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This conceptual article aims to contribute to the design of a theory of family-influenced firms by a framework for the management of business-family dilemmas.

It combines systemic principles with the tetralemma, a tool from ancient Indian logic that families and businesses can use to manage and reframe dilemmas without dissolving the dilemmatic tensions or blurring their boundaries.

In applying the tetralemma, the article offers a range of suggestions, such as observing business and family as two discrete, yet codependent, social systems and envisioning conceptual and methodological imports from codependency research and therapy into family business research and practice.

The article proposes a framework for the selective and flexible navigation of family-business tensions without dissolving them or blurring their boundaries.

Companies’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities tend to be regarded with suspicion: Taking managerial decision about engaging in CSR or communicating, this decision does not constitute the actual execution of this decision itself. A gulf can exist between deciding, speaking and doing. In fact, this gap between speaking and doing has longed fuelled the discussion about the risks, benefits and pitfalls of CSR, mainly for one reason: It remains unknown what happens to CSR concepts when they are transformed from formal decisions at the top of the hierarchy to concrete action in the rest of the organization. This paper explores this internal transformation process by combining the macro- and micro-levels of observation.

From a macro-perspective, the authors use Nils Brunsson’s notion of organizational hypocrisy to elucidate the societal conditions of the intraorganizational enforcement of CSR. Second, the authors combine this framework with Karl Weick’s organizational sensemaking approach to understand better how employee generate meaning and actions from contradictory expectations on the micro-level of the organization. By combining these two streams of theory, the authors provide a clear understanding of the internal sensemaking mechanisms brought about by contradicting societal norms. This approach and its usefulness is illustrated by means of an empirical case study.

The paper illustrates the characteristics of the unavoidable difference between organizational talk and action, the contradictions employees face on the shop floor when executing CSR and the challenges CSR execution has to overcome.

Given the combination of theoretical and empirical reflection, the paper remains explorative.

The moral dilemmas of employees become much clearer, as much as the organizational hypocrisy which CSR drives companies into. That can help managers to better deal with employees’ and the public’s reaction to own CSR efforts.

Combining Nils Brunsson (hypocrisy) with Karl Weick (sensemaking) in the context of CSR has not been undertaken. Accordingly, the insights are unique.

The purpose of this paper is to explore, how organization theoretically diverse research on OCR is actually grounded, since insights into the organization theoretical foundations of OCR are completely lacking.

A selection of 85 articles on organizational change was made, published in top tier journals in 2010. The authors conducted a reference analysis based on 18 prominent organization theories and their main contributing authors.

The findings show firstly a very strong theoretical selectivity, focusing on cognitive, learning, and neo-institutional theories. Other theories are almost fully neglected. Secondly, this analysis suggests that current OCR struggles hard with transforming the cognitive frames of topical OT into fruitful accesses to the own object. The resulting theory application appears as a dissatisfying escape strategy, performed to cover theoretical antagonisms and to avoid a deeper confrontation with the underlying assumptions of OCR.

The authors are fully aware that the depth of their analysis is worth broadening. A more comparable scope in the amount of the theories, journals, articles, and of the covered time span would help to substantiate their results.

Pragmatic change approaches rely strongly on organizational change research. If OCR itself is not topical in terms of using available theoretical knowledge, pragmatic approaches fail to stand on solid ground. The paper therefore provides a background for the link between failing empirical change projects and the usage of available scientific knowledge.

An analysis of the organization theoretical topicality of organizational change research is completely missing. The paper therefore not only contributes to the discovery of a blind spot in organizational studies, it possibly helps to explore the reasons for the high percentage of failing change projects.

Exploding expenditure in health care has led to new reimbursement regulations forcing health care providers to conduct their organisations as business concerns. In order to be competitive providers have started to build networks that allow the delivery of interrelated health services in a well‐adjusted and uniform manner. However, besides strategic agreement, successful networking requires the support of information systems for efficient cooperation and process management in order to deliver efficient day to day service. With serviceflow management we provide a general concept that answers these needs. Based on modelling process patterns and the exchange of XML‐representations of process knowledge and data between service providers, serviceflow management supports organisations in jointly delivering services that cross provider boundaries. Furthermore, it enables flexible handling of processes, which is indispensable in health care. Based on a health care example, we explore the possibilities of serviceflow management and present a Web‐based prototype on the basis of our generic, four‐layered architecture.

Aims to show that workflow management needs to rethink its basis of discussion in order to meet today's challenges and to provide adequate IT support for heterogeneous workflow networks.

First, the need for flexibility in relating resources in workflow management is examined in more detail. Second, some approaches to managing workflows in heterogeneous networks are inspected and it is found that all of these improve flexibility on the basis of contracting services. Third, it is elaborated how processing by contract supports decentralized resource management through dynamically interrelating social and technical services driven by a cycle (“wheel”) of execution and monitoring, evaluation and demand, as well as selecting and contracting.

Conclusions are drawn for systems architecture and implementation to guide the design of internet‐enabled workflow support.

Important questions for the research agenda are: how can one enrich application‐oriented workflow modelling languages in order to describe processes as consisting of heterogeneous services? How should one design and implement workflow engines which enable the turning of the “wheel” with the support of integrating human activities and technical agency as workflow process services?

The idea of processing by contract may lead to new workflow concepts and technology to meet the challenges of an internet economy based on the “pay as you go” principle.

Whereas the workflow paradigm of the past may be phrased as processing by definition, i.e. process execution according to predefined process patterns and resource relations, the idea of processing by contract is suggested, i.e. a mode of process execution driven by recurrent process evaluation and service contracting.

The JAOC has reached an important milestone. It is now 15 years old! This study aims to provide an understanding of the key achievements of the Journal.

This paper reports the findings of a bibliometric analysis of the Journal.

The Journal has made significant contributions towards understanding the various purposes or roles of accounting and the context within which it operates in diverse societies. Case studies in the Third Sector and in countries that tend to be unrepresented in many other journals, such as Laos and Vietnam, represent some of the critical contributions of papers published in the JAOC.

This paper provides a review of the Journal. Key achievements are noted along with trends in the usage of theories and topics. Gaps between the aims of the Journal and what it has achieved are also outlined.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of a firm’s service-dominant orientation on marketing and technological capabilities, and its performance. It outlines how a service-dominant orientation offers guidance for the development and deployment of ordinary capabilities, and indirectly affects performance. Additionally, it delineates how dynamic capabilities affect the impact of a service-dominant orientation on ordinary capabilities.

Partial least squares structural equation modeling drawing on data from 228 firms serves to assess hypotheses relating service-dominant orientation and dynamic capabilities with firm performance.

The results indicate that marketing and technological capabilities fully mediate the relationship between a firm’s service-dominant orientation and firm performance. Furthermore, the positive marginal effect of a firm’s service-dominant orientation on its marketing capabilities increases with the firm displaying a stronger service-dominant orientation. In addition, the positive effect of service-dominant orientation on marketing capabilities reduces the more the firm deploys dynamic capabilities.

Because of the cross-sectional sample, future studies could adopt longitudinal research designs to explore the impact of a service-dominant orientation on ordinary capabilities and performance, or investigate the applicability of the findings in other contexts.

The findings imply that implementing a service-dominant orientation can be beneficial for firms. However, because the impact of such an orientation weakens the greater a firm’s dynamic capabilities, managers need to be mindful of this trade-off.

The study is the first to establish a link between the dynamic capability view, originating from strategy research, and service-dominant logic, stemming from marketing thinking.