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Quality, an abstract concept, requires concrete definition in order to be actionable. This chapter moves the quality discussion from the theoretical to the workplace, building steps needed to manage quality issues.

The chapter reviews general data studies, web quality studies, and metadata quality studies to identify and define dimensions of data quality and quantitative measures for each concept. The chapter reviews preferred communication methods which make findings meaningful to administrators.

The chapter describes how quality dimensions are practically applied. It suggests criteria necessary to identify high priority populations, and resources in core subject areas or formats, as quality does not have to be completely uniform. The author emphasizes examining the information environment, documenting practice, and developing measurement standards. The author stresses that quality procedures must rapidly evolve to reflect local expectations, the local information environment, technology capabilities, and national standards.

This chapter combines theory with practical application. It stresses the importance of metadata and recognizes quality as a cyclical process which balances the necessity of national standards, the needs of the user, and the work realities of the metadata staff. This chapter identifies decision points, outlines future action, and explains communication options.

The paper extends the organizational learning framework: Structural-Functional (SF)-single-loop or Conflictual-Radical (CR)-double-loop learning to the management accounting literature. The sociological approach of organizational learning is utilized to understand those contingent factors that can explain why management accounting innovations succeed or fail in organizations.

We view learning as enhancing an organization’s strategic competitive advantage by making it better able to adopt and diffuse innovation in respond to changes in its environment in order to manage improved performance. The success of management accounting innovations is contingent upon whether its learning process involves SF-single-loop or CR-double-loop learning to adopt and diffuse process innovation.

The paper suggests that the learning strategy that the organization chooses is the reason why some management accounting innovations are more successfully adopted than others and why some innovations are easily diffused in some organizations but not in others. We propose that the sociological approaches to learning provide an alternative framework with which to better understand the adoption and diffusion of process innovations in management accounting systems.

It has become evident that management accounting researchers need to pay particular attention to an organization’s approach to adoption and diffusion of innovation strategies, particularly when they are designing and implementing process innovation programs for an organization. According to Schulz (2001), there are two interrelated stages of the learning that can shape the outcome of the innovation process in an organization. The first stage is related to the acquisition/production (adoption) of knowledge that results in gathering information, codification, and exploration. This is followed by the second stage which is the distribution or dissemination (diffusion) processes. When these two stages – adoption and diffusion – are applied within an accounting context, they address issues that are commonly associated with the successes and/or failures of management accounting innovations.

Although innovation involves learning, the nature of the learning process does not completely describe the manner in which an innovation affects the organization. Accordingly, we suggest that the two interrelated organizational sociological dimensions of innovations processes, namely, (1) the adoption and diffusion theories of Rogers (1971 and 1995), to approach organizational learning, and (2) the SF (single loop) and CR (double loop) approaches to learning be used simultaneously to describe management accounting innovations.

When an innovation is implemented, it initially can be introduced as an incremental change, one that can be limited in both in its scope and its breadth of administrative changes. This means that situations which are most likely to benefit from its initiation can serve as the prototype for its adoption by the organization. If successful, this can be followed by systemic accounting innovations to instituting broader administrative changes within the existing accounting reporting and control systems.

This volume explores an expansive array of organizational imaginaries, or understandings of organizational possibilities, with a focus on how collectivist-democratic organizations offer alternatives to conventional for-profit managerial enterprises. These include worker and consumer cooperatives and other enterprises that, to varying degrees, (1) emphasize social values over profit; (2) are owned not by shareholders but by workers, consumers, or other stakeholders; (3) employ democratic forms of managing their operations; and (4) have social ties to the organization based on moral and emotional commitments. The contributors to this volume examine how these enterprises generate solidarity among members, network with other organizations and communities, contend with market pressures, and enhance their larger organizational ecosystems. In this introductory paper, the authors put forward an inclusive organizational typology whose continuums account for four key sources of variation – values, ownership, management, and social relations – and argue that enterprises fall between these two poles of the collectivist-democratic organization and the for-profit managerial enterprise. Drawing from this volume’s empirical studies, the authors situate these market actors within fields of competition and contestation shaped not just by state action and legal frameworks, but also by the presence or absence of social movements, labor unions, and meta-organizations. This typology challenges conventional conceptualizations of for-profit managerial enterprises as ideals or norms, reconnects past models of organizing among marginalized communities with contemporary and future possibilities, and offers activists and entrepreneurs a sense of the wide range of possibilities for building enterprises that differ from dominant models.

The purpose of this literature review is to reorient empirical research on the causal links between corporate ecological sustainability (CES) and corporate financial performance (CFP). Toward this end, we summarize the findings of four meta-analyses (conducted between 2012 and 2016), which indicate that there is, on average, a small positive association between CES and CFP. In addition, these empirical associations seem to be contingent on the firm’s strategic approach with regard to ecological sustainability (e.g., proactive vs reactive approach) and on the operationalization of both constructs. We conclude that future research may benefit from an even more explicit, analytic shift to the circumstances under which it pays for firms to go green. The main research limitations we point out are model misspecifications, endogeneity, and problems in the measurement of both CES and CFP.

The paper provides an overview of research published in the innovation and operations management (IOM) literature on 15 methods for cost management in new product development, and it provides a comparison to an earlier review of the management accounting (MA) literature (Wouters & Morales, 2014).

This structured literature search covers papers published in 23 journals in IOM in the period 1990–2014.

The search yielded a sample of 208 unique papers with 275 results (one paper could refer to multiple cost management methods). The top 3 methods are modular design, component commonality, and product platforms, with 115 results (42%) together. In the MA literature, these three methods accounted for 29%, but target costing was the most researched cost management method by far (26%). Simulation is the most frequently used research method in the IOM literature, whereas this was averagely used in the MA literature; qualitative studies were the most frequently used research method in the MA literature, whereas this was averagely used in the IOM literature. We found a lot of papers presenting practical approaches or decision models as a further development of a particular cost management method, which is a clear difference from the MA literature.

This review focused on the same cost management methods, and future research could also consider other cost management methods which are likely to be more important in the IOM literature compared to the MA literature. Future research could also investigate innovative cost management practices in more detail through longitudinal case studies.

This review of research on methods for cost management published outside the MA literature provides an overview for MA researchers. It highlights key differences between both literatures in their research of the same cost management methods.

Facebook “likes” are often used as a proxy of users’ attention and an affirmation of what is posted on Facebook (Gerodimos & Justinussen, 2015). To determine what factors predict “likes,” the authors analyzed Facebook posts made by the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump, the top three candidates from the 2016 US primary election. Several possible factors were considered, such as the types of posts, the use of pronouns and emotions, the inclusion of slogans and hashtags, references made to opponents, as well as candidate’s mentions on national television. The results of an ordinary least-squared regression analysis showed that the use of highly charged (positive or negative) emotions and personalized posts (first-person singular pronouns) increased “likes” across all three candidates’ Facebook pages, whereas visual posts (posts containing either videos or photos) and the use of past tenses were liked more often by Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’ followers than by Trump’s followers. Television mentions boosted likes on Clinton and Sanders’ posts but had a negative effect on Trump’s. The study contributes to the growing literature on digitally networked participation (Theocharis, 2015) and supports the emerging notion of the new “hybrid media” system (Chadwick, 2013) for political communication. The study also raises questions as to the relevance of platforms such as Facebook to deliberative democratic processes since Facebook users are not necessarily engaging with the content in an organic way, but instead might be guided to specific content by the Facebook timeline algorithm and targeted ads.

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.