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Most studies on workplace meetings have examined them as physical gatherings but have not linked them to interactions before and after meetings. Drawing upon coordination theory, this study aims to examine the impact of interactions before, during and after meetings on meeting effectiveness.

A survey design was used, and regular workplace meeting attendees were recruited. A mediation model was developed to test the effect of interactions on perceived meeting effectiveness.

Interactions before meetings positively influenced attendee involvement during the meeting, and attendee involvement mediated the positive relationship between attendee interactions during the meeting and perceived meeting effectiveness. A novel finding of this study is that incorporating meeting outcomes in subsequent work positively influenced perceived meeting effectiveness because it fostered common understanding of the meeting agenda.

The present results link prior empirical findings on interactions before and during meetings to new predictions regarding the effect of interactions after meetings. Coordination theory expands current conceptualizations of workplace meetings by broadening the notion of meetings to cover a more extended period of interdependent interactions.

Annual general meetings have been variously described as dull rituals for accountability versus entertaining theatre at the expense of accountability. The research analyses director and shareholder participation and dialogic interactions at annual and extraordinary general meetings of Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSAC). The BSAC was incorporated under a royal charter in 1889 in return for power to exploit a huge territory, Rhodesia/now Zimbabwe. The BSAC's administration ceased in 1924/25. Thus, the BSAC had a dual mandate as a private for-profit listed company and to occupy and develop the territories on behalf of the British government.

The article analyses 29 BSAC general meeting minutes, comprising 25 full sets of verbatim minutes between 1895 and 1925. The study adopts manual content analysis. First, the research adopts conversational analysis to analyse director and shareholder turn-taking and moves by approving and dissenting shareholders. Second, the study identifies and analyses incidents of shareholder sentiment from the shareholder turns/moves. Finally, the article assesses how shareholder sentiment changed throughout the period and whether the BSAC's share price reflected the shareholder sentiment.

The BSAC's general meetings were associated with the greater colonial project of building the British Empire. The authors find almost 1,500 incidents of shareholder sentiment. Directors and shareholders take roughly an equal number of turns (excluding shareholder sentiment). Ritual and ceremony dominate director and shareholder turns and moves, while accountability to shareholders was minimal. The BSAC share price spiked in the early years of the project, waning after that. Shareholder sentiment, both positive and negative, reflect the share price behaviour.

A unique database of verbatim general meeting minutes records shareholders' reactions to what they heard in the form of sounding off through cheering, “hear, hears,” laughter and applause (i.e. shareholder sentiment).

The purpose was to present a developed, tested and evaluated methodology for assessing teamwork and sustainable quality culture, focusing on top management teams (TMTs).

The developed methodology was based on a convergent mixed-method design, including two data collection methods: questionnaire and focus group discussion. Two pilot tests were performed with two TMTs. This design involved analysing, merging and interpreting data, first separately by data collection method and theme and then in a meta-interpretation. Lastly, there was a follow-up meeting for evaluating results.

Findings from the study were that the methodology can be used to assess teamwork and sustainable quality culture, and the results also showed the strength of using two data collection methods to provide a broader picture of teamwork and sustainable quality culture. A follow-up meeting validated the results and provided additional value to the two TMTs in the form of suggestions on how to improve their teamwork and sustainable quality culture.

Applying this methodology can guide TMTs in how to improve their teamwork and sustainable quality culture within their organisations.

This is a new methodology, containing a developed questionnaire and an interview guide, aiming to assess and evaluate teamwork within TMTs and sustainable quality culture. The practice of the methodology adds value to both TMTs and their organisations, as well as provides a theoretical and methodological contribution to research on teamwork and sustainable quality culture.

The present paper aims at understanding how horizontal network collaborations between small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can be designed and implemented to take advantage of a supply chain finance (SCF) perspective.

This study presents an SCF literature background identifying four literature gaps, and in response to them it adopts an action research approach. The empirical analysis is developed on a network-case study: a horizontal collaboration project between small businesses of the Italian wine industry and their supply chains.

SMEs can play an active role in developing – in terms of design and implementation – their collaborative networks by taking advantage of an SCF perspective for themselves, and their customers, based on the reorganization of relationships interface processes. Taking this perspective can be a concrete and crucial way to sustain the development of SMEs and their supply chains in an actual competitive context.

The paper identifies the theoretical gaps in the literature, suggests new research areas that deserve to be more deeply investigated and connects case-related results to the key concepts. The empirical part presents a real case application that proposes a complete roadmap for managers and practitioners who wish to experience similar projects.

This network-case study storyline, presenting an overview of ten years of meetings, with related purposes, is suggesting a roadmap for design and implementation of horizontal network as managerial implications. These kinds of active research projects, with a collaborative mixed team of academics and practitioners, and involving a multilayer group of participants, are positive examples for closing the bridge between companies and academia, which enhance this network of small businesses active in trying to improve their competitiveness working together.

The value of the paper is to embrace a supply chain-oriented perspective for an SME, independent of the financial system and based on inventory flow management. Very little literature focuses on inventory-based research within the SCF framework, designed for real implementation in horizontal network collaboration by entrepreneurial ventures.

Secure mental health services in one UK region have acted within a network to develop a range of involvement practices. A new quality benchmarking tool has been created to appraise the implementation of these involvement practices. The purpose of this paper is to report upon a qualitative evaluation of this development.

Staff and service users involved in the co-production of the benchmarking tool were engaged in a series of focus groups and participatory inquiry approaches enacted in the course of scheduled network meetings. Data thus collected was subject to thematic analysis.

Four distinct themes were identified which were titled: Taking time, taking care; The value not the label; An instrument of the network; and All people working together. These are discussed in relation to recent theorising of co-production.

Effectively, this study represents a case study of developments within one region. As such, the findings may have limited transferability to other contexts.

Staff and service users can work together effectively to the benefit of each other and overall forensic services. The benchmarking tool provides a readymade mechanism to appraise quality improvements.

Despite a prevailing culture of competition in wider health-care policy, cooperation leads to enhanced quality.

The benchmarking tool is a unique development of a longstanding involvement network, demonstrating the positive implications for enacting co-production within secure services.

This study aims to explore the ways that social enterprises (SE) create value by embedding themselves in networks through the process of social innovation (SI). The processes of achieving common social missions were studied through selected organizations using an open approach to SI. Novel operational structures as well as unique forms of created value were explored.

Two organizations embedded in local and international networks were studied and were chosen due to their SI profiles. The study was based on qualitative exploratory research. In-depth analysis was conducted through interviews, open discussions, document analysis as well as personal observation to understand the dynamic interrelatedness of the main factors influencing success of SI ventures.

This paper identified the role of SI in SEs embedded in networks. Furthermore, the social value creation processes of these organizations as well as the value they create were explored. Based on the findings, SI is rooted in the personality of the included members of the network. The tools of collaboration are platforms that connect the network members to each other. The embedded organizations apply the concept of community sharing with the aim of social value creation.

By focusing mainly on system design principles, the sample consists of mainly those at the core of organizations in facilitator roles, leaving peripheral actor perceptions to be determined by secondhand observations.

While providing a general summary of factors influencing SI activities from extent literature, the paper mainly contributes by providing deeper insight into complex models of SI practices used by SEs. The paper further contributes to popularizing the growing role of SI activities in SEs.

This article explores how public librarians understand and perform the democratic mission of public libraries in times of political and social turbulence and critically discusses the idea of public libraries as meeting places.

Five group interviews conducted with public librarians in southern Sweden are analyzed using a typology of four perspectives on democracy.

Two perspectives on democracy are commonly represented: social-liberal democracy, focusing on libraries as promoters of equality and deliberative democracy, focusing on the library as a place for rational deliberation. Two professional dilemmas in particular present challenges to librarians: how to handle undemocratic voices and how to be a library for all.

The analysis points to a need for rethinking the idea of the meeting place and offers a rare example of an empirically based argument for the benefits of plural agonistics for analyzing and strengthening the democratic role of public libraries.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the perception of real teamwork and sustainable quality culture as well as success factors for achieving a sustainable quality culture within an organisation, focusing on top management teams (TMTs). An additional purpose is to explore the relationship between real teamwork and sustainable quality culture.

A mixed-methods design focusing on TMTs was used. Four TMTs were open-sampled and located in different parts of Sweden. The data were collected through questionnaires and focus group discussions between April 2022 and December 2022. Follow-up meetings were thereafter held with the participants. A meta-analysis was conducted of the data from the four TMTs.

Two overarching conclusions of this study were: to follow the developed methodology can be one way to increase TMTs' abilities for real teamwork alongside a sustainable quality culture, and the results also showed the importance of a systems view, emotional commitment and continuous improvement for improving real teamwork and creating a sustainable quality culture.

Practical implications were suggestions on how to increase the TMTs' abilities for real teamwork alongside a sustainable quality culture. A deepened understanding of real teamwork and a sustainable quality culture was also achieved by the participants.

The novelty of this paper is the use of a new methodology for assessing teamwork and sustainable quality culture. To the authors' knowledge, no similar research has previously been performed to investigate teamwork alongside a sustainable quality culture, focusing on TMTs.

This study aims to explore virtual leadership work within educational settings in the light of social disruption. In 2020, a global pandemic changed the way we work. For school leaders, that involved running a virtual school overnight. Although there is a stream of research that explores leadership in solely virtual communities, there is a gap in the literature regarding practices that transition from analog to virtual practices and the changes in leadership in those types of work practices.

The data gathering method constitutes a questionnaire to explore school leaders’ experiences of virtual work and virtual leadership in light of social disruption. One hundred and five Swedish school leaders answered the questionnaire covering both fixed and open questions.

The results show that school leaders’ general experiences of transition to virtual school have worked relatively well. We show how the work changes and shift the focus in the virtual workplace.

The author’s contributions include theorizing about leadership affordances in virtual schools and providing implications for practice. The authors summarize our main contribution in five affordances that characterize virtual leadership, including a focus on core activities, trust-based government, 1:1 communication with staff, structure and clarity and active outreach activities. The results could be interesting for understanding the radical digitalization of leadership in the digital workplace.

Literature reveals ongoing debates around the role of business analysts in agile software development (ASD) teams. This can be attributed, in part, to a knowledge gap concerning how business analysts contribute to overall team capabilities, particularly those which are essential in enabling teams to respond to fast-paced environmental changes. The purpose of this study was to address this gap by investigating how business analysts (BAs) contribute to the dynamic capabilities of ASD teams.

Through a deductive approach, this study adapted and applied a research model based on the team dynamic capabilities (DC) theory to explore the contributions of BAs in agile teams. The study was executed using a qualitative, single case study research strategy directed at an ASD team in the financial services industry. Moreover, data were collected through face-to-face, semi-structured interviews; a focus group; non-participant observation and physical artefacts review. The thematic analysis technique was used to analyse the data.

The study contributes to teams DC theory through four theoretical propositions centred on the role of BAs. The proposition highlights how BAs relationship management, tacit knowledge sharing, task mental models and transactive memory are key contributors of ASD teams' DC. The study also found that BAs contribute to ASD teams' ability to embrace agile principles 2, 4, 6 and 12. This study can inform the design of capacity development programmes for individual team members and BAs and thus help managers curate teams that will best promote DC.

This study can inform the design of capacity development programmes for individual team members and BAs and thus help managers curate teams that will best promote DC.

This study builds on the relatively few studies which focus on DC within software development (SD) teams and ASD project teams. Moreover, the study explores how an individual (i.e. a BA) can contribute to the DC of a team.