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Relationship learning is a topic of considerable importance for industrial networks, yet a lack of empirical research on the impact of relationship governance structures on relationship learning remains. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of relationship governance structures on learning in partnerships.

This paper contributes to the closure of the research gap by examining sample data drawn from 42 interviews on the subject of 199 customer‐supplier relationships within the Finnish metal and electronics industries. As a method, the paper applies cluster analysis and analysis of variance mean‐comparison.

The results of this paper show that balanced hybrid governance structures explain learning in partnerships, which suggests that certain combinations of relationship governance mechanisms (price, hierarchical, and social mechanism) produce the best learning outcomes in partnerships. Results suggest that managers should use hybrid relationship governance structures when governing their supplier partnerships.

The paper has some limitations such as limited sample size, cross‐sectional data, and difficulties due to measuring social phenomenon such as learning. Owing to the interview method being applied, research is bound to apply a sample data drawn from companies that operate in the west coast in Finland. These limitations need to be considered when applying the results.

The results encourage managers to use different governance mechanisms simultaneously when managing their company's supply chain partnerships. The result emphasizes the role of active relationship management.

The paper is one of the first to empirically show that relationship learning is best facilitated by using various relationship governance mechanisms simultaneously. Trust needs to be complemented by hierarchical and possibly by price mechanism.

This paper examines the accountability and governance mechanisms and the challenges in a multi-stakeholder partnership seeking to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a developing country (DC), namely Tanzania.

The paper draws on work on the shift from government to governance to meta-governance to examine the SDGs framework's governance regime. The data stems from documentation, focussed group discussions and face-to-face interviews with key stakeholders involved in the localisation of SDGs in Tanzania.

Despite the emphasis given by promoters of SDGs on the need for multi-stakeholder engagement, and network and market-based governance, Tanzania's hierarchical governance framed in national legislations dominated the localisation of the SDGs. The national-level meta-governance structures were somewhat dysfunctional, partly due to a lack of well-designed coordination mechanisms for collaborative engagement with key stakeholders. The limited involvement of different meta-governors, and particularly network and market-based governance arrangements, has had severe implications for achieving the SDGs in DCs in general and Tanzania, in particular.

The paper calls for a more explicit SDG policy and strategy, alongside strengthening institutional structures and related governance arrangements in Tanzania, to promote the realisation of the SDGs. For the SDGs framework to succeed, the authors suggest that, in addition to adopting SDG friendly policies, the Tanzanian government should devise plans for financial resources, strategies for empowering and engaging with key stakeholders and promote an integrative governance system that underpins accountability at the local level.

Focussing on Tanzania, the paper sheds light on how context in DCs, interactions between state and non-state actors, modes of governance and accountability mechanisms shape the localisation of SDGs and realising the SDGs' agenda. The implementation in Tanzania focussed on priorities in the development plan, thereby neglecting some important SDGs. This raises doubts about the possibility of meeting the SDGs by 2030. The localisation of SDGs remained within the top-down governance structure, as Tanzania's government failed to enact the policy and strategy for multi-stakeholder partnership consistent with the SDGs' principle of “leave no-one behind”. Consequently, meta-governors' efforts and ability to monitor and demand accountability from the government was constrained by the political context, the governance system and regulations enacted to side-line them.

This paper aims to make an empirical contribution by investigating the enforcement mechanisms and governance structures required to protect and govern a regional food product when public certification fails. As one of the recent additions to South Africa’s repertoire of products with a designated origin, Karoo Lamb made for an interesting case study.

A conjoint analysis was conducted to elicit the farmers’ preferred enforcement mechanisms to protect the authenticity of the Karoo Lamb product. The investigation, furthermore, draws on survey data collected among 73 farmers, five abattoirs, two processors/packers and five retail outlets to evaluate the governance structures of the Karoo Lamb supply chain.

The results indicate that due to failed public certification that is governed by market-like structures, Karoo Lamb is better off being governed by hierarchical structures. These structures are expected to allow for a stronger focus on stricter enforcement mechanisms.

At the farm level, the Karoo Lamb supply chain requires better enforcement mechanisms to protect the unique attributes of origin and taste to ensure the authenticity of Karoo Lamb. This change towards stricter enforcement requires more hierarchical structures to allow for private or mutual enforcement mechanisms.

This paper contributes empirically to the governance structure knowledge base by analysing the enforcement mechanisms and governance structures needed to enforce and protect, the quality and origin standards of a region of origin product, Karoo Lamb, in South Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities of workplace democracy in contemporary organisations. While organisational democracy is a popular theme in contemporary management literature, it is often asserted that participatory democracy is impractical and thus representative forms of governance constitute a more appealing and “realistic” option. Such views not only fail to picture workplace democracy beyond procedural principles (e.g. periodical elections), but they also block one of its promising features: its openness to change. In this context, direct democracy that is guided by horizontality and prefiguration may offer more promising grounds in the search for workplace democracy.

The paper exposes the contradictions and limits of representative democracy and traces the debates around hierarchism and horizontality, size and democracy with the aim to focus on its core theme – workplace democracy.

This paper argues that although representative democracy is considered a “realistic” alternative to hierarchical forms of governance it, in fact, reproduces and legitimizes hierarchism. Therefore, organisations can effectively coordinate collective action, without representatives and strict hierarchical structures, by giving emphasis to decentralized networks guided by horizontality and prefiguration.

The paper shows that the current demands for workplace democracy through representation constrains one's imagination of organisational democracy and therefore, one's perception of workplace democracy has to be broadened and radicalized by giving emphasis not only to who rules but also to the process of governance, that is, how to rule.

This paper aims to present insights on the governance of sustainability transitions in higher education in Africa. The authors interrogate the research literatures on the governance of socio-technical transitions in water, electricity, transport and waste management, and identify barriers and enabling factors that enhance transformative practices in universities.

The analytical framework proposed in this paper combines the elements of governance network theory (GNT) and transition topology. The framework of this study is grounded in an actor-centric approach using GNT to understand networks conducive to sustainability transitions. Events and governance networks were mapped on a transition topology to visualise organisational and institutional changes over time. The study engaged students, management, academic and administrative staff in building a community of practice towards sustainability. This research is based on qualitative content analysis grounded in interview data, focus group discussions, workshops, webinars and secondary data analysis.

The findings show that the university has consolidated a sustainability vision and targets, but several factors prevent the community from achieving these targets, including hierarchical decision-making processes, a multitude of disjointed committees and fragmentation in the campus community.

This research adds to an emerging body of literature in the field of sustainability in higher education with two contributions. Firstly, the study presents a novel perspective(s) on the governance of sustainability transitions by combining the literatures on governance and sustainability transitions using a new methodological approach of transition topology to show organisational and institutional changes. Secondly, the study presents new empirical evidence for improving the governance of sustainability transitions in a diverse and highly unequal African university community in the process of (de)colonisation of knowledge and governance.

The purpose of this paper is to study the mechanism through which decisions on the preferred governance mode of strategic technology alliances are made at the firm level.

The author constructed a value‐mediated governance model that is empirically tested through a survey of 57 strategic alliances in the Greek wireless services industry and estimated through a Structural Equation Modeling technique, namely Partial Least Squares.

Quasi‐hierarchy governance modes are preferred by firms assessing their current value as high, and lacking fear of partners' opportunistic behavior. Quasi‐market alliances are preferred by firms having high expectations for the future value of the alliance, and facing high endogenous uncertainty resulting from the existence of a competitive relationship with the partner.

While the resource and cost perspectives are founded on diverse assumptions on firms' ability to write complete contracts, their implications for the firms' decision‐making behaviour on the alliance governance issue seem to be complementary to those of the value perspective.

Transitional governance forms, quasi‐market alliances that evolve to quasi‐hierarchy alliances, seem to be preferred in emerging technology‐based environments.

The Expected Alliance Value concept is introduced to explain how exogenous uncertainty characterizing the environment of emerging technology‐based industries can influence the already investigated effects of the partner uncertainty and the firm's current value on the alliance governance preferences.

With governance networks as the critical emerging feature of public administration, this article examines the structure, governance and challenges of networks in the public sector. Using complexity theory, this article explains that control-based relations do not hold much relevance to govern the complex systems of networks.

Case study research design is employed taking the power network in Pakistan as the unit of analysis. Data were collected through eleven semi-structured interviews, companies' websites, government policy reports and other companies' reports. The structure of the power network was examined through the technique of social network analysis using UCINET. Thematic analysis of interviews was conducted with the help of NVivo 13 to identify the mode of governance and challenges.

The study found that five central public sector actors have a high degree centrality and betweenness centrality. Thematic analysis further revealed that these actors are controlling most of the decisions in the network in a hierarchical mode of governance. Other actors face multiple challenges including lack of autonomy, overlapping authorities, conflicting rules and complex decision processes.

The findings imply that instead of top-down and control-based relations, networks require self-governance mechanisms where actors independently participate and interact with other actors to generate common solutions to problems.

The authorities should use network management strategies, participatory approaches and consensus-building methods to reach decisions.

The study explores the network structure and network governance challenges in the context of a developing country that is barely addressed in the public management literature.

Healthcare organisations exhibit detail and dynamic complexity. It has been argued that discrete event simulation (DES) is ideal for problems exhibiting detail complexity and system dynamics (SD) lends itself naturally to comprehend dynamic complexity. Appreciating the complexity of healthcare, this paper proposes the use of hybrid simulation wherein both SD and DES are integrated symbiotically. The paper further aims to describe how different forms of hybrid simulation can be applied to different modes of governance in UK healthcare.

In order to find different ways that hybrid simulation can be effectively applied to different problem contexts, a literature review has been conducted to find existing hybrid studies. A meta‐review of literature on different modes of governance in UK healthcare has also been conducted.

It has been induced from the literature review that hybrid simulation can be used in three different formats: hierarchical format, process‐environment format, and integrated format. Literature on different modes of governance in UK healthcare further points out that there are three modes of governance in UK healthcare: top‐down performance hierarchical mode, network partnership mode, and quasi‐market mode.

It is believed that hybrid simulation will aid in forming a synergy between strategic and operational management. One of the limitations of this paper is that it does not provide any guidance with respect to technical automation of integration between SD and DES.

This paper proposes the use of hybrid simulation for complex healthcare problems and the way it can contribute towards effective decision making within different modes of governance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which scholars have proposed organizational forms combining elements of markets and hierarchies. These hybrid forms are based on networked connections and bottom‐up entrepreneurship, fostering knowledge sharing among semi‐independent units. Despite their suitability to knowledge‐intensive companies, scholars are divided on their views on governance in internal hybrids. While knowledge management scholars emphasize soft community‐like dimensions, organizational economists seek to reduce opportunism through hard hierarchical governance. Because these views act as complementaries, this paper synthesizes them to present organizational governance in internal hybrids.

A case study with 56 interviews describes the functioning of soft and hard governance mechanisms in the Japanese company Maekawa Manufacturing Ltd.

The case study indicates that soft and hard governance mechanisms work in complementary ways in a successfully implemented internal hybrid.

Internal hybrids tend to function most efficiently with a mix of soft knowledge management practices and hard control devices.

Instead of taking an “either/or” perspective, this paper seeks to synthesize contrasting views of knowledge management and organizational economics.

The French higher education system has experienced reforms since the 2000s that gradually emphasized the executive power of universities and the centralization of decision-making. This culminated with the excellence initiatives (Idex) that concentrated 7.7 billion euros on only nine institutions to create “world-class” universities and made their leaders responsible for the local allocation of this substantial endowment. The universities’ executives had four years to complete changes in governance in order to see their institution permanently awarded the title and the funding of Idex. The hiring process is one of the elements that this policy impacted the most within these universities, enabling leaders to create new kinds of positions and control the hiring process. However, by looking at the hiring practices within three different Idex, we will show that collegiality did not disappear but rather it evolved: in the three cases, the closest colleagues have been marginalized but decision-making remained collective and in the hands of academics chosen by the university executives. Variations in the intensity of this evolution could be observed according to two dimensions. First, the scientific reputation of the university: the higher it is, the less collegiality is transformed. Second, the level of external pressures: the less collegial universities have relaxed their hiring practices after the evaluation that permanently granted them the label of Idex.