commonly referred to as address matching.

Inclusion of directional indicators and zip codes are more important than previously thought. The results highlight the critical need to provide complete descriptions of research methodology. All geographic analyses must be accompanied with: information about the hit rate (percent of cases plotted), details about the software and process used to import tabular crime data, information about the software parameters set for the importation process (geocoding preferences), reference information about the street file used; and, an examination of the missing cases to identify some of the sampling error. When forecasting crime issues or identifying hot spots, analysts must be cognizant of the differential impact this bias will have on the generalizability of the results.

The paper explores previously neglected issues in data quality introduced by GIS software applications.

People reason, learn and persuade in two distinct modes – through stories (narration) and by numbers (calculation). In everyday life narration is privileged over calculation. We understand our lives through narratives, narrating experiences first to ourselves – to convince others – and then to others – to persuade them. However, within the research community, calculating dominates narrating for reasoning, learning and persuading. This is the case for research in both the natural sciences and the social sciences. Although, in the social sciences, narratives are accepted as research inputs (in the form of interview transcripts), less thought has been given to narratives as research outputs. This article looks at the construction of narratives in accounting and management research, where there is now a significant, albeit a minority, interest. Three main issues are discussed: first, the potential for narrative research that identifies forms of argument (or strategizing) in the field; second, the usefulness of aggregating these individual strategizing accounts to construct emergent projects at the organizational level; and, third, the evaluation of this strategizing by revealing how it coalesces in and around key management control processes and events. The research question is “How are narratives best understood, constructed and used as forms of explanation and rhetorical argument in accounting and management research?”

Story‐telling has been identified as a metaphor for management consulting which focuses on the consultant as “impression manager”. The convincing power of strong stories told by consultants is emphasised. In this article management consulting is conceptualised through the metaphor of story‐making, identifying co‐operation and reflection as characteristic features. A specific consultancy process is interpreted as a co‐operative effort between the consultant and the client in which plot lines and characters are constructed. Plots can be opened or closed, and characters can be settled or negotiated. Thus story‐making as a reflective act moves between enhancing reflection and preparing for action.

This study aims to advance both theory and praxis for event portfolio management in cities and destinations. An experiment has been conducted with professional event practitioners in a city to determine their opinions and strategies for balancing value and risk within their event portfolio. The first objective is to rank 14 of the city's recurring events in terms of both value and risk. Second, the events are plotted in a two-dimensional chart of value versus risk with the objective to differentiate between the 14 events. The third objective is to describe the event characteristics that event professionals associate with value and risk.

Results derive from an experiment involving the forced Q-sort procedure and professional event managers from a city renowned as an “event capital”. Empirical evidence is analysed by the constant comparative method of how events are being evaluated by ten professionals working for a DMO.

Economic impact and image effects are characteristics of high-value events as is an opportunity to create relations with event owners for future collaboration. Local community involvement is important for all events. The issue of portfolio fit was a common argument for weak-value events.

Results are based on the opinions of ten DMO employees in one large city. Conclusions help build event portfolio theory.

The results and methods are useful for event strategists and evaluators. In particular, the management of event portfolios and policies covering events in cities and destinations can benefit from the documented method for explicitly balancing risks with perceived value.

A portfolio perspective is also suggested as an approach to analyse the total tourist attractions portfolio of a destination.

Opinions regarding public value and risk by civil servants who work with events have not been studied before. The constant comparative method produces results that can be applied to policies governing events. In terms of theory development, concepts from financial portfolio management, product portfolio management and risk management are used to develop event portfolio design and management, and insights are gained on trade-offs in the process. The plot of the events in a two-dimensional chart of value versus risk clearly differentiated the 14 events and is an original contribution.

This paper aims to construct an approach referred to as “the participatory narrative” for organizational learning in diverse organizations. The approach is grounded in an understanding of organizational learning as the process of social construction which is narratively mediated.

The participatory narrative is constructed theoretically. Additionally, the approach and its potential use are illustrated by means of a practical example.

It is shown that the participatory narrative enables interplay between various perspectives of diverse people. It makes it possible to overcome the temporal and spatial limits of organisational learning situations and helps to question self‐evident assumptions about diverse people and makes such assumptions visible and negotiable.

The application of the participatory narrative is only highlighted with the help of an illustrative example.

The participatory narrative helps to stimulate people's empathetic orientation, which provides a basis for responses to the experiences and world‐views of other people. Thus, it helps people in diverse organizations to learn to become capable of imagining not only their own position but also the position of others.

This article contributes to prior literature by developing an awareness of the narrative mechanisms of language use in the field of organizational learning. The paper shows also that the transformative dynamic of narratively mediated organizational learning lies in the empowering recognition that organization members understand that they are the active authors of the stories.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a tactical approach to cope with the issues related to low availability of repairable machines or systems because of their poor reliability and maintainability. It not only explores the significance of availability, but also embarks upon a step-by-step procedure to earmark a relevant replenishment plan to check the mean time between failure (MTBF) and the mean time to repair (MTTR) efficiently.

The literature review identifies the extent to which availability depends on reliability and maintainability, and highlights the diversified challenges appearing among repairable systems. Different improvement initiatives have been suggested to avoid downtime, after analyzing the failure and repair time data graphically. Relevant plots and growth curves captured the historical deviations and trends along with the time, which further helps to create more robust action plans to enrich the respective reliability and maintainability of machines. During the case study, the proposed methodology has been tested on four SPMs and successfully validated the claims after achieving around a 98 percent availability at the end.

Graphical analysis is the key to developing suitable action plans to enhance the corresponding reliability and maintainability of a machine or system. By increasing the MTBF, the reliability level can be improved and similarly quick maintenance activities can help to restore the prospect of maintainability. Both of these actions ultimately reduce the downtime or increase the associated availability exponentially.

The work revolves around the availability of SPMs. Moreover, SPMs have been divided only into series sub-systems. The testability and supportability aspects have not been considered thoroughly during the fabrication of the approach.

The work focusses on the availability of systems and proposed frameworks that helps to reduce downtime or its associated expenditure, which is generally being ignored. As a case study-based work especially on SPMs in the auto sector this paper is quite rare and will motivate affiliated engineers and practitioners to achieve future breakthroughs.

This paper develops a problematisation of research about intellectual capital (IC) with a view to extending the types of questions that can be posed and explanations that can be given about the roles and effects of IC. The aim is to contribute to the debate on how it is possible and fruitful to study IC.

The paper compares an ostensive and a performative approach to IC research and develops an analysis and critique of ideas in IC research on this basis.

The paper concludes that it is possible and advisable to develop research that has an ambition to understand IC as a concept and not only as an application of a pre‐set idea. It suggests that a performative approach to IC will enhance possibilities of developing new and interesting propositions about how IC works and is involved in organisational and social transformation.

The main implication of this paper is that research in IC can take up new forms of inquiry that will complement and extend the currently used approaches.

To underline that viewing entrepreneurship in the context of shifting career roles and professional identities, gendered organizational life and in the current societal context regarding working life (ageing, gender discrimination) provides us with new lenses and enables us to perceive the entrepreneurial identity as fluid and emergent.

A female entrepreneur's life‐story collected through a narrative interview is applied in the study. In this paper identities, organizations and societies in change form the basis for entrepreneurship. Treating entrepreneurship as a social process constrained by time and place allows it to gain new meanings and understandings of security, reliability, risk‐moderation that it has not previously seen to possess.

The paper presents the connections of time and place for entrepreneurship; first, by demonstrating how entrepreneurship as a phenomenon reflects the time and place of investigation; second, how time and place are applied as important elements in the individual story presented in the paper, and, third, how readings of time and narrative are applied to make sense of entrepreneurship in the story.

The paper suggests that the social context (different times, places as well as, e.g. different roles, social identities and careers) should more frequently be studied within entrepreneurship research.

By portraying entrepreneurship from the non‐economic and non‐heroic standpoint, and reflecting the social changes that surround it, entrepreneurship is potentially made more accessible for a larger number of people.

The paper refuses the research of entrepreneurs as a general overriding, economic category and the quest for the “Theory of Entrepreneurship”.