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This paper asks the question of whether more environmental uncertainty affects the design of performance measurement systems in terms of a greater variety of performance measures and whether this leads to more management satisfaction with the performance measurement system and improved firm performance.

Information processing theory is used to frame the hypotheses and findings. A questionnaire was sent to the 300 largest companies in Iceland, where environmental uncertainty has been prevalent.

The results indicate that increased uncertainty leads to a larger variety of non-financial performance measures, such as customer measures. A positive relationship is found between management satisfaction with the performance measurement system and firm performance. However, the variety of performance measures was not linked to management satisfaction or firm performance.

The results suggest that managers increase the variety of performance measures when uncertainty increases. However, it is not the variety itself that increases management satisfaction or improves firm performance.

Performance measurement design is affected by environmental uncertainty. Managers focus on important stakeholder groups such as customers under such conditions and can consult research and practice for the purpose of customer relationship management and customer profitability measurement to improve measurement selection.

This work focusses on performance measurement system design, examining the use of more than 50 different performance measures, and differentiates between small and medium-sized firms and between service and non-service firms.

Competence, credibility, image and integrity all came under scrutiny during the economic crisis in Iceland. This period was not just about the financial system, it was about trust, something the Icelandic economy and individual businesses in the country lost in the wake of the crash. Reykjavík Energy, an Icelandic power- and utility-company, was one such company. In the year leading up to the economic crisis, mistrust in Reykjavík Energy had taken root and the firm’s image was already under attack. When its external debt doubled in the crash with the depreciation of the Icelandic króna, it was clear that the company’s position was unsustainable. In the years following the crisis, the rebuilding of the public’s trust in Reykjavík Energy has been a demanding task. The project of restoring trust and strengthening the firm was two-fold. On the one hand, short-term measures that were necessary to keep the company alive were taken. On the other hand, work was done to develop the foundations for long-term results and sustainable management. Reykjavík Energy, to a large extent, has now reclaimed its position in the eyes of its stakeholders. However, trust is not a constant but something that is earned over time and the challenge for the future is therefore to maintain it while learning from the past.

The enormous financial losses during the economic crash in Iceland led to widespread anxieties, coupled with a deep sense of shared national disaster and moral collapse (Bernburg, 2015; Ólafsson, 2014). The strong sense of betrayal indicates how economic processes are not only about economic prosperity, but are embedded also in wider societal discourses and a sense of national identity (Schwegler, 2009). We use perspectives from anthropology and cultural economics to ask how the lack of trust by the Icelandic population after the crash signals both a different way of visualising Iceland’s role within an increasingly global world and a changing sense of Icelanders as national subjects standing unified against foreigners. Iceland’s neo-liberalisation inserted the country into global institutions and processes with the faith that these processes would automatically be beneficial to Iceland. Furthermore, the sense of some kind of a unified Icelandic subject was manifested in the image of the ‘Business Viking’, which was seen as embodying the interest of the Icelandic nation as a whole. Following the economic crash, the betrayal of trust involved disrupting the idea of the ‘oneness’ of Iceland and thus, the sharp distinction between ‘us’ Icelanders and ‘those’ foreigners. In our discussion, we trace different ways of conceptualising this sense of Icelanders as a unified entity, asking what this notion means in terms of trust. Our research shows how the sense of ‘unified Icelanders’ was instrumental in creating the feeling of trust, and how it is possible to manipulate and appropriate that trust.

This paper investigates the use of management controls when environmental uncertainty and hostility increase abruptly. Specifically, it explores this in the context of the 2008 financial crisis in six banks located in two countries.

The paper is based on 26 qualitative interviews with selected managers employed by the six banks. Eight interview guides were developed based on the typology of controls in Malmi and Brown (2008). Respondents explained which changes in management controls occurred after the crisis.

Both organic and mechanistic management controls were mobilized at the same time to deal with the change. The use of controls played three main roles: (1) guide and control behavior, (2) change internal and external perceptions and (3) discharge accountability. Finally, control use during a crisis evolves as individual managers design and implement controls. There is no “grand design” rationally guiding the design of the overall system of controls.

The use of management controls in dealing with an increase in uncertainty and hostility cannot be labeled either organic or mechanistic, but will depend on the specific type of change in environmental characteristics. Management controls evolve by interaction with outside actors, as well as internal techniques.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of knowledge management (KM) on value creation in Icelandic service firms. The aim is to examine how KM contributes to value creation, and measure the ways in which KM affects intangible assets, such as customer capital, innovation, and human capital.

The authors propose a survey approach conducted in 2007 among 222 firms (46.1 percent response rate). Of these firms 97 had KM programmes in place and this paper is based on these firms. Service firms were 60 percent of the firms that had implemented KM.

The findings of the study show that firms with KM report more value creation in the fields of customer capital, innovation and human capital compared to firms that have not introduced KM. This indicates that KM has a positive impact on intangible assets in firms, but given the few firms involved in the survey, findings need to be interpreted with care.

The findings of the study have highly practical implications for managers and researchers, as KM programmes seem to enhance the creation of intangible assets so vital for the competitive advantage of firms in a knowledge economy.

The paper analyses the effect on value creation of knowledge management in Icelandic service firms.

Within entrepreneurship research there is an increased interest in investigating the nexus between venture opportunities and enterprising individuals (Venkataraman, 1997; Shane & Venkataraman, 2000; Eckhardt & Shane, 2003; Sarasvathy, Dew, Velamuri, & Venkataraman, 2003). The move is towards the understanding of why and when opportunities emerge, why only some individuals identify and exploit these opportunities, and how different conditions influence the means of their exploitation.

Following the collapse of the banking system in October 2008, the Icelandic authorities attempted to restore confidence in the country’s institutions, improve their functioning and gradually improve the country’s credit rating. The authorities took ownership of an International Monetary Fund-sponsored economic programme that managed to turn the macroeconomic development around when, following a trough in the summer of 2010, an economic expansion started that has continued ever since. They applied for membership in the European Union in order to show their commitment to be part of the international economic community and to have a lender of last resort in the European Central Bank in future crises. The causes of the collapse were investigated and many bankers were prosecuted. Finally, financial regulations were made stricter and the structures of the Central Bank and the supervisory authority were changed for the better. The net effect was to lower the credit default swap rate on the government’s debt, gain access to capital markets and make the Iceland story one of resurrection rather than only hubris and collapse.

The purpose of this paper is to establish a baseline for the study of offshore outsourcing in Iceland. After an extensive search to identify any paper (English or Icelandic) that dealt with this topic turned up empty, it was decided that a comprehensive work was necessary to provide an opportunity for future comparative research.

Data were secured by interviewing the chief information officers (CIOs) or equivalent officers of the 11 largest corporations (by Icelandic standards). A checklist was used to focus the initial question session, and then the CIOs were permitted, and encouraged, to muse about their information technology (IT) operations. Insights were gathered on a set of problems, and some of those identified problems were quite unexpected.

Ten trends are identified consisting of aspects of: the difficulty of hiring qualified labor in‐country; establishment of strategy resides entirely within the IT management; security remains a serious concern; offshore subcontractors sometimes place their employees within Icelandic companies; mid‐ and upper‐level employees who can strategically develop networks and systems are in strong demand; use of information system (IS)/IT standards for information security is mostly voluntary; generally, the establishment of IS/IT strategy does not remain with board of directors; virtually all Icelandic corporations engage in, or have engaged in, outsourcing over the past five years (11 sub‐trends are identified); and the business school curricula is inadequate to the needs of Icelandic corporations with respect to IT demands.

Comparisons among Nordic and other small nations are not addressed. Virtually, every trend noted should be followed up with additional study. This paper is designed to establish baseline of current offspring activity in Iceland. It is by no means a definitive study.

Many research threads are identified and opened for future work. Academic programs can use this paper as motivation for modifications in existing programs and the creation of new one that better satisfies corporate needs.

Prior to this paper, there is no information available on the state of IT offshoring in the country of Iceland. A benchmark is now established against which future research can be measured.

In this study, we analyze sport as a cultural product of a particular place. We use the concept of “tradition” to highlight the collective (as opposed to individual) aspects of sport, emphasizing the importance of temporality, emergence, and novelty in social processes. We conducted a case study of internationally successful Icelandic men’s team handball that provides an interesting topic in this respect. Our findings challenge decades of research on sport that has stressed innate talent, individual qualities or physiological processes rather than the sociocultural processes. They support the interactionist approach to culture showing how local culture, rooted in specific interaction settings, influences the formation and development of a successful sport tradition. It is the way that cultural elements interact and combine in various networks that is crucial for national variations in playing sport. The social processes involved are best captured by Mead’s concepts of emergence, novelty, and the principle of sociality. These concepts help us to explain how unique national styles of playing sports derive from general cultural and social mechanism that interact to produce emergent and novel national variations. Our findings also support and extend earlier work on craftsmanship indicating that crafts-work, which is a part of an organized community resembling the old “workshop,” explains in part how innovations originate in sport-specific and other local networks. These theories offer a sociological extension of pragmatic theories of learning, emphasizing the group in the tradition of Mead.

The purpose of this paper is to model SME board configurations and then to examine empirically their diversity. Polarity in corporate board research around two primary tasks (control and service/strategy), neither captures comprehensively the range of SME board types, based on what they actually do, nor elucidates how boards configure and why. SME heterogeneity is problematic for understanding how the triumvirate of power and control – owners, directors and executives – governs in such firms.

Survey research is used to examine 186 French private SMEs. Factorial and cluster analyses are used to classify board configurations according to board task performance.

Results reveal six different board types among small firms. The findings indicate that both organisational and board design need to be adjusted to align with the differentiation between the ownership and the management, and between the ownership and the directorship. The greater the differentiation between these power/control functions in response to increased internal and/or external contingencies, the more varied will be the board’s portfolio of tasks, with implications for the director capabilities and board competence.

The research extends SME board governance theory and practice by bringing greater clarity to the field of board task performance in SMEs. It provides insights into explicit board task-related configurational behaviour through recognising the degree of differentiation between the triumvirate power/control functions at the apex of the small firm. SME boards in the sample show not just a single configuration but a combination from a portfolio of tasks with different emphases on each according to their circumstances. This finding implies that a particular type of board may select a task, or set of tasks, from the portfolio, depending on the nature of the SME in terms of its proximity – whether it is characterised more by specificity or by denaturation. Further research is needed to understand the variation in these configurations over time in response to internal and external contingencies and what board emphases and processes are involved in transitioning through these evolutions.

The findings are important because the extent of knowledge about what the configuration comprises will determine how effectively a board will execute its tasks. This knowledge is useful in helping boards place emphasis on how best to concentrate their efforts on creating value for the SME, by selecting an effective combination of tasks from a given board configuration depending on their circumstances.

The research extends SME board governance theory and practice by bringing greater clarity to the field of board task performance in SMEs. It provides insights into explicit board task-related configurational behaviour through recognising the degree of differentiation between the triumvirate power/control functions at the apex of the small firm.