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This paper explores how actors engage in the situated learning of resource integration (RI) within value cocreation practices (VCPs). VCPs are collectively shared and organized routine activities that actors perform to cocreate value.

This paper draws on a qualitative study of how successful music actors engage in VCPs and learn RI. Interviews and observations were used to collect data that were analyzed by drawing on the Gioia methodology.

The findings illuminate the types of VCPs actors engage in to learn RI, the ways in which actors learn RI by engaging in VCPs, and how social contexts condition actors' learning of RI.

This paper offers a framework for understanding actors' situated learning of RI by engaging in VCPs. It illuminates the VCPs that actors engage in to learn RI, how actors advance from peripheral to core participation through their learning, the ways in which actors learn RI by engaging in VCPs, and how social contexts condition actors' situated learning of RI. Implications for the scarce prior research on how actors learn RI are presented.

To contribute to innovative solutions and sustainable growth, managers and policymakers need to offer actors opportunities to learn and make space for actors with competencies that may be important and needed in future VCPs.

In focusing on how actors learn RI by engaging in VCPs, this study draws on theories of communities of practices and situated learning, as well as practice theoretical service research.

This paper aims to study front-line employees’ contribution to service innovation, when they contribute and how they are involved in service innovation.

The paper draws on a multiple-case study on service innovation in four organizations with extensive front-line employee involvement. The main data collection methods are interviews and observations.

The paper suggests that front-line employees contribute customer knowledge, product knowledge and practice knowledge during five phases of the service innovation process – project formation, idea generation, service design, testing and implementation – and that front-line employee involvement ranges from active to passive.

Statistical generalization of the results is needed.

The paper reveals that early and active front-line employee involvement in the service innovation process creates conditions for a positive contribution to service innovation.

The paper suggests that early and active knowledge contributions by front-line employees to the service innovation process are associated with the creation of attractive value propositions.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a concept of auditor as consigliere in family firms, that captures additional functions to monitoring, those of advice, mediating, and conveying.

The concept is tested through a survey conducted on 309 Swedish auditors.

The data indicate that the consigliere role is generally not emphasized, indicating that auditors primarily perform the monitoring role of the audit. However, the authors do find indications of the auditor performing the consigliere role, through performing the advisory and mediating functions and, to a smaller degree, the conveying function.

The survey is limited in response rate and in separating governance situations from consigliere functions.

With reservation for professional independence, the auditor as consigliere could be part of the governance of the family firm, but should be trained for this activity.

Regulators should pay attention to the consigliere role when, for example, stipulating compulsory rotation of auditors.

The paper shows that the auditor is more than a monitor in family firms. The consigliere role, even if not at all dominating, has to be considered, at least in family firms.

Drug Treatment Courts (DTCs) offer a form of alternative sentencing for people who have been convicted of a crime related to drug or alcohol abuse. The work of rehabilitation in DTCs is client-centered, meaning that it takes into account all of the client’s needs that affect their life in regards to completion of the program and rehabilitation. DTCs employ teams of people made up of judges, lawyers, educators, clinicians, and community supervisors. There are specific ways that librarians might become involved with DTCs regarding both literacy and, more specifically, health literacy. Existing programs could be adapted to solve common health literacy problems of participants, and librarians could also forge relationships with DTCs. Training for librarians should include education about the health and literacy problems faced by this population so they can successfully connect DTC participants with people and information that will contribute to their success completing the program and building healthier lives. This chapter looks to established best practices within DTCs and to some current related programs within public libraries to find grounds for expanding services to this population.

The purpose of this study is to clarify changes in people-place interrelationship and hidden layers of survivors psychological challenges in the reconstructed housing environment, the 2003 Bam and 2017 Ezgeleh-Sarpol Zahab earthquakes occurred in Iran, because perception of earthquake risk in residential dwellings and traumatic experiences during and after its occurrence are among stressful events making communities face with various spectrum of emotional and cognitive consequences. Such events shape memory “traumascapes” and cause changes in mental schemas and as a result, altering decisions and behavioral responses in long-term familiar environments. Because, in the disaster-affected communities, psychological recovery will be greatly influenced by residential experiences.

The current research was performed with a qualitative and multicase study design, and data were collected using deep and semistructured private interviews and discussions in focus groups with participation of 33 people by narrative technique.

According to findings, people are facing enduring cognitive disruptions regarding home concept and its location as a safe and secure paradigm. Findings showed that there are a considerable amount of behavioral responses and emotional consequences in the form of protective behaviors, severe sensitivity to environmental stimuli, fears, phobias in residential dwellings and disturbances in place attachments.

It is noteworthy that despite all time and place differences, the two studied communities had significant similarities in earthquake traumatic experiences and perceptions and also resulting conscious and subconscious responses.

IT was last July that we denounced the Bullock proposals because of our conviction that they would not work. True, that was not by any means the first time that we had voiced that opinion. We said so, firmly, from the moment that they were promulgated. There was so much against them.

This paper aims to add to the theorization of the gender dynamic in rural areas by investigating the motives of women who join their family firm (or their spouse's family firm) and thereby defy the demographic trend of rural flight. The context of this study is the depopulation of rural areas with the closing of basic services and relocation of the younger population, and educated women in particular, to urban areas. Consequently, rural family businesses risk failing to find successors and suffering forced closure or relocation. The empirical site of the study is rural family firms in Sweden, a context characterized by a high level of gender equality in legislation and culture but gender-conservative business structures in rural regions.

The empirical case in this paper builds on a qualitative study of nine (9) life course narratives of women entrepreneurs in a rural region of Southern Sweden who have returned to rural areas to join their family business. The authors follow the view established by gender scholars that women are active agents in navigating their lives, and their life story narratives offer insight into the considerations that inform their choice to stay or return to rural locations. In Sweden, the setting for the study, gender equality is widely supported by legislation, policy and institutional frameworks and popular understanding of gender relations. In contrast to the gender-progressive policies of Sweden at large, women's entrepreneurship in rural regions of Sweden tends to follow traditional gender hierarchies and face similar constraints as in rural areas of other countries. The juxtaposition of these competing sets of ideals makes Sweden an important and interesting place to study and draw insights from the experiences of women entrepreneurs.

The findings reveal that women who choose to join rural family firms view them primarily in a positive light and see this choice as aligned with their need for professional flexibility and assertiveness, rewarding relationships, and a calm, secure, well-balanced life. Theoretically, the study implies that women choosing to engage in rural family firms seek non-material benefits, such as work–life balance and social support, and may be driven in part by a sense of psychological ownership that extends to the rural community.

The findings provide novel insights on women as active agents in navigating their lives and the intrinsic (e.g. alignment of personal values) and extrinsic (e.g. community support) motives that inform their decisions. The study also raises questions regarding how women perceive themselves as “fitting in” to rural settings and to what extent the sense of security within these settings that the women describe may be contingent upon factors such as their families' embeddedness within the community as well as their conformity to the local social norms.

The purpose of this paper is to explore board functions and their location in family firms.

Through structured induction in a four-case study of medium-sized Swedish family firms, the authors demonstrate that board functions can be located in other arenas than in the common board and suggest propositions that explain their distribution.

(1) The board is but one of several arenas where board functions are performed. (2) The functions performed by the board vary in type and emphasis. (3) The non-family directors in a family firm serve the owners, even sometimes governing them, in what the authors term “bidirectional governance”. (4) The kin strategy of the family influences their governance. (5) The utilization of a board for governance stems from the family (together with its constitution, kin strategy and governance strategy), the board composition and the business conditions of the firm.

Being a case study the findings are restricted to concepts and theoretical propositions. Using structured induction, the study is not solely inductive but still contains the subjectivity of induction.

Governance agents should have an instrumental view on the board, considering it one possible governance arena among others, thereby economizing on governance.

The institutional pressure toward active boards could paradoxically reduce the importance of the board in family firms.

The board of a family company differs in its emphasis of board functions and these functions are performed with varying emphases in different governance arenas. The authors propose the concept of kin strategy, which refers to the governance importance of the structure of the owner and observations on bi-directional governance, indicating that the board can govern the owners.