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This research paper aims to explore the added value of knowledge management (KM) and its antecedents for innovation and organizational performance (OP) in marginal healthcare organizations.

Using insights from the resource-based view and knowledge-based theory of the firm, the model explains the effects of technology capabilities (TC) and organizational culture (OC) on the KM process, process innovation (PIN), administrative innovation (AIN) and OP. The authors used partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to analyze data collected from 168 healthcare practitioners in Cameroon using a survey.

The authors reveal that TC and OC positively impact some KM components. Knowledge sharing (KS), knowledge acquisition (KA) and responsiveness to knowledge (RK) influence PIN, while only PIN and KA influence OP. FsQCA provided several configurations that lead to high OP within healthcare centers. As a result, the results are adaptable to any healthcare center that wishes to set up one or more KM processes.

Given that the results will help the health workforce make concerted decisions about medical care, the authors contribute significantly to the definition and optimization of KM in healthcare by implementing various processes and policies to ensure the continued existence of high-quality and outstanding healthcare systems. The KM propositions will enable healthcare centers to: (1) improve the quality of patient care through collegiality in medical practice; (2) optimize processes in the patient care chain; and (3) leverage knowledge gained though knowledge sharing among the medical team. The propositions open up avenues for future research in addition to providing practical implications for healthcare center practitioners.

This study sheds new empirical light on the relationships between KM antecedents and processes, innovation and OP in healthcare centers. This research is one of the few to examine the relationship between TC, OC, KM processes, innovation and OP in developing countries. This paper aims to fill this gap and inform future research concerning KM in the healthcare sector. Further, this study goes beyond testing the PLS-SEM approach's hypotheses by applying fsQCA to provide practical and comprehensive knowledge on how to increase the efficiency of a healthcare center through KM.

The purpose of this paper is to study the incidence, impact, and consequences of accountant and lawyer bankruptcies in Victorian Scotland. The paper examines these bankruptcies in the context of an emerging profession separating from an established legal profession as part of the rise of professionalism in the Victorian Age.

The paper reports data describing 135 accountant and 361 lawyer bankruptcies declared between 1855 and 1904. It uses theories of the rise of professionalism, signals of movement to occupational ascendancy, and social attitudes to money to provide explanations of the incidence, impact, and consequences of these bankruptcies. The paper also examines bankruptcy and the early disciplinary codes of professional accountancy associations.

Despite a trend of general decline in total, accountant, and lawyer bankruptcies in Scotland through the Victorian Age, there is no consistency over time between accountant and lawyer bankruptcies and economic conditions. Bankrupt accountants were typically unregulated as professionals in contrast with bankrupt lawyers who were usually regulated. Accountant and lawyer bankruptcies predominantly involved experienced practitioners, location in major cities, and administration by professional accountants. Bankruptcy was associated with criminal activity in a minority of cases in each profession. There was inconsistency in the post‐bankruptcy disciplining of bankrupt accountants and lawyers, and post‐bankruptcy loss of economic status in both professions.

The paper contributes to the Victorian history of institutionalised professions such as accounting and law. It demonstrates the presence of marginal practitioners in emerging and established professions, the need to study professionalisation in social context, and the impact of bankruptcy on discipline in an emerging profession.

The paper represents the first contextualised study of bankruptcy among professionals generally and accountants and lawyers, particularly in the Victorian Age.

This chapter explores the potential roles and contributions of “marginal stakeholders” in sustainability collaborations. A group of smaller and less powerful NGOs engaged in a three-year collaboration to build capacity and drive action to address the severe water situation in Beijing, China. That the NGOs were the primary driver of the collaboration provides a unique opportunity to explore and understand whether and how the less powerful constituents of a network can organize to influence such broad, complex, and challenging issues.

The case study is the result of a participant action research effort. The author served as researcher, observer, participant, and consultant during different phases of the collaboration.

Individual members and the network as a whole demonstrated increased capacity and capability, but mostly failed to drive action. By themselves, small and marginal stakeholders have limited capacity or capability to effect large-scale sustainability efforts. With coaching, development, and a shared agenda, they may emerge as a force for change, but there are significant hurdles to overcome.

The successes and failures of a steering committee formed early in the collaboration provide concrete guidelines for anyone who wants to help marginal stakeholders play change agent roles in complex networks.

Very little is known about the role of “marginal” or “fringe” stakeholders in network collaborations. This case demonstrates the potential contribution of these stakeholders but also identifies the hazards associated with their participation.

This paper aims to examine the effect of circular economy’s ending of waste on marginal property practices.

This paper utilises doctrinal and theoretical legal analysis, along with theoretical perspectives and qualitative empirical evidence drawn from non-legal academic disciplines.

The current legalistic conception of waste depends on control and value. The indeterminate status of waste as goods at the margins of consumption attracts attention from legal regimes. This process is evidenced by a commercialised treatment of goods at the margins of consumption, limiting the scope of radical marginal property practices such as freeganism (taking goods abandoned by others, to use such goods).

The circular economy aims to end waste. Restriction, and ultimately elimination, of marginal property practices is necessary for circular economy. Freegans will be limited to acting in a “challenge” role, identifying breaches of commercial commodification processes. Control over the use (including disposal) of goods reduces the spaces available for marginal property practices, which in turn raises problematic normative implications for “normal” consumption practices involving waste.

This is the first examination of the impact of circular economy on freeganism. It is also the first sustained application of marginal property theory (van der Walt, 2009) in a legal analysis of circular economy and waste.

The 1990s have been the decade of state decentralisation both in India and in Sweden. Decentralisation of political power has been accompanied by the rhetoric of community participation in natural resource management and rural development initiatives. In light of this, questions about whom or what constitutes the ‘community’ and ‘the local’ take on important connotations. Women and men living in many rural areas (often peripheral in relation to State and other decision-making structures) have sought to ‘redefine’ community citizenship and their relationships with the forests and nature around them. They have tried to play a more active and responsible role in the relationships that they already share by virtue of living together with the forests. Although considerable research has now turned to look at these processes, the gendered nature of these efforts is often subsumed in all-encompassing terms such as community, state or forests. Research with women in two forest communities, one in Sweden and the other in India illustrated that natural resource management is clearly gendered and has tangible effects on the gendering of citizenship in rural areas.

Professionals often dislike dirty work, yet they accommodate or even embrace it in everyday practice. This chapter problematizes Andrew Abbott’s professional purity thesis by examining five major forms of impurities in professional work, namely impurity in expertise, impurity in jurisdictions, impurity in clients, impurity in organizations, and impurity in politics. These impurities complicate the relationship between purity and status as some impurities may enhance professional status while others may jeopardize it, especially when the social origins of professionals are rapidly diversifying and professional work is increasingly intertwined with the logics of market and bureaucracy. Taking impurities seriously can help the sociology of professions move beyond the idealistic image of an independent, disinterested professional detached from human emotions, turf battles, client influence, and organizational or political forces and towards a more pragmatic understanding of professional work, expertise, ethics and the nature of professionalism.

This paper uses the capital asset pricing model to show that, in realistic circumstances, double taxation and differential tax rates on personal and capital-gains income affect corporate stock values and financial policies in non-neutral ways. This non-neutrality holds whenever inflation is uncertain and tax-avoidance activity is neither costless nor riskless. The model also allows us to explore how a series of frequently proposed changes in the interplay of corporate and personal taxes would affect corporate dividend payouts and debt usage. Our analysis clarifies that conscientious efforts to integrate corporate and personal tax rates must make supporting changes in the size and character of capital-gains tax preferences built into the tax code.

Numerous studies have examined the institutional setting of accounting as a professional occupation. However, institutional deeds and outcomes derive from the behaviour of individual actors, particularly those key players who drive the creation, policy development and outlook of practitioner associations. Recognising this, and in search of a more detailed understanding of the dynamics of professional formation, this study applies the prosopographical method of inquiry to accounting development in Australia during the period 1886 to 1908. Motives and actions are identified with the founding members of the Incorporated Institute of Accountants, Victoria, during this formative era, which saw key personalities transfer their allegiance to the Australasian Corporation of Public Accountants. The beliefs, preferences and ambitions of individual participants are shown to exert significant influence over the process of professional formation, highlighting the capacity of prosopographical studies to augment the predominantly vocational and institutional focus of the prior sociology of professions literature.

Surveys the process of professionalization as it applies to UK librarianship in its evolution from occupation through semi‐profession to full blown professional status. Examines Abbott’s ideas on the heartland of work and jurisdiction in relation to librarianship and some of the issues bearing on the profession today, such as deprofessionalization and hospitality of membership. Gives an historical overview of the first events in the passage of the Library Association along the professionalization continuum. Outlines a model of a fusion‐fission process underlying the life cycle of professional bodies.

The purpose of this Australian case study, set in the 1960s, is to comprehensively examine the responses of the two major professional accounting bodies to a financial/corporate/regulatory crisis necessitating the defence of the profession's legitimacy.

This historical paper draws on surviving primary records and secondary sources and applies the perspectives on the dynamics of occupational groups and the legitimacy typology of Suchman.

While the history of the accounting profession has been characterized by intra‐professional rivalries, this case study illustrates how such rivalries were put aside on recognising the power of collectivizing in defending the profession's legitimacy. Based on the available evidence, pragmatic legitimacy is shown to have been a key focus of attention by the major accounting bodies involved.

The paper may motivate similar studies in Australia and elsewhere, thus potentially contributing to developing a literature on comparative international accounting history. The evidence for this historical investigation is largely restricted to surviving documents, making it necessary to rely on assessments of the key sources.

In addressing responses to crises in defending the legitimacy of the profession as a whole, the paper makes an original contribution in exploring the relationship between literature on the dynamics of occupational groups and on legitimacy management.