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The authors examine how performance measurement systems (PMSs) and academic agency influence the meaning of research quality in practice. The worries are that the notion of research quality is becoming too simplistically and narrowly determined by research quality's measurable proxies and that academics, especially manager-academics, do not sufficiently realise this risk. Whilst prior literature has covered the effects of performance measurement in the university sector broadly and how PMSs are mobilised locally, there is only little understanding of whether and how PMSs affect the meaning of research quality in practice.

The study is designed as a comparative case study of two university faculties in Finland. The role of conceptual analysis plays a notable role in the study, too.

The authors find that manager-academics of the two examined faculties have rather similar conceptual understandings of research quality. However, there were differences in the degree of slippage between the “espoused-meaning” of research quality and “meaning-in-practice” of research quality. The authors traced these differences to how the local PMS and manager-academics’ agency relate to one another within the context of increasing global and national performance pressures. The authors developed a tentative framework for the various “styles of agency”. This suggests how the relationship between the local PMS and manager-academics’ exerted agency shapes the “degrees of freedom” of the meaning of research quality in practice.

Given that research quality lies at the heart of academic work, the authors' paper indicates that exploring the three matters – performance measurement, the agency of manager-academics and the meaning of research quality in practice – in combination is crucial for the sustainability of the academe. The authors contribute to the literature by detailing the way in which local PMS and manager-academics' agency have material impacts on what research quality means in practice. The authors conclude by highlighting the pressing need for manager-academics to exercise the agency in efforts to safeguard a broad and pluralistic understanding of research quality in practice.

Neo-liberal “reform” has in many countries shifted services across the boundary between the public and private sector. This policy re-opens the question of what structural and managerial differences, if any, differences of ownership make to healthcare providers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the connections between ownership, organisational structure and managerial regime within an elaboration of Donabedian’s reasoning about organisational structures. Using new data from England, it considers: how do the internal managerial regimes of differently owned healthcare providers differ, or not? In what respects did any such differences arise from differences in ownership or for other reasons?

An observational systematic qualitative comparison of differently owned providers was the strongest feasible research design. The authors systematically compared a maximum variety (by ownership) sample of community health services; out-of-hours primary care; and hospital planned orthopaedics and ophthalmology providers (n=12 cases). The framework of comparison was the ownership theory mentioned above.

The connection between ownership (on the one hand) and organisation structures and managerial regimes (on the other) differed at different organisational levels. Top-level governance structures diverged by organisational ownership and objectives among the case-study organisations. All the case-study organisations irrespective of ownership had hierarchical, bureaucratic structures and managerial regimes for coordinating everyday service production, but to differing extents. In doctor-owned organisations, the doctors’, but not other occupations’, work was controlled and coordinated in a more-or-less democratic, self-governing ways.

This study was empirically limited to just one sector in one country, although within that sector the case-study organisations were typical of their kinds. It focussed on formal structures, omitting to varying extents other technologies of power and the differences in care processes and patient experiences within differently owned organisations.

Type of ownership does appear, overall, to make a difference to at least some important aspects of an organisation’s governance structures and managerial regime. For the broader field of health organisational research, these findings highlight the importance of the owners’ agency in explaining organisational change. The findings also call into question the practice of copying managerial techniques (and “fads”) across the public–private boundary.

Ownership does make important differences to healthcare providers’ top-level governance structures and accountabilities and to work coordination activity, but with different patterns at different organisational levels. These findings have implications for understanding the legitimacy, governance and accountability of healthcare organisations, the distribution and use power within them, and system-wide policy interventions, for instance to improve care coordination and for the correspondingly required foci of healthcare organisational research.

This paper strives to understand the role of resource orchestration (RO) in the rapid growth of high-tech small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Based on a comparative case study, RO is compared between a high-tech family firm and a high-tech non-family firm. To capture the complexity of RO, this study applies a longitudinal approach using a large volume of archival and interview data gathered over ten years.

The configuration of family-firm paradoxical growth-oriented RO emphasizes RO based on collectivism and responsibility, although relying on large-scale conforming normative control. In contrast, the configuration of non-family-firm growth-oriented RO emphasizes administrative-based delegation and management-supported value creation.

By suggesting ownership-based RO configurations, this study provides insights into how ownership types, i.e. family firms and non-family firms, affect RO in firms operating in complex and dynamic environments. These configurations explain how and why RO is arranged in a growth context.

As the global presence of Chinese firms grows, increasing numbers of Chinese managers are working abroad as expatriates. However, little attention has been paid to such Chinese expatriate managers and their leadership challenges in an inter-cultural context, especially across a large cultural distance. To fill the gap in the literature concerning the leadership challenges for expatriate managers in an inter-cultural context, the purpose of this paper is to elucidate the leadership styles of Chinese expatriate managers from the perspectives of three traditional Chinese philosophies (i.e. Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism) in the inter-cultural context of the Netherlands.

The data for this qualitative study were collected via semi-structured, open-ended, narrative interviews with 30 Chinese expatriate managers in the Netherlands.

The results clearly show that the leadership style of Chinese expatriate managers is deeply rooted in the three traditional Chinese philosophies of Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism, even in an inter-cultural context. Specifically, the study reveals two salient aspects of how Chinese expatriate managers frame and interact with a foreign cultural context from the perspectives of traditional Chinese philosophies. First, the Chinese expatriate managers reported an initial cultural shock related to frictions between the foreign cultural context and Confucianism or Taoism, but less so in the case of Legalism. Second, the Chinese expatriate managers also reported that their interactions with the Dutch culture are best described as a balance between partial conflict and partial complementarity (thus, a duality). In this sense, the leadership style of Chinese expatriate managers is influenced jointly by the three traditional Chinese philosophies and certain elements of the foreign cultural context. This is consistent with the Chinese perspective of yin-yang balancing.

This study is among the first to offer a more nuanced and highly contextualized understanding of leadership in the unique case of expatriate managers from an emerging market (e.g. China) in an advanced economy (e.g. the Netherlands). The authors call for more research to apply the unique perspective of yin-yang balancing in an inter-cultural context. The authors posit that this approach represents the most salient implication of this study. For practical implications, the authors argue that expatriate leaders should carefully manage the interplay between their deep-rooted home-country philosophies and their salient host-country culture. Reflecting on traditional philosophies in another culture can facilitate inter-cultural leadership training for Chinese expatriates.

The purpose of this study is to review the extant literature on chatbots and stakeholder interactions to identify major trends and shed light on knowledge gaps.

A systematic literature review was conducted combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. A code book based on early systematic literature reviews was developed and used to extract information from 62 discrete peer-reviewed English articles. An inductive approach was used to analyse definitions of chatbots, topics, metrics, perspectives and implications.

Chatbots have been studied by many different disciplines, but not much from organizational, stakeholder and corporate communication perspectives. Existing studies focus on the technical developments of chatbots and chatbot language and conversations skills. Research has remained anchored at the micro-level understanding of the phenomenon, that is, the nature of chatbots, but has not yet taken into consideration the meso (organizational) or macro (societal) levels.

This study focused only on academic peer-reviewed papers in English and excluded conference proceeding, books, book chapters and editorials that may have offered other important and relevant reflections. The limited number of studies in communication-related disciplines shows that corporate communication scholars could contribute more to the discussion of chatbot–stakeholder interactions.

This is the first research in the field of corporate communication that examines organizational chatbot–stakeholder interactions. Results of this review offer important information on chatbots' organizational capabilities and affordances, which, arguably, must be taken into consideration when stakeholder engagement strategies are set.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of two micro trends on the future marketing functions of national tourism organisations (NTOs): the increasing power of individuals and the irreverence of NTO’s current marketing functions.

Through a discussion of the literature driving the two identified micro-trends, a number of supportive sub-micro trends were also identified and explored.

The paper concludes that NTO’s have failed to recognise the growing distrust of monolithic organisations. NTO’s seem to be more concerned about their own survival, rather than providing a service to both their citizens and tourists. Also NTO’s have failed to acknowledge that tourists are much more confident in making their own decisions, based on marketing information from their own trusted “closed friendship groups”, rather than relying on NTO’s.

The paper is based on a discussion of issues from only two micro-trends, but tourist decision-making processes may be more complex than suggested.

The paper concludes that in the near future there will be an increasing rejection of NTO’s marketing information, and in the longer term this may result in the demise of NTO’s. However, if NTO’s are to survive, it suggests two actions they could take to ensure their future relevance to both its citizens and tourists.

Questioning whether national/state organisations always act in the best interests of its citizens, challenges the trust in NTO’s. The paper suggests that NTO’s recognise that their power relationships are more strongly linked to ideals of nationhood and endorsement by their international peers, rather than providing services to tourists.

This paper questions the implicate assumption that NTO’s should be a trusted source of marketing information. It suggests that NTO’s have failed to recognise the changing methods tourist use to help in their decision making.

This study aims to investigate how sustainability has been incorporated – or mainstreamed - in a school at one university through techniques of responsibilization and accountabilization.

Inspired by the extended case study methodology, the authors participated, observed and analyzed two audit-inspired processes, whose aims included ensuring that sustainability was integrated into the educational process.

By following two audit-inspired processes, the authors show how teachers were asked to respond to open-ended survey questions and by doing so emerged as responsibilized subjects. Although the teachers were given lots of space to interpret the concept of sustainability and show how it was translated into the programs and courses offered, the teachers were made accountable as established organizational hierarchies were reproduced when responsibilization was formalized through techniques of accountabilization.

The analysis moves beyond the instrumental epistemologies characterizing much of the positivist-oriented research in higher education. As with all studies, the authors study also has methodological limitations, such as involving a single higher education institution. There is a general need for more empirical research in this area in order to build theory and to understand whether the concepts of responsibilization and accountabilization can also be applied in other higher education contexts.

The study shows that higher education administrators engage in processes of responsibilization and accountabilization through formalized processes of interpellation, as documents and self-assessment exercises tie teachers to organizational contexts.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that introduces the concepts of responsibilization and accountabilization as social relationships in higher education governance.

More complexity, less freedom, distrust and a lack of information seem to pose threats to the success of partner relationships in accounting firms, as approximately 70% of business partnerships fail globally, undermining SDG 17. The low competitive intensity in this industry seems not to help the current situation. Yet, the existing strategic alliance (SA) literature have been somewhat sluggish in adequately addressing how partnership attributes (PAs) affect partnership success (PS) and how brand competition (BC) impacts this relationship. In response, this conceptual work addresses the impact of PAs on PS in accounting firms. It further explores the BC conditions under which the PAs–PS connection may be intensified.

Incorporating theories and empirics on six distinct topics, this study presents a conceptual model and ten hypotheses that are worth testing in future research.

This research finds that PAs will be favourably linked to PS, and this favourable association will be positively moderated by BC such that the PAs–PS connection will be more pronounced if BC within the accounting industry is high than low.

Further research is needed to empirically test the suppositions made. Also, they could extend the proposed framework to cover other moderators like technological turbulence, market dynamism and government regulation.

Practical lessons for governments, shareholders, chief executive officers, consultants and other industry players, particularly those who are interested in the success of accounting partnership firms, are deliberated.

This study demonstrates how PAs and BC interact to foster PS. It also provides a baseline information for upcoming researchers to investigate other external factors under which the PAs–PS connection may be improved.

The sale of NFTs and the interest in them has “exploded” recently. While there is a lot of information on them, it is not clear what final form they will take. There are several reasons to be uneasy, such as the prevalence of scams, but there are also reasons for optimism and confidence in NFTs. First, they solve the problem of how to own digital assets. Additionally, some of the more reliable and proven cryptoasset exchanges are offering them. However, this innovation will have difficulties reaching a wider audience until more clarity is achieved on two main issues. Therefore, this study aims to clarify what the NFT business models are, and how do they build trust.

This research attempts to identify the NFT business models with case study analysis in three stages. The first stage is a focus group, followed by 16 short case vignettes and finally four longer case studies.

The findings show that there are four NFT business models: (1) NFT creator; (2) NFT marketplace, selling creators’ NFTs; (3) company offering their own NFT (fan token) and (4) computer game with NFT sales.

This research brings the literature on business models and NFTs together to offer clarity on the proven NFT business models.

For non-profit organizations (NPOs) external funding is an essential resource. Studies highlight how control is attributed to funders and so external funding threatens the autonomy of the recipient organization. The purpose of this study is to investigate how external control can be structured and exercised, and to explore how control interacts with organizational autonomy.

The research is based on interviews and participant observations with NPOs and their funders over a period of time. It reports from four different funding-relations: contract-based, social investment, gift-funded and civil society–public partnership. The concept of organizational discretion is used to analyse how control and autonomy are interconnected in these relationship.

The analysis illustrates the value in exposing the different discretionary boundaries related to external control and how control can become a sparring partner in the organization's striving for autonomy. A concluding argument is that control and autonomy are each other's companions rather than antagonists. The study leads us to question a general assumption that NPOs strive to avoid resource dependence and external control but instead may use such control to develop strategies for independence and self-realization.

The empirical material is unique as it includes voices of recipient organizations and funders, and offers a comparison of different controlling-relations. The study presents an innovative analytical framework based on the concepts of discretionary space and reasoning, which supports a critical discussion regarding the idea of external control as detrimental to the autonomy of NPOs.