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This paper aims to explore how researchers in general, and field researchers in particular, might respond to systems of governance of the researchers' activity in ways that can support rather than distort the quality of the research.

We draw upon literature on serendipity to develop a framework for engaging with the positive and negative potentials of systems of governance. We ground our analysis in discussion of participation in the field comprising two parts: first, the examination of our own activities and second, the accounts of participation found in two career-autobiographical interviews with emeritus professors of management accounting from Japan.

We highlight the potential for a productive tension between two contrasting perspectives that researchers might take on governance of their activity. A contractual perspective sees the value of targets and detailed pre-planning. A reflexive perspective sees the value of exploring the unexpected and considering many alternatives. We offer a framework for considering serendipity and the conditions that facilitate serendipity to help researchers maintain a productive tension between these perspectives.

We build upon retrospective accounts of two successful individuals whose careers evolved in a specific context. The intention is not to set out what might be generally achievable in a research career, nor to propose specific lines of action or planning in relation to specific systems of governance, since these vary across countries and over time. Rather, the paper draws on these materials to illuminate the more general challenge of preparing for serendipity in a way that goes beyond simple opportunism.

We analyse how researchers' mindfulness of serendipity and the nature of contexts that facilitate serendipity can encourage a productive tension between contractual and reflexive perspectives on governance of academic activity.

This paper aims to outline the role that serendipity can play in providing a complementary and previously unrepresented vector in deliberate and emergent strategies within organizations.

The paper is conceptual in nature and draws upon the serendipity pattern in sociological theory and serendipitous relations in developmental sciences to provide a framework for executives to consider when examining the process of strategy formation. Two case vignettes are used to illustrate the difference between luck and serendipity and the paper also traces key micro foundations of serendipity by returning to the original serendipity fable and a famed science experiment producing “floppy-eared” rabbits.

The notion of chance favoring the “prepared firm” is espoused where the prepared organizational mind is positioned as an antecedent of serendipitous strategy formation. This is based on Louis Pasteur’s famous aphorism, “chance favors the prepared mind.” Components of the prepared firm include deep domain knowledge, anticipatory mindset, noticing, abductive reasoning, elaboration and relations development.

The paper is a conceptual articulation of a novel concept that now requires deeper empirical case development and ultimately statistical validation. The paper suggests linkages between serendipity and theories of absorptive capacity and the attention-based view of the firm.

Several mindsets, capabilities and relations for architecting organizational serendipity are suggested for executives using a stylized framework.

From a strategy process perspective, the Mintzberg and Waters seminal article “Of strategies deliberate and emergent” is complemented by considering “floppy-eared” strategy characterized by unexpected, anomalous and strategic datum.

Websites, search engines, recommender systems, artificial intelligence and digital libraries have the potential to support serendipity for unexpected interaction with information and ideas which would lead to favored information discoveries. This paper aims to explore the current state of research into serendipity particularly related to information encountering.

This study provides bibliometric review of 166 studies on serendipity extracted from the Web of Science. Two bibliometric analysis tools HisCite and RStudio (Biblioshiny) are used on 30 years of data. Citation counts and bibliographic records of the papers are assessed using HisCite. Moreover, visualization of prominent sources, countries, keywords and the collaborative networks of authors and institutions are assessed using RStudio (Biblioshiny) software. A total of 166 papers on serendipity were found from the period 1989 to 2022, and the most influential authors, articles, journals, institutions and countries among these were determined.

The highest numbers of 11 papers were published in the year 2019. Makri and Erdelez are the most influential authors for contributing studies on serendipity. “Journal of Documentation” is the top-ranking journal. University College London is the prominent affiliation contributing highest number of studies on serendipity. The UK and the USA are the prominent nations contributing highest number of research. Authorship pattern for research on serendipity reveals involvement of single author in majority of the studies. OA Green model is the most preferred model for archiving of research articles by the authors who worked on serendipity. In addition, majority of the research outputs have received a citation ranging from 0 to 50.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper may be the first bibliometric analysis on serendipity research using bibliometric tools in library and information science studies. The paper would definitely open new avenues for other serendipity researchers.

This article aims to gain a better understanding of the reasons why serendipity is designed for in different kinds of environments. Understanding these design intents sheds light on the value such designs bring to designers, in contrast to the users of the environment. In this way, the article seeks to contribute to the literature on cultivating serendipity from a designers’ point of view.

An extensive review of the literature discussing designing for serendipity was conducted to elicit the different motivations to design for serendipity. Based on these findings and a thorough analysis, a typology of design intents for serendipity is presented.

The article puts forward four intents to design for serendipity: serendipity as an ideal, common good, mediator and feature. It also highlights that the current academic discourse puts a strong emphasis on two of them. It is argued that this academic abstraction could be problematic for how we deal with designs for serendipity, both in theory and practice.

The novelty of this article is that it addresses the question of why to design for serendipity from a designer’s point of view. By introducing the notion of directionality it opens up the opportunity to discuss serendipity from multiple perspectives, which contributes to gaining a firmer understanding of serendipity. It allows to more explicitly formulate the different functions of a design for serendipity and thereby expands our knowledge on the value of designing for serendipity. At the same time, it sheds light on the potential threats to designing for serendipity.

This study aims to explore the serendipitous discovery of integrated reporting (IR) by Alpha, an Italian small and medium-sized enterprise (SME). Alpha piqued the curiosity when the authors discovered that it experimented with IR alongside other management accounting practices, such as the Balanced Scorecard. As the authors reflected on Alpha’s experiences, the authors had to opportunistically develop a new framework to understand the change that was taking place at Alpha fully. Thus, the authors developed the serendipitous drift framework. This study contributes to addressing the gap between management accounting research that sees change as a planned, ordered process versus research that sees it as an unmanageable drift.

The authors ground the research on a qualitative methodology based on a single case study. This methodology allows us to focus on understanding what has happened at Alpha to discover new themes and provide theoretical generalisations. The authors developed the framework using middle-range thinking and fleshed it out using empirical findings from the case study. Middle-range thinking implies going back and forth between the theory and the empirical material. Therefore, the authors develop the serendipitous drift framework from prior theories and use it to inform the empirical study. In turn, the empirical material collected in Alpha helps refine and flesh out the serendipitous drift framework. The framework explains how Alpha leveraged serendipity to steer change towards favourable outcomes for them.

The authors find that the search for change undertaken by Alpha’s managers was non-specific but purposeful. Their dispositions were sagacious enough to recognise the potential value found in management accounting practices, such as IR and the Balanced Scorecard. They chanced upon new and unforeseen practices through trial and error, iteration, internal engagement and networking.

Overall, the results indicate that Alpha’s managers shaped the disorder of management accounting changes, even though it followed unexpected, uncertain and messy paths. Indeed, appropriate informal controls can act as a frame of reference for choosing, adapting and implementing new management accounting practices to shape the disorder. Informal controls can both guide and bound the experimentation process towards desirable outcomes.

The authors contribute to management accounting change theory by developing a framework rooted in serendipity and drifting theories. The framework identifies how searching, sagacity and chance are essential for making positive, unexpected discoveries. Therefore, the authors provide novel insights on how and why IR and other management accounting practices are eventually translated and adopted in the case company. Moreover, the serendipitous drift framework has the potential to help managers frame cultural controls to actively seek opportunities for valuable serendipitous eureka moments through networking and experimentation.

Online reviews derived from peer communications have been increasingly viewed as an important approach for consumers to gather pre-purchase information. This study aims to examine factors affecting online reviews adoption in social network communities and then indicates the underlying mechanism of this process based on an extended information adoption model (IAM).

Using the data collected from 242 users of a social network community via an online survey, the proposed model is empirically assessed by partial least squares-based structural equation model (PLS-SEM).

The results show that both perceived diagnosticity and perceived serendipity are drivers of online reviews adoption in social network communities. Meanwhile, community identification is not only an antecedent of diagnosticity and serendipity perceived by community members, but also motivates source credibility which, in turn, positively influences argument quality. Finally, the importance of argument quality and source credibility in reviews adoption process is also presented.

This study extends the IAM and enriches the literature regarding online reviews adoption. It deepens the understanding of serendipitous experiences and community identification in social networking context by addressing their important roles in the authors' extended IAM.

This study investigated the moderating effect of organizational knowledge management performance on the sharing and use of information encountered by serendipity within the organization.

The authors surveyed 274 medical librarians from the top 100 medical schools.

Individual information encountering predicted information encountering at work, which, in turn, predicted organizational sharing of encountered information. When the propensity to encounter information was high, then organizational knowledge management performance moderated the effect between organizational encountering and organizational sharing of information. Encountered information at work was only present when high organizational knowledge management performance was in place.

This finding helps information behavior researchers discover the transfer of behaviors from everyday life to organizational environments.

It shows the need for greater support for information encounterers at work and the role of knowledge management, which may enhance their contribution to the organizational objectives.

Information encountering involves finding information by chance. Studies on information encountering have not focused on work settings and if the individual propensity to encounter information translates to organizational settings. Also, the relationship between information encountering and organizational knowledge management has not been studied so far.

In this study, the distinctive functional features of linked data (LD) catalogues were investigated to contrast with existing online public access catalogues (OPACs) and discovery systems using a checklist approach. The checklist was derived from a literature review and is composed of 10 items as follows: self-descriptive and dynamic content for resource description, linkage to external LD sources and online services, aggregation of knowledge contexts into knowledge graphs (KGs), URI-based link discovery, representation and query of LD relationships, URI-based serendipitous discovery, keyword recommendation, faceted limitation and browsing, visualization and openness of data.

Ten functional features derived from the literature were checked against existing LD catalogues offered by libraries, archives and museums (LAMs). The LD catalogues were regarded as qualified subjects if they offered functional features that were distinct from current OPACs and discovery systems through URI-based enrichment and aggregation from various LD sources. In addition to individual organizations, LD union catalogues were also included. However, LD hubs, such as ISNI, OCLC WorldCat Entities, VIAF and Wikidata, were excluded. In total, six LD catalogues from LAMs were selected as subjects for examination.

First, LD catalogues provide similar KG information through URI combination, and KGs also facilitate information serendipity, including social-document, intellectual, conceptual, spatial and temporal contexts and networks of corporate bodies, persons and families (CPFs). Second, LD catalogues have transformed the “seek first and browse later” paradigm into a “seek or browse” paradigm by refreshing the browsing function of traditional card catalogues with preview and new options to facilitate LD identification and discovery. Third, LD catalogues have refined keyword recommendation with the addition of the following fields: person’s title, CPF relationships, entity type and LD source. Lastly, a virtual union LD catalogue is offered.

The proposed checklist revealed the unique/improved functional features of LD catalogues, allowing further investigation and comparison. More cases from the fields of medicine, engineering science and so on will be required to make revisions to fine-tune the proposed checklist approach.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to propose a checklist of functional features for LD catalogues and examine what the results and features of LD catalogues have achieved and are supported by from ontologies across LAMs. The findings suggest that LD provides a viable alternative to catalogues. The proposed checklist and results pave the way for the future development of LD catalogues and next-generation catalogues and also provide a basis for the future study of LD catalogues from other fields to refine the proposed checklist.

This chapter considers the role of entrepreneurship theory in the development of ideation techniques for entrepreneurship education. It begins by considering how metatheories impact theory construction in entrepreneurship research and discusses the role of ontology, epistemology, axiology, as well as the role of assumptions about human nature and social change. The chapter presents four different paradigms of thought that apply different philosophies and illustrates how these different paradigms conceptualize entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial opportunity differently. The four paradigms include the equilibrium paradigm, the disequilibrium paradigm, the disruptive innovation paradigm, and the social constructionism paradigm. Within each paradigm, the nature of entrepreneurial opportunity is discussed, and the chapter provides examples to show how different ideation techniques can be generated from these different conceptualizations. Forms of ideation technique are presented and explained, as they relate to each paradigm, and the chapter concludes by explaining the value of these techniques for ideation, opportunity discovery, and creation, in the entrepreneurial process.

This study aims to provide a critical assessment of developments in the field of voluntary corporate non-financial and sustainability reporting and disclosure (VRD). The assessment is grounded in the empirical material of a three-year research project on integrated reporting (IR).

Alvesson and Deetz’s (2021) critical management framework structures the arguments in this paper. By investigating local phenomena and the extant literature, the authors glean insights that they later critique, drawing on the empirical evidence collected during the research project. Transformative redefinitions are then proposed that point to future opportunities for research on voluntary organisational disclosures.

The authors argue that the mainstream approaches to VRD, namely, incremental information and legitimacy theories, present shortcomings in addressing why and how organisations voluntarily disclose information. First, the authors find that companies adopting the International IR Council’s (IIRC, 2021) IR framework tend to comply with the framework only in an informal, rather than a substantial way. Second, the authors find that, at times, organisations serendipitously chance upon VRD practices such as IR instead of rationally recognising the potential ability of such practices to provide useful information for decision-making by investors. Also, powerful groups in organisations may use VRD practices to establish, maintain or restore power balances in their favour.

The paper’s limitations stem directly from its aim to be a critical reflection. Even when grounded on empirics, a reflection is mainly a subjective effort. Therefore, different researchers could come to different conclusions and offer different lessons from the two case studies.

The different rationales the authors found for VRD should make a case for reporting institutions to tone down any investor-centric rhetoric in favour of more substantial disclosures. The findings imply that reporting organisations should approach the different frameworks with a critical eye and read between the lines of these frameworks to determine whether the purported normative arguments are achievable practice.

The authors reflect on timely and relevant issues linked to recent developments in the VRD landscape. Further, the authors offer possible ways forward for critical research that may rely on different methodological choices, such as interventionist and post-structuralist research.