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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 authors explore the entanglement of smartphone technology and power in this paper. This paper explores the following question: In what ways does the actualization of smartphone affordances result in empowering outcomes (i.e. increase or reduce oppression) in the daily lives of refugees? Leveraging both affordance and feminist theories, the authors develop a hybrid lens bringing attention to the contextualized relationship between social process goals and affordances for sociality, upon which the authors introduce the notion of “goal-affordance interrelations”. The authors then trace how the actualization of these interrelations increases or reduces oppression.

Using an abductive approach, the authors analyze 32 semi-structured interview transcriptions conducted with Syrian refugees in Lebanon.

The analysis in this study reveals four categories of social process goals (meet financial needs, satisfy security needs, communicate and learn and maintain pre-existing social ties) that are intimate components of contextually meaningful affordances. When actualized, the goal–affordance interrelations fundamentally shape refugee experiences of power outcomes. The findings suggest forms of empowerment where powerlessness, marginalization, violence and exploitation are perceived to be reduced. Actualization outcomes are also found to increase perceived oppression. Additionally, the findings reveal that not all interrelations are actualized, such that the anticipation of an oppressive power outcome may limit the actualization of affordances for sociality.

This research raises considerations concerning technology and oppression, and that efforts to empower refugees through technology should critically question whether the lived experiences of oppression will be reduced. The findings of this study reveal various forms of less empowering (i.e. oppressive) outcomes for the refugees sampled, they also point to the potential politicization of the actualization of goal–affordance interrelations.

The purpose of this paper is to critique and evaluate need-driven dementia compromised behavior theory and the health behavioral model using Meleis’ (2010) criteria of theory evaluation.

Theory critique using Meleis’ (2010) criteria of theory evaluation.

This paper provides a conclusion about each theory in terms of agitation in the elderly. Meleis’s (2010) criteria will be used for both theories to evaluate different components such as the relationship between structure and function, diagram of the theory, circle of the contagiousness, usefulness and external components.

The critique of the two theories broadened the nurses’ understanding of the connection between the NDB model and the behavior symptoms, including agitation and its related issues. Further studies need to be conducted to shed light on the other aspects of the behavioral symptoms in elderly with dementia that supports the results of this study, like its specific causes, trigger factors and other intervention strategies. Nurses should be able not only to understand the patient’s behavior symptoms but also to decode them into communication signals to meet their needs in a more effective way.

This paper is a critique of Western modernity and the problems and promises of postmodernism in (re)liberating disaster studies. It criticizes metanarratives and grand theories of Western discourses to advance postmodern discourses in disaster studies.

This paper outlines a conceptual domain through which approaches of postmodernism can be employed to (re)liberate disaster studies.

Metanarratives and grand theories frame the scope and focus of disaster studies. But the increasing number and the aggravated impacts of disasters and environmental challenges in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are proofs that our current “frames” do not capture the complexities of disasters. Postmodernism, in its diversity and various meanings, offers critical and complementary perspectives and approaches to capture the previously neglected dimensions of disasters.

Postmodernism offers ways forward to (re)liberate disaster studies through ontological pluralism, epistemological diversity and hybridity of knowledge.

The agenda of postmodernism in disaster studies is proposed in terms of the focus of inquiry, ontological and epistemological positionalities, research paradigm, methodologies and societal goals.

This paper aims to systematically review the literature on quality management in agri-food supply chains (SCs) and propose an integrated conceptual framework.

A systematic literature review that analyses 93 papers in peer-reviewed academic journals published from 1996 to November 2021 is conducted. A conceptual model is advanced.

Based on a hierarchy of capabilities perspective, the authors develop an integrated conceptual framework in which SC quality (SCQ) management practices promote three levels of SC dynamic capabilities, which in turn lead to agri-food SCQ performance.

The authors propose a hierarchy of capabilities perspective of quality management in agri-food SCs and develop a conceptual framework. Furthermore, a number of propositions based on dynamic capabilities and the review findings are provided. Four future research directions are presented.

Endeavoring to expand their global market presence, firms often launch products into emerging markets where managers face the daunting task of deploying products by managing available, and often limited, supply chain resources. Yet, literature has not empirically examined managerial resource orchestration in this context. Accordingly, by embedding resource orchestration theory (ROT) into the emerging market context, the authors offer middle-range theorizing on supply chain resource orchestration (SCRO) and empirically test how acquiring, bundling and leveraging activities impact new product launch performance.

The authors test the model by analyzing empirical data from 175 individual product launches into emerging markets using a survey methodology.

The authors’ results suggest that SCRO holds the promise of being a viable middle-range theory in the supply chain field, especially where managers face limited resources and must “work with what they have to do what they can.”

The authors’ study also has some limitations. First, because a panel data service company was used to collect the data, the authors were not provided with any information regarding the respondents' company names or other identifying data. Second, because the authors did not directly interact with the respondents nor were the authors able to contact multiple individuals from their respective organizations, the study was limited to a single-respondent design. However, to counter issues associated with single-response bias, the central constructs in the study referenced phenomena related to a specific product launch project as opposed to constructs at the firm or inter-firm relational level.

The authors’ results reveal that SCRO activities can enhance the performance of new product launches, even in resource-starved emerging market contexts.

The results validate measures for several of the SCRO processes (i.e. supply chain resource acquisition, supply chain resource bundling and supply chain leveraging) and provide evidence that supply chain resource bundling and supply chain leveraging mediate the relationship between supply chain resource acquisition and product launch performance. Further, soft logistics infrastructure is found to be an important boundary condition for these relationships.