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Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) carry huge economic importance worldwide. At the same time, SMEs face specific challenges, some of which may be alleviated by employing accountants. However, research on the role and impact of accountants in SMEs has long remained fragmented and scarce. This paper aims to encourage more research on accountants in SMEs by providing the first comprehensive and systematic review of relevant research.

Based on systematic review methods, the authors critically examine 68 research articles dealing with accountants in SMEs.

The review identifies three dominant roles for accountants in SMEs: providers of reporting services, sources of SME owners’ self-validation and translators between capital providers and SMEs and advisors. Implicitly, many studies assume a value-enhancing effect of employing accountants in SMEs regardless of these specific roles. At the same time, available studies seldom make use of existing theoretical frameworks to more closely analyze the value-enhancing potential of human resources such as accountants. The authors, thus, propose the resource-based view as a robust theoretical framework to improve theory building in research on accountants in SMEs.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first systematic review of accountants in SMEs. In addition, the authors develop a resource-based model on accountants in SMEs to guide future research on this topic.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the motivations behind teleworkers’ role transitions in a coworking office and how these motivations shape role communication between independent workers in a shared office.

This paper draws upon observation, in-depth interviews (n=23) and temporary membership in the organization.

Self-enhancement and self-validation motivations work in concert to prompt individuals to capitalize on the networking opportunities that come with membership in this office and individuals strategically position an occupation-framed version of their identity in these networks.

Only one coworking office was studied. However, this is countered by the richness of the data.

Communication managers whose organizations employ teleworkers are encouraged to provide ongoing social and task-related support to their teleworkers; coworking site proprietors are encouraged to ensure members understand what is expected of them when they join a coworking office.

As teleworking is a widely-used flexible work arrangement, this study advances knowledge of teleworker management.

Scholars have not yet explored how individuals use coworking spaces and what motivates teleworkers to establish their role identities in mixed offices.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential for personal and community transformation through storytelling within a therapeutic community (TC) through the analysis of one narrative case study.

The paper uses a narrative research design to describe and theorise the individual narrative of a TC client member, “Emily”, who self-identified areas of therapeutic change. Emily’s story is a single case of personal and community transformation. Analysis focussed on story of her weight loss to understand her changing role to herself and the community.

Emily’s story reveals the social complexities underpinning individual transformations within a community context. This complexity is particularly evident as Emily experienced visible weight loss but identified that the meaningful change is her changed relationship with herself and others. Using theories on symbolic interactionism, analysis of Emily’s narrative indicates the TC played a role in facilitating personal change and that through sharing her story with the wider TC, the community shifted its perspective on food and weight loss.

The paper expands the discussion on how storytelling practices within a TC contribute to therapeutic change. It is argued that community relationships play a key role in facilitating a changed relationship with self and others, and that stories themselves play an active role in shaping community meanings.

To facilitate innovative software development, more and more software development teams (SDTs) turn to agile methods. Such agile methods develop both extensive and efficient software responses to a client’s requirement change. However, the antecedents of successful agile software development are poorly understood. The authors goal is to propose a model of how power asymmetry and paradoxical leadership interact and affect agility in SDTs, which in turn affect their capacity to innovate. By leveraging insights from research on individuals’ cognition, the authors argue that developers with relatively higher power evaluate their contributions to their teams more ambivalently, which increases their delay or postponement of their contributions to their teams’ tasks. As a result, power asymmetry is negatively related to software teams’ response extensiveness and efficiency. Second, and drawing on leadership studies on behavioral complexity, the authors consider the moderating role of paradoxical leadership that a team receives as an important moderating factor to this effect. The authors argue that, when team leaders exhibit paradoxical leadership behaviors, high-power individuals’ ambivalence is less likely to emerge; hence, transforming power asymmetry to an asset for the enhancement of agility in the SDT.

Social media has transformed communication possibilities for immigrant consumers with their home country in their acculturation efforts. However, the acculturative outcomes of consumer interactions with the home country through social media are largely overlooked in previous research. This study aims to investigate the acculturative processes and outcomes resulting from interacting with the home country through social media.

A netnographic approach is used to collect data from a social media platform that provides an interactive social context in which Iranian immigrants in Australia share their experiences of immigration with non-immigrants who are considering and planning to migrate to Australia.

Findings show how both immigrants and non-immigrant users via social media reflexively contribute to the formation of two competing collective narratives, namely, the dominant, romanticizing narrative and counter, pragmatic narratives. Findings highlight how notions of the home and host countries, and the idea of migrating from home to host, are constructed as the result of the circulation of the dominant and counter narratives. Further findings include how these two collective narratives come into play in the formation of three acculturative outcomes, namely, self-validating, ordinary experts and wellbeing. These insights extend consumer acculturation theory through highlighting the acculturative processes and outcomes of interactions with the home country via a social media platform. This includes, for example, how interacting with the home culture can take on assimilationist properties through the construction of a romanticized representation of the hosting society (i.e. Australia) in the dominant collective narrative.

Implications for ethnic marketing practice, policymakers and non-governmental organisations are advanced, especially regarding using social media as a channel to communicate with current and potential immigrant consumers. Notably, policymakers can use social media to engage with immigrants before and after migration to reduce the potential for cognitive dissonance in recent arrivals. Managerially, brands can advertise on Web-based forums, independent websites and social media platforms to target potential immigrants to sell relevant products immigrants needs after migrating to the host country.

Findings broaden the understanding of the potential acculturative outcomes on social media by moving away from the traditional outcomes, which are restricted to the dichotomy between the home and host cultures.

Scholarly attention is deficient on the role of direct interaction with the home country in immigrant consumer acculturation, especially through social media, which is the focus of this study.

Sensor arrays and pattern recognition-based electronic nose (E-nose) is a typical detection and recognition instrument for indoor air quality (IAQ). The E-nose is able to monitor several pollutants in the air by mimicking the human olfactory system. Formaldehyde concentration prediction is one of the major functionalities of the E-nose, and three typical machine learning (ML) algorithms are most frequently used, including back propagation (BP) neural network, radial basis function (RBF) neural network and support vector regression (SVR).

This paper comparatively evaluates and analyzes those three ML algorithms under controllable environment, which is built on a marketable sensor arrays E-nose platform. Variable temperature (T), relative humidity (RH) and pollutant concentrations (C) conditions were measured during experiments to support the investigation.

Regression models have been built using the above-mentioned three typical algorithms, and in-depth analysis demonstrates that the model of the BP neural network results in a better prediction performance than others.

Finally, the empirical results prove that ML algorithms, combined with low-cost sensors, can make high-precision contaminant concentration detection indoor.

This study aims to examine how post-PhD researchers construct their identities through significant work experiences as they endeavour to develop their research independence and a distinct scholarly profile. The authors were especially interested in how they made meaning of their important work experiences, the ones that were emotionally salient.

Using a narrative approach, the analysis was conducted on a data subset from a large cross-national mixed-methods research project about early-career researchers’ identity development. The sample included 71 post-PhD researchers from the UK who completed an online survey. Ten of whom were also interviewed through a semi-structured protocol.

Post-PhD researchers considered work experiences to be significant when those experiences helped them to gauge whether their self-representation as researchers was coherent and a further research career was practicable. The same type of significant event (e.g. publishing in a prestigious journal) could hold different meanings depending on who experienced it. Positive experiences helped to maintain their motivation and made them feel that they were consolidating their identities. Negative experiences tended to challenge their sense of identity and their sense of belonging to academia. Whereas positive feelings towards a significant experience appeared to persist over time, negative feelings seemed to fade or evolve through self-reflection, but ultimately had greater saliency.

Few previous studies have been conducted on how emotionally powerful work experiences influence post-PhD researchers’ identity development. Besides highlighting how emotions and feelings, often-neglected aspects of identity development, influence the process, this study offers a constructive – and, in some ways, alternative – view of the impact that negative experiences have on their identity development.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how contemporary artists construct and position their “person brands” and reflects on the extent to which artist brand building results from strategic brand management.

A conceptual framework proposes a spatial perspective on artist brand building to reach an analytical insight into the case of visual artists in London. The empirical analysis is qualitative, based on serial and in-depth interviews, complemented by participant observations.

Artist brand building relies on the creation and continuous redefinition of “in-between spaces” that exist at the blurred boundaries separating an individual and isolated art studio, and the social and visible art scene. Artist brand building is a bundle of mechanisms that, mainly occurring without strategic thinking, are “nested” within the art production process throughout which learning, producing and performing are heavily intertwined.

This study was undertaken with a focus on visual artists and specific operations and spatialities of their individual art projects. Further empirical research is required in order to fully explore the manifold of practices and spatialities that constitute contemporary artistic practice.

This study fosters artists’ awareness of branding effects that spillover from artistic production, and thus potentially opens the way to a more strategic capitalization on these.

The adopted spatial perspective on the process of artist brand building helps to uncover “relatively visible” and “relatively invisible” spatialities that, usually overlooked in branding debate, play a significant role in artist brand building.

This research seeks to review extant organisational role theory (ORT) literature, and to identify issues that limit its usefulness to contemporary academics and practitioners alike.

A review of ORT literature was conducted in light of the issues surrounding the effective implementation of HR policies in the workplace. The paper was based on a review of the intersection between ORT and contemporary HR management, and explored using primary survey and semi‐structured interview data.

It was found that three assumptions underpinning classical ORT are inadequate to account for the array of roles enacted by employees and the manner in which they impact on working‐life. The research suggests that ORT needs to incorporate the key themes of “multi‐faceted employee”, “employer recognition/facilitation” and “compartmentalisation” into its assumptions in order to account for contemporary HRM issues.

This research is only exploratory in nature, and thus requires its findings to be verified in larger sample sizes, and amongst respondents from different cultures and industry categories.

This research has practical implications for HR managers wishing to employ effective role‐taking/WLB policies in their workplace. Current WLB issues are well established in the literature, and the reconceptualisation of ORT provides some insight into what might constitute the tenets of an effective WLB policy regime.

This paper provides an exploration of the contemporary HRM issues that need to be included in a reconceptualisation of ORT. This research would be of value to both academics (reconceptualising classical ORT) and practitioners (who would observe specific implications for the formulation of effective HR policies in the workplace).

There is a great deal of literature on leadership education best-practices (e.g., curricular considerations, teaching strategies, assessment of learning). Yet, to be a leadership educator is more than having knowledge or expertise of content and pedagogy. Perceptions, experiences, and values of leadership educators comprise a professional identity that is reflective of not only what leadership educators do, but also who they are and how they view themselves within the profession. This qualitative study builds on Seemiller and Priest’s (2015) Leadership Educator Professional Identity Development (LEPID) conceptual model by analyzing stories from participants of a professional leadership educator development experience. Leadership educators’ identity development reflected a consistent and linear progression through the identity spaces outlined in the LEPID model, and further can be viewed through three distinct dimensional lenses (experiential, cognitive, and emotional experiences). Additionally, leadership educator identities were shaped by a particular set of ongoing influences and critical incidents; the most prevalent incident was related to feelings of inadequacy in leadership expertise and competence. Findings from this study can inform educational programs and professional associations in efforts to train and develop leadership educators.