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The authors explore the under-researched area of post-decision evaluation in PPPs (public–private partnerships), focusing upon how and whether Post-decision Project Evaluation (PdPE) is considered and provided for in United Kingdom (UK) public infrastructure projects.

The authors’ research design sought insights from overviewing UK PPP planning and more focused exploration of PPP operational practice. The authors combine the extensive analysis of planning documents for operational UK PPP projects with interviews of different stakeholders in PPP projects in one city. Mobilising an open critical perspective, documents were analysed using ethnographic content analysis (ECA) and interviews were analysed using thematic analysis consistent therewith. The authors theorise the absence and ambiguities of PdPE drawing on the sociology of ignorance.

The authors find a long-standing absence and lack of PdPE in PPP projects throughout planning and operational practice, reflecting a dynamic, multi-faceted ignorance. Concerning planning practice, the authors’ documentary analysis evidences a trend in PdPE from its absence in the early years (which may indicate some natural or genuine ignorance) to different levels or forms of weak inclusion later. Regarding this inclusion, the authors find strategic ignorance played a substantive role, involving “deliberate engineering” by both public sector and private partners. Interview findings indicate lack of clarity over PdPE and its under-development in PPP practice, deficiencies again suggestive of natural and strategic ignorance.

The authors draw from the sociology of ignorance vis-à-vis accounting's absence and ambiguity in the context of PPP, contributing to an under-researched area.

Protection motivation theory (PMT) explains that the intention to cope with information security risks is based on informed threat and coping appraisals. However, people cannot always make appropriate assessments due to possible ignorance and cognitive biases. This study proposes a research model that introduces four antecedent factors from ignorance and bias perspectives into the PMT model and empirically tests this model with data from a survey of electronic waste (e-waste) handling.

The data collected from 356 Chinese samples are analyzed via structural equation modeling (SEM).

The results revealed that for threat appraisal, optimistic bias leads to a lower perception of risks. However, factual ignorance (lack of knowledge of risks) does not significantly affect the perceived threat. For coping appraisal, practical ignorance (lack of knowledge of coping with risks) leads to low response efficacy and self-efficacy and high perceptions of coping cost, but the illusion of control overestimates response efficacy and self-efficacy.

First, this study addresses a new type of information security problem in e-waste handling. Second, this study extends the PMT model by exploring the roles of ignorance and bias as antecedents. Finally, the authors reinvestigate the basic constructs of PMT to identify how rational threat and coping assessments affect user intentions to cope with data security risks.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how professionals, like doctors, deal with their ignorance? Which strategies do they apply? How can the organization support activities that encourage dealing with ignorance in a positive way? The paper shows how ignorance can be managed in professional organizations like hospitals.

To explore this touchy subject, the research follows a sequential mixed method design. The advantage of combining research methods is the opportunity to explore an uninvestigated research field. In the first exploratory research sequence (empirical study 1) preliminary questions were defined by means of 43 qualitative semi-structured interviews with hospital physicians and literature analysis. The results of the qualitative content analysis also served as a starting point for the development of a Germany-wide online-questionnaire survey with more than 2,500 physicians (empirical study 2).

The results show that breaks, a lack of negative organizational constraints, collective learning, positive role models and intrinsic motivation have the highest impact on ignorance sharing of physicians in hospitals. In reverse, negative organizational constraints, distrust, a lack of intrinsic motivation and omitting the implementation of evidence-based insights in terms of collective learning have the highest impact on hiding ignorance. These findings help to manage ignorance in a positive way.

Physicians all over the world have to deal with incomplete information and ignorance in their daily work. Mostly, they have no time and/or resources to gather all relevant information before they make a diagnosis or administer a therapy. It is quite evident that scientific discourses on knowledge management and professions mostly emphasize the power of expertise and knowledge, whereas research on ignorance is currently more or less neglected. This paper is one of the first attempts to overcome this research gap.

Attempts to document how different forms of ignorance may evolve in different organizational dialogues and become embedded in organizational context. Develops the four primary forms of ignorance based on the research from social psychology, public opinion studies, legal studies, behavioral economics, and clinical psychology. The recognition of the historic interdisciplinary evolution of the concept of ignorance plays an important role in the knowledge economy and learning organizations. If management is not aware of the various latent forms of organizational ignorance, it is difficult to develop meaningful innovation programs for organizations in the twenty‐first century. Develops a framework to address the issue of “not knowing what one does not know” (i.e. ignorance of ignorance) that may be the biggest barrier for organizations to becoming an active participant in the knowledge economy.

The purpose of this paper is to identify individual variables with an impact on knowledge sharing and explore the under-discussed construct of employees’ ignorance. This can enhance the knowledge-sharing process and facilitate the development of greater intellectual capital.

Eighty-four dependent variables affecting knowledge sharing are analyzed and classified into 11 categories. In addition, the direct effect of employees’ ignorance on knowledge sharing is introduced and empirically investigated in a case study of a multinational organization operating within the aerospace and defense industry.

The findings suggest that employees’ ignorance may negatively affect their intention to share knowledge, thus leading to poor decision-making and communication in organizations. Employees’ ignorance could also limit the organizational ability to repel external threats, implement innovation and manage future risks.

A classification scheme based on different categories of employees’ ignorance is developed, providing tailor-made recommendations for practitioners facing different types of ill-informed organizational scenarios. Further, the need to shift the emphasis away from the management of knowledge to the management of ignorance is also an important contribution of this paper.

This paper examines the historical development of pluralistic ignorance as a construct and its application to organizational studies. Pluralistic ignorance is a social comparison error where an individual holds an opinion, but mistakenly believes that others hold the opposite opinion. Pluralistic ignorance was first developed as an important social construct in the 1920s by social psychologist Floyd Allport, and has been applied to myriad settings in psychology and sociology, including racial segregation, student perceptions of alcohol use, and classroom behavior. Despite work in pluralistic ignorance for over 75 years, it has only recently been applied to management settings. Management scholars have suggested applications of pluralistic ignorance to decision‐making, business ethics, group dynamics, performance appraisal, and burnout. Other management applications are proposed as a means to guide research in pluralistic ignorance in the future.

Pluralistic ignorance is defined as a situation in which an individual holds an opinion, but mistakenly believes that the majority of his or her peers hold the opposite opinion. The purpose of this paper is to refocus attention on pluralistic ignorance as an important, applied, and multilevel concept to organizational researchers by developing a theory of pluralistic ignorance in organizational contexts.

The paper reviews the literature with regard to the causes and consequences (for individuals, groups and organizations) of pluralistic ignorance and develops an integrated understanding of how pluralistic ignorance influences employees and organizations.

The paper finds that pluralistic ignorance is a complex phenomenon that has important consequences for organizations with relation to behavior of individuals.

The development of a model of pluralistic ignorance, with research propositions, will assist researchers seeking to conduct research on this topic.

This paper is original in that it is the first to delineate the processes underlying pluralistic ignorance in a managerial/organizational context.

The purpose of this study is to examine individual differences in the susceptibility to pluralistic ignorance of avoidance among Japanese by measuring the value of social harmony.

Two studies were conducted to examine the effects of a concern for social harmony on pluralistic ignorance of conflict avoidance among Japanese, hypothesizing that the pluralistic ignorance of avoidance will occur more frequently among those with a low regard for the value of social harmony than those with a high regard.

Consistent with the hypothesis, pluralistic ignorance occurred only among Japanese participants with a low regard for the value of social harmony and not among those who valued it highly.

These findings suggest that those who have a different stance from the cultural value feel a normative pressure by the biased perception of others' behavior due to pluralistic ignorance, which, as a result, works to preserve the predominant cultural value.

The ideal worker norm refers to the belief that employees can and should be singularly devoted to work. Our purpose is to understand the extent to which workers buy into various components of ideal work and how unpopular components of the ideal worker norm persist. We hypothesize they persist, at least in part, because of pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance entails situations in which most people privately reject a norm, but incorrectly assume others accept it.

Drawing on original survey data, we examine the extent to which US workers subscribe to a range of factors described in the ideal work literature. We test the pluralistic ignorance hypothesis by comparing workers’ agreement with, and their perceptions of their coworkers’ agreement with, these factors.

We find workers embrace some components of ideal work. Yet, regardless of gender or parental status, they dislike those components that involve working extremely long hours and prioritizing work at the expense of personal or family life. In addition, regardless of gender or parental status, workers experience pluralistic ignorance with respect to those components that involve prioritizing work at the expense of personal or family life.

Our findings suggest that researchers distinguish between different components of ideal work. They also suggest that everyone – not just women or parents – desire work–family balance. Lastly, because people often behave in ways that are congruent with what they mistakenly believe to be the norm, our findings suggest workers may unintentionally perpetuate family-unfriendly workplace standards.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how professionals learn from varying experiences with errors in health-care digitalization and develop and use negative knowledge and digital ignorance in efforts to improve digitalized health care.

A two-year qualitative field study was conducted in the context of a public health-care organization working with digital patient communication. The data consisted of participant observation, semistructured interviews and document data. Inductive coding and a theoretically informed generation of themes were applied.

The findings show that both health-care and digital communication professionals learn through experiences with digital “rule-” and “knowledge-based” errors in patient communication and develop negative knowledge and awareness of digital ignorance. In their joint efforts, they use negative knowledge to “bend the rules” and to explore digital ignorance in efforts to improve patient communication.

This study provides insight into the importance of collaboration between professionals with varying experience of errors in digitalizing patient communication. Such collaboration is required to acknowledge own shortcomings and create complementary negative knowledge to improve digital patient communication. This is particularly important when working with innovative digitalization in health care.