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The academic library’s physical capacity and its service obligations to local users structured the traditional print collection. Largely freed of these constraints, the digital collection manager enjoys unprecedented freedoms but now contends with a collection susceptible to resource sprawl and scope ambiguity. This exploratory study aims to consider the possibility that intra-field social processes help to structure and routinize digital collection practice.

Lacking the constraints to which print collections are subject, electronic resource and digital library collections are more likely to reflect idiosyncratic institutional interests and therefore, to demonstrate significant variation. Evidence of homogeneity may suggest the influence of heretofore underexplored social structures. To determine the extent of such homogeneity, the author performed exploratory/descriptive content analyses on ten electronic resource collection development policies and six digital library collection development policies.

The data reveal among both the electronic resource and digital library collection policies significant uniformity. Content analyses demonstrate consistent themes (e.g. media, audience, selection priorities, etc.) and rhetoric. These findings lend support to the study’s central hypothesis regarding latent social structures. Analyses also reveal a set of unanticipated constraints unique to digital collection management.

Despite the breadth and maturity of literature addressing the Digital Turn in academic librarianship, relatively little attention has been paid to the social dimensions of collection management. This work represents an important corrective and suggests new theoretical approaches to the study of digital collection practice.

This book chapter takes an institutional perspective on competing logics in global markets concerned with sustainability values and how market actors in the form of buyers and sellers attempt to solve these conflicting situations. We do this by identifying competing institutional logics in global market contexts aiming for sustainability values, together with techniques for navigating these competing institutional logics in the organizational field studied. As an empirical illustration, we use a case study of buyers and sellers in two different markets where sustainability has come into focus for their market relationships. This viewpoint allows us to better understand how global market actors deal with the competing institutional logics in their market context. We make three contributions with this research: firstly, we identify the institutional logics in global markets towards sustainability; secondly, we demonstrate how global market actors prioritize among the competing logics and their market relationships and thirdly, we outline what this means for the relationship between buyers and sellers in global markets towards sustainability.

Institutions play a central role in service-dominant logic. However, the discussion regarding how institutional theory supports service-dominant logic advancements is still insufficient. This paper aims to contribute to a discussion on the multiple service-dominant logic approaches to institutions.

This conceptual paper presents the characterization of the existing streams in the broad institutional literature, highlighting the differences among those streams and elaborates on how one of the discussed streams – neo-institutionalism – is suitable to support service-dominant researchers in understanding the role of institutions in markets and value co-creation.

The paper shows that the three institutional perspectives presented are used indistinctly by service-dominant logic and a greater fit between the service-dominant logic and the neo-institutionalism stands out.

The paper proposes that service-dominant researchers should look at the neo-institutional stream as a particularly fertile ground for furthering their research.

This study aims to examine the contribution of board role performance and isomorphic forces on internet financial reporting.

This study is cross-sectional and correlational. Data were collected through a questionnaire survey of 40 financial services firms. The study’s unit of analysis was a firm. Chief Internal Auditors and Chief Finance Officers were the study’s unit of inquiry. Data were analyzed through correlation coefficients and linear regression using Statistical Package for Social Sciences.

The results suggest that board role performance and isomorphic forces are significant predictors of internet financial reporting. However, board role performance is not a significant predictor of internet financial reporting in the presence of isomorphic forces. The control and strategic roles of the board are positively and significantly associated with internet financial reporting unlike the service role. Only the coercive isomorphism is positively and significantly associated with internet financial reporting unlike the normative and mimetic isomorphism.

This study provides initial empirical evidence on the contribution of board role performance and isomorphic forces on internet financial reporting using evidence from Uganda’s financial service firms. To the researcher’s knowledge, this is the first perception-based study on internet financial reporting.

Based on a review of professional staff (PS), which includes research managers and administrators, in 54 academic publications, I propose a novel definition for this category of staff: ‘degree holding university employees who are primarily responsible for developing, maintaining and changing the social, digital and physical infrastructures that enable education, research and knowledge exchange’. The proposed definition facilitates the development of new research questions that target the level of the organisational fields of higher education and science, to complement research on the university and individual levels. This view supports the study of the contributions of PS to higher education and science. I anticipate that such a broader focus will help to counter and nuance accounts of ‘administrative bloat’ by focusing on how PS as a group shape and are shaped by the organisational fields of higher education and science, rather than dismissing them as superfluous or parasitic.

Existing public–private partnership (PPP) literature that explicitly adopts neo-institutional theory, tends to elucidate the impact of isomorphic pressures and organizational fields and structuration on PPP projects. This paper advances this literature by presenting the institutional work and micro-level dynamics through which actors initiate and implement a new form of project delivery. The authors show how actors enact responses to institutional structuration in the expansion and transformation of an airport from a public entity into a PPP in Saudi Arabia.

The authors use a single case study design that offers an empirically rich and thick description of events such as the dynamic processes, practices and types of institutional work carried out by actors and organizations to deliver the project under investigation.

Religious symbolic work as social integration triggered system integration work, which expanded the power capabilities of individual actors leading the project. Repair work then followed to alleviate the negative effects of disempowering the agency of actors negatively affected by the PPP model and to streamline the project implementation process.

This research offers several practical implications. For PPPs to operate successfully in contexts similar to the Gulf region, policymakers should provide strong political support and be willing to bear a considerable risk of losses or minimal outcomes during the early phases of experimentation with PPPs. Also, policymakers should not only focus their attention on technical requirements of PPPs but also associate new meanings with the normative and cultural-cognitive elements that are integral to the success of PPP implementation. In order to design strategies for change that are designed to fit the unique cultural and sociopolitical settings of each country, policymakers should empower capable individual actors and provide them with resources and access to power, which will enable them to enforce changes that diverge from institutionalized practices.

This research connected the PPP literature with theoretical frameworks drawn from neo-institutional theory and power. It would be valuable for further research, however, to connect ideas from the PPP literature with other disciplines such as psychology and social entrepreneurship. PPP research examines a recent phenomenon that can potentially be combined with non-traditional streams of research in analyzing projects. Expanding the realm of PPP research beyond traditional theoretical boundaries could potentially yield exciting insights into how the overall institutional and psychological environments surrounding projects affect their initiation and implementation.

The paper contributes new insights regarding the roles of religious symbolic work, allied with social and system integration of power relations in implementing PPP projects. It suggests a theoretical shift from structures and organizational fields – macro- and meso-levels of analysis – to individuals – micro-level – as triggers of new forms of project delivery that break with the status quo.

This rich descriptive study examines auditors' client risk assessment (i.e. “key audit matters”/critical audit matters) disclosures in expanded audit reports of 328 Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 350 companies. The study compares auditor-identified client risks with corporate risk disclosures identified in audit committee reports, in terms of number and type of risks. The research also compares variation in auditor-identified client risks between individual Big 4 audit firms. In addition, the study examines auditor ranking of their client risks disclosed.

The study manually content analyses disclosures in audit reports and audit committee reports of a sample of 328 FTSE-350 companies with 2015 year-ends.

Audit committees identify more risks than auditors (23% more risks). However, auditor-identified client risks and audit-committee-identified risks are similar (80% similar), as are auditor-identified client risks between the individual Big 4 audit firms. Only ten (3%) audit reports rank the importance of auditor-identified client risks.

Sample is restricted to one year, one jurisdiction, large-listed companies and companies audited by Big 4 auditors.

The study provides important insights for regulators, auditors and users of financial statements by identifying influences on disclosure of auditor-identified client risks.

The paper mobilises institutional theory to interpret the findings. The findings suggest that auditor-identified client risks in expanded audit reports may demonstrate mimetic behaviour in terms of similarity with audit-committee-identified risks and similarity between individual Big 4 audit firms. The study provides important insights for regulators, auditors and users of financial statements by identifying influences on disclosure of auditor-identified client risks.

This paper aims to determine the essential “collective goods” which a foreign multinational enterprise (MNE) must have before production can start in a remote area of an emerging economy, and to consider the alternative governance modes available to procure or create these goods.

This purpose is examined conceptually and theoretically. First, the concept of “collective goods” is presented, followed by a consideration of the traditional “buy, ally or make” contractual approaches available to obtain goods and services. These approaches are repositioned in the context of an “emerging economy” so that alternative “ordering systems” as well as “non-contractual” means of obtaining things have to be considered in the context of internalization and reciprocity theories.

It is difficult to obtain collective goods in remote areas of emerging economies where private ordering prevails and even succeeds but at high transaction costs and with substantial government intervention. However, the use of non-contractual modes of exchange such as reciprocity is available to facilitate exchanges between market MNEs and nonmarket state offices and civil-society associations such as non-governmental organizations with which collaboration is necessary but which cannot be acquired or controlled by MNEs. However, market firms can use philanthropy and lobbying to obtain the help of these nonmarket actors who know how to operate under private and state-ordering systems.

Theoretical implications: Internalization theory explains why MNEs are able to obtain collective goods by providing them “in-house”, while reciprocity theory exemplifies how non-contractual modes of exchange can substitute for the traditional but contractual “buy, ally and/or make”.

Managerial implications: In terms of the organizational structure of the subsidiary of an MNE operating in an emerging economy, it appears that the line functions of procurement, engineering and production may rely more on contractual exchanges with foreign suppliers, while the staff functions of public affairs, government relations and human resources may be more adept at using reciprocal exchange with local suppliers.

The provisioning of the collective goods when a firm builds its facilities in a remote and underdeveloped part of an emerging economy has hardly received any research attention nor have the non-contractual ways – such as reciprocity – available in the context of private ordering to obtain these goods.

Collegiality is the modus operandi of universities. Collegiality is central to academic freedom and scientific quality. In this way, collegiality also contributes to the good functioning of universities’ contribution to society and democracy. In this concluding paper of the special issue on collegiality, we summarize the main findings and takeaways from our collective studies. We summarize the main challenges and contestations to collegiality and to universities, but also document lines of resistance, activation, and maintenance. We depict varieties of collegiality and conclude by emphasizing that future research needs to be based on an appreciation of this variation. We argue that it is essential to incorporate such a variation-sensitive perspective into discussions on academic freedom and scientific quality and highlight themes surfaced by the different studies that remain under-explored in extant literature: institutional trust, field-level studies of collegiality, and collegiality and communication. Finally, we offer some remarks on methodological and theoretical implications of this research and conclude by summarizing our research agenda in a list of themes.