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1 – 10 of over 20000Practical wisdom (PW; phronesis), as one of the human virtues, is experiencing a renewal in the contemporary management literature. The aim of this conceptual paper is first, to…
Abstract
Purpose
Practical wisdom (PW; phronesis), as one of the human virtues, is experiencing a renewal in the contemporary management literature. The aim of this conceptual paper is first, to explore the core practices of managers and leaders in the literature and second, to demonstrate how PW can manifest itself in these practices.
Design/methodology/approach
The research follows the interpretivist research philosophy, inductive approach, qualitative method and the theory-building research strategy. The data collection method is a literature review. The practice ecosystem framework is applied to demonstrate the presence of PW in the core practices of managers and leaders.
Findings
The paper proposes a practice-based paradigm of management and leadership. From the literature study, envisioning, enabling, energizing, engaging and executing as five fundamental practices are identified.
Research limitations/implications
The most significant literature was selected based on decisions of the author. Therefore, it might be that important sources were overlooked. The paper proposes future research questions, and it calls for an empirical validation of the proposed conceptual model in management and leadership practices context.
Practical implications
The practical implications for managers and leaders are in applying the framework developed in this paper as a tool or guidelines to cultivate PW in their practices. The paper offers implications for management education, traditional educational institutions and educational practitioners because they are the key influencers of wise thinking and actions of future managers and leaders.
Originality/value
The novelty of this paper is in making explicit how the eight features of PW can manifest themselves in the everyday actions of managers and leaders. Applying the practice ecosystem framework for this purpose is an original contribution.
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Chris Akroyd, Kevin E. Dow, Andrea Drake and Jeffrey Wong
In this paper, the editors argue that management accounting research should seek to expand to examine the broader ecosystem of information sources that influence organizational…
Abstract
In this paper, the editors argue that management accounting research should seek to expand to examine the broader ecosystem of information sources that influence organizational performance. The editors introduce the concept of the management accounting ecosystem as a means of linking discrete management accounting research topics to the broader environment in which organizations operate. By doing this, a stronger connection can be established between management accounting research and management accounting practice. The goal is to encourage more cross-disciplinary research that provides a better understanding of the ecosystem in which management accounting practitioners operate. The editors encourage researchers to submit studies to “Advances in Management Accounting” that evaluate the effectiveness of new management accounting information sources and the techniques used to analyze them in the broader ecosystem to enhance the effectiveness of management accounting practices. By exploring the wider information sources within the management accounting ecosystem, future management accounting research can become more innovative and better address the decision-making needs of organizational members.
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Pennie Frow, Janet R. McColl-Kennedy, Adrian Payne and Rahul Govind
This paper aims to conceptualize and characterize service ecosystems, addressing calls for research on this important and under-researched topic.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to conceptualize and characterize service ecosystems, addressing calls for research on this important and under-researched topic.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors draw on four meta-theoretical foundations of S-D logic – resource integration, resource density, practices and institutions – providing a new integrated conceptual framework of ecosystem well-being. They then apply this conceptualization in the context of a complex healthcare setting, exploring the characteristics of ecosystem well-being at the meso level.
Findings
This study provides an integrated conceptual framework to explicate the nature and structure of well-being in a complex service ecosystem; identifies six key characteristics of ecosystem well-being; illustrates service ecosystem well-being in a specific healthcare context, zooming in on the meso level of the ecosystem and noting the importance of embedding a shared worldview; provides practical guidance for managers and policy makers about how to manage complex service ecosystems in their quest for improving service outcomes; and offers an insightful research agenda.
Research limitations/implications
This research focuses on service ecosystems with an illustration in one healthcare context, suggesting additional studies that explore other industry contexts.
Practical implications
Practically, the study indicates the imperative for managing across mutually adapting levels of the ecosystem, identifying specific new practices that can improve service outcomes.
Social implications
Examining well-being in the context of a complex service ecosystem is critical for policymakers charged with difficult decisions about balancing the demands of different levels and actors in a systemic world.
Originality/value
The study is the first to conceptualize and characterize well-being in a service ecosystem, providing unique insights and identifying six specific characteristics of well-being.
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Tiina Tuominen, Bo Edvardsson and Javier Reynoso
This study aims to understand and explain how institutional change occurs at the level of value co-creation practices in service ecosystems. Despite the centrality of collective…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to understand and explain how institutional change occurs at the level of value co-creation practices in service ecosystems. Despite the centrality of collective practices to the service ecosystems perspective, theoretically grounded explanations of how practices change and become institutionalized remain underdeveloped. Applying the theory of routine dynamics, this paper addresses two questions as follows: what does the institutional change mean at the level of value co-creation practices and what processes underlie these changes?
Design/methodology/approach
The study develops a conceptual framework that characterizes value co-creation practices as routines involving three aspects, namely, ostensive, performative and artifactual. As a key element in institutional change, the interplay between these informs an account of institutional change processes in service ecosystems.
Findings
The proposed conceptual framework specifies the conditions for institutional change in terms of value co-creation routines. First, any such change is seen to be grounded in alignment between changing institutional rules and the ostensive, performative and artifactual aspects of routines. Second, this alignment is seen to emerge through a dialectics of planned and practice-based activities during institutional change. An empirical research agenda is proposed for the analysis of institutional change processes in different service ecosystems.
Originality/value
This conceptual framework extends existing accounts of how service ecosystems change through the contributions of multiple actors at the level of value co-creation practices.
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Janet R McColl-Kennedy, Lilliemay Cheung and Elizabeth Ferrier
The purpose of this paper is threefold: to introduce a practice-based framework designed to integrate and deepen our understanding of how individuals co-create service experience…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is threefold: to introduce a practice-based framework designed to integrate and deepen our understanding of how individuals co-create service experience practices; to identify co-creating service experience practices; and to provide a compelling agenda for future research, and offer practical strategies to enhance co-created service experiences. Accordingly, we extend practice theory, building on Kjellberg and Helgesson’s (2006) practice-based framework for markets by integrating Holt’s (1995) consumer practices and social capital-based practices (Gittell and Vidal, 1998; Woolcock, 2001).
Design/methodology/approach
The authors interpretive analysis draws on naturalistic observations carried out over 18 months, supplemented with 35 interviews (17 with residents, and 18 with staff) and a diary study of nine non-management staff (including nursing staff, kitchen and cleaning staff and administrative staff) at a residential aged care facility.
Findings
This paper offers a new conceptualization of service experience. Rather than viewing service experiences as dyadic, designed and produced by the firm for the customer, the authors conceptualize service experience as dynamic, experiential, relational activities and interactions, thus highlighting the collective, collaborative, evolving and dynamic nature of service experience.
Research limitations/implications
Building on McColl-Kennedy et al.’s (2012) foundational work, the authors articulate three distinct types of practices that characterize service experiences. We extend practice theory offering an integrative practice-based framework consistent with our practice-based conceptualization of service experience. Based on the service ecosystem metaphor and drawing parallels and contrasts with an ant colony, the authors provide a co-created service experience practices (CSEP) framework comprising: representational practices – assimilating, producing and personalizing; normalizing practices – bonding, bridging and linking; and exchange practices – accounting (searching and selecting), evaluating (sorting and assorting), appreciating, classifying (displaying objects and demonstrating collective action, and play (communing and entertaining). Our CSEP framework integrates three theoretical frameworks, that of Kjellberg and Helgesson’s (2006) market practices framework, Holt’s (1995) consumer practices and social capital-based practices (Gittell and Vidal, 1998; Woolcock, 2001), to yield a deeper explanation of co-created service experience practices.
Practical implications
It is clear from our observations, interviews with residents and staff, and from the diary study, that customers co-create service experiences in many different ways, each contextually determined. In some cases the customers are well equipped with a wide array of resources, integrated from exchanges with other customers, staff, friends and family and from their own resources. In other cases, however, few resources are integrated from few sources. Importantly, the authors found that some staff are willing and able to offer an extensive range of resources designed to complement the customers’ own resources to help facilitate the service experience. We offer a seven-point practical plan designed to enhance service experiences.
Originality/value
The authors work contributes theoretically and practically in four important ways. First, the authors provide a critical analysis of prior service experience conceptualizations. Second, consistent with the conceptualization that service experiences are dynamic, experiential, relational activities and interactions developed with the customer and potentially other actors, including for example, other customers, organizations, and friends and family, we draw parallels and contrasts with a biological ecosystem and offer a co-created service experience practices (CSEP) framework designed to integrate and deepen the understanding of co-created service experiences and extend practice theory. Third, the authors provide managerial implications, including a seven-point practical plan. Finally, the authors offer a research agenda to assist further theory development.
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Nitha Palakshappa, Sarah Dodds and Loren M. Stangl
The world continues to grapple with grand challenges – climate change, pandemic, poverty, social injustice and diminishing resources – requiring mitigation if we are to focus on…
Abstract
Purpose
The world continues to grapple with grand challenges – climate change, pandemic, poverty, social injustice and diminishing resources – requiring mitigation if we are to focus on well-being and move towards a more sustainable future. Cultivating sustainable ecosystems offers a possible solution. The purpose of this paper is to understand how sustainable organizations at the meso level can nurture sustainable service ecosystems that provide the potential for greater well-being outcomes for individuals, business, society and the planet.
Design/methodology/approach
Case study data is gathered from 11 sustainable fashion organizations operating at the meso level within a complex ecosystem. The analysis includes interviews with founders and/or key managers and secondary information from company websites and publicly available reports.
Findings
The findings identify key value co-creation sustainable practices at the meso level that facilitate the function of the service ecosystem to create well-being outcomes. Value co-creation practices include – embedding a sustainable ethos; implementing sustainable strategies that embrace innovation, transparency and stakeholder collaboration; and incorporating sustainable communication practices that engage.
Originality/value
Encapsulating sustainability within macromarketing and service ecosystems enables the development of a sustainable service ecosystems framework that has the potential to offer enhanced well-being. Implications for marketing practice in terms of important factors that facilitate service-sustainable ecosystems to enhance well-being are considered.
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Janet R. McColl-Kennedy, Christoph F. Breidbach, Teegan Green, Mohamed Zaki, Alexandria M. Gain and Mieke L. van Driel
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how and why some service ecosystems are more resilient and, consequently, more sustainable than others during turbulent times, and how…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how and why some service ecosystems are more resilient and, consequently, more sustainable than others during turbulent times, and how resilience can be cultivated to enable pathways to service ecosystem sustainability.
Design/methodology/approach
This work integrates disparate literature from multiple service and sustainability literature streams, iterating through constant comparison with findings from 44 semistructured interviews conducted in the context of primary health care clinic service ecosystems.
Findings
The authors offer a novel conceptual framework comprising pillars (shared worldview, individual actor well-being and multiactor interactions), changing practices to cultivate resilience through resilience levers (orchestrators, individual actor effort, actor inclusivity and digitaltech–humanness approach), and pathways to service ecosystem sustainability (volume vs value, volume to value, volume and value). The authors demonstrate that service ecosystems need to change practices, integrating resources differently in response to the turbulent environment, emphasizing the importance of a shared worldview across the ecosystem and assessing different pathways to sustainability.
Originality/value
This paper offers new insights into the important intersection of service marketing, sustainability and health care. The authors provide guidance to practitioners aiming to cultivate resilience in service ecosystems to achieve pathways to sustainability in primary health care clinics. Finally, implications for theory are discussed, and directions to guide future service research offered.
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Roderick J. Brodie, Kumar Rakesh Ranjan, Martie-louise Verreynne, Yawei Jiang and Josephine Previte
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a crisis for healthcare systems worldwide. There have been significant challenges to managing public and private health care and related services…
Abstract
Purpose
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a crisis for healthcare systems worldwide. There have been significant challenges to managing public and private health care and related services systems’ capacity to cope with testing, treatment and containment of the virus. Drawing on the foundational research by Frow et al. (2019), the paper explores how adopting a service ecosystem perspective provides insight into the complexity of healthcare systems during times of extreme stress and uncertainty.
Design/methodology/approach
A healthcare framework based on a review of the service ecosystem literature is developed, and the COVID-19 crisis in Australia provides an illustrative case.
Findings
The study demonstrates how the service ecosystem perspective provides new insight into the dynamics and multilayered nature of a healthcare system during a pandemic. Three propositions are developed that offer directions for future research and managerial applications.
Practical implications
The research provides an understanding of the relevance of managerial flexibility, innovation, learning and knowledge sharing, which offers opportunities leading to greater resilience in the healthcare system. In particular, the research addresses how service providers in the service ecosystem learn from this pandemic to inform future practices.
Originality/value
The service ecosystem perspective for health care offers fresh thinking and an understanding of how a shared worldview, institutional practices and supportive and disruptive factors influence the systems’ overall well-being during a crisis such as COVID-19.
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Matthew M. Lastner, David A. Locander, Michael Pimentel, Andrew Pueschel, Wyatt A. Schrock, George D. Deitz and Adam Rapp
This study aims to examine the applicability of Hartmann et al.’s (2018) service ecosystem framework to the day-to-day management of the modern sales force. The authors provide a…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to examine the applicability of Hartmann et al.’s (2018) service ecosystem framework to the day-to-day management of the modern sales force. The authors provide a review of the framework, acknowledging its strengths, while also indicating areas for advancement. The authors conclude with recommendations to the framework and indicate opportunities where future research could advance sales theory.
Design/methodology/approach
A review of the theoretical underpinnings of the service ecosystem framework is weighed against the established roles and responsibilities of the modern sales force in the literature.
Findings
The ability of the framework to capture the multi-level, multi-actor and dynamic aspects of sales represents an improvement in the conceptualization of selling is critical. Suggestions around the refinement for meso-level sales interactions and a more pliant application of service dominant-logic are offered.
Research limitations/implications
The suggested extensions of the framework continue the advancement of novel theorization for the field of sales. Priorities for future research include consideration of ethical implications of the framework and formulations of new management strategies reflective of the broad and dynamic properties of the ecosystem conceptualization.
Practical implications
This paper provides managerial guidelines and implications tied specifically to the thick and thin crossing points and how they may impact employee decision-making.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to pointedly examine the service ecosystem framework with respect to established principles of managing a modern sales force.
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We are currently experiencing what is often called the sixth period of mass extinction on planet Earth, caused undoubtedly by the impact of human activities and businesses on…
Abstract
Purpose
We are currently experiencing what is often called the sixth period of mass extinction on planet Earth, caused undoubtedly by the impact of human activities and businesses on nature. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential for accounting and corporate accountability to contribute to extinction prevention. The paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach, weaving scientific evidence and theory into organisational disclosure and reporting in order to demonstrate linkages between extinction, business behaviour, accounting and accountability as well as to provide a basis for developing a framework for narrative disclosure on extinction prevention.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is theoretical and interdisciplinary in approach, seeking to bring together scientific theories of extinction with a need for corporate and organisational accountability whilst recognising philosophical concerns in the extant environmental accounting literature about accepting any business role and capitalist mechanisms in ecological matters. The overarching framework derives from the concept of emancipatory accounting.
Findings
The outcome of the writing is to: present an emancipatory “extinction accounting” framework which can be embedded within integrated reports, and a diagrammatic representation, in the form of an “ark”, of accounting and accountability mechanisms which, combined, can assist, the authors argue, in preventing extinction. The authors suggest that the emancipatory framework may also be applied to engagement meetings between the responsible investor community (and non-governmental organisations (NGOs)) and organisations on biodiversity and species protection.
Research limitations/implications
The exploratory extinction accounting and accountability frameworks within this paper should provide a basis for further research into the emancipatory potential for organisational disclosures and mechanisms of governance and accountability to prevent species extinction.
Practical implications
The next steps for researchers and practitioners involve development and implementation of the extinction accounting and engagement frameworks presented in this paper within integrated reporting and responsible investor practice.
Social implications
As outlined in this paper, extinction of any species of flora and fauna can affect significantly the functioning of local and global ecosystems, the destruction of which can have, and is having, severe and dangerous consequences for human life. Extinction prevention is critically important to the survival of the human race.
Originality/value
This paper represents a comprehensive attempt to explore the emancipatory role of accounting in extinction prevention and to bring together the linkages in accounting and accountability mechanisms which, working together, can prevent species extinction.
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