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The purpose of this paper is to critically review and explore how organizations knowledgeably respond to unfavorable institutional environments that exert institutional pressures and thereby limit their decision-making and eventually their actual behavior.

Based on a thorough structuration and analysis of the literature in management and related fields, the authors present a comprehensive synthesis of organizational knowledgeable responses to institutional pressures.

Based on the review, the authors categorize organizational knowledgeable responses into three major types – passively responding to avoid non-conformity, reactively mitigating institutional pressures and proactively developing institutional environments toward less interfering setups.

The authors discuss the enabling conditions for the categorized organizational knowledgeable responses as well as limitations to their application. They identify research gaps and formulate research questions to offer promising avenues for future work. The authors expect this detailed synthesis to lay the framework for investigating how the knowledge-based view of the organization influences its knowledgeable response to institutional pressure.

The authors elaborate on distinct passive, reactive and proactive strategies, which firms can apply to cope with institutional pressures. The contribution of this study will be of relevance to practitioners managing organizations in the face of unfavorable institutional setups, as well as to policymakers engaged in the development of institutions and interacting with affected organizations.

This study provides a valuable overview on developments in institutional theory, particularly on contributions to the “nascent literature” that examines heterogeneous organizational knowledgeable responses to institutional pressures.

Across country and regional borders firms are faced with the question whether to address individual markets on a stand-alone basis or cooperatively. In order to support such strategic decisions, this paper aims to develop a decision framework accounting for the most relevant market dynamics affecting joint venture (JV) decisions, particularly in the truck industry. Moreover, the authors apply the framework to an expert Delphi and scenario approach to back a Western original equipment manufacturers (OEM’s) JV decision in the truck industry in Russia. Based on country-specific projections structured along the globally applicable decision framework, the authors serve executives’ individual information demand in an institutionally unique emerging market environment.

Online real-time expert Delphi study; scenario analysis; and expert workshops were used in this study.

Among other insights, the results predict hard times for Russian OEMs as they will likely face strong foreign competition, leading to decreased sales volumes and market shares. Although some experts doubt the survival of several Russian truck manufacturers, the Delphi sheds light on possible strategic responses, including consolidation, cooperation or focusing on new markets. Based on the Delphi results and an additional expert workshop, we draw multiple scenarios addressing, particularly, uncertain aspects of the industry’s development and their likely impact on the key stakeholder groups.

Although there are some studies following a similar methodological approach as that in this study (von der Gracht and Darkow, 2010; Gnatzy and Moser, 2012), the authors break new ground in developing a JV-dedicated decision framework and applying it to a special emerging market industry setup.

There is a growing awareness of intellectual property (IP) rights in European public research institutes. Since 2008 a non‐binding recommendation of the European Commission has been, in effect, proposing a consistent policy for IP in research and development (R&D). While there is a broad consensus on the overall goal – achieving a higher competitiveness of European industry in the international market place – there are, however, conflicting expectations on the micro‐management: are technology transfer agencies to be considered as profit‐centers, cost‐centers, mediators or all of the above? This paper seeks to provide an answer

The Physikalisch‐Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) is the national metrology institute of Germany with 1,900 employees and an annual budget of €145 million. It has established a micro‐management policy for IP rights, which is successfully fostering the development of modern instrumentation for metrology and may serve as an example for other public institutions as well. While it is obliged by law to operate as a regular market participant when licensing patents, there are additional conditions, some with the status of a law or a binding government decision as well.

The BSC approach, implemented at PTB, provides guidelines to reconcile seemingly conflicting requirements for a public entity while at the same time generating economic benefits in terms of additional income from licensing. In the authors' opinion this approach keeps costs at a reasonable level, fosters inventors' motivation and furnishes data for decisions for the technology transfer office as well as for the leadership of the institution.

To manage this conflict of goals the authors developed and implemented a balanced score card (BSC) system for IP management in order to optimize licensing income generation, cut costs, keep the inventor's motivation high and simultaneously realize macro‐economic technology transfer tasks. The BSC was originally introduced for the private sector by Norton and Kaplan in 1992, in response to a failure of purely monitoring financial indicators. The balanced score card considers economic and non‐economic factors, often denoted as “soft”. It is balanced with respect to result‐oriented indicators, like licensing income, and with respect to process‐oriented indicators, like the acceptance rate of inventions for patenting. And it tries to deduce from a trend of an indicator in the past a prediction of future development, associated with recommendations for actions to influence the ongoing process. The paper discusses the issues.

Organizations are increasingly aware that to face complexity and uncertainty in today's business landscape, it is important to properly exploit, combine, and continuously develop their intellectual capital (IC). In this introduction to the special issue the aim is to develop some theoretical and managerial reasons explaining the importance of IC to achieve business excellence; then, to call for renewed analysis in the IC research stream aimed to investigate what are the new key intellectual capital dimensions and traits to be better developed and managed in order to deal with the fluidity of business, uncertainty, crisis, change, turbulence and high competitive pressure.

The approaches, evidences and insights discussed in this introduction are largely based on the discussion of the topics of the conference “International forum on knowledge assets dynamics” organized in June 2010 in Matera, Italy. At this conference, leading experts discussed the importance of intellectual capital for organizational business excellence in the twenty‐first century, the new IC key‐value drivers to manage in order to face emergent competitive scenarios, and research and management practices for addressing complexity, uncertainty and changes of today's business landscape.

The outcomes of this introduction and the contributions to the special issue reflect the emerging discussion about the role of IC management constructs. This discussion is largely focused on the importance of translating IC management within organizational components for achieving business excellence, highlighting approaches and tools in different contexts of analysis.

This introduction as well as all the contributions to the special issue deal with different aspects, which are important in the discussion of the role played by IC in achieving organizational business excellence as well as the approaches, tools, methods and techniques to better disentangle the mechanisms by which IC dimensions, separately or interdependently, contribute to improve companies' organizational performance.

The paper aims to analyze the contribution of young academics to the field of public relations (PR) and shows which authors exert most influence on them. The study thereby contributes to the assessment of the state of the art of theory building in the field. The authors analyzed the study data against the background of two approaches on progress in the field: Nothhaft et al.’s (2018) idea of strategic communication as an elusive concept and Winkler et al.’s (2021) narrative approach.

The study comprises two parts. First, the authors conducted a survey among participants of the EUPRERA PhD-workshops between 2007 and 2019, asking respondents about their perception of the state of the field. Second, the authors performed a bibliometric (co-)citation analysis of the young scholars’ most important works.

Results indicate that though the field has progressed in terms of quantity and diversified with regard to established paradigms, it has not matured in a sense that it has settled on a generally accepted theoretical underpinning. However, the data show how the dominant paradigms in the field map onto the co-citation networks that emerged out of the works of young scholars. The authors’ findings imply that this new generation might signal their allegiance to a paradigm by citing the works of its emblematic authors.

Unlike most bibliometric studies, this one uses an author-centered approach, thus studying works that matter most to young academics themselves. Not only do the authors thereby contribute to the analysis of the state of theory building in PR research, but also expand the scope in looking at research as a social system, in which young researchers need to position themselves.

This chapter provides an overview of the research management and administration (RMA) sector in Germany. It describes the German research ecosystem, looks at the – in Germany – still young profession of RMA and the professional network FORTRAMA, and provides a brief insight into the work and employment situation of people working in this field. This chapter concludes with a prognosis for the field in the upcoming years.

This paper aims to examine the determinants of socioeconomic factors on housing prices and their differential effects among regions.

This study employs a hierarchical linear model to analyze the housing and socioeconomic data of 363 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the USA.

This study generates four findings. First, the population, the percentage of the elderly in population, violent crime rates, and foreclosure rates produce greater effects on housing prices in the Northeast than those in the West. Second, the population produces a greater effect on housing prices in the Northeast than those in the Midwest. Third, mortgage rates produce less significant effects on housing prices in the Northeast than those in the Midwest. Fourth, the population, the percentage of the elderly in population, and rent-income ratio produce greater effects on housing prices in the Northeast than those in the South.

Based on data collected for 2010, this study analyzes socioeconomic factors on the demand side under the implicit assumption that supply side remains constant. Future research can lift the restriction on fixed supply assumption.

The results can provide information to buyers and sellers about how socioeconomic factors affect housing prices. Moreover, this study also provides useful information for the government to design and implement relevant housing policies.

This is the pioneering study to examine the differential effect of socioeconomic factors on metropolitan housing prices among regions by employing dummy regional variables to detect changes in slope coefficients. These detailed conclusions would enhance the efficiency of transaction in housing markets.