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The purpose of this article is to address research gaps relating to agency and institutionalism in new institutional theory (NIT) and institutional work (IW) and use the critical sensemaking (CSM) approach to bridge the debates around agency, especially on issues of language and discourse, actor network theory (ANT) and history.

A conceptual analysis of the literature is performed to discuss issues of agency in IW and CSM in organizations, and examples of empirical studies are used to illustrate connectivity, contrast and fusion.

The analysis illustrates points of distance (rather than disconnect), but most importantly, connectivity and the potential for further developments between the literature on IW and CSM.

Discussion around new possibilities to focus on agency has the potential to contribute to humanist thinking about the (agentic) character of organizations and the potential for social change.

The article contributes to the discussion of agency in the organization through a starting point (i.e. CSM) outside of NIT.

Multisited ethnography has primarily been portrayed as a challenge for the following field-worker, with the researcher taking the central role and neglecting research participants also experiencing a multisited nature of their work. The authors argue that literature on multisited ethnography merely discusses multisitedness as a methodological theme. In correspondence, the authors propose to think of multisitedness not just as a methodological theme but also as an empirical theme.

The authors contend etic and emic perspectives to address multisitedness empirically, which enables researchers to compare and contrast the multisited topic of inquiry in academic “outsider” terms with the etic analysis and considering the perspective of the research participants' multisited experiences using the emic perspective. To show the fruitfulness of discussing multisitedness using the complementary etic and emic analysis, the authors present the example of Mennonite entrepreneurial activities in Belize, a heterogeneous group of migrants that established themselves as successful traders and entrepreneurs.

Through an etic multisited ethnographic perspective, the authors compare and contrast four communities of Mennonites in terms of their entrepreneurial activities, technology and energy use. Through an emic perspective, the authors demonstrate how Mennonites, while preferring an in-group focus, navigate their multisited entrepreneurial activities, which require interaction with the outside world.

The authors highlight the value of combining etic–emic reflections to acknowledge and include the multisited nature of many social phenomena as experienced by the research participants.

This paper tests whether Bayesian A/B testing yields better decisions that traditional Neyman-Pearson hypothesis testing. It proposes a model and tests it using a large, multiyear Google Analytics (GA) dataset.

This paper is an empirical study. Competing A/B testing models were used to analyze a large, multiyear dataset of GA dataset for a firm that relies entirely on their website and online transactions for customer engagement and sales.

Bayesian A/B tests of the data not only yielded a clear delineation of the timing and impact of the intellectual property fraud, but calculated the loss of sales dollars, traffic and time on the firm’s website, with precise confidence limits. Frequentist A/B testing identified fraud in bounce rate at 5% significance, and bounces at 10% significance, but was unable to ascertain fraud at the standard significance cutoffs for scientific studies.

None within the scope of the research plan.

Bayesian A/B tests of the data not only yielded a clear delineation of the timing and impact of the IP fraud, but calculated the loss of sales dollars, traffic and time on the firm’s website, with precise confidence limits.

Bayesian A/B testing can derive economically meaningful statistics, whereas frequentist A/B testing only provide p-value’s whose meaning may be hard to grasp, and where misuse is widespread and has been a major topic in metascience. While misuse of p-values in scholarly articles may simply be grist for academic debate, the uncertainty surrounding the meaning of p-values in business analytics actually can cost firms money.

There is very little empirical research in e-commerce that uses Bayesian A/B testing. Almost all corporate testing is done via frequentist Neyman-Pearson methods.

Lean distributed manufacturing (LDM) is being considered as an enabler of achieving sustainability and resilience in manufacturing and supply chain operations. The purpose of this paper is to enhance the understanding of how LDM characteristics affect the resilience of manufacturing companies by drawing upon the experience of food manufacturing companies operating in the UK.

The paper develops a conceptual model to analyse the impact of LDM on the operational resilience of food manufacturing companies. A triangulation research methodology (secondary data analysis, field observations and structured interviews) is used in this study. In a first step, LDM enablers and resilience elements are identified from literature. In a second step, empirical evidence is collected from six food sub-sectors aimed at identifying LDM enablers being practised in companies.

The analysis reveals that LDM enablers can improve the resilience capabilities of manufacturing companies at different stages of resilience action cycle, whereas the application status of different LDM enablers varies in food manufacturing companies. The findings include the development of a conceptual model (based on literature) and a relationship matrix between LDM enablers and resilience elements.

The developed relationship matrix is helpful for food manufacturing companies to assess their resilience capability in terms of LDM characteristics and then formulate action plans to incorporate relevant LDM enablers to enhance operational resilience.

Based on the literature review, no studies exist that investigate the effects of LDM on factory’s resilience, despite many research studies suggesting distributed manufacturing as an enabler of sustainability and resilience.

Approaches to solving sustainability problems require a specific problem-solving mode, encompassing the complexity, fuzziness and interdisciplinary nature of the problem. This paper aims to promote a complex systems’ view of addressing sustainability problems, in particular through the tool of network science, and provides an outline of an interdisciplinary training workshop.

The topic of the workshop is the analysis of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a political action plan. The authors are interested in the synergies and trade-offs between the goals, which are investigated through the structure of the underlying network. The authors use a teaching approach aligned with sustainable education and transformative learning.

Methodologies from network science are experienced as valuable tools to familiarise students with complexity and to handle the proposed case study.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work which uses network terminology and approaches to teach sustainability problems. This work highlights the potential of network science in sustainability education and contributes to accessible material.

This study assesses the impact of marital status towards customer-centric measures in a Canadian ski resort using the importance-performance map analysis (IPMA) as the analytical framework. For the purpose of this paper, the three groups that were assessed included singles, partnership without children and partnership with children as marital status indicators. From the theoretical and especially managerial point of view, knowing the importance and the performance of the relevant ski resort-related customer-centric perceptions is of key importance.

A survey was completed to assess customer-centric measures including customer satisfaction, repurchase intent, value for money, willingness to recommend, overall performance in terms of meeting expectations, relationship quality and skiing service quality. An IPMA was conducted with partial least square-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to assess the importance-performance perceptions of the three marital status groups.

The results indicated that for five of the seven customer-centric measures, there were significant differences between the marital status groups. Overall, singles appeared to have the lowest values in customer-centric measures, whereas respondents living in partnership with children had the highest. This was also the case with the value for money perceptions, although the cost for the ski resort visit was likely to be the highest for the respondents living in partnership with children. There were also differences between the marital status groups in terms of the importance-performance evaluations.

Results of this research have implications for ski resort management as the three marital status groups appear to perceive the customer-centric measures quite differently in the IPMA framework.

The purpose of this contribution is twofold: at the empirical level, it is shown how in the relationship that subjects are encouraged to construct with their bodies major implications for workers' well-being can be found; at a theoretical level, attention is drawn to the importance of framing the different practices workers may display towards digital wellness programmes not just in terms of acceptance or resistance, but also in terms of appropriation.

Empirically, this study concentrates on the pilot study conducted by a large manufacturing firm that decided to implement a digitally assisted corporate wellness programme. The experimentation involves a sample of the company's workers. The 24 participants were interviewed at the beginning, during the programme and at its end, for a total of 69 interviews. Interviews were transcribed and analysed through a template analysis.

This research emphasizes how workers' well-being manifests in the relationship subjects are fostered to construct with their body and, in parallel, how workers may play an active and unpredictable role in corporate wellness programmes.

Differently from the current literature that frames workers' reactions towards digital corporate well-being initiatives in mainly polarized ways, this contribution leads to a less dichotomic and more nuanced interpretation of the “impacts” wellness programmes may have, showing how workers may display practices not just of acceptance or resistance, but also of appropriation.

In this study, the authors aim to probe the relationship between listening and lurking and discuss types of lurking that occur on social media sites based on the motivations driving them. Although listening is a significant practice of online attention, intimacy, connection, obligation and participation as much as voice is, it is yet to receive the kind of attention voice is given in the context of social media. In the rather limited studies on online attention, the concept that has gained consideration is “lurking”, and this practice has often been treated as a derogatory non-activity or as passivity. The interest to study lurking is based on the premise that lurking is a significant ground on which listening occurs in social media and through which voice can be given attention.

This study adopted a phenomenological approach to understand motivations for lurking in online spaces. Phenomenological research involves data gathering through inductive, qualitative methods with the aim of explaining specific phenomena from the perspective of research participants. In this research, the lived experience studied was lurking and what drives lurking. A total of 12 members of the Licence to Talk project, a research project based at the School of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa, took part in the study. They shared their personal experiences of online lurking through a critical reflective writing. Based on the experiences shared, the authors identified and categorised the various types of lurking based on the varied motivations driving them.

Through the phenomenological approach, the study has theorised a more useful understanding of lurking as a form of online listening by identifying and categorising seven lurking behaviours that are nested within the lurking activity. This study, thus, provides a tentative framework for studying online lurking by bringing to bear listening theory and by reasoning that lurking is a needs-based activity that has purpose imbedded within it.

The authors recognise that this study is limited by its small number of participants. Nevertheless, as researchers with a strong grounding in listening theory, the authors thought it valuable to interrogate their own practices on social media and to develop a more useful understanding of what lurking might entail and, on the lurking-listening relationship. A larger study would provide stronger evidence to test the hypothesis about lurking as a very interesting form of listening with a relationship to complex behaviours and needs.

It is expected that by conceptualising the various forms of lurking based on the motivations that drive online lurking (listening), it will provide an empirical and theoretical/conceptual basis for further investigations into this pervasive mode of online attention.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between psychiatry and occupational therapy in Ireland through a case study of the development of the occupational therapy department in St. Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin, from 1935 to 1969. Patronage by psychiatrists was an important factor in the professionalisation of occupational therapy internationally.

Documentary sources and oral history interviews were analysed to conduct an instrumental case study of occupational therapy at St. Patrick’s Hospital from 1935 to 1969.

The research identified key individuals associated with the development of occupational therapy at St. Patrick’s Hospital, including psychiatrist Norman Moore, occupational therapy worker Olga Gale, occupational therapist Margaret Sinclair, and social therapist Irene Violet Grey. Occupational therapy was considered by the hospital authorities to be “an important part in the treatment of all types of psychiatric illness” (Board Meeting Minutes, 1956). It aimed to develop patient’s self-esteem and facilitate social participation. To achieve these objectives, patients engaged in activities such as dances, arts and crafts, and social activities.

This study has highlighted the contributions of key individuals, identified the links between occupational therapy and psychiatry, and provided an insight into the development of the profession in Ireland prior to the establishment of occupational therapy education in 1963. Occupational therapy practice at St. Patrick’s Hospital from 1935 to 1969 was congruent with the prevailing philosophy of occupational therapy internationally, which involved treatment through activities to enhance participation in society.

Despite to useful relevance to better understand how group-level identity develops, few studies have explored the identity theory in the esports field and, in particular, considering the impact of a fan's role identity. The current study aims to explore esports fan role-identity vis-à-vis the relationship with the sponsor and the sponsee so as to understand the effects on their behavioral intentions.

Using a sample of 356 esports fans who attended the 2021 FPF eFootball Open Challenge, a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) analyzed the psychometric properties of the constructs and a subsequent Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) examined the effects of fan identity on two types of behavioral intentions and sponsor–sponsee relationship.

Results indicate that fans who highly identify with esports have the highest attachment to the event and tend toward having a positive word-of-mouth intention. Esports fans who have a higher brand identification reported a positive attitude toward the event's sponsor brand and tend to purchase its products. Moreover, the study findings also provide evidence of the bidirectional interaction between the way in which fans attach with the esports event and its sponsor brand, leading to greater reciprocity in their identity formation.

This study helps to understand how the fan identity process can enhance its fate and develop mutually, building role overlapping identity in the esports sponsor–sponsee relationship. Complementarily, it supports of how the marketeers and managers must analyze the importance of being a fan to the individual in order to understand how its self-identity can shape the future behavior.