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This paper aims to outline a conceptual framework for the quality evaluation of web-based sustainability reports (SRs) aiding managers in determining and evaluating quality criteria for the sustainability report of their company.

The paper reviews quality criteria in existing standards and guidelines on sustainability reporting and identifies research gaps. A conceptual framework including a multi-method approach for the quality evaluation of SRs is developed and evaluated.

Existing standards and guidelines on sustainability reporting mainly focus on the content of the reports and neglect common information systems (IS) acceptance criteria such as ease of use and visual appeal. The proposed framework directly involves different stakeholder groups and research methodologies into the quality evaluation process.

The limitations of the research approach offer a number of starting points for future research. The proposed framework needs to be further evaluated by a larger number of test users in a more natural use setting.

The application of a multi-method approach as well as the direct involvement of the stakeholders allows for an in-depth quality evaluation of SRs, enabling reporting companies to meet the readers' demand for information on economic, environmental and social activities of the reporting company. Common acceptance factors from the field of IS should be integrated into existing standards and guidelines on sustainability reporting. Coaching of the users through help functions, wizards, instructional videos or avatars is desirable.

The proposed framework applies innovative technologies such as eye-tracking and software-supported attention analysis. By applying the framework to a set of sample reports, its usefulness and applicability are demonstrated.

Aims to address a gap in the literature about quality criteria for validity and reliability in qualitative research within the realism scientific paradigm. Six comprehensive and explicit criteria for judging realism research are developed, drawing on the three elements of a scientific paradigm of ontology, epistemology and methodology. The first two criteria concern ontology, that is, ontological appropriateness and contingent validity. The third criterion concerns epistemology: multiple perceptions of participants and of peer researchers. The final three criteria concern methodology: methodological trustworthiness, analytic generalisation and construct validity. Comparisons are made with criteria in other paradigms, particularly positivism and constructivism. An example of the use of the criteria is given. In conclusion, this paper’s set of six criteria will facilitate the further adoption of the realism paradigm and its evaluation in marketing research about, for instance, networks and relationship marketing.

This paper aims to assess the quality of the case study based research approach as documented in articles published during the past 13 years, based on a synthesis of indicators for the quality criteria truth‐value, transferability, and traceability.

Content analysis of 134 case study‐based articles published in six leading logistics and supply chain management (SCM) journals between 1998 and 2010 is used to assess and evaluate the quality of the case study‐based research approach as documented in these publications.

This research provides an overview of the quality of the case study‐based research approach. Results show that the quality is generally low, supporting the ongoing, but empirically unsupported criticism on the quality of case study‐based research. The results also highlight which specific aspects authors and reviewers need to address to ensure high quality of the case study‐based research approach in published articles.

This study is limited to the analysis of published articles in six logistics and SCM journals. Further research should investigate different journals in logistics and other disciplines, and the relationship between the rigor of case study based research and its contribution to the field.

The findings give guidance to authors and reviewers in developing articles with a high‐quality case study‐based research approach and help reviewers and readers to evaluate the quality of the described approach.

The paper verifies the validity of ongoing claims for more rigor in case study‐based research and identifies areas of improvement.

The desired outcome in the new product development (NPD) effort is the timely commercialization of a profitable product. Whether marketing can benefit from the NPD case study is a critical but underresearched issue. The purpose of this study is to investigate the usage and quality of NPD case studies in business and industrial marketing.

To investigate the prevalence and research quality of case studies on NPD in business and industrial marketing, 317 case studies published in mainstream journals over the past decade (2010–2020) are reviewed.

This study finds that the distribution of quantity and quality of case studies fluctuates across journals. The scores on the evaluation template for the different case study stages vary widely across journals. This indicates that different journals have different criteria and priorities for NPD case studies. By focusing on different issues, enterprises can quickly find appropriate journals and case results according to their own needs.

This paper can help spark a debate about the implementation and quality of NPD case studies, including future studies and practical applications. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no similar study has been found in existing studies.

The purpose of this paper is to articulate criteria for assessing the quality of lesson and learning studies as forms of practice-based educational action research that are grounded in the practical experience of those engaged in such research.

The paper explores the implications of Stake and Schwandt’s distinction between quality as measured and quality as experienced for assessing lesson and learning studies in higher education contexts, where “standards templates” are increasingly used to measure “quality”. Such templates it is claimed distance research from the action context of teachers’ work. Previously published work, in which the author distils criteria for good educational action research from his own narratives of experience, is then summarised as a basis for conceptualising lesson study as good action research. This poses the issue of whether the use of learning theories to inform lesson study distorts their quality by distancing them from action. The author argues that this does not apply to lesson studies that are informed by Marton and Booth’s theory of variation. In doing so he distils a set of experience-based quality criteria for assessing learning studies, and demonstrates a high degree of congruence between the pedagogical implications of variation theory and Stenhouse’s idea of “teachers as researchers”.

A set of experience-based quality criteria are distilled for assessing what counts as a high-quality learning study report.

The paper creates an alternative view of the relationship between educational research and practice to that which currently dominates academic discourse.

This study explores the everyday experiences of researchers in assessing their own and others' research, highlighting what “good” qualitative accounting research is from their perspectives.

The analysis is based on interviews with accounting scholars from the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain and Australia, with diverse ethnic background and methodological preferences.

Interviewees pointed to a plurality of practical, and to some extent tacit, ways in which they demonstrate and assess the quality of research, concerning “contribution”, “consistency” and “confidence”, with generalizability being seen as more controversial and difficult to attain. In general, interviewees highlighted the underlying ambiguity on what constitutes good research in the qualitative accounting community, contrasting it to the perceived stronger clarity to be found in the quantitative accounting community. This was seen as potentially strengthening the positions of “gatekeepers” in the accounting communities, and encouraging conformance and “signaling” behaviors, at the risk of hampering innovation.

The main critical issues affecting qualitative research quality highlighted by interviewees concern the engagement with the world of practice, and with theory and literature, the importance of accounting for the analysis of qualitative data and for the messiness of the underlying process, and the implicit search for compliance with editors' and community's expectations and conventions. These findings suggest the need to continue debating how to assess the quality of qualitative research in everyday activities, and reflect on how to promote acceptance and openness to pluralism, in scientific communities, as well as in data collection, analysis, in the theorizing, and in connecting epistemology and methodology.

An action research project is usually restricted to improving one workgroup's practices within one organisation. However, after that project is done, some academics or consultants may want to try to generalise the findings from that one particular project to several other situations. The aim of this paper is to identify the two scientific paradigms appropriate for each of these two purposes, and to identify the criteria that could be used to judge how well each purpose is achieved. Essentially, it argues that the critical theory paradigm underlies the action research project of a workgroup within one organisation, and the realism paradigm underlies the generalisation from those findings to other situations. Criteria from the two paradigms can be used to evaluate the validity and reliability of these two processes. An example of how this has been done in practice, is provided.

The existing literature expresses a strong need to develop tools that support the manufacturing reshoring decision-making process. This paper aims to examine the suitability of analytical hierarchy process (AHP)-based tools for initial screening of manufacturing reshoring decisions.

Two AHP-based tools for the initial screening of manufacturing reshoring decisions are developed. The first tool is based on traditional AHP, while the second is based on fuzzy-AHP. Six high-level and holistic reshoring criteria based on competitive priorities were identified through a literature review. Next, a panel of experts from a Swedish manufacturing company was involved in the overall comparison of the criteria. Based on this comparison, priority weights of the criteria were obtained through a pairwise analysis. Subsequently, the priority weights were used in a weighted-sum manner to evaluate 20 reshoring scenarios. Afterwards, the outputs from the traditional AHP and fuzzy-AHP tools were compared to the opinions of the experts. Finally, a sensitivity analysis was performed to evaluate the stability of the developed decision support tools.

The research demonstrates that AHP-based support tools are suitable for the initial screening of manufacturing reshoring decisions. With regard to the presented set of criteria and reshoring scenarios, both traditional AHP and fuzzy-AHP are shown to be consistent with the experts' decisions. Moreover, fuzzy-AHP is shown to be marginally more reliable than traditional AHP. According to the sensitivity analysis, the order of importance of the six criteria is stable for high values of weights of cost and quality criteria.

The limitation of the developed AHP-based tools is that they currently only include a limited number of high-level decision criteria. Therefore, future research should focus on adding low-level criteria to the tools using a multi-level architecture. The current research contributes to the body of literature on the manufacturing reshoring decision-making process by addressing decision-making issues in general and by demonstrating the suitability of two decision support tools applied to the manufacturing reshoring field in particular.

This research provides practitioners with two decision support tools for the initial screening of manufacturing reshoring decisions, which will help managers optimize their time and resources on the most promising reshoring alternatives. Given the complex nature of reshoring decisions, the results from the fuzzy-AHP are shown to be slightly closer to those of the experts than traditional AHP for initial screening of manufacturing relocation decisions.

This paper describes two decision support tools that can be applied for the initial screening of manufacturing reshoring decisions while considering six high-level and holistic criteria. Both support tools are applied to evaluate 20 identical manufacturing reshoring scenarios, allowing a comparison of their output. The sensitivity analysis demonstrates the relative importance of the reshoring criteria.

Conducting research that is both practice- and theory-relevant is important for the service research community. Action research can be a fruitful approach for service researchers studying the transformative role of service research and wanting to make contributions to both the research community and to practical development. By exploring the current use of action research in service research, this study aims to make suggestions for enhancing the contribution to theory and practice development and to propose criteria for research quality for action research in service research.

This study builds on a systematic literature review of the use of action research approaches in service research.

The study makes three main contributions. First, it posits that any action research project needs to consider the four elements of problem identification, theorization, creating guiding concepts and intervention. Second, based on these elements mirrored in service action research, it outlines and analyzes three approaches to action research (i.e. theory-enhancing, concept developing and practice-enhancing). Third, it suggests a move from instrumental to a more conceptual relevance of the research and elaborates on the criteria for research quality.

This study contributes to the understanding of how action research may be applied for conducting high-quality collaborative research in services and proposes measures to enhance research quality in action research projects focusing services.

Quality criteria of The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) have been used as a standard for organisational self‐assessment and benchmarking. The threefold purpose of this paper is: to analyse the individual weights of the MBNQA criteria for organisations of the construction and the manufacturing industry within the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries in order to create a basis for self‐assessment and benchmarking; to identify differences of criteria importance between the construction and the manufacturing industry (external alignment) in order to identify challenging areas on TQM when two organisations from the respective industries collaborate; and to compare the perspectives of project managers with those of quality management representatives (internal alignment) in order to identify challenging areas on an organisation's TQM caused by not aligned or contradicting perspectives.

Questionnaire based in‐depth interviews of GCC project managers and quality management representatives were analysed using a fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to calculate the weights and subsequent ranking of seven quality criteria.

When compared to the original weights of the MBNQA criteria, the “results” criterion was found to be ranked the same. However, clear differences were identified regarding the criteria “leadership” and “measurement/analysis”. The differences between the two analysed industries were not significant, whereas project managers and quality management representatives have clearly differing views on all seven criteria.

First, the analysed ranking of MBNQA quality criteria in the GCC countries gives organisations of the construction and the manufacturing industry a benchmark for comparison with their ranking of the MBNQA criteria. Second, clients may assume a common and hence strong basis for TQM when organisations belonging to the construction industry collaborate with organisations belonging to the manufacturing industry. Third, the organisations’ internal communication between project managers and quality management representatives needs to be improved in order to pursue common TQM goals effectively.