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This paper aims to point to the shift in the temporal orientation, going from reporting on the past to creating insights about the future, which might be suggestive of perennial managerial attempts to push the boundaries of bounded rationality.

In this essay, the authors want to critically engage with the concept of “data-driven management” in the context of digitalization. To do so, they sketch the edges of current discourses around the emerging idea of data-driven management and its relationship with the inner workings of organizations from an accounting perspective. They question the often-times supposed objectivity and increased rationality of the concept and instead introduce the idea of becoming “data-curious” (before being data-driven).

The authors observe that this push also seems to be accompanied by trends of individualized decision-making and prevailing hopes of technology to solve organizational problems. They therefore suggest that it is valuable for current debates to take a moment to give attention, in practice and in research, to the role of temporality, benefits of collective decision-making and changes in professions (of accountants).

The aim of this paper is to spark curiosity and engagement with the phenomenon of data-driven management by outlining a novel set of potential future pathways of research and point towards methods that might help studying the questions arising for a data-curious approach.

The shared development concept is crucial for the construction of a socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This is because shared development constitutes the logic thread of the socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics and the core for the formation and development of its whole system.

China’s modernization is well underway and is following a unique path with its own characteristics, whereby shared development is undoubtedly one of its core values.

In the new era, the development path under the concept of shared development of socialism with Chinese characteristics must adhere to the all-round development of human beings, promote social equity and justice via development, and embrace inclusive growth, specifically, pro-poor growth.

This article aims to analyze the strategic work of Polish entrepreneurs in the furniture industry following the political changes in 1989. The authors examined how these entrepreneurs transitioned from local craftsmen or importers into leaders of international manufacturing companies and how their strategizing contributed to the unprecedented growth of the Polish furniture sector.

The authors examined extant data, specifically biographical interviews conducted with 11 prominent leaders in the Polish furniture industry (Hryniewicki, 2015, 2018). They analyzed within a theoretical framework that integrates J.C. Spender’s theory of strategic management with Barry Johnson’s concept of polarity management. Polarity is a way of understanding and managing interdependent, opposing pairs of values or perspectives that give rise to conflict.

The analysis reveals key patterns of strategic challenges at the level of human agency, history and sense-making. The authors identified four key polarities: life and business, knowledge presence and absence, concordance and discordance, and instrumental and non-instrumental sense-making.

The polarity concept illuminates the interplay of agency and determinism in strategic decision-making, offering valuable insights for methodology and a deeper understanding of Poland’s furniture industry.

Traditional studies in the sociology of science have highlighted the self-organized character of the academic community. This article focuses on recent interrelated changes that alter that distinctive governance structure and its related patterns of competition and cooperation. The changes that we identify here are contractualization and large-scale cooperative research. We use different data sources to exemplify these new patterns and discuss the illustrative role of research clusters in German academia. Research clusters as funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) are both a highly prestigious scarce good in the competition for reputation and resources and a means of fostering cooperation. Our analysis of this German example reveals that this new institutional configuration of universities as organizations, academic researchers, and the state has a profound effect on organizational practices. We discuss the implications of our empirical findings with regard to collegiality in academia. Ultimately, we anticipate a further weakening of collegial bonds, not only because universities and the state have become more active in shaping the nature of academic competition and cooperation but also because of the increasing strategic and individualistic orientation of academic researchers. In the final section, we summarize our findings and address the need for further research and an international comparative perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate the meaning of being a social entrepreneur in a society marked with multiple transitions. It aims to understand how theoretical concepts of social entrepreneurs, including common dichotomies between economic and social, collective and individual, reflect in social entrepreneurs’ rationale, values and identities.

The study used an exploratory and qualitative approach. Empirical data were gathered during 14 semi-structured interviews with Croatian social entrepreneurs. Thematic analysis was used as an analytical framework.

The findings suggest complexity of social entrepreneurs’ rationale and identities as they face challenges in balancing different goals. Democratic and participative governance appeared to be the weakest link of social enterprises. Identity of social entrepreneurs in the society of multiple transitions is fluid and changes through the continuum from pure social to pure commercial, from more related to civil society to more related to the market, from mostly individual to mostly collective.

The main limits of the study are related to sampling strategy and the small sample size. Generalization is limited by the nature of qualitative research and relies on analytical and naturalistic generalization.

The findings of the study may contribute to ecosystem development that would be more suitable for social enterprise realities in a specific context.

This paper focuses on the individual level and provides rare insights into social entrepreneurs’ rationale, values and identities.

This study aims to explore the serendipitous discovery of integrated reporting (IR) by Alpha, an Italian small and medium-sized enterprise (SME). Alpha piqued the curiosity when the authors discovered that it experimented with IR alongside other management accounting practices, such as the Balanced Scorecard. As the authors reflected on Alpha’s experiences, the authors had to opportunistically develop a new framework to understand the change that was taking place at Alpha fully. Thus, the authors developed the serendipitous drift framework. This study contributes to addressing the gap between management accounting research that sees change as a planned, ordered process versus research that sees it as an unmanageable drift.

The authors ground the research on a qualitative methodology based on a single case study. This methodology allows us to focus on understanding what has happened at Alpha to discover new themes and provide theoretical generalisations. The authors developed the framework using middle-range thinking and fleshed it out using empirical findings from the case study. Middle-range thinking implies going back and forth between the theory and the empirical material. Therefore, the authors develop the serendipitous drift framework from prior theories and use it to inform the empirical study. In turn, the empirical material collected in Alpha helps refine and flesh out the serendipitous drift framework. The framework explains how Alpha leveraged serendipity to steer change towards favourable outcomes for them.

The authors find that the search for change undertaken by Alpha’s managers was non-specific but purposeful. Their dispositions were sagacious enough to recognise the potential value found in management accounting practices, such as IR and the Balanced Scorecard. They chanced upon new and unforeseen practices through trial and error, iteration, internal engagement and networking.

Overall, the results indicate that Alpha’s managers shaped the disorder of management accounting changes, even though it followed unexpected, uncertain and messy paths. Indeed, appropriate informal controls can act as a frame of reference for choosing, adapting and implementing new management accounting practices to shape the disorder. Informal controls can both guide and bound the experimentation process towards desirable outcomes.

The authors contribute to management accounting change theory by developing a framework rooted in serendipity and drifting theories. The framework identifies how searching, sagacity and chance are essential for making positive, unexpected discoveries. Therefore, the authors provide novel insights on how and why IR and other management accounting practices are eventually translated and adopted in the case company. Moreover, the serendipitous drift framework has the potential to help managers frame cultural controls to actively seek opportunities for valuable serendipitous eureka moments through networking and experimentation.

The purpose of this research is to highlight the impact of integrative leadership behaviors on network performance in local government networks.

The data were retrieved from a survey conducted on 362 local government network leaders in Italy. Their leadership behaviors were compared with the level of network performance anonymously self-reported.

The findings show that high frequency in the usage of a specific category of behavior does not always lead to high performance in local government networks. Moreover, leadership behaviors leading to highly performing networks are not always engaged most frequently by networks' leaders.

This research gives an empirical contribution to a neglected topic: network leadership. Moreover, the authors attempt to highlight how it is able to influence network performance.

Unique among European Union (EU) economic governance entities and multilateral banks, the European Investment Bank (EIB) possesses a dual nature, as an EU body and a bank. The EIB has been ever evolving to adapt to policy and market developments and to reflect the geo-economic landscape. In 2019, in association with the EU's Green Deal, the bank announced its metamorphosis into a “Climate Bank,” ending its fossil fuel lending after 2021. Additionaly, upon the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and its attendant health and economy crisis, EU decision-makers have solicited the bank to support both urgent needs for tackling and countering the spread of the disease and the post-pandemic economic recovery. Nevertheless, devastated economic actors in need of assistance fall within many sectors, including some less green ones.

This article is grounded on agency theory for developing a generic stakeholder framework, which is then subsequently applied in investigating the EIB, in interaction with its main stakeholders.

This article investigates the EIB stakeholders in pursuing these two seemingly contradictory objectives of exclusively restricting its activity to green funding and expanding its action for achieving a broad impact in the real economy. By exploring this tension, the article argues that by prioritizing the post-COVID restart, the EIB risks to deviate from its strict green commitment.

The analysis of the EIB's divergent stakeholder stances demonstrates some ambivalence in future EIB activity in an effort to equipoise climate finance with a post-pandemic boost. The same ambivalence might equally occur with other major economic governance actors. The stakeholder framework developed and applied in the case of the EIB can be useful for studying also the stakeholder dynamics of other organizations.

The analysis demonstrates a tension between selective climate-related funding for “building back better” and the need for a wide broaching of countercyclical stimulus, with implications for economic and social actors alike.

The approach is novel, as it develops a new analytical framework for understanding stakeholder dynamics and tests it empirically on the EIB. This constitutes the first study of EIB stakeholder management.

As China embarks upon a new era of high-quality development, it is increasingly important and imperative for China’s economic development to live up to its real nature, which is to satisfy people’s growing needs for a better life. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The paper attempts to discuss the implication of HQD and its related theoretical issues from the basic theory of economics, and literature review. It is necessary to return to Marx’s “dual character of commodity” to check the theoretical foundation of this issue, based on the duality methodology, namely, the duality of the value of use and the value of exchange.

Moving from HSG phase to HQD phase constitutes a major challenge and an arduous task that is extremely difficult both theoretically and practically. A series of new problems crop out as to the theoretical understanding and practical resolution. Fundamentally speaking, this new dynamic mechanism intrinsically requires a perfect integration of the instrumental rationality of market economy and the value-based rationality of economic development.

This new momentum requires a perfect match between the instrumental rationality of market economy and the value-based rationality of economic development.

This paper aims to offer an incremental contribution, augmenting the notion of situated rationality as proposed by terBogt and Scapens (2019). Through insights from empirical data, the authors explore the role of situated rationalities of key individual actors in processes of management control change.

A qualitative research approach was adopted with qualitative data collected in a single public service organisation through face-to-face interviews, organisation documentation and observations.

The findings present the important role of key individual actors in bringing about a new situated rationality in a housing department. External austerity forces combined with actors’ experience rationalities acted as a stimulus to change existing management control practices in the management of public services.

The paper conceptualises “experience” rationality, capturing the experiences of a key actor, including elements of leadership style. Drawing on a story of a complex process of management control change, this paper thus reveals interactions between generalised practices and situated rationalities which were not highlighted by the extended framework of terBogt and Scapens.