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In many public sector reform processes, employees’ roles as professional experts are shifting toward more entrepreneurial and market-oriented roles, a change that entails a shift in the demands made of these employees. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the reflections, considerations, and experiences of such employees regarding the spaces of possibility open to them in which to act in accordance with this new role.

Two ethnographic studies were carried out in drug and alcohol treatment services and in city and business development in the Danish welfare system.

Although the areas of investigation are not related in their daily practices, the authors trace similar responses to the demands made of their respective employees as their role shifts from that of professional experts to include more entrepreneurial aspects. The authors observe that employees are often eager to align new demands and practices, and the authors identify various challenges in respect of the structural public set-up of these services, which often leaves the employees to operate in what could be described as a “twilight zone” between the public and the private.

While scholars often have accounted for situations where such pluralistic roles create conflict, the authors also answer calls to capture moments of synergy where tensions of role paradox are constructively exploited. In this process of ongoing production, images of hierarchy and bureaucracy, rather than merely casting shadows over more bottom-up process of entrepreneurship, are actively used, alongside images of entrepreneurship, in the mutual construction of different roles and the constantly shifting relationality between them, conflicting or synergetic. The definitions and interpretations of the role of the public sector employee are not entirely fixed, but rather subject to ongoing (re)construction in the daily workings of public organizations.

This chapter describes the complementary benefits of model-building and data analysis using algorithm and statistical modeling methods in the context of unobtrusive marketing field experiments and in transforming findings into isomorphic-management models. Relevant for marketing performance measurement, case-based configural analysis is a relatively new paradigm in crafting and testing theory. Statistical testing of hypotheses to learn net effects of individual terms in MRA equations is the current dominant logic. Isomorphic modeling might best communicate what executives should decide using the findings from algorithm and statistical models. Data testing these propositions here uses data from an unobtrusive field experiment in a retailing context and includes two levels of expertise, four price points, and presence versus absence of a friend (“pal” condition) during the customer-salesperson interactions (n = 240 store customers). The analyses support the conclusion that all three approaches to modeling provide useful complementary information substantially above the use of one or the other alone and that transforming findings from such models into isomorphic-management models is possible.

For knowledge exchange systems to yield best organizational benefits, it is acknowledged that employees have to both contribute with and apply system content. This may be of particular importance in distributed environments due to limitations in alternative channels for knowledge exchange. This study investigates the effects of the gap between contribution and application on the degree of knowledge exchange within and between organizational borders and work locations.

The study is based on survey data involving 2204 respondents from a large petroleum operator company and eight of its main contractors.

An increase in the gap between contribution and application is accompanied with reduced levels of knowledge exchange between organizational borders and work locations, but has no effects on knowledge exchange between employees of the same organization working at the same location. This is explained by the availability of substitute channels for local knowledge exchange.

Knowledge exchange systems research and practice have to focus on both knowledge contribution and knowledge application as fundamental processes, and should further consider organizational structure as an important factor.

Most research on contribution and application of content in knowledge exchange systems focuses on knowledge exchange within company boundaries. This study systematically investigates the effects of the gap between contribution and application of system content at different levels of organizational distribution, and thus extends existing research by introducing organizational distribution as a conditioning variable for successful knowledge management.

This paper aims to summarise a contribution to the International Comparative Social Enterprise Models (ICSEM) Project from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It particularly highlights the relevance of the social constructionist approach adopted in the study to investigate and make sense of the social enterprise concept as an imported concept in a new environment.

This approach is used as a thread to follow through the structure proposed by the ICSEM Project, namely, to look at the concept in context, to identify social enterprise models and establish a typology, as well as to describe institutional trajectories shaping the models. This paper highlights the constructs and institutional trajectories shaping the concept, and the main findings of the study when identifying the models and establishing the typology, based on an in-depth survey of 12 social enterprises in the UAE.

While this typology can be considered as a preliminary one, it reveals creative recurrent models, with the state and private sector involved as incubators. Although the UAE offers a tax-free environment, the lack of a legal and regulatory system conducive to social enterprises seems to hamper the opportunities for them to develop and scale up.

This contribution is the first study to investigate the ecosystem of social enterprise and its deriving models, and to propose a preliminary typology in the UAE.

This paper aims to examine the impact of the auditor's characteristics on bank's earnings management (EM) through loan loss provisions (LLP) for African banks.

This study is based on 360 bank-year observations from 14 African countries for the period 2011–2016, discretionary LLP is used as proxy for EM. Panel regressions have been conducted.

The authors' findings reveal that auditor's industry specialization and tenure exert a negative and significant influence on the extent of LLP-based EM. The results also show that total fees paid to the banks' auditors are positively related to the extent of EM. In a further analysis, the authors find that industry specialist auditors are more effective in reducing the incoming-increasing. Similarly, the positive relationship previously found between EM and total fees still holds only for income-increasing. Moreover, auditor tenure negatively impacts both income-increasing and income-decreasing EM. As for auditor change, results reveal differential effect on EM.

The current research extends prior literature and provides an understanding of an important external monitoring mechanism, the external audit, within African banks. To the best of the authors' knowledge, there is a paucity of cross-country studies that has addressed the influence of auditors' attributes on banks' EM in Africa.

This paper aims to shed light on how offshore wind park business networks can orchestrate dynamic capabilities to enable innovation for the competitive advantage of renewable offshore wind energy.

The research is based on a qualitative multiple-case study of operation and maintenance activities in offshore wind parks, starting in June 2014 with a pilot qualitative case study and the main qualitative multiple-case research conducted via in-depth interviews with 20 enterprises. The preliminary findings were presented for the qualitative triangulation of comments in a seminar in May 2015.

The findings explain the need for collaboration across the business network through the use of an open innovation platform for orchestrating dynamic signature capabilities in combination with ordinary capabilities. Both locally distributed leadership and central leadership in knowledge creation are necessary ingredients. The model developed from the research findings shows the need to change the competitive advantage criteria within business networks to VRIS (valuable, rare, imitable, substitutable) in contrast to the traditional criteria for individual enterprises of VRIN (valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, non-substitutable).

The research is focused on offshore wind park business networks, and therefore, the generalizability of this qualitative case study to other contexts can be limited. Further research is thus needed to verify the findings.

A three-fold contribution is made to the understanding of the integrated combination of orchestrating dynamic capabilities in the offshore wind energy sector. Business networks, academia and policy bodies are given a model for enacting the competitive advantage of renewable offshore wind energy for the benefit of society.