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To understand how organizations, public or private, must increase their productivity perception (PP), independently of the sector. This article aims to analyze PP in the digital transformation (DT) process to determine how it is affected by technostress (TS) and work engagement (WE), two concepts that seem to be forces opposing PP.

The authors use data from a questionnaire addressed to personnel in two organizations (public and private). The analysis applies partial least squares technique to the 505 valid responses obtained from these organizations. This analysis is based not on representativeness but on uniqueness.

The results suggest a positive, significant relationship between DT and PP. This article integrates DT and its effects on aspects of people's health, PP and WE. The model thus includes interactions of technology with human elements. In both business and administrative environments, PP is key to optimizing resources and survival of organizations.

DT processes are different and complex because every organization is different. The authors recommend expanding this study to other sectors in both spheres, public and private. Aligning the objectives of the institutions for aid with DT is also quite complicated.

This study contributes to improving participating organizations. It also provides government institutions with a clear foundation from which to encourage actions that promote the health and WE of their workforce without reducing productivity. In addition, this study adds novelty to the research line.

The authors have deepened this line of research by developing fuller knowledge of the relationships among novel and necessary variables in organizations. The authors provide complementary, different and inspiring value in addressing this line of research.

Municipalities have the potential to become models of the circular economy (CE). This paper aims to examine the impact of the municipal council’s characteristics on municipal CE disclosure and promotion.

This paper is based on the resource dependence and upper echelons theories. For a sample of the 100 largest cities in Canada, a mixed methodology is used to code and analyze data and test the hypotheses.

Municipal councillors’ education and experience related to the environment or sustainability are both likely to affect CE disclosure, and their sector membership (public or private) moderates the relationship between CE disclosure and councillors’ experience. This experience may be reinforced by membership in the private sector, which has applied CE principles more extensively than the public sector has. Municipal councils with a greater number of councillors from the private sector appear to perform better in matters of transparency and to disclose more CE information on their public websites.

Municipalities could use the findings to foster their transition to CE by implementing a CE-related training plan for their councillors. A CE-dedicated section on their websites could improve transparency and inform and educate residents about CE.

The public sector could learn from the private sector’s best practices regarding CE.

This paper contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence of the transparency and engagement of municipalities toward CE. The authors extend the resource dependence and upper echelons theories to a new context, that of public organizations.

This study aims to assess the knowledge-sharing risks and controls in the government sector from the knowledge workers’ perspective.

This qualitative study combines two techniques. First, the study uses the Delphi technique to identify the risks and rank them. Second, the study used a follow-up interview approach to identify the needed controls to mitigate these identified risks.

The Delphi study revealed the top knowledge-sharing risks are related to organizational and individual risks. Furthermore, the study identified the top controls that needed to mitigate these identified risks from technology, process and people dimensions. The study findings suggested that implementing controls on people and processes is the most important, and the focus must be on them, especially in the government sector.

The study offers several practical implications for the government sector to establish a knowledge-sharing risks management strategy. Such study has been given little attention in previous research, especially in developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to use Bourdieu’s Theory of Capital–Field–Habitus to explore how refugees, asylum seekers and migrants accumulate and mobilise social, cultural, symbolic and economic capital to find meaningful work in the Australian construction industry.

The paper reports the results of a survey of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who have either successfully or unsuccessfully searched for employment in the Australian construction industry.

The findings dispel widely held negative stereotypes of about this group by describing a highly capable workforce which could address significant skills shortages in the industry, while concurrently diversifying the workforce. However, it is found that refugees, asylum seekers and migrants face considerable barriers to finding meaningful employment in the construction industry. In circumventing these barriers, education institutions, charities and community-based organisations play an especially important role, alongside friends and family networks. They do this by helping refugees, asylum seekers and migrants accumulate and deploy the necessary capital to secure meaningful work in the construction industry. Disappointingly, it is also found that the construction industry does little to help facilitate capital accumulation and deployment for this group, despite the urgent need to address diversity and critical skills shortages.

Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Capital–Field–Habitus, the findings make a number of new theoretical and practical contributions to the limited body of international research relating to the employment of refugees, asylum seekers and migrant workers in the construction. The results are important because meaningful employment is widely accepted to be the single most factor in the successful integration of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants into a host society and the construction industry represents an important source of potential employment for them.

Technology is widely recognised to be revolutionising the accounting profession, allowing accountants to focus on professional skills and technical knowledge that deliver value for organisational success. Despite the known benefits, it is reported that accountants are not fully leveraging the potential value of certain technologies. To understand why, this study aims to draw on the technology adoption model (TAM) and investigates accounting professionals’ perceptions towards technology, and how these may influence adoption at work.

The study gathered online survey data from 585 accounting managers from organisations of varying sizes and in different sectors in Australia and parts of Southeast Asia. Qualitative data were thematically analysed, and quantitative data were analysed using both descriptive and multivariate techniques.

The study highlighted the pivotal role of staff perceptions on the importance and ease of using technology on the uptake and successful usage. Findings emphasised important opportunities for organisations to educate accounting staff on the value of technology and optimise their confidence and skills through training and support initiatives, particularly smaller businesses. Marked differences in the orientation towards technology among Australian and Southeast Asian participants illuminate how national work culture and practice can influence technology adoption.

The study makes a practical contribution by advancing the understanding of the relative importance and value of certain technologies in different regions and organisation types in the accounting profession. It extends the theoretical understanding of the role of TAM’s core elements to the accounting context, exploring staff’s notions of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use from the manager’s perspective.

The total defence (TD) concept constitutes a joint endeavour between the military forces and civil defence structures within a TD state. Logistics is essential for such joint collaboration to work; however, the mismatch between military and civil defence logistics structures poses challenges for such joint collaboration. The purpose of this paper is to identify logistics concept areas within the TD framework that allow for military and civil defence collaborations from a logistics operations perspective.

Pattern-matching analysis is used to compare patterns found in the investigated case with those prescribed from the literature and predicted to occur. The study seeks to identify logistics concepts within TD from the literature and from the events describing the Swedish response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Pattern matching thus allows for the reconciliation of logistics concepts from the literature to descriptions of how the response was handled, albeit under a TD framework.

Findings show quite distinct foci between the theoretical and observational realms in terms of logistics applications. While the theoretical realm identifies four main logistics concepts, the observational realm identifies five logistics conceptual themes. This goes on to show an incongruence between the military and civil parts of the TD.

This study provides basis for further research into the applications and management of logistics activity within TD and emergency response.

Logistics applications within TD have not, until now, received much attention in the literature. Given this knowledge gap, this study is of original value.

With the growing need for employees to be innovative, public-sector organizations are investing in employee training. This study aims to examine the effects of a combined Lean Six Sigma and innovation training, using action learning, on public-sector employees’ creative role identity and innovative work behavior.

The authors studied a public service agency in Singapore in which a five-day Lean Innovation Training was implemented, using a combination of Lean Six Sigma and Creative Problem-Solving tools, with a simulation on day one and subsequent team-based project coaching, spread over six months. The authors administered pre- and postintervention surveys among all the employees, and initiated group interviews and observations before, during and after the intervention.

Creative role identity and innovative work behavior had significantly improved six months after the intervention, enabled through senior management’s transformational leadership. The training induced managers to role-model innovative work behaviors while cocreating, with their employees, a renewal of their agency’s core processes. The three completed improvement projects contributed to an innovative work culture and reduced service turnaround time.

Starting with a role-playing simulation on the first day, during which leaders and followers swapped roles, the action-learning type training taught all the organizational members to use various Lean Six Sigma and Creative Problem-Solving tools. This nimble Lean Innovation Training, and subsequent team-based project coaching, exemplifies how advancing the staff’s creative role identity can have a positive impact.

This paper aims to examine the history of data leaks and investigative journalism, the techniques and technology that enable them and their influence in Australia and abroad. It explores the ethical and professional considerations of investigative journalists, how they approach privacy and information-sharing and how this differs from intelligence practice in government and industry. The paper assesses the strengths and limitations of Collaborative Investigative Reporting based on Information Leaks (CIRIL) as a kind of public-facing intelligence practice.

This study draws on academic literature, source material from investigations by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and a survey of financial crime compliance professionals conducted in 2022.

The paper identifies three key causal factors that have enabled the rise of CIRIL even as traditional journalism has declined: the digital storage of information; increasing public interest in offshore finance and tax evasion; and “virtual newsrooms” enabled by internet communications. It concludes that the primary strength of CIRIL is its creation of complex global narratives to inform the public about corruption and tax evasion, while its key weakness is that the scale and breadth of the data released makes it difficult to focus on likely criminal activity. Results of a survey of industry and government professionals indicate that CIRIL is generally more effective as public information than as an investigative resource, owing to the volume, age and quality of information released. However, the trends enabling CIRIL are likely to continue, and this means that governments and financial institutions need to become more effective at using leaked information.

Over the past decade, large-scale, data-driven investigative journalism projects such as the Pandora Papers and the Russian Laundromat have had a significant public impact by exposing money laundering, financial crime and corruption. These projects share certain hallmarks: the use of human intelligence, often sourced from anonymous leaks; inventive fusion of this intelligence with data from open sources; and collaboration among a global collective of investigative journalists to build a narrative. These projects prioritise informing the public. They are also an important information source for government and private sector organisations working to investigate and disrupt financial crime.

A significant number of criminal and deviant acts are investigated by nonpolice actors. These include private investigators who charge fees for their services, professional services firms such as firms of accountants who also charge fees, in-house investigators employed by private organisations and in-house investigators of public sector organisations who are not sworn police officers. Some of these investigators, such as private investigators, have been exposed in unethical activities such as illegal surveillance and blagging to name some. In this respect, this study aims to uncover the ethical orientations of investigators using cluster analysis.

This study is based upon an online survey of private investigators predominantly in the UK, i.e. investigators beyond the public police. An innovate statistical inferential analysis was used to investigate the sample which resulted in the development of three ethical orientations of such investigators.

Based upon a survey response from 331 of these types of investigators this study illustrates the extent they engage in unethical activities, showing a very small minority of largely private investigators who engage in such activities.

A unique feature of this study is the use of an innovative statistical approach using an unsupervised machine learning model, namely, TwoStep cluster analysis, to successfully group and classify respondents based on their ethical orientation. The model derived three types of ethical orientation: ethical, inbetweeners and risk takers.

Personal influence is one of the most powerful strategies to influence publics’ behaviours. Yet, there is scant attention on how personal influence is leveraged for different public relations purposes in different cultural contexts. This study empirically investigates the presence and use of personal influence among Italian public relations professionals.

A survey was conducted through a self-administrated, web-based questionnaire and was developed from earlier studies investigating personal influence in public relations literature. Survey participants included public relations professionals across public, non-profit and private sectors.

The findings empirically show the presence and regular use of personal influence by professionals from all sectors to cultivate interpersonal relationships. Personal influence is considered a personal resource and used to leverage own influencing power. The findings also document four major manifestations of personal influence, which were named: relational closeness strategy, engagement strategy, expertise strategy and added value strategy.

This study enhances our understanding of personal influence in a specific cultural context and offers strategic insights for international professionals seeking to leverage influence in the socio-political environment of Italy. It also offers elements to improve public relations education and training.

The study offers some preliminary understandings of how Italian professionals leverage their personal influence in their daily public relations activities contributing with empirical evidence to the body of knowledge in public relations.