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The authors draw on an article by Fondas published in 1997 to expose a masculine ethos underlying “feminine” management practices, diffused through management texts. This is based on the findings that: management theories are of a masculine nature; companies seldom implement “feminine” practices; and those that do use those practices to maintain their underlying masculinity. This challenges academics and practitioners to recognize that management theory is gendered and that changes towards feminine organizations are superficial, at best.

The purpose of this study is to examine the management perceptions towards calculative practices behind the reconstruction of a mandatory hospital accreditation (HA) system that transforms multiple facets of health-care quality into a single performance index.

This study contributes to the sociology of quantification mobilising the concept of commensuration as a social process to reflect on contemporary changes in managing HA systems. Data are collected adopting a case study of a Spanish public hospital drawing on semi-structured interviews, observation and documentary review.

Findings emphasise a shift from standards’ compliance to a more comprehensive view encouraging continuous quality improvement. Accreditation acts as a tin opener to facilitate external inspection removing contextual differences amongst hospitals and reducing organisational practices into controllable objects. It also reveals underlying ethical concerns as the system was built as a care quality measure that promptly developed into an attainment goal.

The valuable role of HA to enhance quality standards and the limitations resulting from its commensuration practices will be of interest to policymakers, organisational managers and researchers.

Despite a growing emphasis on audit and valuation practices in health care, accounting studies examining the capacity of public hospitals to manage quality improvement are scarce. This study inspires further research on accreditation to overcome commensuration flaws regarding external transparency, evaluation ambiguity and extra incentives.

Some studies show that improvisation is a source of change, whereas others show that it is a source of stability. The purpose of this paper is to specify the factors which set the boundary between improvised change and improvised stability.

The paper draws on two published studies and contrasts their findings to analyze the extent to which improvisation leads to organizational change or organizational stability.

The paper suggests that the most innovative instances of improvisation reproduce some features of everyday experience. The extent to which an improvisation is a source of stability or a source of change depends on the dynamics of variation, selection and retention therein.

Future research needs to add empirical flesh to this theoretical skeleton to push research on organizational improvisation beyond the study of its causes and into further research on its consequences.

The paper deals with the paradox of making sense about two apparently opposing streams of research on improvisation.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the creation of a complexity theory of strategy by integrating a number of ideas that have previously been explored independently in the strategy literature, namely improvisation, minimal structures, simple rules, dynamic capabilities, bricolage, and organizational resilience.

Organizations are taken as complex adaptive systems that align with their environments through interaction and response rather than analysis and planning. The paper discusses how Schumpeterian environments influence organizations in the direction of simpler, minimally‐structured designs and considers why Schumpeterian environments create the need for strategic improvisation and minimally‐structured designs.

The paper articulates recent concepts in the management literature. The integration of these new concepts may be relevant to explore the way they relate with each other in the emerging organizational configurations. A model is proposed for further empirical testing.

This contribution challenges the old representation of the strategic process as one involving complex organizations with simple people (except at the top), to one where simple organizations enable complex and professional people to create the strategy in an intentional, even if not always planned, response to the concrete world.

In this paper, we discuss the topic of participation in the classroom and explore its implications for management development. We suggest that participation is triggered when there is motivation (interest in course content) and potential (resources) for it. The success of participation depends on the presence of a minimal interaction structure and results in higher levels of perceived learning and perceived class quality. The paper advances a process approach to organizational participation and highlights the necessity of a dialectical approach to organizational phenomena.

Change has become one of the most studied topics in management research. Although literally hundreds of research initiatives on this theme are carried out annually, there are still important questions in this area that have been left unanswered. There are two, logically possible, modes of change that have yet to be identified and there are at least two tensions that go unresolved: the punctuated versus incremental change and the emergent versus deliberate change tensions. Drawing on a “grounded theory” research on organizational improvisation, we argue that this phenomenon contributes toward filling one of the gaps in a taxonomy of organizational change modes and toward a synthesis between the poles of the two tensions mentioned above.

The purpose of this paper is to offer the author's view about some of the challenges young Iberoamerican scholars face in order to build a successful research record.

This is an individual account of some of the most common barriers Iberoamerican scholars face when starting their academic career.

The paper presents some of the difficulties encountered by young scholars, such as motivation, lack of feedback, teaching load, and lack of resources and addresses these challenges in an almost intimate fashion.

The paper uses an idiosyncratic approach to the practical career obstacles faced by a young scholar outside the mainstream academic environment.

The purpose of this paper is to perform a comparative analysis between Aveiro's Lagoon (Portugal) and Sepetiba Bay (Brazil), in order to understand the similarities and differences between these two coastal zones, in terms of human occupation.

This paper is supported by works (papers and scientific projects being developed) produced in Portugal and Brazil, by researchers from different areas of expertise.

These two coastal zones have a similar geomorphologic evolution, due to the fact that both appeared because of a sandy spit, which started to grow and separated these areas from the sea, converting them into sheltered coasts. It was because they are protected that these two study cases early became targets for human occupation. The anthropic impacts in the systems were sustainable until the middle of the twentieth century. Since then, however, the economic development options, based first in industry and second in tourism exploration, have compromised the natural healthy balance.

This paper could be a contribution to a scientific support for political decisions on the coastal zone management (namely in these studied areas).

The paper provides and increases the knowledge of the coastal zones’ evolution and occupation – from a multidisciplinary perspective – produced and made available to scientists, local politicians, students and local populations.

The paper provides a truly interdisciplinary approach, which allows a better understanding of the evolution of these two systems, discussing the causes and consequences of human activities in both coastal areas.