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This paper reviews what has been written on leadership development from the leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) perspective, which views leadership as emerging in everyday activities and interactions of a collective in a specific context. This paper aims to deepen the theoretical understanding of how leadership can be learned and developed from the L-A-P perspective.

An integrative literature review was undertaken to review and synthesise what has been written on the topic in journal articles and scholarly books.

The importance of the context and the practices that are embedded in it is the most central aspect affecting leadership development from the L-A-P perspective. This places workplace leadership development centre stage, but several papers also showed that leadership programmes have an important role. Not only collective capacity building is emphasised in the papers, but the importance of individual-level leader development is also recognised.

The contribution of this study is twofold: First, it brings the currently fractured information on L-A-P development together to enhance theory building by providing a synthesis of the literature. Second, a conceptual framework is constructed to show how the L-A-P perspective on leadership development can take both leadership development at the collective and individual levels into account, as well as the learning that takes place either inside or outside the workplace. This study’s results and framework show that the development has its own specific purpose and suggested methods in both levels, in both learning sites.

This paper aims to explore how historical context influences the content and selection of rhetorical legitimation strategies. Using case study method, this paper will focus on how insurance companies and labor tried to defend their legitimacy in the context of enactment of Medicare in the USA. What factors influenced the strategic (rhetorical) decisions made by insurance companies and labor unions in their institutional work?

The study is empirically grounded in archival research, involving an analysis of over 9,000 pages of congressional hearings on Medicare covering the period 1958–1965.

The authors show that rhetorical legitimation strategies depend significantly on the specific historical circumstances in which those strategies are used. The historical context lent credibility to certain arguments and organizations are forced to decide either to challenge widely held assumptions or take advantage of them. The authors show that organizations face strong incentives to pursue the latter option. Here, both the insurance companies and labor unions tried to show that their positions were consistent with classical liberal ideology, because of high respect of classical liberal principles among different stakeholders (policymakers, voters, etc.).

It is uncertain how much the results of the study could be generalized. More information about the organizations whose use of rhetorics the authors studied could have strengthened our conclusions.

The practical relevancy of the revised paper is that the authors should not expect hegemony challenging rhetorics from organizations, which try to influence legislators (and perhaps the larger public). Perhaps (based on the findings), this kind of rhetorics is not even very effective.

The paper helps to understand better how organizations try to advance their interests and gain acceptance among the stakeholders.

In this paper, the authors show how historical context in practice influence rhetorical arguments organizations select in public debates when their goal is to influence the decision-making of their audience. In particular, the authors show how dominant ideology (or ideologies) limit the options organizations face when they are choosing their strategies and arguments. In terms of the selection of rhetorical justification strategies, the most pressing question is not the “real” broad based support of certain ideologies. Insurance company and labor union representatives clearly believed that they must emphasize liberal values (or liberal ideology) if they wanted to gain legitimacy for their positions. In existing literature, it is often assumed that historical context influence the selection of rhetorical strategies but how this in fact happens is not usually specified. The paper shows how interpretations of historical contexts (including the ideological context) in practice influence the rhetorical strategies organizations choose.

The literature on the past triggering learning in strategy practice is scant. To fill this gap, this study aims to examine the meaning of the past to learning in strategy practice and expands on the strategy-as-practice (SAP) literature. Understanding the relationship between the past and learning in strategy practice is important because learning is what keeps strategy practice in motion and remains in place, even if organizations and strategy practitioners change.

The authors used a longitudinal case study design combined with historical methods to examine how the past is embedded in present strategy practice. To capture learning in strategy practice over time, the authors applied a four-stage methodology in our analysis of document and interview data.

The authors identified four dimensions of the past embedded in the present strategy practice. These dimensions emerged from the analysis of the interviews and document data. The study’s results showed that the past appears in structures and routines, materiality, positioning and reflecting over repeated rounds of strategic planning. According to the study’s results, reflecting on strategy practice draws on past structures and routines, positioning and materiality. The past facilitates reflecting and reflecting on the past enables learning in strategy practice.

The authors constructed a conceptual model and showed that in strategy practice, reflection triggers learning. The authors contributed to theory development by demonstrating how the past is embedded in present strategy practice and is available for use by strategy practitioners. The authors showed that strategy practice is a continuous learning process.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the interplay between human resource management (HRM) and emergent factors in constructing a strong HRM climate. Specifically, the paper aims to shed light on how employee perceptions of the HRM process and emergent factors together construct a strong HRM climate, i.e. employees' shared perceptions of HRM.

The paper uses qualitative interview data (managers and employees) from two organisations operating in Finland. The data are analysed based on a systematic data analysis and gives an illustration of the interplay between high-performance work system and the emergent factors.

The findings illustrate the three types of interplay between HPWS and emergent factors – supplementation, substitution and suffocation – that construct employee experience.

The paper extends earlier discussions on the relationship between HRM and employee experience by empirically examining how the HRM process – together with emergent factors – constructs a strong HRM climate. The present study contributes to further theorising and increasing our understanding of the creation of employee experience.

The paper seeks to examine the manifestation of management paradigms in personnel magazines of Finnish metal and forest industry corporations from the 1930s to recent years.

The research data consist of articles of personnel magazines on management. The articles were analyzed by quantitative and qualitative content analysis.

The findings indicate that normative paradigms, such as industrial betterment, human relations school, and cultural theories, have been discussed in personnel magazines more than rational paradigms, although earlier studies suggest that in general rational management paradigms have been more influential in Finland. The frequent use of normative paradigms can be seen as a tool in enforcing the role of personnel journals in generating a sense of belonging and togetherness among employees. Normative paradigms are also discussed more frequently in the articles that are written from the viewpoint of the worker than those written from the viewpoint of the manager or company.

The study offers empirical evidence on the adoption of management paradigms in different lines of industries. It also shows that personnel magazines provide a rich and interesting source of data that could be used more frequently than has traditionally been the case.

This paper aims to examine when and how the main management paradigms have emerged and prevailed in Finnish management research. It seeks to offer a country‐specific case on the diffusion of management paradigms in the field of management research.

This paper is a historical study that uses quantitative content analysis as a methodology. The data consist of research proposals funded by eight of the largest Finnish funding agencies during the period 1937‐2007. The results obtained from these data are compared to the emergence and prevalence of the paradigms in Finnish academic management education, as depicted by course descriptions obtained from the study guides of eight main Finnish academic institutions that provide graduate level education in management.

Management research and management education do not seem to follow the same patterns of adopting different management paradigms. Management paradigms seem to experience upswings in their patterns of use, on average a decade earlier in management research than in education.

As the position of formal scientific management knowledge varies greatly across countries and historical periods, the study contributes to this line of research by giving a descriptive account of the paradigmatic development of management research schemes in Finland which can be compared and contrasted to the development of management research in other countries. The relevance of the study for management theory‐building is in contemplating the relationships between the actors creating, diffusing and using managerial knowledge.

The purpose of this study is to examine what employee agency entails for psychological contract theory. The paper aims to explore how employee agency manifests itself, how it is reflected in employees' perceptions of their psychological contract obligations, and what it implies for psychological contract theory.

The study draws on a qualitative interview study of employees from the mobile phone content production industry in Finland. The analysis is based on 15 semi‐structured employee interviews, which were supported by a discussion of the interviewees' weekly agendas.

This study reveals that employee agency manifests itself as self‐actualisation, action, influence and creativity, all of which have implications for employees' psychological contracts. Employees emerge as active parties to the psychological contract, consciously modifying and constructing it instead of simply reacting to employer behaviour, as is assumed in current research.

This study contributes to psychological contract theory by providing one of the few empirical attempts to demonstrate how employees actively manage the exchange relationship captured by the psychological contract. It highlights the importance of acknowledging employee agency in future psychological contract research.