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This paper aims to explore how historical context influences the content and selection of rhetorical legitimation strategies. Using case study method, this paper will focus on how insurance companies and labor tried to defend their legitimacy in the context of enactment of Medicare in the USA. What factors influenced the strategic (rhetorical) decisions made by insurance companies and labor unions in their institutional work?

The study is empirically grounded in archival research, involving an analysis of over 9,000 pages of congressional hearings on Medicare covering the period 1958–1965.

The authors show that rhetorical legitimation strategies depend significantly on the specific historical circumstances in which those strategies are used. The historical context lent credibility to certain arguments and organizations are forced to decide either to challenge widely held assumptions or take advantage of them. The authors show that organizations face strong incentives to pursue the latter option. Here, both the insurance companies and labor unions tried to show that their positions were consistent with classical liberal ideology, because of high respect of classical liberal principles among different stakeholders (policymakers, voters, etc.).

It is uncertain how much the results of the study could be generalized. More information about the organizations whose use of rhetorics the authors studied could have strengthened our conclusions.

The practical relevancy of the revised paper is that the authors should not expect hegemony challenging rhetorics from organizations, which try to influence legislators (and perhaps the larger public). Perhaps (based on the findings), this kind of rhetorics is not even very effective.

The paper helps to understand better how organizations try to advance their interests and gain acceptance among the stakeholders.

In this paper, the authors show how historical context in practice influence rhetorical arguments organizations select in public debates when their goal is to influence the decision-making of their audience. In particular, the authors show how dominant ideology (or ideologies) limit the options organizations face when they are choosing their strategies and arguments. In terms of the selection of rhetorical justification strategies, the most pressing question is not the “real” broad based support of certain ideologies. Insurance company and labor union representatives clearly believed that they must emphasize liberal values (or liberal ideology) if they wanted to gain legitimacy for their positions. In existing literature, it is often assumed that historical context influence the selection of rhetorical strategies but how this in fact happens is not usually specified. The paper shows how interpretations of historical contexts (including the ideological context) in practice influence the rhetorical strategies organizations choose.

This study aims to help uncover corporate culture and values to attract and retain talent by understanding job reviews written by business-to-business (B2B) salespeople.

Over 40,000 job reviews on Glassdoor.com are analyzed by a dictionary-based content analysis tool, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2015), to explore the links between corporate culture and linguistics characteristics of reviews as articulated by B2B salespeople. This study adopted a multidimensional scaling approach based on the nine cultural value scores to create a map of corporate profiles. A projection of the LIWC2015 scores on this map uncovers differences in language patterns and emotions expressed across the profiles.

Findings reveal a map of corporate profiles with two dimensions, namely, product-centricity and customer-centricity, that divide salesforce subculture into a 2 × 2 matrix of four types: Empathic Innovators, Product Pioneers, Customer Champions and Commodity Traders.

This study combined two data sets, scores on CultureX’s nine cultural values (agility, collaboration, customer orientation, diversity, execution, innovation, integrity, performance and respect) and job reviews on Glassdoor.com. This research seeks to develop profiles of the organizational culture and to use a blend of qualitative and quantitative methods. This study adds to the literature on salesforce subculture and showcases a solution to the methodological difficulty in categorizing and measuring culture.

Our goals were to explore the pedagogies applied by instructors that supported Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) student learning in a leadership course and the leadership behaviors BIPOC students identified as being applicable after the course.

Through survey research and qualitative data analysis, three prominent themes emerged.

High-quality, purposeful pedagogy created opportunities for students to learn. Second, a supportive, interactive community engaged students with the instructor, each other and the course material to support participation in learning. As a result, students reported experiencing big shifts, new growth and increased confidence during their leadership courses.

We discuss our findings and offer specific recommendations for leadership educators to better support BIPOC students in their leadership courses and classrooms and for further research with BIPOC students.

The purpose of this paper is to revisit the potential of the New Deal as a research context in management and organization studies and, in doing so, forward the role one of its chief architects, Harry Hopkins, played in managing the economic crisis. The exploration takes us to multiple layers that work together to form context around Hopkins including the Great Depression, the Roosevelt Administration, and ultimately, the New Deal. By raising Harry Hopkins as an exemplar of historical-narrative exclusion, the authors can advance the understanding of his role in the New Deal and how his actions produced early insights about management (e.g. modern crisis management).

The paper experiments with the methodological assemblage of ANTi-History and microhistorical analysis that the authors call “ANTi-Microhistory” to examine the life narrative of Harry Hopkins, his early association with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and later, the New Deal. To accomplish this, the authors undertake a programme of archival research (e.g. the digital repository of The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum) and assess various materials (e.g. speeches, biographies and memoirs) from across multiple spaces.

The findings suggest Harry Hopkins to be a much more powerful actor in mobilizing New Deal policies and their effect on early management thought than what was previously accepted. In the process, the authors found that because of durable associations with Roosevelt, key policy architects of the same ilk as Harry Hopkins (e.g. Frances Perkins, Henry Wallace, Lewis Douglas, and others) and their contributions have been marginalized. This finding illustrates the significant potential of little-known historical figures and how they might shed new insight on the development of the field and management practice.

The aim is to demonstrate the potential of engaging historical research in management with the individual – Harry Hopkins – as a unit of analysis. By engaging historical research on the individual – be it well-known or obscure figures of the past – the authors are considering how they contribute to the understanding of phenomena (e.g. New Deal, Progressivism or Keynesian economics). The authors build on research that brings to focus forgotten people, communities and ideas in management studies but go further in advocating for space in the research to consider the scholarly potential of the individual.

This study attempts to elucidate the role of key influencers impacting the student decision-making process of enrollment for higher education in India from the lenses of Stephen Covey's theory on circles of life.

A sample of 556 students of Delhi NCR, India was selected based on a multi-staged sampling method. PLS-SEM was subsequently applied for statistical data analysis.

This quantitative finding voiced the relationships among the constructs in the proposed theoretical framework, i.e. Stephen Covey's circle of life theory. Additionally, it tinted the crucial role of “College attributes” in reconnoitering the relationship dynamics between key influencers (Circle of Influence and Circle of Concern) and student college choice (Circle of Control).

The present study incorporates only the first-year student population of undergraduate management courses in private universities from Delhi NCR, India limiting the generalization of findings substantially.

The study garners the attention of education policymakers on the cognizance of the role played by parents and cohorts in driving the student's decision-making process of college choice under the circle of influence.

This study is pioneering research disseminating a comprehensive outlook of the circle of life theory of great Stephen Covey engrained upon a compendious conceptual model which enlightens the landscape of the decision-making process of student on enrollment under the influence of key influencers.

This study aims to assess green food packages’ role in sustaining a restaurant’s curbside pickup service on three stages of consumer experiences: choosing a restaurant, evaluating their experiences of a recent purchase and weighing their post-consumption behavioral intentions after the recent purchase.

The service encounters framework and relevant literature guided the development of the questionnaire. A Qualtrics panel data of 314 valid questionnaires were collected and analyzed with choice experience, ordinary least squares regression and PROCESS modeling.

First, word-of-mouth (WOM) and function encounters significantly influence consumers’ first-time curbside pickup purchasing decisions. Then, service results encounter (besides distributor encounter) most significantly affects consumers’ overall curbside pickup experience. Finally, green food packages increase consumers’ shares of future purchases through their positive WOM intentions and extra efforts of revisiting the restaurant. Consumers’ perceived importance of green restaurant practices strengthens green food packages’ positive impact on extra efforts.

This study provides operational and marketing insights for restaurants to use food packages and sustain their curbside pickup service.

Besides assessing consumers’ evaluations and behavioral intentions for an off-premises restaurant service expected to stay beyond the pandemic, this research uniquely focuses on green food packages, a sustainability issue lacking research attention. The findings add new empirical insights to studies about sustainability and restaurant/food–retail operations.

This paper aims to assess retail shopping avenues for young consumers based on the type of guidance and assistance they pursue (social media vs professional service provider) in purchasing situations judged to be important. Young consumers consider themselves pet parents and pets represent an extension of self. Thus, pet-related products, by their importance, represent an excellent area of analysis for this inquiry.

Data collection was completed in a way that is contextually relevant and gives the results ecological validity with the assistance of a major supplier of pet food. A total of 470 Gen Z owners of small companion animals were obtained. The partial least squares structural equation modeling testing method is considered appropriate for the model analysis due to the structure and homogeneity of the sample and due to the precision of the method.

Results indicate that, in accordance with social media engagement (SME) theory, high SME elevated social commerce purchase intentions while professional advice seekers reported increased brick-and-mortar shopping. Thus, context-dependent, young consumers may purchase from brick-and-mortar sites.

This paper draws on SME and Advice Response Theory and proposes an original model explaining channel selection preferences for young consumers based on the type of advice sought for important purchasing decisions. The model represents a steppingstone to investigate the mechanism that translates information search sources into buying through different channels.

Design science research (DSR) is a structured approach for solving complex ill-structured problems in organizations through the development of an artefact followed by its validation. This paper aims to evaluate existing DSR methodology and propose specific accents to promote DSR for environmental, social and governance (ESG)-oriented operational excellence (OPEX) initiatives within organizations.

This commentary paper is based on an abductive reasoning approach to evaluate and understand DSR and assess its effectiveness for developing solutions to typical ESG-oriented OPEX-based problems within organizations.

Existing literature on DSR is reviewed, after which it is evaluated on its ability to contribute to the implementation of sustainable solutions for ESG-oriented OPEX-based problems. Based on the review, specific DSR methodological accents are proposed for the development of ESG-oriented OPEX-based solutions in organizations.

This conceptual paper contributes to the conceptual understanding of the applicability, limitations and contextual preconditions for applying DSR. This paper proposes an explicit and, in some ways, alternative view on DSR research for OPEX researchers to apply and further the body of knowledge on matters of sustainability (ESG) in operations management.

Currently, there is limited understanding and application of the DSR methodology for OPEX-based problem-solving initiatives, as appears in the scant literature on DSR applied for the implementation of OPEX based initiatives for ESG purposes. This paper aims to challenge and provide accents for DSR applied to OPEX-related problems by means of a DSR framework and thereby promotes intervention-based studies among researchers.

The proposed step-by-step methodology contains novel elements and is expected to be of help for OPEX-oriented academicians and practitioners in implementing DSR methodology for practical related problems which need research interventions from academics from Higher Education Institutions.

The purpose of this study is to systematically examine the existing literature published on the circulation methods used in academic libraries and to discuss a proposed model for the self-check-in and check-out methods using quick response (QR) codes.

A systematic literature review (SLR) provided a complete overview of circulation systems used in academic libraries for the last more than 140 years. Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) method for SLR was used. Several databases such as ProQuest, Emerald, Library and Information Science Abstracts, EBSCO and Google Scholar were searched. Out of 277 papers retrieved in the search, 43 most relevant papers were taken up for the SLR. These were classified into four themes based on the systems of circulation used, namely, manual (5), mechanized (13), automated (5) and networked system (20). Based on the findings of the SLR, a model of circulation system in which QR code technology has been used.

The result of SLR identified 33 systems used in above mentioned four groups. Among this, a large number 48.48% of mechanized systems were found. Each system has limitations either because of devices used or of technology. The present study proposes a QR code-based model at the circulation desk, for which a prototype of Android app has been designed. This would help to initiate the new “self-services” facility to users at the circulation desk.

The proposed model, after its successful implementation, can be adopted by academic libraries. Guidelines and a graphical representation of this study can be used by any researcher for further experimentation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first kind of study in which a QR code-based Android app model has been proposed for library circulation records.

“The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on service innovation during the past two decades and provide an analysis of sources of publication, citations and authorship using bibliometric analysis techniques (VOSviewer).” This paper aims to assesses the important trends, enhance the academic debate, identify research gaps and propose future directions and a research agenda.

This paper examines 176 articles in English language published from 2002 to 2022 from the Scopus database by adopting the bibliometric technique using VOSviewer software. This paper analyzes the different levels and boundaries of service innovation using bibliometric analysis of “service innovation research” using VOSviewer software. The methodology analyzes the number of citations, co-citations, keywords, authors, journals and countries.

The review of the past 20 years indicates a substantial growth in the number of good research publications on service innovation. The UK, the USA, Sweden and Australia dominate this research area with the most articles published to date under the subject area of “Business management.” The review highlighted that most of the studies on service innovation focused on products, companies and processes in the services industry. The most critical factors behind service innovation failure are improper management and lack of knowledge. The citation analysis revealed various research implications and directions for the future.

This study focuses only on service innovation and excludes research on performance management and control. Thus, future studies may explore this area of research in future studies. Only research articles were analyzed; conference papers, reports, manuals and white papers from practice were excluded. Research implications indicate that future studies on service innovation would be essential for organizational excellence, not process excellence.

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and essential trends of research on service innovation. This study identifies the research gaps and provides a clear research agenda for understanding the various elements of service innovation.