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For professional service firms (PSFs) the partnership form of governance is the most effective means of reconciling the potentially competing claims of three sets of stakeholders: shareholders, professionals, and clients. Increasingly, PSFs are abandoning this traditional form of governance in favour of incorporation and flotation. Very little is known about the implications of this trend. We examine an alliance between a partnership and a corporation and analyse the systems and structures that professionals in both firms deploy in their efforts to preserve and sustain the interpretive scheme of professionalism and partnership. We emphasise the need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between governance as a legal form and governance as an interpretive scheme.

The purpose of the paper is to provide a personal, reflexive examination of the negotiation of the professional identity of governance services personnel as a specific role set in professional services in higher education (HE).

A reflexive framework is adopted, drawing on the author's own professional positioning and practice in a UK higher education institution (HEI). Drawing on, and challenging aspects of Whitchurch's typology of professional identities in HE, a “weak” social constructivist approach is adopted, through examination of the author's inter‐professional interfaces with the external members populating institutional governance structures. This epistemological approach resonates with an exploration in the paper of the author's interventions as secretary to the institution's audit committee, in production of documentation as a form of corporate knowledge‐creation and narrative production in a wider scheme of accountability.

The paper proposes that in contrast to Whitchurch's notion of “bounded” professionalism, the HE governance professional, in migrating to and from governance “space”, constitutes a mode of boundary‐crossing unexamined in the literature and policy.

While adopting a self‐reflexive stance, the paper provides a basis for undertaking empirical research into professional identity configurations in the corporate governance of HEIs, grounded in the experience of the actors populating governance structures, including professional services staff, ex officio, elected and external members of HE governing bodies.

The paper contributes to an emerging literature on professional identities in HE, and to qualitative approaches to HE governance.

In 2017, the Chinese Super League (CSL), the first professional football division in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), became the highest-spending league in the international players’ transfer market, with a total spending of €377m. Moreover, the government of the PRC is backing the CSL with an ambitious football plan. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the governance of the CSL by questioning the organisational viability of the league.

In addition to the relevant international literature, this study is based on 14 recent scholarly articles published in Mandarin from 2013 to 2018 to reflect the national academic debate. Moreover, website research on all CSL clubs has been conducted. The institutional analysis follows the integrative change model of Cunningham (2002) complemented by agency and bureaucracy theory.

The CSL still faces substantial governance problems caused by the divergence of goal setting, organisational inefficiencies and compliance issues. The organisational change is notably constrained by internal competitive value commitments and external power dependency.

The institutional findings on the CSL provide a starting point for empirical studies. The approach contributes to the theory of sport governance processes.

The material and insights are informative for decision makers to evaluate the competitiveness of the CSL.

This paper is the first international in-depth analysis of the governance of the CSL using the body of knowledge published in Mandarin.

The study discusses the professionalization of academic leadership in Israel by analyzing and comparing two different training programs: the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s (HUJI) program and the CHE-Rothschild program. The HUJI program began in 2016 to train the professoriate to take charge of leadership positions alongside a separate program for administrative staff, while the CHE-Rothschild program was launched in 2019 to train academic leaders, both professors and administrators from universities and colleges nationwide. The analysis reveals two “ideal types” of collegiality: While Model A (exemplified by the HUJI program) bifurcates between the professoriate and administrative staff, Model B (exemplified by the CHE-Rothschild program) binds administrative and academic staff members through course composition, pedagogy, and content. The study suggests a pattern of redefinition of collegiality in academia: we find that while academic hierarchies are maintained (between academic faculty and administrative staff and between universities and colleges), collegiality in academia is being redefined as extending beyond the boundaries of the professoriate and emphasizing a partnership approach to collegial ties.

This chapter offers an anthropological commentary on the work of the Academy of Social Sciences’ Research Ethics Group and the process through which five generic ethical principles for social science research was created. I take an anthropological approach to the subject and, following the structure of Macdonald’s essay Making Research Ethics (2010), I position myself in relation to the process. I discuss various features of the REGs work including the enduring influence of medicine and biomedical research ethics on the ethics and ethics governance of social science research; the absence of philosophers and applied ethicists and their incompatibility with the kind of endeavour pursued by the Research Ethics group; and the antipathy many felt towards the creation of a common code resulting in a preference for generic principles. This chapter offers insight into the work of the Research Ethics Group and the creation of the five ethical principles for social science research, subsequently adopted by the Academy of Social Sciences.

This qualitative study examined the views of clinical governance leads in South West England on the development of clinical governance, and its relationship to education in primary care. Information was obtained from semi‐structured interviews with clinical governance leads, and supplementary methods were used to confirm key findings. Four principal themes emerged: education, support, barriers, and evolution. Education is central to achieving the clinical governance agenda. There is a range of educational needs within primary care and these must be integrated into practice professional development plans, which will be shaped by national and local priorities. A need for PCG clinical governance tutors to support this process emerged. A range of supporting mechanisms was identified, as were barriers: principally inadequate resources and a rigid agenda imposed from above. Existing educationalists will need to change their role within the new structures, and this should be an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary process.

In this chapter, we address the operationalization of the enterprise risk management (ERM) system in Italy. We first present some Italian economic highlights emphasizing the uncertainty characterizing the domestic development, and we focus on the recent changes in domestic regulation which are related to the concept of risk. Then, we examine the degree of knowledge of ERM in the academic arena and the role of professional bodies in this field, focusing on if and how ERM principles are embedded within organizations and effectively integrated into their practices. On the basis of the evidence from questionnaires collected from risk professionals working in prominent Italian firms, who are involved in different ways in the ERM process, we provide some concluding considerations about the degree of integration of ERM practices with governance mechanisms, accounting practices and disclosure in annual reports.

The purpose of this study is to describe council structure, its benefits, supportive and obstructive factors and developmental needs as a part of shared governance in a university hospital.

This is a descriptive study, where semi-structured interviews with 12 nurses was conducted in 2014 and documents from 75 council meetings from 2009 to 2014 were gathered and analyzed. Qualitative content analysis method was used on the data.

The study hospital has been developing nursing shared governance with unique structure and processes of councils. Professors and university researchers act as chair and members are voluntary nursing staff. The factors supporting the councils are nurse managers’ support, enthusiastic personnel and neighboring university. The factors obstructing the councils are lack of time, understanding and skills. The work of the councils benefits the organization by improving patient care, harmonizing nursing practices and informing decision-making. The council’s developmental needs were more visibility, concentration into everyday problems and interprofessionality.

Applying nursing shared governance structures into an organization improves the professional practice environment of nursing personnel.

The study hospital has its own, unique council structure. It did not cover the whole hospital or all of the nursing personnel, but it is already producing promising results. It should be given an official status and more support from nurse managers, and it should be developed into an inter-professional discussion. The results presented here indicate that shared governance, even, in its early stage, contributes positively to the quality of care, harmonizes nursing practices and informs decision-making. Applying shared governance structures into an organization improves the professional practice environment of nursing personnel. The study showed concrete supporting and obstructing factors that should be notified in nursing leadership.

Despite the extensive empirical studies on nursing shared governance, there is very little research on councils in the Scandinavian countries.

The web offers a large and ever expanding range of information sources on the popular and widely researched topic of corporate governance. This paper aims to introduce keys sites of quality and relevance to those interested in researching the field of corporate governance using freely available web resources. It will also aims to prove useful to librarians who wish to develop web‐based subject pathfinders in this field or who want simply to connect with and build their knowledge of major topics and participants in the field of corporate governance.

By way of introduction important or groundbreaking works in the corporate governance literature are identified and cited in the paper to place selected web sites within the context of recent and historic developments in the area of corporate governance. A wide range of web‐based sources were consulted and critically evaluated in the study.

The result of this work is a significant sampling of quality web‐based information sources with evaluative annotations.

Given the recent explosion in information resources available on the topic of corporate governance, this paper will prove especially timely and useful to anyone interested in accessing and interacting with quality information on the free web from a wide range of significant players and stakeholders in the corporate governance arena.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the shifting nature of governance reforms, both at global and national levels, in the increasingly commercialised game of cricket. The authors explore the inter-relationship and linkages between governance and commercialism, and in the process, question the contemporary reliance placed on governance as a generic counter-commercialist force and accountability aid.

The analysis is based on a comprehensive analysis of cricketing archives, newspapers and online media. The authors specifically utilise a range of review reports, governance and accounting information from annual reports and websites of the International Cricket Council (ICC) as well as different national cricket governing bodies (NCBs).

The paper vividly demonstrates the importance of recognising the specific significance of different cultural traditions and modes of organising – and not presuming a particular form of impact. The findings highlight that the adoption of a dominant market logic by cricket administrators has resulted in a shift in the balance of power in favour of non-western nations. India has emerged as the clear leader and driving force shaping the way cricket is globally governed. The consequences have been profound but not in terms of delivering, enhanced standards of transparency and accountability. Drawing on institutional theory, the paper argues that the scale of the Board of Cricket Control of India’s financial and operational control over the ICC has not only led to an increasingly commercialised game but engendered divergent and highly questionable standards of governance at the level of NCBs.

Unlike other global games, cricket has an imperialistic root, and has gone through the process of globalisation in relatively recent times. Also, the commercialisation of cricket has resulted in the global economic and power base shifting from the West to the East, giving us the opportunity to study the dynamics between commercialisation and governance in a quite different globalisation context that allows an assessment to be made of the culturally contingent nature of governance as a substantive organising force.