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Legislation plays an essential role in addressing climate change in China. However, many barriers to formulating national legislation to address climate change have so far prevented its enactment. The bottom-up approach adopted in the international climate regime sets a good example. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the regional legislation to address climate change in China through exploring the following two questions: whether it is necessary to enact climate change legislation at regional level first and whether it is feasible to develop such regional legislation in the absence of national climate change law.

This paper analyses the necessity and feasibility of regional legislation to address climate change. Section 2 introduces the current legislative framework on climate change in China. Section 3 investigates whether it is better to push the legislative agenda at regional, rather than national level. Section 4 analyses the feasibility of establishing regional legislative systems. Section 5 explores the key issues in formulating and promoting regional legislation.

This paper concludes that it is necessary and feasible to pilot regional legislation before enacting national legislation. Under these circumstances, local governments can take the initiative to begin formulating regional legislation.

Addressing climate change needs immediate action and effective measures. It is, thus, necessary to reconsider the approach that China should adopt when developing legislation on climate change. This paper contributes to broadening current knowledge of regional climate change legislation in China.

This paper aims to examine how competitive intelligence (CI) relates to the strategy formulation process of firms.

Due to the novelty of the phenomenon and to the depth of the investigation required to grasp the mechanisms and logics of CI, a multiple case study has been performed related to four companies located in Brazil that adopted CI practices within dedicated business units to inform and support strategic decision-making.

The authors provide detailed empirical evidence on the connection and use of CI practices throughout each stage of the strategy formulation process. Moreover, the study suggests that CI practices, despite their strategic relevance and diffusion, are still extensively adopted for tactical use.

This study sheds light on how CI practices may inform, support, and be integrated in the strategy formulation process, as few studies have done before.

The paper examines the impact of market power on wages within the context of a developing country, focusing on Brazil.

With access to matched employer–employee data from Brazil, we first characterized the evolution of the local labor market concentration (Municipality Herfindahl–Hirschman Index [HHI]). Then, we built a fixed-effect model with instrumental variables to verify the association between the local labor market concentration and wages. Finally, a difference-in-difference (DiD) was implemented to verify whether a merger transaction impacted the workers’ earnings in the Brazilian banking sector.

The paper’s findings suggest that there may be a negative relationship between market power and workers’ earnings.

This research conducted an in-depth investigation of the labor market power in a developing country. As far as we know, our work is the first to evaluate the extension of local concentration in Brazilian formal labor markets and to illustrate its evolution over the last decades. Additionally, when going through the effects of market concentration on wages, we use a new identification strategy that explores changes in the HHI that are caused by national trends in an industry as a source of exogenous variation. Finally, the last part of the paper assesses the effects of antitrust policy on the labor market, a kind of investigation that is still scarce.

This study aims to investigate the adoption of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the new performance perspective in cities. It also aims to understand how accounting for SDGs begins in city administrations by following Power’s (2015) fourfold development schema composed of policy object formation, object elaboration, activity orchestration and practice stabilization.

Focusing on a network of cities coordinated by the Finnish local government association, we analyzed the six largest cities in Finland employing a holistic multiple case study strategy. Our data consisted of Voluntary Local Reviews (VLRs), city strategies, budget plans, financial statements, as well as results of participant observations and semi-structured interviews with key individuals involved in accounting for SDGs.

We unveiled the SDG framework as an interpretive scheme through which cities glocalized sustainable development as a novel, simultaneously global and local, performance object. Integration of the new accounts in city management is necessary for these accounts to take life in steering the actions. By creating meaningful alignment and the ability to impact managerial practices, SDGs and VLRs have the potential to influence local actions. Our results indicate further institutionalization progress of sustainability as a performance object through SDG-focused work.

While prior research has focused mainly on general factors influencing the integration of the sustainability agenda, this study provides a novel perspective by capturing the process and demonstrating empirically how new accounts on SDGs are introduced and deployed in the strategic planning and management of local governments.

This paper analyses the degree of political decentralisation and its relation to the local councils in Tanzania. It explores the institutional and political set-up of the local councils originating from the degree of political decentralisation and how it influences the tension between the bureaucrats and local politicians.

Qualitative approach by a comparative case study is adopted to investigate the phenomenon in two local governments in Tanzania. The data were collected through interviews with 37 senior local government officials and eight focus group discussions with 48 administrators and councillors.

The findings indicate that the two local governments are subjected to a similar political system guided by similar rules and guidelines from the central government bureaucracy for implementing the party manifesto and central government priorities. Thus, the local politicians have little room for negotiation in adopting local agenda to reflect the preferences of the local community. Any attempt to challenge this status quo creates political tensions between bureaucrats and the administrators.

The findings provide invaluable insights to different stakeholders such as political scientists, government officials, and policymakers with interests in research or practice of political decentralization and political-administrative relation.

This study aims to investigate practitioners’ perceptions of strategic work in municipal facilities management: how public facilities management is changing, what is included in strategic public facilities management and who leads the strategic work.

A literature review begins with mainstream studies of strategy management, ultimately concentrating on municipal facilities management. Findings are based on a 2020/2021 questionnaire targeting 356 practitioners in municipal facilities management across Sweden (50% response rate). The statistical treatment includes factor analysis.

Most respondents indicated changed ways of managing facilities in the past five years; most reported that they were in an organization with an explicit goal of working more strategically. Respondents associated strategic facilities management with governance, facilities, sustainability, technology change and communication. Frequently, it was the management team of the facilities management department that led strategic work.

Research into municipal facilities management is dominated by studies in Northern Europe, and more studies from other regions are needed. How strategies and work roles evolve in parallel appears to be a fruitful direction of further research.

Facilities managers need stronger competences and more resources to engage in strategic facilities management. Findings indicate a need to integrate sustainability aspects better into long-term strategic work.

More strategic municipal facilities management is of obvious social value.

This is the first study of practitioner perceptions of work on strategic facilities management in municipalities.

This paper aims to conceptualize supply market orientation (SMO) for the purchasing and supply chain management function and discusses how SMO capabilities are developed and how their application differs within and across firms. This research can thus be used as a blueprint for the development of a SMO capability that accommodates a firm’s unique contextual antecedents’ profile.

The qualitative research design comprises five in-depth case studies with 43 semi-structured interviews with large manufacturing and service firms.

SMO is defined as the capability to exploit market intelligence to assess, integrate and reconfigure the heterogeneously dispersed resources in purchasing and supply chain management in a way that best reflects the peculiarities of a firm’s supply environment. The empirical analysis shows that although SMO capabilities are configured similarly, their application varies across and within firms depending on the characteristics of a firm’s purchasing categories and tasks. Hence, reactive versus proactive SMO application is contingent upon firm-level and purchasing category–level characteristics.

The study uses the dynamic capabilities view as a theoretical background and provides empirical evidence and theoretical reasoning to elaborate and endorse SMO as a dynamic capability that firms need to have to compete in a complex and dynamic environment. The study provides guidance for supply chain managers on how to successfully develop and deploy a SMO capability.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the competence in use when working with interactive research, which is a continuation and elaboration of action research.

A qualitative research approach was adopted for the study. The main body of empirical material in this paper is based on two sources of data – a survey comprising open-ended questions, followed by a series of focus group interviews. The respondents were researchers with varying degrees of experience in using interactive research.

The findings provide illustrations of what characterises interactive research as work and identify an additional set of activities that go beyond traditional research activities. Some activities are relatively easy to describe, while others exist in the gaps between other activities – e.g. boundary spanning – and are harder to explicitly define in terms of implications for the involved researchers’ competence. The work activities reaching beyond the traditional research boundaries are implicit and are not a common shared practice. From a competence point of view, this implies that the competence in use for these implicit tasks of interactive research becomes individually carried. Based on these findings, a number of individual aspects of what constitutes competence in use are suggested.

In future studies, it would be valuable to use a mixed-method approach that also includes longitudinal observations of the actual work of conducting interactive research.

The findings and suggestions for how to understand the competence of interactive researchers can be used as guidance for training in research education.

This study contributes to previous research by describing important requirements and critical elements of competence in use when conducting interactive research.