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1 – 10 of over 1000Chiara Tagliaro, Alessandra Migliore, Erica Isa Mosca and Stefano Capolongo
This paper aims to explore how the scientific literature and company reports have addressed inclusive workplace design and strategies to date.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore how the scientific literature and company reports have addressed inclusive workplace design and strategies to date.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper adopts a scoping review to answer the following question: To what extent is inclusion present in workplace design and related strategies? An analysis of 27 scientific papers and 25 corporate social responsibility reports of the highest-ranked companies in the Great Place to Work global ranking disentangles the main aspects related to workplace design and strategies for promoting inclusion.
Findings
This paper opens avenues for four macro-categories of diversity (psycho-physical aspects; cultural aspects; socio-economic conditions; and ability, experience and strengths) to support the development of inclusive workplace design and strategy. Besides, multiple spatial scales emerged as material and immaterial elements of the workplace encountering inclusion and diversity.
Originality/value
Nowadays, the workforce is becoming more diverse. Although diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) has become key to many organizations, it remains unclear how DE&I principles are applied in workspace design and strategies. This scoping review provides a novel perspective on the topic by integrating scientific knowledge and practice-based approaches which still address this matter independently.
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Anne-Charlott Callerstig, Marta Lindvert, Elisabet Carine Ljunggren, Marit Breivik-Meyer, Gry Agnete Alsos and Dag Balkmar
In order to address the gender divide in technology entrepreneurship, we explore how different national contexts impact policies and policy implementation. We investigate how…
Abstract
Purpose
In order to address the gender divide in technology entrepreneurship, we explore how different national contexts impact policies and policy implementation. We investigate how transnational concerns (macro level) about women’s low participation in (technology) entrepreneurship are translated and implemented amongst actors at the meso level (technology incubators) and understood at the micro level (women tech entrepreneurs).
Design/methodology/approach
We adopt gender institutionalism as a theoretical lens to understand what happens in the implementation of gender equality goals in technology entrepreneurship policy. We apply Gains and Lowndes’ (2014) conceptual framework to investigate the gendered character and effects of institutional formation. Four countries represent different levels of gender equality: high (Norway and Sweden), medium (Ireland) and low (Israel). An initial policy document analysis provides the macro level understanding (Heilbrunn et al., 2020). At the meso level, managers of technology business incubators (n = 3–5) in each country were interviewed. At the micro level, 10 female technology entrepreneurs in each country were interviewed. We use an inductive research approach, combined with thematic analysis.
Findings
Policies differ across the four countries, ranging from women-centred approaches to gender mainstreaming. Macro level policies are interpreted and implemented in different ways amongst actors at the meso level, who tend to act in line with given national policies. Actors at the micro level often understand gender equality in ways that reflect their national policies. However, women in all four countries share similar struggles with work-life balance and gendered expectations in relation to family responsibilities.
Originality/value
The contribution of our paper is to (1) entrepreneurship theory by applying gendered institutionalism theory to (tech) entrepreneurship, and (2) our findings clearly show that the gendered context matters for policy implementation.
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It's hard to envision a system more global and more integrated than research. Many stakeholders affect and are affected by changes in the research ecosystem; the ecosystem differs…
Abstract
It's hard to envision a system more global and more integrated than research. Many stakeholders affect and are affected by changes in the research ecosystem; the ecosystem differs in significant ways across the globe and between researchers, institutions and fields of study; and there are many questions that exclusive action can't address. There are also broad ecosystem-level questions that need answering. For these reasons alone, global approaches to reform are needed.
The first step in this exploration isn't to start looking for “solutions”, but to develop a better understanding of how our needs and interests overlap. By identifying the broad contours of common ground in this conversation, we can build the guardrails and mileposts for our collaborative efforts and then allow the finer-grained details of community-developed plans more flexibility and guidance to evolve over time.
What are these overlapping interests? First, the people in this community share a common motive – idealism – to make research better able to serve the public good. We also share a common desire to unleash the power of open to improve research and accelerate discovery; we are all willing to fix issues now instead of waiting for market forces or government intervention to do this for us; and we want to ensure that everyone everywhere has equitable access to knowledge.
There is also very broad agreement in this community about which specific problems in scholarly communication need to be fixed and why, and well as many overlapping beliefs in this community. OSI participants have concluded that four such beliefs best define our common ground: (1) research and society will benefit from open done right; (2) successful solutions will require broad collaboration; (3) connected issues need to be addressed, and (4) open isn't a single outcome, but a spectrum.
OSI has been observing and debating the activity in scholarly communication since late 2014 with regard to understanding possible global approaches and solutions for improving the future of open research. While the COVID-19 pandemic has made the importance of open science abundantly clear, the struggle to achieve this goal (not just for science but for all research) has been mired in a lack of clarity and urgency for over 20 years now, mostly stalling on the tension between wanting more openness but lacking realistic solutions for making this happen on a large scale with so many different stakeholders, needs and perspectives involved.
Underlying this tension is a fundamental difference in philosophy: whether the entire scholarly communication marketplace, driven by the needs and desires of researchers, should determine what kind of open it wants and needs; or whether this marketplace should be compelled to adopt open reform measures developed primarily by the scholarly communication system's main billpayers-funders and libraries. There is no widespread difference of opinion in the community whether open is worth pursuing. The debate is mostly over what specific open solutions are best, and at what pace open reforms should occur.
OSI has proposed a plan of action for working together to rebuild the future of scholarly communication on strong, common ground foundation. This plan – which we're referring to as Plan A – calls for joint action on studies, scholarly communication infrastructure improvement, and open outreach/education. Plan A also calls for working together with UNESCO to develop a unified global roadmap for the future of open, and for striving to ensure the community's work in this space is researcher-focused, collaborative, connected (addressing connected issues like peer review), diverse and flexible (no one-size-fits-all solutions), and beneficial to research. UNESCO's goal is to finish its roadmap proposal by early 2022.
For a full discussion of OSI's common ground recommendations, please see the Plan A website at http://plan-a.world.
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In this study, we applied the strategy-as-practice (SAP) framework to analyse strategic communication practices. SAP implies approaching strategy as something that organisational…
Abstract
Purpose
In this study, we applied the strategy-as-practice (SAP) framework to analyse strategic communication practices. SAP implies approaching strategy as something that organisational members do and is useful for understanding the tensions between emergence and formalisation and between planning and improvisation that characterise the everyday communication work of communication practitioners.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on an ethnographic study of a record company and on qualitative interviews with various actors from the music industry.
Findings
Tensions exist between the emergence of inputs from active consumers that require flexibility and attempts to strategically formalise and continuously adapt plans and encourage consumers to act in anticipated ways. The findings revealed five strategic communication practices—meetings, working in the office, gathering and analysing consumer engagement and related data, collaboration and storytelling—that practitioners used to conduct strategic communication and navigate the tensions.
Originality/value
The study contributes to understanding the role of strategic communication practices in contemporary organisations and how practitioners manage the tensions within them. The study shows that an SAP approach can account for improvisation and emergence, as well as planning and formalisation. It also shows how SAP resonates with emergent and agile strategic communication frameworks.
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Susanna Toivanen, Hanne Berthelsen and Tuija Muhonen
This study aims to investigate university staff relocation from multiple separate buildings to a new building with activity-based flexible offices (AFOs) at a University in…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate university staff relocation from multiple separate buildings to a new building with activity-based flexible offices (AFOs) at a University in Sweden. The aim was to assess staff perceptions of the physical and psychosocial work environment and whether there were any changes in these perceptions before and after the move.
Design/methodology/approach
A mixed-methods design was used, analyzing closed-ended survey data at two time points (T1, n = 169 and T2, n = 160) and open-ended responses (n = 180) at T2.
Findings
The main findings revealed that employees started working more from home and that there were significant decreases in perceptions of the physical and psychosocial work environment, as well as job satisfaction, after the move to the new premises.
Practical implications
A comprehensive analysis of existing work processes, tasks and collaborations is crucial when planning new university premises. The planning process needs to be done in close collaboration with different stakeholders with multiple perspectives.
Originality/value
Introduction of AFOs in an academic setting can lead to negative consequences for occupational health and efficiency.
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As part of a national plan to govern professional and organizational development in Norwegian specialist healthcare, the country’s hospital clinics are tasked with constructing…
Abstract
Purpose
As part of a national plan to govern professional and organizational development in Norwegian specialist healthcare, the country’s hospital clinics are tasked with constructing development plans. Using the development plan as a case, the paper analyzes how managers navigate and legitimize the planning process among central actors and deals with the contingency of decisions in such strategy work.
Design/methodology/approach
This study applies a qualitative research design using a case study method. The material consists of public documents, observations and single interviews, covering the process of constructing a development plan at the clinical level.
Findings
The findings suggest that the development plan was shaped through a multilevel translation process consisting of different contending rationalities. At the clinical level, the management had difficulties in legitimizing the process. The underlying tension between top-down and bottom-up steering challenged involvement and made it difficult to manage the contingency of decisions.
Practical implications
The findings are relevant to public sector managers working on strategy documents and policymakers identifying challenges that might hinder the fulfillment of political intentions.
Originality/value
This paper draws on a case from Norway; however, the findings are of general interest. The study contributes to the academic discussion on how to consider both the health authorities’ perspective and the organizational perspective to understand the manager’s role in handling the contingency of decisions and managing paradoxes in the decision-making process.
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Informal knowledge sharing interactions (IKSI) are of particular value for innovation projects. This is especially true for unplanned IKSI, because they are even more likely to…
Abstract
Purpose
Informal knowledge sharing interactions (IKSI) are of particular value for innovation projects. This is especially true for unplanned IKSI, because they are even more likely to provide non-redundant knowledge and new perspectives than planned IKSI. Seminal studies have shown that the formation of unplanned IKSI can be explained on the basis of spatial structures. Strictly speaking, however, these studies only explain unplanned encounters. Whether unplanned IKSI result from these unplanned encounters, though, cannot be satisfactorily explained on the basis of spatial configurations alone. The purpose of this paper is to tackle this explanatory gap by unraveling the fundamental social processes by application of the symbolic interaction theory.
Design/methodology/approach
For this purpose, the formation of 132 IKSI on innovation projects from three research and development departments of large companies was recorded in detail using a combination of diaries and interviews. The data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis.
Findings
The analysis reveals that IKSI cause symbolic costs (image damages), and that these costs vary between types of social situations. Because actors anticipate situation-specific costs, their propensity to initiate IKSI can be explained in terms of the situations in which they encounter one another. Furthermore, the analysis reveals six particularly relevant characteristics of situations and further elaborates the basic argument by analyzing their functioning.
Originality/value
The paper complements previous explanations of unplanned IKSI by opening up the social processes underlying their formation.
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Rocco Palumbo, Elena Casprini and Mohammad Fakhar Manesh
Institutional, economic, social and technological advancements enable openness to cope with wicked public management issues. Although open innovation (OI) is becoming a new…
Abstract
Purpose
Institutional, economic, social and technological advancements enable openness to cope with wicked public management issues. Although open innovation (OI) is becoming a new normality for public sector entities, scholarly knowledge on this topic is not fully systematized. The article fills this gap, providing a thick and integrative account of OI to inspire public management decisions.
Design/methodology/approach
Following the SPAR-4-SLR protocol, a domain-based literature review has been accomplished. Consistently with the study purpose, a hybrid methodology has been designed. Bibliographic coupling permitted us to discover the research streams populating the scientific debate. The core arguments addressed within and across the streams were reported through an interpretive approach.
Findings
Starting from an intellectual core of 94 contributions, 5 research streams were spotted. OI in the public sector unfolds through an evolutionary path. Public sector entities conventionally acted as “senior partners” of privately-owned companies, providing funding (yellow cluster) and data (purple cluster) to nurture OI. An advanced perspective envisages OI as a public management model purposefully enacted by public sector entities to co-create value with relevant stakeholders (red cluster). Fitting architectures (green cluster) and mechanisms (blue cluster) should be arranged to release the potential of OI in the public sector.
Research limitations/implications
The role of public sector entities in enacting OI should be revised embracing a value co-creation perspective. Tailored organizational interventions and management decisions are required to make OI a reliable and dependable public value generation model.
Originality/value
The article originally systematizes the scholarly knowledge about OI, presenting it as a new normality for public value generation.
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Paola Bellis, Silvia Magnanini and Roberto Verganti
Taking the dialogic organizational development perspective, this study aims to investigate the framing processes when engaging in dialogue for strategy implementation and how…
Abstract
Purpose
Taking the dialogic organizational development perspective, this study aims to investigate the framing processes when engaging in dialogue for strategy implementation and how these enable the evolution of implementation opportunities.
Design/methodology/approach
Through a qualitative exploratory study conducted in a large multinational, the authors analyse the dialogue and interactions among 25 dyads when identifying opportunities to contribute to strategy implementation. The data analysis relies on a process-coding approach and linkography, a valuable protocol analysis for identifying recursive interaction schemas in conversations.
Findings
The authors identify four main framing processes – shaping, unveiling, scattering and shifting – and provide a framework of how these processes affect individuals’ mental models through increasing the tangibility of opportunities or elevating them to new value hierarchies.
Research limitations/implications
From a theoretical perspective, this study contributes to the strategy implementation and organizational development literature, providing a micro-perspective of how dialogue allows early knowledge structures to emerge and shape the development of opportunities for strategy implementation.
Practical implications
From a managerial perspective, the authors offer insights to trigger action and change in individuals to contribute to strategy when moving from formulation to implementation.
Originality/value
Rather than focusing on the structural control view of strategy implementation and the role of the top management team, this study considers strategy implementation as a practice and what it takes for organizational actors who do not take part in strategy formulation to enact and shape opportunities for strategy implementation through constructive dialogue.
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This study aims to provide an overview of the dimension of stored collections displayed in visible storage and to indicate the main factors which hinder their accessibility.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to provide an overview of the dimension of stored collections displayed in visible storage and to indicate the main factors which hinder their accessibility.
Design/methodology/approach
This study is based on quantitative analysis: a survey was conducted through the offices of International Council of Museums and direct invitations to 2,558 museums located worldwide.
Findings
The study estimated 32% on average the share of stored collections displayed in visible storage. The analysis provides a picture of how many stored items are made accessible in visible storage across the continents, according to the collection’s type and size and the museums’ legal status. In addition, several aspects of visible storage are investigated to highlight whether or not it truly enables museums to achieve accessibility of their stored collections and which factors might hinder the accessibility. Amid them, the foremost factors involve the inadequacy of resources, such as the lack of staff (71%) and poor budget (68%). Because of it, museums are prone to setting up offsite storage (37%), often 16 km far from the city centre, thereby questioning the concept of accessibility itself.
Research limitations/implications
One major limitation of this study is that it does not consider people’s standpoints. Therefore, the author recommends that future studies focus on what people opine on visible storage, such as their appreciation of the display format, the behind-the-scenes, their need for interpretation and the degree of satisfaction with their information needs, as well as their perception of the size of stored collections.
Practical implications
These findings suggest that museums could take action in areas whereby the data demonstrated weaknesses in terms of accessibility. For instance, museums could set up a shuttle service or arrange public transportation service to allow people to visit offsite storage. Additionally, financial accessibility might be achieved by not charging some groups (elderly, students, etc.).
Social implications
The topic of stored collections and their accessibility has crucial social implications because not displaying collections triggers inequality amid social groups of excluded people and a small elite.
Originality/value
This study focuses on visible storage as a possible solution to enhance the accessibility of collections and indicates to what extent visible storage provides this accessibility. On the contrary, previous research did not estimate how much visible storage impacts the accessibility of stored collections.
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