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The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species in achieving biodiversity conservation and preventing the extinction of species. The Red List is a calculative device that classifies species in terms of their exposure to the risk of extinction.

The paper draws on theorising in the Social Studies of Finance literature to analyse the Red List in terms of how it frames a space of calculability for species extinction. The analysis then traces the ways that this framing has overflowed, creating conditions for calculative innovations, such that assemblages of humans and calculative devices (i.e. agencements) are constructed with collective capabilities to act to conserve biodiversity and prevent species extinctions.

This paper has traced three ways that the Red List frame has overflowed, leading to calculative innovations and the construction of new agencements. The overflow of relations between the quality of “extinction risk”, produced by the Red List, and other qualities, such as location, has created opportunities for conservationists to develop agencements capable of formulating conservation strategies. The overflow of relations between the identity of the “threatened species”, produced by the Red List, and other features of evaluated species, has created opportunities for conservationists to develop agencements capable of impelling participation in conservation efforts. The overflow of ecological relations between species, discarded by the Red List’s hierarchical metrology of extinction risk classifications, has created opportunities for conservationists to develop agencements capable of confronting society with the reality of an extinction crisis.

The paper contributes to the accounting for biodiversity literature by addressing its fundamental challenge: explaining how accounting can create conditions within society in which biodiversity conservation is made possible.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize the “interacted” actor and connect it with practices of managerial value creation in an interactive business world. In doing so, it accounts for the interactive agency of actors via dynamics of the creational process across increasing technological “platformization” of interactions of heterogeneous (human and non-human) sociomaterial entities.

The study discusses a foundational theoretical framework of a co-creation paradigm (CCP) while connecting it with recent industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP) literature on mixed network and system ontology. It then elaborates on conceptual research contributions and key business management implications in advancing IMP studies through CCP.

The framing of interactional flows across interactive system environments in business networks is related to both stability and developmental change in the enactment of creation via interactive agencies-structures in the ongoing pursuits of both business efficiency and innovation of value creational opportunities.

By effectively configuring platformed networked interactions of experience value creation in their business contexts, managers (and stakeholding individuals in general) can better cope with the complexity of interactivity and interdependencies.

Managerial experience value co-creation through CCP builds on the IMP tradition by explicitly recognizing actors, in addition to activities and resources as being interactively defined. Because the relational logics are applicable at varying levels of scale across system-environment boundaries, it can be applied at both the individual and company levels or more generally at any level of agglomeration.

Many countries today, especially in Europe, provide publicly funded public services in quasi-markets. As these markets commercialize, agencies of various types are providing technologies that support citizens’ choice of services. Citizens’ use of technologies for service provision is studied as e-government under labels of channel management, e-service uptake or adoption. In contrast, by using actor–network theory (ANT), the purpose of this paper is to focus on the marketing devices that are used to enroll citizens to choose technologies in a context with large penetration of quasi-market arrangements.

Based on a Swedish case study, this paper uses qualitative data from 11 occurrences of technologies to support citizens’ choice (“market devices”) in education, healthcare and public pension in an analysis of the means taken (“marketing devices”) to increase their use. The study formulates a tentative typology of these devices.

The marketing devices are intended to attract citizens’ attention to the possibility of choice (e.g. catalogs, postcards and commercials), invite interaction (e.g. various social media platforms), improve the technological support in line with user needs (e.g. user participation in development), increase visibility of technological support (e.g. search optimization) or directly connect citizens to technological support (e.g. via links).

The paper contributes to e-government research through a typology of means taken to increase citizens’ technology use based on selected concepts from ANT, and to a discussion of technologies and humans.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the current developments to “mainstream” and standardise sustainability reporting and the consequences of those changes. Those changes give rise to the colonisation of sustainability reporting through the adoption of financial reporting concepts.

This research draws on critical theory, particularly the work of Foucault, to understand the dynamics of accounting change. This approach provides an alternative to the current narrative that the concepts that underpin reporting are universal and timeless.

It is suggested that if the aim of mandatory sustainability reporting is to promote companies adopting sustainable business models, then it must properly reflect the context of the company. Both transactive and relationship information is critical to providing an account that can be used to judge the performance of the corporation beyond its production of short-term net positive cash flows.

The design of standard setting arrangements for sustainability reporting needs to recognise that it may be unhelpful to simply adopt financial reporting concepts for the purposes of directing corporate behaviour towards sustainable development.

Continuing to adopt a view of the corporation as a nexus of contracts with no clear accountability to stakeholders is likely to stymie efforts to deal with the environmental and social crisis facing people and planet.

Whilst other works have considered the development of sustainability reporting, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to consider the impacts of “mainstreaming” it within mandatory corporate reporting.

Digitalization denotes an on-going transformation of great importance for the retail sector. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the phenomenon of the digitalization of retailing by developing a conceptual framework that can be used to further delineate current transformations of the retailer-consumer interface.

This paper develops a framework for digitalization in the retail-consumer interface that consists of four elements: exchanges, actors, offerings, and settings. Drawing on the previous literature, it describes and exemplifies how digitalization transforms each of these elements and identifies implications and proposals for future research.

Digitalization transforms the following: retailing exchanges (in a number of ways and in various facets of exchange, including communications, transactions, and distribution); the nature of retail offerings (blurred distinctions between products and services, what constitutes the actual offering and how it is priced); retail settings (i.e. where and when retailing takes place); and the actors who participate in retailing (i.e. retailers and consumers, among other parties).

The framework developed can be used to further delineate current transformations of retailing due to digitalization. The current transformation has created challenges for research, as it demands sensitivity to development over time and insists that categories that have been taken for granted are becoming increasingly blurred due to greater hybridity.

This paper addresses a significant and on-going transformation in retailing and develops a framework that can both guide future research and aid retail practitioners in analysing retailing’s current transformation due to digitalization.

Digital ecosystemic business environments challenge dyadic approaches to value creation and particularly to business-to-business (B2B) sales. This paper aims to offer a novel conceptualization of the connection between value creation and B2B sales, which indicates practical implications and builds an agenda for future research.

This conceptual paper integrates theoretical insights on service-dominant logic, service ecosystems, interactional value co-creation and B2B sales. This paper uses anecdotal evidence from the field of B2B sales to illustrate theoretical concepts developed in the paper.

The paper develops the concept of value idea emergence (VIE), the process through which B2B entities become aware of a pursuable benefit. The paper further proposes that value (co-)creation in ecosystems happens through VIE’s intertwinement with the process of value proposition creation, a process, which includes all activities needed to bring a value proposition to a customer. The paper then discusses the role of B2B in these processes and proposes an agenda for future research.

The novel conceptualizations of value (co-)creation can help B2B sales managers to understand the ecosystemic nature of the interactions that affect sales and value creation in the current business environment.

The paper contributes to the literature on B2B sales and value creation by proposing a novel concept of VIE, introducing a conceptual model of interactive value (co-)creation in ecosystems and reformulating the role of B2B sales in value creation. These theory-developing insights can be used to guide both academic and managerial attention to interactions happening in the ecosystem outside of the buyer-seller dyad.

Intermediate short food supply chains (SFSC) have been presented as a possible solution to unsustainable global food supply chains. There is currently a knowledge gap about intermediate SFSC. Thus, this review synthesizes the available literature to identify prominent themes and their main considerations.

This research is based on a systematic literature review including peer-reviewed journal articles until December 2021. Inductive data coding resulted in the identification of four themes related to intermediate SFSC.

The identified themes illustrate the complex landscape intermediate SFSCs operate in and focus on the key relationships within these supply chains. The established relationships have implications for the governance of intermediate SFSCs. The organization of intermediate SFSCs affects numerous sustainability indicators.

Future research should focus on the position intermediate SFSCs have in food systems and the roles intermediaries have in intermediate SFSCs. There is furthermore an opportunity for researchers to investigate different types of intermediaries and explore the factors influencing them.

Creating sustainable food supply chains is one of the major societal challenges of today. The current state of the art suggests that intermediate SFSCs could play an important role in achieving this. So far, this area is underdeveloped and this review highlights knowledge gaps in the literature and suggestions for a future research agenda are proposed.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the interactions of factors impacting the widespread adoption of prefabricated building technologies and the intervention strategies to facilitate the development of prefabrication based on fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs).

Through in-depth interviews with six stakeholder groups, namely, the government, developers, designers, contractors, manufacturers and researchers, 13 critical factors were identified and used to construct stakeholder-grouped FCMs, which were further aggregated into a collective FCM. The complexity and density of the collective FCM and the centrality of factors in the FCM were examined. Subsequently, a series of “what-if” simulations of the collective FCM were conducted to analyze the effectiveness of different interventions in promoting prefabrication.

The results show that three factors including market demand, cost, and policies and regulations have been mentioned by all stakeholder groups. However, these factors were ranked differently by stakeholder groups, implying that different stakeholder groups perceive the barriers to prefabricated building technologies differently. FCM simulations show that strengthening policies and regulations yield the strongest overall effect stimulating prefabrication, alleviating the organizational and environmental barriers more than the technological barriers, while improving the knowledge and expertise alleviate the technological barriers more. These measures need to be accompanied by other approaches, such as reducing cost and improving quality.

It is a tough task to promote prefabrication as it is affected by numerous barriers with complex interactions, which have been overlooked by previous studies. This study clearly shows which strategy could tackle which barriers to prefabrication through the FCM simulations. This provides valuable references for the enterprises’ decision making and the governments’ policy making to facilitate the diffusion of prefabricated building technologies.

Few studies aim to analyze the interactions among the barriers to prefabrication, while this study specifically investigates this issue by illustrating the complex interactions using FCMs. Few studies also aim to identify the intervention strategies promoting prefabrication based on a quantitative approach, while this study employs FCM simulations to directly simulate the effectiveness of different strategies to facilitate prefabrication in a quantitative manner.

The purpose of this paper is to make sense of the tensions and contradictions between different conceptions of the meaning of carbon accounting.

The paper draws on theories of framing to help explain the divergent understandings and practices currently encompassed by the term “carbon accounting”. The empirical core of the paper is based on a review of the literature and illustrated through examples of some of the contemporary problems in carbon accounting.

Tensions and contradictions in carbon accounting can be understood as the result of “collisions” between at least five overlapping frames of reference, namely physical, political, market‐enabling, financial and social/environmental modes of carbon accounting.

Unresolved tensions in carbon accounting can undermine confidence in climate science, policies, markets and reporting, thereby ultimately discouraging action to mitigate climate change. Understanding this problem can contribute to finding practical solutions.

The paper makes three distinct contributions to the emerging theoretical literature on carbon accounting. First, it provides a unique “unpacked” definition of carbon accounting that attempts to represent the contemporary range of meanings encompassed by the term. Second, it demonstrates how social science ideas about framing can help explain why definitions and understandings of carbon accounting vary. Third, by making the interactions between different forms of carbon accounting explicit through the metaphor of colliding frames of reference, the origins of some of the contemporary intractable issues in carbon accounting can be better understood.

Most studies investigating the adoption of lean startup (LS) practices by technology new ventures focus on software startups in mature entrepreneurial ecosystems and disregard their applicability for opportunity exploitation in other technological backgrounds. This study contributes to this research stream by exploring how Brazilian technology new ventures (in different technological fields) tentatively adopt LS to exploit opportunities and whether LS is suitable to their emerging economy context.

The authors adopt an exploratory multiple-case study based on qualitative data collection and analysis of nine Brazilian biotechnology, engineering and software startups.

The study shows how technology new ventures tackle the activities of opportunity exploitation – namely, developing a product or service, acquiring human resources, gathering financial resources and setting up the organization – by leveraging LS tools and practices for business model validation; also, it identifies six contextual constraints hindering the systematic adoption of LS and reveals how technology new ventures cope with such constraints in their early stages by integrating LS with complementary strategies and practices. Furthermore, the study reveals that the systematic and comprehensive adoption of LS nurtures the development of an entrepreneurial experimental capability to explore opportunities in a quasi-scientific and hypothesis-driven fashion.

The study investigates how Brazilian engineering, biotechnology and software startups exploit opportunities and overcome constraints to business model validation through the combined adoption of LS and complementary strategies and practices and provides a set of propositions to guide future research.