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At the dawn of a new decade, as ever more corporations are pursuing sustainable working conditions and advocating employee well-being, employees are increasingly tending to feel fatigued and drained by their work, which compromises their performance. Drawing on the job demands–resources model and social acceleration debate, the authors test a moderated mediation model. Specifically, the authors hypothesise that unreasonable tasks raise perceptions of emotional exhaustion when the pace of work is increased and investigate the moderating role of psychological detachment.

This study used a sample of 245 employees from Europe, all knowledge workers, to test the hypotheses.

Apart from unreasonable tasks being directly related with emotional exhaustion, this relationship was mediated by the perceived work pace. In addition, the authors establish psychological detachment as a relevant moderator for the mediating effect.

Managers and HR practitioners are equipped with a better understanding of the effects of an increasing speed of work, the conditions leading to it and the individual and organizational resources that may help to create healthy and meaningful job positions, which facilitate employee efficiency.

Our study expands the literature on contemporary stressors and adds to what is known about the ‘dark side’ of job demands that affect the organizational bottom-line, as well as the resource-based mechanism that can buffer the negative effects.

COVID-19 has forced Big 4 firms to challenge existing management control arrangements and adapt their ways of working. Yet, we know little about how management control might be enacted in the future of the sustainable workplace. The objective of the study is to examine the patterns of management control change in the Big 4 accounting firms during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Adopting an exploratory qualitative research design, the authors draw on 42 interviews with directors and associates in the Big 4 professional services firms.

The findings reveal two pathways of management control change including alignment and displacement. The authors found that relatively minor adaptions to action and result controls were relied upon to respond to substantial cultural and personnel control changes.

The contributions are threefold: the authors take a temporal perspective to (1) unpack the changes to management control arrangements; (2) theorise the findings by developing a three-dimensional taxonomy of change pathways encompassing pace, scope and longevity of management control change and (3) contextualise management control arrangements in a hybrid work setting.

1. COVID-19 has forced Big 4 firms to challenge existing management control arrangements.

2. Literature has focused on traditional, onsite work settings and largely ignored change pathways.

3. The authors take a temporal perspective to unpack changes to management control arrangements.

4. Big 4 firms adapted to hybrid work with substantial changes to personnel and cultural controls.

5. The authors theorise the findings by developing a three-dimensional taxonomy of change pathways.

COVID-19 has forced Big 4 firms to challenge existing management control arrangements.

Literature has focused on traditional, onsite work settings and largely ignored change pathways.

The authors take a temporal perspective to unpack changes to management control arrangements.

Big 4 firms adapted to hybrid work with substantial changes to personnel and cultural controls.

The authors theorise the findings by developing a three-dimensional taxonomy of change pathways.

Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and, at its core, Machine Learning (ML) offer opportunities for organizations to develop new or enhance existing capabilities. Despite the endless possibilities, organizations face operational challenges in harvesting the value of ML-based capabilities (MLbC), and current research has yet to explicate these challenges and theorize their remedies. To bridge the gap, this study explored the current practices to propose a systematic way of orchestrating MLbC development, which is an extension of ongoing digitalization of organizations.

Data were collected from Finland's Artificial Intelligence Accelerator (FAIA) and complemented by follow-up interviews with experts outside FAIA in Europe, China and the United States over four years. Data were analyzed through open coding, thematic analysis and cross-comparison to develop a comprehensive understanding of the MLbC development process.

The analysis identified the main components of MLbC development, its three phases (development, release and operation) and two major MLbC development challenges: Temporal Complexity and Context Sensitivity. The study then introduced Fostering Temporal Congruence and Cultivating Organizational Meta-learning as strategic practices addressing these challenges.

This study offers a better theoretical explanation for the MLbC development process beyond MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) and its hindrances. It also proposes a practical way to align ML-based applications with business needs while accounting for their structural limitations. Beyond the MLbC context, this study offers a strategic framework that can be adapted for different cases of digital transformation that include automation and augmentation of work.

Our study aims to evaluate the impact of infrastructure and public investment on private investment in machinery and equipment in Brazil from 1947 to 2017. The contribution of our article to the existing literature lies in providing a more comprehensive understanding of the presence or absence of the crowding effect in the Brazilian economy by leveraging an extensive historical database. Our central argument posits that the recent decline in private capital accumulation over the last few decades can be attributed to shifts in economic policies – moving from a developmentalist orientation to nondevelopmental guidance since the early 1990s, which is reflected in the diminished levels of public investment and infrastructure since the 1980s.

We conducted a series of econometric regressions utilizing the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model as our chosen econometric methodology.

Employing two different variables to measure public investment and infrastructure, our results – robust across various specifications – have substantiated the existence of a crowding-in effect in Brazil over the examined period. Thus, we have empirical evidence indicating that the state has influenced private capital accumulation in the Brazilian economy over the past decades.

Our article contributes to the existing literature by offering a more comprehensive understanding of the crowding effect in the Brazilian economy, utilizing an extensive historical database.

Few resources exist to incorporate principles of modular approach to course design. This research aimed to help instructors by presenting principles for practical and empirically informed modular course design in engineering education.

In the first phase, a systematic literature review was completed to identify categories addressing a modular course design. Search and screening procedures resulted in 33 qualifying articles describing the development of a modular course. In the second phase, 6 expert interviews were conducted to elaborate on the identified categories.

Guided by the interview results and the ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate) course design model, the categories were compiled into six design principles. To present the design principles in relation to the guiding principles of modular approach, an overarching conceptual model was developed.

Here, we present our innovation; a foundation for an evidence-based systematic approach to modular course design. Implications have value for supporting flexibility and autonomy in learning.

OpenWHO is the World Health Organization's online learning platform that was launched in 2017. The COVID-19 pandemic led to massive growth in the number of courses, enrolments and reach of the platform. The platform is built on a stable and scalable basis that can host a large volume of learners. The authors aim to identify key factors that led to this growth.

In this research paper, the authors examined OpenWHO metadata, end-of-course surveys and internal processes using a quantitative approach.

OpenWHO metadata showed that the platform has hosted over 190 health courses in 65 languages and over seven million course enrolments. Since the onset of the pandemic, there have been more women, older people and people from middle income countries accessing courses than before. Following data analysis of the platform metadata and course production process, it was found that several key factors contributed to the growth of the platform. First, OpenWHO has a standardised course production pathway that ensures efficiency, consistency and quality. Further, providing courses in different languages increased its reach to a variety of populations throughout the world. For this, multi-language translation is achieved through a network of translators and an automated system to ensure the efficient translation of learning products. Lastly, it was found that access was promoted for learners with disabilities by optimising accessibility in course production. Data analysis of learner feedback surveys for selected courses showed that the courses were well received in that learners found it useful to complete courses that were self-paced and flexible. In addition, results indicated that preferred learning methods included videos, downloadable documents, slides, quizzes and learning exercises.

Lessons learnt from the WHO's learning response will help prepare researchers for the next health emergency to ensure timely, equitable access to quality health knowledge for everyone. Findings of this study will provide valuable insights for educators, policymakers and researchers in the field who intend to use online learning to optimise knowledge acquisition and performance.

The authors enrich and extend the existing institutional anomie theory (IAT) in the hope of sharpening the understanding of the joint effects of selected cultural values and social institutional changes on women's pre-entrant entrepreneurial attempts. The authors theorize that women are culturally discouraged to pursue pre-entrant entrepreneurial attempts or wealth accumulation in a specific culture. This discouragement creates an anomic strain that motivates women to deviate from cultural prescriptions by engaging in pre-entrant entrepreneurial attempts at a faster speed. Building on this premise, the authors hypothesize that changes in social institutions facilitate the means of achievement for women due to the potential opportunities inherent in such institutional changes.

Using a randomly selected sample of 1,431 registered active individual users with a minimum of 10,000 followers on a leading entertainment live-streaming platform in the People's Republic of China, the authors examined a unique mix of cultural and institutional changes and their effects on the speed of women's engagement in live-streaming platform activity.

The authors find support for the impact of the interaction between changes in social institution conditions and cultural values. Unexpectedly, the authors also find a negative impact of cultural values on women's speed of engaging in pre-entrant entrepreneurial attempts.

The authors add institutional change to the IAT framework and provide a novel account for the variation in the pre-entrant entrepreneurial attempts by women on the platform.

This paper examines the qualities of situations wherein hybrid professionals in knowledge-intensive public organizations (KIPOs) vary in their displays of conflicting institutional logics. Specifically, it examines the situations when individual researchers vary in their displays of a traditionalist academic- and an academic performer logic.

Analysis is grounded in an institutional logics perspective and founded on qualitative interviews with university researchers recurrently exposed to performance measurement and management.

The findings show that individual researchers display a traditionalist academic- and an academic performer logic in situations of lower or higher “perceived control exposure” (i.e. perceptions of (not) being exposed to “what the performance measurement system wants to/can ‘see’”). In more detail, that a traditionalist academic logic is displayed more in situations of lower “perceived control exposure” whereas an academic performer logic is displayed comparatively more in situations of higher “perceived control exposure”.

These findings add insight into when there is room for resistance to pressures to perform in accordance with increasing performance measurement and when researchers more so tend to conform. While previous research has mostly studied such matters by emphasizing variation between researchers, this study points out the importance of situations of lower or higher “perceived control exposure”. Such insight is arguably also more broadly valuable since it adds to our understanding about hybridity of professionals in KIPOs and how to design and use performance measurement systems in relation to them.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of paradoxes, underlying tensions and potential management strategies when integrating digital technologies into existing lean-based production systems (LPSs), with the aim of achieving synergies and fostering the development of production systems.

This study adopts a collaborative management research (CMR) approach to identify patterns of organisational tensions and paradoxes and explore management strategies to overcome them. The data were collected through interviews and focus group interviews with experts on lean and/or digital technologies from the companies, from documents and from workshops with the in-case researchers.

The findings of this paper provide insights into the salient organisational paradoxes embraced in the integration of digital technologies in LPS by identifying different aspects of the performing, organising, learning and belonging paradoxes. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate the intricacies and relatedness between different paradoxes and their resolutions, and more specifically, how a resolution strategy adopted to manage one paradox might unintentionally generate new tensions. This, in turn, calls for either re-contextualising actions to counteract the drift or the adoption of new resolution strategies.

This paper adds perspective to operations management (OM) research through the use of paradox theory, and we (1) provide a fine-grained perspective on why integration sometimes “fails” and label the forces of internal drift as mechanisms of imbalances and (2) provide detailed insights into how different management and resolution strategies are adopted, especially by identifying re-contextualising actions as a key to rebalancing organisational paradoxes in favour of the integration of digital technologies in LPSs.

This paper is an extension of a panel presentation delivered in response to a joint call for panels by the Social Informatics and Information Ethics and Policy Special Interest Groups for the 2022 Association for Information Science and Technology conference. The purpose is to introduce critical race frameworks and tenets as a lens to develop, assess and analyze the social informatics (SI) within information science (IS) research, professional discourse, praxis and pedagogical paradigms. This paper spotlights one of the presentations from that panel, an iteration of Critical Race Theory (CRT) designed specifically for information studies: CRiTical Race information Theory (CRiT).

Just as importantly, using SI as part of the context, the paper also includes a discussion that illustrates research and theory building possibilities as both counter and complement to the technocratic advances that permeate society at every level (macro, mezzo and micro), which can also be reasonably framed as the information industrial complex. Thus, CRiT joins other forms of critical discourse and praxis grappling with deconstructing, decolonizing, demarginalizing and demystifying the influence and impact of information technologies. While CRiT has global intentions and implications, this specific discussion has an extensive American focus.

If we consider the rapid pace in which techno-determinism is moving toward the vise grip of techno-fatalism controlled by frameworks generated from the information industrial complex, we can reasonably consider that humanity on a global basis is living within a meta-large technocratic crisis moment. This crisis moment is both acute and chronic. That is, the technocratic crisis is continuously moving quickly while simultaneously worsening over an extended period of time with no remedies and few responses to substantively address the crisis.

Part of the nature of information and data is measurability. Thus, identifying compatible nomenclature connecting the descriptiveness of intersectionality (a seminal CRT tool) as a qualitative research method to the measurability of data connected to quantitative research, a mixed method approach moves from possible to plausible. Additionally, within IS, there are often opportunities to measure human engagement, such as social media content, search engine use, assessing practices of categorizations, and multiple forms of surveillance data as a short list. Hence, the descriptiveness of intersectional qualitative research “mixed” with the measurability of quantitative research within information settings implies exponential methodological possibilities.

CRiT is multilayered, on the one hand, with the intention of being a discipline-specific, information-specific form of CRT. On the other hand, CRiT theory building is interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary based on information as omnipresent phenomena. An ongoing challenge for CRiT theory building is identifying and working within a balance between, practitioners who typically throw anything and everything at practical problems, while scholars often slice problems into such small segments that practical understanding is severely limited. Embracing and integrating the dynamic interplay between developing ideas and using them is the key to evolving CRiT within the social sciences.

There is plenty of room as well as a need for additional narrative discussing or challenging the use or appropriation of information from a technocratic approach, a counter to the information industrial complex.

CRiT is emerging and cutting edge in discussion that addresses the technocratic determinism found in most scholarly discourses.