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The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of attending a Recovery College (RC) on NHS staff attitudes towards mental health and recovery, clinical and peer interactions, and personal wellbeing.

Qualitative and quantitative data were collected via online surveys from 94 participants. Thematic analysis and descriptive statistics were used.

Themes were identified for change in attitudes towards mental health and recovery: new meanings of recovery; challenging traditional views on recovery; hope for recovery; and increased parity. The majority felt that the RC positively influenced the way they supported others. Themes relating to this were: using or sharing taught skills; increased understanding and empathy; challenging non-recovery practices; and adopting recovery practices. Responses highlighted themes surrounding impacts on personal wellbeing: connectedness; safe place; self-care; and sense of competency and morale at work. Another category labelled “Design of RC” emerged with the themes co-learning, co-production and co-facilitation, and content.

It is important to understand whether RCs are a useful resource for staff. This research suggests that RCs could help to reconcile Implementing Recovery through Organisational Change’s 10 Key Challenges and reduce staff burnout, which has implications for service provision.

This is one of the first papers to directly explore the value of RCs for staff attending as students, highlighting experiences of co-learning.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the voluntary disclosure of risk-related issues, with a focus on credit risk, in graphical reporting for listed banks in the major European economies. It aims to understand if banks portray credit risk-related information in graphs accurately and whether these graphs provide incremental, rather than replicative, information. It also investigates whether credit risk-related graphs provide a fair representation of risk performance or a more favourable impression than is warranted.

A graphical accuracy index was constructed. Incremental information was measured. A multi-level linear model investigated whether credit risk affects the quantity and quality of graphical credit risk disclosure.

Banks used credit risk graphs to provide incremental information. They were also selective, with riskier banks less likely to use risk graphs. Banks were accurate in their graphical reporting, particularly those with high levels of credit risk. These findings can be explained within an impression management perspective taking human cognitive biases into account. Preparers of risk graphs seem to prefer selective omission over obfuscation via inaccuracy. This probably reflects the fact that individuals, and by implication annual report’s users, generally judge the provision of inaccurate information more harshly than the omission of unfavourable information.

This study provides theoretical insights by pointing out the limitations of a purely economics-based agency theory approach to impression management.

The study suggests annual reports’ readers need to be careful about subtle forms of impression management, such as those exploiting their cognitive bias. Regulatory and professional bodies should develop guidelines to ensure neutral and comparable graphical disclosure.

This study provides a substantive alternative to the predominant economic perspective on impression management in corporate reporting, by incorporating a psychological perspective taking human cognitive biases into account.

In this chapter, we explore ‘unanticipated excess’ through the lens of our own doctoral research projects, which are presented as distinct vignettes: Reade’s digital ethnography of young women’s relations with ‘fitspo’ (fitness inspiration) content on Instagram, Moran’s social media ethnography of African young people in Australia and Lyall’s show-and-tell interviews with users of digital self-tracking devices. While our projects differ in many ways, we share research practices that did not fully anticipate the challenges of digitalised research fields. In coming to terms with our unanticipated excess, we reflect on inescapable moments and uneasy feelings from our fieldwork. In so doing, we argue that excess need not be considered a ‘failure’ – to establish boundaries, to filter data or to engage in objective analysis – but should rather be seen as an important part of reflexive research practice. Excess holds possibilities and potentials to foster care and camaraderie between digital scholars and can push us and our work – empirically, methodologically and ethically – in new directions. It also presents an opportunity to continue to champion integrity over production as we move forward in our personal and collective research journeys.

In this chapter we put projects at the centre stage of firms' activities – i.e. product and process innovation, strategy formulation and implementation, capability building and learning, organizational structure and design, and systems integration (the capability to combine diverse knowledge bases and physical components into functioning systems). Based on the findings of a 10-year research programme into firms producing high-value capital goods – known as complex products and systems (CoPS) – we draw out conceptual insights about project organizing that can inform and contribute to the development and reformulation of more universally applicable formal theories of strategic management and organization.

The last several years have witnessed a growing scholarly interest in project-based organizations. This interest mirrors the diffusion of this organizational form across a wide range of industries, well beyond those where organizations traditionally have been organized by projects. To date, however, research on project-based organizations has not yet offered a systematic investigation of the interactions between project-based organizing and strategic management research. An examination of the existing literature indicates that some of the answers to key strategy questions remain incomplete, at times contradictory, and at best ambiguous. This volume moves the discussion to the next level by offering a comprehensive yet integrated view of cutting-edge research on project-based organizing to shed light on some of these ambiguities and clarify the relationship between project-based organizing and strategic management. To accomplish this, the volume includes the contributions of several leading scholars who have been active researchers on this subject. The chapters develop and extend key strategic aspects of project-based organizing, raise many new important questions, and identify fruitful areas for future research.

There has been a growing interest in the field of strategic management to understand the relationship between the organizational capabilities of firms and (a) the direction of strategies pursued and (b) the impact on competitive performance. Much of this literature has been influenced by the resource-based view of the firm. As indicated in early formulations of this theory, one implication is that the organization of resources is equally important as the resources themselves. Accordingly, the organizational and integration of resources and knowledge can be viewed as a core facet of the organizational capabilities of firms that are difficult to imitate for competitors. This paper explores a particular kind of organization referred to as the “P-form corporation” (Project-Form), its organizational capabilities and options for strategic alternatives. The chapter addresses three broad questions: (1) What are the main characteristics of P-form corporations? (2) What are the capabilities acquired and developed by P-form corporations and how are these acquired? (3) How do these capabilities vary across different strategic alternatives in the P-form corporation? The chapter concludes with a discussion about the implications for strategy and management.

This manuscript discusses the main findings gathered through a systematic literature review aimed at crystallizing the state of art about evidence-based management (EBMgt) in healthcare. The purpose of this paper is to narrow the main gaps in current understanding about the linkage between sources of evidence, categories of analysis and kinds of managerial decisions/management practices that different groups of decision-makers put in place. In fact, although EBMgt in healthcare has emerging as a fashionable research topic, little is still known about its actual implementation.

Using the Scopus database as main source of evidence, the authors carried out a systematic literature review on EBMgt in healthcare. Inclusion and exclusion criteria have been crystallized and applied. Only empirical journal articles and past reviews have been included to consider only well-mature and robust studies. A theoretical framework based on a “process” perspective has been designed on these building blocks: inputs (sources of evidence), processes/tools (analyses on the sources of evidence), outcomes (the kind of the decision) and target users (decision-makers).

Applying inclusion/exclusion criteria, 30 past studies were selected. Of them, ten studies were past literature reviews conducted between 2009 and 2014. Their main focus was discussing the previous definitions for EBMgt in healthcare, the main sources of evidence and their acceptance in hospitals. The remaining studies (n=20, 67 percent) were empirical; among them, the largest part (n=14, 70 percent) was informed by quantitative methodologies. The sources of evidence for EBMgt are: published studies, real world evidence and experts’ opinions. Evidence is analyzed through: literature reviews, data analysis of empirical studies, workshops with experts. Main kinds of decisions are: performance assessment of organization units, staff performance assessment, change management, organizational knowledge transfer and strategic planning.

This study offers original insights on EBMgt in healthcare by adding to what we know from previous studies a “process” perspective that connects sources of evidence, types of analysis, kinds of decisions and groups of decision-makers. The main findings are useful for academia as they consolidate what we know about EBMgt in healthcare and pave avenues for further research to consolidate this emerging discipline. They are also useful for practitioners, as hospital managers, who might be interested to design and implement EBMgt initiatives to improve hospital performance.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of the comply-or-explain principle in the Italian context. In particular, the analysis will evaluate, which factor impact on firms' voluntary adoption of this tool to adequate their non-financial reports to the legal requirements of Directive 95/2014/EU.

The methodology consists of two different levels of analysis. The first part is statistical descriptive, and it consists of a rhetorical analysis on the justifications provided by the firms about their omissions to comply with Directive 95/2014/EU. The second part is inferential and its aim is to evaluate, which factors impact on comply-or-explains adoption.

The findings reveal how the comply-or-explain application in Italy has been characterized by several criticisms. The result highlight how the justifications adopted by the firms is influenced by their sector of activity and omission's type. Moreover, the analysis suggests how the sector of activity and the level of adherence to global reporting initiative influenced the average number of omissions.

The limitations of the research are represented by the focuses on a single country and by the short period of analysis. In this sense, future research could be addressed to the analysis of countries different from Italy. Moreover, accounting scholars could provide further contributions to the political debate through the evolution of the “comply-or-explain” principle’s strategies over the years.

The practical implications connected to the present research are twofold. The first one is represented by the possibility for policymakers to increase the degree of attention about the use of comply-or-explain as legitimization's tool. The second one is represented by the possibility for practitioners to identify a new reporting framework.

The social implications are represented by the possibility for stakeholders to evaluate the reliability's degree of the disclosure produced by Italian public interest entities after the implementation of Directive 95/2014/EU.

Despite the growing attention paid by academics regard Directive 95/2014/EU, this is the first attempt to analyze the comply-or-explain from a rhetorical perspective.

This chapter clarifies our understanding of the project-based firm (PBF) by sharpening the theoretical foundations of project capabilities. It emphasizes the differences between project capabilities that eliminate variance in project outcomes (to control costs and add value) and economies of scale that reduce costs across multiple projects. It also highlights how the different ways in which value is captured by project-based organizations can feedback to influence how these capabilities and scale economies are generated. This opens up new typologies of project-based organizations, with implications for theory and practice.

Can sustainability disclosures be a tool for executing image restoration strategies after corporate manslaughter? This is the question explored in this study of Costa Crociere's sustainability reports after the Concordia disaster.

Merging traditional textual content analysis with visual analysis and supported by machine learning tools, this is a predominantly qualitative study framed by legitimacy theory, image restoration theory and impression management.

Costa Crociere's voluntary sustainability reporting is strongly influenced by a mix of text and visual signals that distract readers' attention from the disaster. A “nothing really happened” communication strategy pervades the disclosures, with the only rational motivation being to change perceptions and erase memories of this tragic and avoidable event.

Although the analysis covered multiple sources of corporate information, media coverage was not one of them. A more in-depth exploration of sustainability reporting in the cruise industry, including evidence of similar cases, to test impression management theory would be a worthwhile avenue for future research.

While Costa Crociere technically followed the customary guidelines of disclosing human resource impacts, there was almost no acknowledgement of the people involved in the accident. Costa Concierevastly understated their responsibility for the accident, did not apologize, and conveyed very little remorse. The majority of disclosures centred on disaster recovery management.

The authors discuss why and how a company can overcome a legitimacy threat by completely freezing its voluntary sustainability reporting, and the authors show how a company can restore its image by minimizing specific aspects of an accident and shifting attention from the human victims to corporate operations. Incorporating image recognition driven by AI models and combining the results with narrative disclosures contributes an innovative and original analysis technique to the field of impression management. In addition, this research also contributes to our knowledge on the cruise industry – a sector currently under scrutiny for its ethical, social and environmental practices.