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This paper aims to address the general lack of detailed attention to the value co-creation process which happens in the consumers’ social environment. The purpose of the paper is to extend prior understanding on new ways of creating value within an uncertain and complex small business environment where consumers are increasingly collaborating and constructing value within their own social environment that is not always visible to entrepreneurs.

The authors collected in-depth data from craft beer consumers who detail consumers’ perspectives on value co-creation within their social context. Discourse analysis is used to examine the ways in which consumers create value within their social environment. Discourses are generated through in-depth, semi-structured interviews.

The findings reveal that a significant part of value creation happens outside the entrepreneurs’ control. Consumers seek to have social experiences which they want to experience individually but not alone. Accordingly, the legitimacy of a certain type of consumption creates a basis for consumers’ self-presentations and situational selves, on which value can be built.

This study offers new insights into how contemporary consumers work together to co-create value. In addition, this study answers the call for scholarly attention to consumer-to-consumer value linkages to gain new understandings of socially constructed value and contemporary consumption behaviour and reveals how entrepreneurs can benefit from this.

This study explores municipal leaders' perceptions on strategic human resource management in their local government organization. Previous studies on companies demonstrate that the top manager's perceptions of the importance of human resource management (HRM) for the organization are reflected in the quality of human resource management and its strategic role. The authors are interested in how leaders in municipalities perceive HRM.

The authors interviewed 30 leaders of Finnish municipalities for this qualitative study focused on municipal leaders' perceptions of HRM. The authors applied a discourse analytical approach in the analysis.

The authors recognized four discourses that frame perceptions of HRM: HRM as a strategic weapon, HRM as an underperformer, HRM as a matter of formality and HRM as a cost generator. In addition, the authors recognized that the discourses reflected leaders' self-positioning in relation to the power to impact issues related to HRM. Shifting between distinct roles demonstrated that municipal leaders' emphasis on HRM and its strategic alignment reflects the power relations in the municipality and the attitudes to the importance of HRM.

This study contributes to the academic discussions on HRM in municipalities and provides views on the municipal leader's role and impact on valuing and investing in HRM. From a practical point of view, the study will increase municipal leaders' knowledge of HRM's impact on the performance of the organization and also of the possible means of HRM.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the kinds of effects that using a temporary agency workforce may cause on an organisational level, especially on relations between employees. In this study the authors explore the organisation as a community, leaning on the theory of social capital.

The data were gathered via semi-structured interviews with 18 temporary agency workers and five employees in permanent positions. Discourse analysis with some degree of pragmatism was employed in comprehending the speech of the interviewees.

The position of agency workers may be problematic from the perspective of social capital formulation in a work organisation. The short duration of contracts and different conditions of employment shake relations in a work group. Agency workers may also be outside the information flows. Additionally the norms and rules may be different for temporary and permanent employees and thus cause confusion.

The findings will hopefully provoke researchers to investigate the effects of using a temporary agency workforce in different organisational contexts. In addition, the study indicates that the theory of social capital is fruitful for investigating the topic on the organisational level.

The use of agency workforce should be considered comprehensively in organisations. Its effects on work organisations may be conflicting. If temporary agency workers are needed as interim help, HRM practices should be developed in order to minimise the potential problems in terms of social capital.

The study adopted an organisational perspective on the agency workforce, which is still rare in studies on the topic.

By adopting a paradox lens, the purpose of this study is to explore paradoxes in relation to work organization, recruitment and competence development in growth-oriented companies.

The study is a qualitative content analysis based on research interviews of managers responsible for human resource management (HRM) in Finnish small and medium-sized growth enterprises (SMEs).

The results show four themes, namely, (1) individualized work, (2) cultural cohesiveness, (3) experimental organization and (4) personal closeness. These identified themes are interpreted as mutually enabling, active responses to the underlying paradoxes of individualism – community and stability – change.

The results contribute to research on tension and paradox in HRM by taking the still unexplored opportunity to apply paradox theory to HRM in SMEs.

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.

Adopting the critical sensemaking (CSM) lens to the micro-level interaction between leader and employees, the article offers a theoretically informed example of leading with soft power and positive emotions that blurs boundaries in democratic organisations.

The research methodology involves videography and interpretive analysis of video-recorded interactions that combines focused ethnography with video analysis. The analysis focuses on face-to-face meeting interactions between a leader and employees in a small service firm.

The findings illustrate how restoring the sense of the democratic organisation is an accumulating and complex phenomenon where explicit and implicit organisational rules and changing identity positions are enacted by constructing affective loyalties, moral and reflex emotions that serve as soft power capacities helping the leader and employees to enact meanings attached to a democratic rather than hierarchical organisation.

The article provides new insight for human resources practitioners and leaders who want to build resilient organisations and pay attention to shared, distributed and relational leadership practices, co-creative work and collective decision-making processes.

The power explored in previous sensemaking studies has been power over, which is most often associated with the negative aspects of power, such as domination and suppression, in the pursuit of specific performance. The applications of videography method linking ethnography and interpretive analysis of video-recorded interactions are still rare in organisation studies.