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Fair value issues remain central to the pace of convergence in international accounting standards. This article identifies a fundamental issue at the root of the fair value debate, places the issue in an international and historical context, and recommends that standard-setters work to rationalize principles of accounting for money.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.

Employee involvement (EI) is a major part of high-performance work systems (HPWS) that have successfully transformed a large number of organizations and have become standard practice in many new organizations. Despite the proven benefits of EI, however, it is still not as widely utilized as it could be even when accounting for industry and organization differences in its applicability. We suggest that EI implementation is limited in part by the change management challenges it presents. We review the recent research on EI and HPWS, and suggest ways in which change research and theory can inform our understanding of why EI practices have fallen short of their potential and how they can be effectively implemented.

Creativity and innovation are important for fulfilling organizational goals. In understanding ways to enhance creativity research has moved on from understanding individual creativity, to an organizational analysis of successful firms that encourage creativity. However, an additional source of creativity stems from direct and indirect leadership and the decisions leaders make to enhance creativity throughout the organization. This chapter examines creativity in film and television as influenced by leadership activities at the organization, team, and individual level and describes lessons learned.

This chapter investigates the presence of a difference in the systemic risk level between Islamic and conventional banks in Bangladesh. The authors compare systemic resilience of three types of banks: fully fledged Islamic banks, purely conventional banks (CB), and CB with Islamic windows. The authors use the market-based systemic risk measures of marginal expected shortfall and systemic risk to identify which type is more vulnerable to a systemic event. The authors also use ΔCoVaR to identify which type contributes more to a systemic event. Using a sample of observations on 27 publicly traded banks operating over the 2005–2014 period, the authors find that CB is the least resilient sector to a systemic event, and is the one that has the highest contribution to systemic risk during crisis times.

This chapter contributes to the Public Value (PV) literature in relation to accounting by providing evidence on its content's operationalization through performance measurement. In particular, it establishes the link with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which may work as guiding principles of a public organization’s action. Accordingly, organizations embedding SDGs include them in their strategic decisions and disclose them through performance measurement and narratives.

The SDGs' presence is explored in the PV of a sample of Italian health institutes through documentary analysis of their performance plans. The aim is to verify if and how SDGs are pursued and whether the COVID-19 pandemic has affected PV content.

Besides Goal No. 3 (Health), the PV content of the investigated institutes contains various SDGs. Before the pandemic, their PV was aligned with SDGs mainly related to prosperity, economic growth and social inclusion. In the following period, the number of SDGs increased, introducing planet and environmental protection dimensions. No one explicitly mentions pursuing SDGs, revealing a non-institutionalized sensitivity of managers towards SDGs. The analysis distinguishes between ‘core’ SDGs, revealed mostly by traditional performance measures disclosing the achievement of institutes' mission, and ‘complementary’ SDGs, expressed mostly through narratives. This can derive from performance measurement, which employs the language of performativity, while the contribution to society is relegated in the narratives, making them less incisive.

Microfoundations of institutions are central to constructing place – the interplay of location, meaning, and material form. Since only a few institutional studies bring materiality to the fore to examine the processes of place-making, how material forms interact with people to institutionalize or de-institutionalize the meaning of place remains a black box. Through an inductive and historical study of Boston’s North End neighborhood, the authors show how material practices shaped place-making and institutionalized, or de-institutionalized, the meaning of the North End. When material practices symbolically encoded meanings of diverse audiences into the church, it created resonance and enabled the building’s meanings to withstand environmental change and become institutionalized as part of the North End’s meaning as a place. In contrast, when the material practices restricted meaning to a specific audience, it limited resonance when the environment changed, was more likely to be demolished and, thus, erased rather than institutionalized into the meaning of the North End as a place.

In this paper, we argue that work should be recognized as “commons.” We call for a new approach to how managers define their role and responsibility regarding the problem of work flexibility and of its societal implications. We argue that, in the global and digitized economy, it is in the best interest of all the company’s stakeholders that managers choose combinations of work arrangements and human resource policies considering the externalities of these decisions. Managers’ responsibility spans to the costs and risks that the broader social system of organizational stakeholders will bear because of their decisions. When labor market institutions are “thin,” it is management’s responsibility to contribute structuring and shaping them, so that the interests of workers, independent of the work arrangements, are considered.