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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the value of shadowing managers, in relation to other methods for studying managerial work, such as interviews and surveys.

The paper reflects upon (empirical) studies of managers and managerial work, research and bodies of knowledge, and puts available insights into perspective.

Shadowing managers enables researchers to cope with the paradoxical situation that arises when managerial work is studied. Managerial work must be understood in as unbiased a way as possible; managers themselves are unable to understand their own work and the texts they use to capture their work and behavior are either superficial or “manipulative.” At the same time, managerial work cannot be understood without (theoretical) bias; researchers need a priori assumptions when they study real-life work, especially about the institutional settings in which work streams are embedded. The paper concludes that “theoretical shadowing” is relevant.

The paper brings together different bodies of knowledge that have evolved over time and shows that observing managers can never be done openly, despite remarks made by earlier students of managerial work.

Organizational innovations are closely associated with organizational knowledge, and thus a firm builds its knowledge base to enhance its innovative performance. However, insights into this process are still limited, especially in the context of firms in developing countries. Building on the dynamic managerial capabilities literature and open innovation paradigm, this paper attempts to fill this gap by developing and empirically testing a model that investigates how firms in developing countries accumulate knowledge to innovate.

A model of a firm's knowledge accumulation and innovation is proposed in which it specifies relationships among absorptive capacity, knowledge breadth, research and development (R&D), knowledge depth, exploratory innovation and exploitative innovation, and then it is empirically tested by using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique based on the surveyed data of Vietnamese firms.

The results indicate that absorptive capacity positively influences both knowledge breadth and knowledge depth, knowledge breadth positively influences R&D, R&D positively influences exploratory innovation and knowledge depth, and knowledge depth positively influences exploratory and exploitative innovation.

The study proposes an “acquire and develop” open innovation model for firms in developing countries in which firms acquire external technologies and then develop R&D (develop and design) capability to adapt acquired technologies to their local conditions to create new organizational-specific capabilities and exploratory innovation.

This study argues that external knowledge acquisition is beneficial to innovative performance of firms in developing countries via renewing their knowledge base. Furthermore, the study provides the unique evidence that novel external knowledge acquisition and internal R&D are fit to each other in the fit-as-mediation form in which novel external knowledge acquisition is mediated by R&D to positively influence exploratory innovation.

This paper aims to present two objectives. The first objective is to identify the academic knowledge interests (managerial, agentic, curatorial and critical) prevalent in research on global careers. The second objective is to consider and critique the discourse constructed and perpetuated in academic texts on global careers concerning globalization, global careers and the global careerist.

Using a critical discourse analysis, the paper analyzes 66 articles and book chapters and one book on the subject of a global career. The authors positioned the texts into one of the four academic knowledge interests – managerial, agentic, curatorial and critical. The texts were also analyzed with respect to the discourse manifested in relation to globalization, global careers and the global careerist.

The authors found that the texts were driven by primarily managerial academic knowledge interests, followed by agentic and curatorial interests. Very few reflected critical knowledge interests. In addition, texts on global careers accept the globalization of business as natural and unproblematic and, consequently, construct a discourse about the global career and the global careerist which fits the idea that global business expansion in its current form is inevitable and inescapable.

This paper is the first to analyze the academic knowledge production and discourse on “global careers” and the “global careerist” as it is emerging among career scholars. It is also one of the very few articles offering a more critical perspective on global careers specifically and careers more generally.

Although accounting professors around the globe have addressed various social aspects of accounting, very rarely does that research address the concerns of students. This is despite the fact that students are the focus of the educational mission of most universities. In an effort to address this gap, this chapter extends the field of social accounting to an issue critical to students: the cost of accounting textbooks in the United States. Textbook cost is drawing increasing attention from public interest groups and government regulators as costs are growing at a more rapid rate than many other costs, and constitute a significant portion of the total cost of obtaining a higher education degree. For accounting students, these costs are exacerbated by the fact that accounting textbooks are among the most expensive of any major, and they are being revised with increasing frequency – which eliminates students’ ability to buy less expensive used books – often with little or no discernible benefit to students. We argue that in some subfields of accounting – especially managerial/cost and introductory courses – topics are relatively stable, and that frequent textbook revisions are unnecessarily costly for our students, many of whom, along with their families, are making significant financial sacrifices to earn their degrees. In this study, we provide background on the textbook pricing issue, include data from a survey of accounting faculty demonstrating that they consider the revisions too frequent, document the increasing frequency of accounting textbook revisions over recent decades, analyze content in a leading accounting textbook, and discuss options for reducing the cost of accounting textbooks, including following student activists’ lead in advocating for open-source, free textbooks.

University Accountancy faculty need criteria to assist with the selection of textbooks, to ensure that the subject matter is congruent with the level at which students are taught. Readability is one such criterion. The purpose of this study is to assess the readability of two Managerial Accounting and two Financial Management textbooks, using three different readability evaluation methods.

The sample for the study included 281 Accounting students from an Eastern seaboard university. Each student was requested to complete two passages – one from a Management Accounting textbook and one from a Financial Management textbook. The Gunning Fog Index, Flesch Reading Ease and Cloze Procedure readability evaluation methods were used to measure readability.

The findings suggest varying levels of readability among the textbooks. Results from the Cloze Procedure reveal that three of the four textbooks were being read at the Frustration Level and the fourth marginally above the Frustration Level. The readability formulae returned varying results demonstrating that some of the textbooks were at a level that the students ought to be able to read.

Only two Managerial Accounting and two Financial Management textbooks of many published were assessed, and only three readability evaluation methods were used.

The findings have implications for university faculty, authors, publishers, editors and students.

The readability of Managerial Accounting and Financial Management textbooks used at South African universities, has received scant attention in the literature. The analysis of the readability of the accounting textbooks, presents a synthesis that adds important knowledge in this under‐researched topic.

This study examines 117 verbs associated with 2,872 learning objectives, and 377 questions taken from 24 textbooks across the accounting curriculum. To determine the level of cognitive ability associated with the individual learning objectives I analyzed the verbs based upon Bloom's Taxonomy. To reach across the accounting curriculum I chose texts from Financial Accounting, Intermediate Financial Accounting, Advanced Financial Accounting, Managerial Accounting, Cost Accounting, and Auditing. Results of the analysis found that the authors used verbs at the lower learning levels of the cognitive domain. The verbs used by the author teams depend upon individual preference rather a specific segment of the cognitive domain. In addition, as the student progresses through the accounting curriculum some topics in upper level textbooks use learning objectives at the same level as in introductory level textbooks.

This article aims to analyze a set of features in the managerial implications of the most-cited business-to-business (B2B) marketing articles which are related to their managerial relevance. The purpose is to further identify which are the most recurrent features of managerial implications, as well as the connections between such features. Finally, the articles aim to verify if these features of managerial implications vary depending on the scientific impact of the article.

The 60 most-cited articles were selected from both generalist and specialized academic journals and a content analysis was conducted. Then the article assesses the formal features (e.g. dedicated space), the language (e.g. consulting or normative), the translation of scientific results (e.g. message efficacy) and such other features as time orientation, specificity and abstraction of the managerial implications in these high-impact articles. The article also analyses patterns and associations between the aforementioned dimensions across the 60 articles, also depending on their level of scientific impact (i.e. their number of citations).

The results point that six out of nine features contributing to managerial relevance are the most frequently present in the implications (dedicated section easy to find, balance between academic and consulting language, partly scientific approach, overlap with scientific findings, message neither too complicated nor too simplistic, and long-term orientation). However, three other features reducing managerial relevance afflict nearly half of the articles: non-normative, generic and abstract implications. The ten articles lacking completely managerial implications are slightly more frequent among highest impact ones, which also often include overly complicated implications; while speculative and overly simplistic implications typically appear more among lowest impact articles which, however, also stand for very specific messages. There seems not to be any statistical correlation between the features contributing to managerial relevance and the scientific impact (number of citations) of an article. Instead, several of these features are correlated among each other, meaning that when one is missing, it is likely that the others also are. Finally, when implications are included in a dedicated section of the article, they tend to be specific and consequently also tend to have the other features favoring relevance.

The article provides an empirically grounded assessment of features that influence the managerial relevance of scientific research in the areas of B2B marketing. Our results are, in fact, grounded in a detailed examination of the managerial implications of 60 high-impact articles in this disciplinary domain.

Managerial cognition is a fundamental area informing all sub-fields in strategy, and therefore, a systematic review of the methodological choices of premier strategy publications aids cognition researchers in choosing methods. However, past studies have given little attention to the methods recently published in premier journals. This chapter both illustrates a common cognitive method – content analysis – and uses it to analyze the methodological content of 573 publications from two prominent management journals. Our findings provide cognition scholars with useful information about current methodological standards. Our findings also will help students choose methods courses and will spark a healthy debate about methodological expectations.

The purpose of this paper is to gain knowledge on the character of managerial implications within business-to-business (B2B) marketing, in terms of type of relevance addressed in research articles on solution business and integrated solutions.

Use of Jaworski’s framework on role-relevance to classify the type of relevance addressed in 29 journal articles. A systematic literature review on solution business preceded the selection of articles and a concern to include different journal categories.

Managerial implications in the studied articles within solution business do not seem to emphasize role-relevance particularly; they rather address applicability of findings on a company level and for B2B marketing in a more general sense. The majority of implications for practice are framed to have an impact on “present actions”. Managerial knowledge needs are dominantly addressed by “empirical findings” or “frameworks”. The dominating managerial core tasks addressed are “transformer of marketing” and “marketing strategy”.

There do not seem to be studies with managerial implications addressing future actions and thinking; providing instruments, methods or models that are role- relevant; focusing on the challenges of a “coordinator”, “strategist” or “performance controller”. The focus on solution business limits the generalizability of findings.

Results suggest that implications for practice potentially would benefit from being written in the form of explicit recommendations; targeted to a particular managerial role; and increasingly developed when it comes to proposed frameworks for them to be useful for managers in industrial marketing.

This is one of the first studies to systematically examine the character of managerial implications by categorizing results in accordance with a framework specifically addressing role-relevance.