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The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of R&D investment as a determinant of ongoing or abandoned innovation activities. The literature review focuses especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that deploy R&D investment as a way of developing innovation processes.

This study’s design used a sample of 4,229 Portuguese SMEs to analyse the effects R&D investment has on the innovation activities; the results obtained demonstrate the great importance of firms investing in R&D internal activities for the development of their innovation process.

The most important findings highlight the types of activities that emerge as relevant to innovation processes susceptible for development to avoid abandoning and maintaining ongoing innovation activities. Among them, the authors would highlight the design of products or services, the introduction of innovations to the market and the acquisition of machinery, equipment and specific software, among others.

In addition, other types of activities emerge as relevant to innovation processes susceptible for development to avoid abandoning and maintaining ongoing innovation activities. This research adds value to the current literature mainly showing several determinants related to R&D, which could be used by SMEs to improve and develop their activities of innovation.

This paper aims to analyses barriers as a determinant of ongoing or abandoned innovation activities. The literature exploits barriers as the nature of innovation and its influence on firm’s. The main focus is the Portuguese SMEs and the impacts that act as barriers in the development of innovation activities.

The database was obtained through the Community Innovation Survey 2010 (CIS 2010) that was coordinated by EUROSTAT. In this sense, a logistic regression model is proposed, which makes it possible to analyse the relations between three or more variables, depending on whether the relationship is one of dependence or interdependence, thus allowing the application of distinct statistical techniques, using 6,160 firms

There are several sources of information that are associated with the development of innovation projects.

The importance of barriers to the development of innovation activities, as well as it being a decisive factor in the impediment to and abandon of the same, was noted.

This study also demonstrated that each case is different and that a barrier in one firm can at the same time be a window of opportunity for another firm.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how the term “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) is interpreted, introduced and applied in corporations from the point of view of the person in charge of this process, i.e. the translator.

A case study approach is applied. Semi‐structured interviews with those responsible for CSR introduction in three different companies are conducted, based on the knowledge transfer and translation theory (KTT). The content of CSR reports issued by the three companies is also reviewed to describe the CSR introduction process.

The findings suggest that the translator's understanding of the term CSR, as well as his or her position and motivation, impacts the outcome of CSR introduction. Furthermore, the findings reveal that introducing the term CSR into the corporate vocabulary does not necessarily reflect changes in corporate activities.

The cases were selected to reflect differing corporate settings. However, for the purposes of generalization, the findings should be tested on other companies and in other countries.

The study and findings are useful for self‐evaluation and benchmarking by other corporations.

The study confirms that the growth in volume and scope of CSR reports does not necessarily reflect the same increase in CSR activities. In these cases, the main effect of CSR introduction reflects increased openness about already ongoing environmental and social activities.

Whereas most attention so far has been given to how institutional pressure leads to CSR activities, the paper reveals the importance of the individual translator's interpretation of institutional CSR pressure and how this subsequently becomes the corporate CSR approach.

The main objective of this article is to present an empirically based reformulation of our models of the organisational change process. In Part 2 this reformulation will be developed and illustrated with reference to an extended case study. In this first part of the article I will attempt to demonstrate that this reformulation is necessary because current empirical data on the practice of OD is not consistent with the conceptual models of the organisational change process presented in the literature. The evidence suggests that models are used regularly in the practice of Organisational Development and are important to consultants and clients alike, because they enable a complex and uncertain process to be better understood, It is therefore vital that such models are accurate representations of reality.

Since the definition of objectives lies at the basis of any programme, an analytical system of classifying service organisation activities is proposed in which the focus is on internal characteristics of the activities, and differentiation among programmes and treatments. This taxonomy may be used by social welfare organisations who wish to know what they do, and to what extent they adhere to what they aim to do, as it makes both a conceptual and empirical contribution, increasing awareness of what the organisation and its professional staff do, and allowing examination of the consistency of any programme.

In England in recent years, concerns have been raised about the proportion of time social workers and other frontline children's social care practitioners spend carrying out desk‐based, administrative activities. This article aims to report time use activity data from front line workers on the amount of time spent on different activities to support children in need (as defined by the 1989 Children Act).

The data were collected from a range of sources including focus groups, event records (diaries completed by practitioners) and online surveys.

The proportion of time spent on direct and indirect activities varies according to the types of process. Those associated with ongoing support have the highest proportion of direct activity, whereas those associated with decision making, especially if a one‐off activity, have the highest proportion of administrative activities. The greater the needs of the child, the more direct and indirect support was given, but there was some variation across social work teams. But the activities of social workers are interconnected, making it difficult to provide conclusive evidence, but the concern about the imbalance between direct work and administrative tasks seems justified.

The findings highlight the complexity of exploring how social workers spend their time and how the proportion of time spent on direct and indirect activities is determined by the needs and circumstances of children and their families.

Wider contextual practice issues are also explored including the recent increases in referrals to children's social care and the use of electronic recording systems.

The breakdown of the activities using the approach outlined in the article increases transparency in understanding how social workers spend their time.

Although it is transforming the meaning of employment for many people, little is known about the implications of the gig economy for human resource management (HRM) theory and practice. The purpose of this paper is to conceptually explore the notion of HRM in the gig economy, where intermediary platform firms design and implement HRM activities while simultaneously trying to avoid the establishment of employment relationships with gig workers.

To conceptualize HRM in the gig economy, the authors offer a novel ecosystem perspective to develop propositions on the role and implementation of HRM activities in the gig economy.

The authors show that HRM activities in the gig economy are designed to govern platform ecosystems by aligning the multilateral exchanges of three key gig economy actors: gig workers, requesters and intermediary platform firms, for ensuring value co-creation. The authors argue that the implementation of HRM activities in the gig economy is contingent on the involvement and activities of these gig economy actors. This means that they are not mere recipients of HRM but also actively engaged in, and needed for, the execution of HRM activities.

The study contributes to research by proposing a theoretical framework for studying the design of HRM activities, and their implementation, in the gig economy. From this framework, the authors derive directions for future research on HRM in the gig economy.

Shadowing is becoming an increasingly popular method in management and organization studies. While several scholars have reflected on this technique, comparatively few researchers have explicated the specific practices that constitute this method and discussed their implications for research on processes of organizing. The purpose of this article is to address these issues by offering a conceptual toolbox that defines shadowing in terms of a set of framing practices and provides in‐depth insight into the methodological choices and challenges that organizational shadowers may encounter.

In this article, the authors explicate the specific framing practices in which researchers engage when taking an intersubjective approach to organizational shadowing. To demonstrate the value of viewing shadowing as framing, the paper grounds the theoretical discussion in actual fieldwork experiences, taken from three different ethnographic studies.

Based on a systematic and critical analysis of fieldwork experiences, the paper argues that organizational shadowing is constituted by three interrelated framing practices: delineating the object of study; punctuating the process/flow of a given organizing process; and reflecting on the relationship between researcher and the object(s) or person(s) being observed. These analytical constructs highlight specific activities with which shadowers are confronted in the field, namely foregrounding and backgrounding particular aspects in defining a given object of study, trying to keep this object in focus as the fieldwork unfolds, and making decisions about the degree to which the relationship with shadowees should be taken into account in understanding this object.

This article provides an in‐depth reflection on the subtle practices that constitute organizational shadowing. It offers a useful conceptual toolbox for researchers who want to use this method and demonstrates its operational value to help them understand how knowledge construction is the outcome of a coconstructive process that depends on a series of decisions negotiated in ongoing interactions with the actors under study.

The paper seeks to explore the extent of involvement of management accounting in strategic inter‐organizational decisions and control in the context of offshoring of services.

For the present study, a multiple case study field research design was selected. A data‐bank media search identified companies actually offshoring their services. In total, 17 semi‐structured interviews with management accountants/managers were conducted in 14 of the identified companies. The interviews were analyzed using content analysis techniques.

Management accounting is involved in offshoring activities to a much lower extent than expected. The reasons range from contractual agreements between the different parties, which substitute in part for management accounting interventions, to competence problems in accounting departments. Therefore, management accounting often fails to provide support for strategic planning and coordination.

The data obtained through the qualitative research approach have a low‐scaling level, which limits subsequent analysis to descriptive statistics only.

The paper identifies risks and actual problems associated with offshoring, which indicate an increased need for coordinated planning and information processing. Furthermore, it raises the question of how management accounting can overcome existing competence problems with respect to the support of strategic decision making, in order to fulfil its function within the company more efficiently.

Literature does not provide convincing evidence of the practical significance of management accounting in the context of strategic decisions and inter‐organizational relations. This paper shows that management accounting currently remains far removed from its function as a developer of strategic decisions and as a support function for corporate planning and coordination processes.

This paper proposes an innovative intelligent simulation-based construction planning framework that introduces a new approach to simulation-based construction planning.

In this approach, the authors developed an ontological inference engine as an integrated part of a constraint-based simulation system that configures the construction processes, defines activities and manages resources considering a variety of requirements and constraints during the simulation. It allows for the incorporation of the latest project information and a deep level of construction planning knowledge in the planning. The construction planning knowledge is represented by an ontology and several semantic rules. Also, the proposed framework uses the project building information model (BIM) to extract information regarding the construction product and the relations between elements. The extracted information is then converted to an ontological format to be useable by the framework.

The authors implemented the framework in a case study project and tested its usefulness and capabilities. It successfully generated the construction processes, activities and required resources based on the construction product, available resources and the planning rules. It also allowed for a variety of analyses regarding different construction strategies and resource planning. Moreover, 4D BIM models that provide a very good understanding of the construction plan can be automatically generated using the proposed framework.

The active integration between BIM, discrete-event simulation (DES) and ontological knowledge base and inference engine defines a new class of construction simulation with expandable applications.