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While clinical governance is assumed to be part of organisational structures and policies, implementation of clinical governance in practice (the praxis) can be markedly different. This paper draws on insights from hospital clinicians, managers and governors on how they interpret the term “clinical governance”. The influence of best-practice and roles and responsibilities on their interpretations is considered.

The research is based on 40 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with hospital clinicians, managers and governors from two large academic hospitals in Ireland. The analytical lens for the research is practice theory. Interview transcripts are analysed for practitioners' spoken keywords/terms to explore how practitioners interpret the term “clinical governance”. The practice of clinical governance is mapped to front line, management and governance roles and responsibilities.

The research finds that interpretation of clinical governance in praxis is quite different from best-practice definitions. Practitioner roles and responsibilities held influence practitioners' interpretation.

The research examines interpretations of clinical governance in praxis by clinicians, managers and governors and highlights the adverse consequence of the absence of clear mapping of roles and responsibilities to clinical, management and governance practice.

This paper aims to enlarge ongoing debate about corporate social responsibility (CSR) proposing reflections about the role of cognitive and information flows in influencing companies’ approaches and market expectations related to CSR.

The paper builds upon the research streams related to the information asymmetry and cognitive distance, for identifying through the interpretative lens provided by systems studies, possible key drivers on which policymakers, researchers and practitioners should act for building a suitable, shared and long-term oriented path for CSR.

The paper defines a scenario map about CSR in the light of information asymmetry and cognitive distance. Such a map supports both researchers and practitioners in better understanding actions and paths required for building a shared approach to CSR.

Recognizing the multidimensionality of CSR and the multiple managerial and organizational contributions provided for underling its advantages for companies, the paper focuses the attention on the elements and conditions able to promote, stimulate and encourage companies’ CSR strategies.

The paper provides a fresh conceptual framework for explaining conditions and elements required for ensuring the success of strategies for CSR. Adopting a systems view, the paper overcomes the limitations related to a reductionist view about advantages and results of CSR to call the attention on the conditions that should be met for ensuring the emergence of a shared approach to CSR.

The objective of this research is to explore integration and transition activities in large industrial projects. The purpose is to (a) obtain a better understanding of the integration and transition activities between the project front-end (FE) and project initiation phases (PIPs), (b) explore what, how and when these integrations and transitions occur, and (c) explore what the integration and transition activities mean to project practitioners.

A qualitative research design methodology is followed, based on interviews using open-ended questions. An expert panel is used to provide responses to questions pertaining to the integration and transition between the project FE and PIP. The research is focused on managing large projects in the South African electrical engineering industrial projects industry. A literature review combined with empirical analysis reflects the importance of integrating and transitioning in project business.

The findings provide guidance to researchers and practitioners on integration and transition mechanisms, how and when these occur. It highlights the benefits of integration and transition activities. Important lessons for researchers and practitioners are provided together with areas for future research.

This is an interpretative analysis of expert opinion. Expert panel members are experienced at senior decision-making level, and their expertise was accessed based on experience, education and knowledge. This extensive experience is shared in this paper providing insights into their opinions, experiences, success and failures. These inputs together with the literature review provide interesting implications for both a theoretical foundation as well as practical implications for practitioners.

This study aims to explore how human resource (HR) practitioners conceive of their practice, reveal challenges they grapple with in daily work and generate a conceptual framework of HR praxis.

The paper is based on interviews with HR practitioners in Sweden and a review of articles that examine aspects of HR practitioners' work.

The HR practitioners' work is fragmented and reactive, filled with meetings and affords few opportunities to work undisturbed. Operational tasks are prioritised over strategic work, and their work sometimes involves tasks that are not HR's responsibility. The nature of HR practitioners' daily work mimics the work of their main “customer”, i.e. managers within the organisations.

The HR practitioners were working mainly in the service of managers, which suggests that they have an internal focus. Consistent with current, prescriptive HR discourse, HR practitioners should adopt a multi-stakeholder perspective of human resource management (HRM) and a more external focus that is necessary to contribute to wider, organisational effectiveness. The findings could enrich what is taught in higher education by providing students with an account of the reality of HR practitioners' daily work.

The study provides a situated account of the daily work of HR practitioners, which is largely absent from the literature.

This article investigates the implementation of a compliance programme (CP) in terms of how practitioners conceive of and execute the responsibilities arising from this corporate governance mechanism.

This study involves a practice lens approach forms the case study analysis and interpretation, involving both interviews and documentary materials collected from an Italian company with prolonged compliance experience. Schatzki's (2002, 2010) practice organisation framework guides the interpretation of CP as a practice organised by rules, practical and general understandings and teleoaffective structures.

CP practice evolves over time. A practical understanding of daily actions required to accomplish the CP and a general understanding of the responsibilities connected with the CP, such as the attitudes with which the CP is performed, are mutually constitutive and jointly favour this evolution. Dedicated artefacts – such as IT platforms, training seminars and compliance performance indicators – help spread both of these types of understanding. These artefacts also align practitioners' general understanding with the CP's teleoaffective structures imposed, including the CP's assigned objectives and the desired reactions to them.

The findings have theoretical and practical implications by revealing the relevance of practitioners' understanding of corporate governance mechanisms in their implementation processes.

This study reveals the potential benefits of practice lens approaches in corporate governance studies. It responds to the call for qualitative studies that demonstrate corporate governance as implemented in daily activities.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the competence in use when working with interactive research, which is a continuation and elaboration of action research.

A qualitative research approach was adopted for the study. The main body of empirical material in this paper is based on two sources of data – a survey comprising open-ended questions, followed by a series of focus group interviews. The respondents were researchers with varying degrees of experience in using interactive research.

The findings provide illustrations of what characterises interactive research as work and identify an additional set of activities that go beyond traditional research activities. Some activities are relatively easy to describe, while others exist in the gaps between other activities – e.g. boundary spanning – and are harder to explicitly define in terms of implications for the involved researchers’ competence. The work activities reaching beyond the traditional research boundaries are implicit and are not a common shared practice. From a competence point of view, this implies that the competence in use for these implicit tasks of interactive research becomes individually carried. Based on these findings, a number of individual aspects of what constitutes competence in use are suggested.

In future studies, it would be valuable to use a mixed-method approach that also includes longitudinal observations of the actual work of conducting interactive research.

The findings and suggestions for how to understand the competence of interactive researchers can be used as guidance for training in research education.

This study contributes to previous research by describing important requirements and critical elements of competence in use when conducting interactive research.

This study aims to discuss science governance in Europe and the network of associated nonprofit institutions. The authors posit that this network, which comprises both (partial) learning organizations and non-learning organizations, has been observed to postpone taking up “responsibility” as an issue in science governance and funding decisions.

This paper discusses the challenge of learning and policy implementation within the European science governance system. By exploring how learning on responsible innovation (RI) in this governance system can be provoked, it addresses the question how Senge’s insights in organizational learning can clarify discourses on and practices of RI and responsibility in research. This study explores the potential of a new organizational form, that of Social Labs, to support learning on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in standing governance organizations.

This study concludes that Social Labs are a suitable format for enacting the five disciplines as identified by Senge, and a Social Lab may turn into a learning organization, be it a temporary one. Responsibility in research and innovation is conducive for learning in the setting of a Social Lab, and Social Labs act as intermediary organizations, which not merely pass on information among actors but also actively give substantive shape to what they convey from a practice-informed, normative orientation.

This empirical work on RRI-oriented Social Labs therefore suggests that Social Lab–oriented temporary, intermediary learning organizations present a promising form for implementing complex normative policies in a networked, nonhierarchical governance setting.

Based on this research funding and governance organizations in research, policy-makers in other domains may take up and create such intermediary organizations to aid learning in (science) governance.

This research suggests that RRI-oriented Social Labs present a promising form for implementing complex normative policies, thus integrate learning on and by responsible practices in various governance settings.

European science governance is characterized by a network of partial Learning Organization (LOs) and Non-Learning Organization (nLOs) who postpone decision-making on topics around “responsibility” and “solving societal challenges” or delegate authority to reviewers and individual actors, filtering possibilities for collaborative transformation toward RRI. social lab (SLs) are spaces that can address social problems or social challenges in an open, action-oriented and creative manner. As such, they may function as temporary, intermediary LOs bringing together diverse actors from a specific context to work on and learn about issues of science and society where standing organizations avoid doing so. Taken together, SLs may offer temporary organizational structures and spaces to move beyond top-down exercise of power or lack of real change to more open, deliberative and creative forms of sociopolitical coordination between multiple actors cutting across realms of state, practitioners of research and innovation and civil society. By taking the role of temporary LOs, they may support existing research and innovation organizations and research governance to become more flexible and adaptive.

This study answers the call for research and theorising exploring ethical communication and brand risk from the African continent. The study's purpose was to identify the challenges that strategic communication practitioners face in enacting ethical crisis communication in South Africa.

The researchers conducted ten in-depth interviews with South African strategic communication professionals.

The dominant theme emerging from the study is the marginalisation and exclusion of the communication function in decision-making during crisis situations. Communicators were viewed as implementers, technicians and not strategic counsel. The protection of organisational reputation was done at the expense of the ethics and moral conscience of practitioners. Practitioners were viewed and deployed as spin doctors and tools to face unwanted media interactions.

The article sheds light on the concepts of ethical communication and decision-making in a multicultural African context using the moral theory of Ubuntu and strategic communication. It demonstrates the tension professionals experience as they toggle between unethical capitalist approaches and African values. The practitioner's role as organisational moral conscience is hindered, suppressed and undermined by organisational leadership's directives to use opaque, complex communication, selective transparency and misrepresentation of facts.

The purpose of this paper is to revisit the scholarly impact agenda in the context of work-based and workplace research, and to propose new directions for research and practice.

This paper combines a contemporary literature review with case vignettes and reflections from practice to develop more nuanced understandings, and highlights future directions for making sense of impact in the context of work-based learning research approaches.

This paper argues that three dimensions to making sense of impact need to be more nuanced in relation to workplace research: interactional elements of workplace research processes have the potential for discursive pathways to impact, presence (and perhaps non-action) can act as a pathway to impact, and the narrative nature of time means that there is instability in making sense of impact over time.

The paper proposes a number of implications for practitioner-researchers, universities/research organisations, and focusses on three key areas: the amplification of research ethics in workplace research, the need for axiological shifts towards sustainability and the need to explicate axiological orientation in research.

This paper offers a contemporary review of the international impact debate in the specific context of work-based and workplace research approaches.