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The purpose of this paper is to analyze how local and central authorities choose between lowest price and more complex scoring rules when they design supplier-selection mechanisms for public procurements. Five hypotheses are tested: a high level of cost uncertainty and highly non-verifiable quality makes the use of the lowest-price supplier-selection method less likely. Organizational habits and transaction-cost considerations influence the choice of mechanism. Strong quality concerns make complex rules more likely.

The analysis departures from normative theory (rational choice) and is based on the regression analysis and survey data comprising a gross sample of 40 contracting authorities and detailed information about 651 procurements.

More complex scoring rules are used more often when the authority is uncertain about costs and about delivered quality. Authority effects are also found to directly and indirectly influence the choice of supplier-selection method, suggesting that tendering design is partly driven by local habits and institutional inertia.

The authors argue that, from a normative point of view, lowest price is an adequate method when the degree of uncertainty is low, for example, because the procured products are standardized and since quality can be verified. When there is significant cost uncertainty, it is better to use the so-called economically most advantageous tender (EMAT) method. (Preferably this should be done by assigning monetary values to different quality levels.) If there is significant uncertainty concerning delivered quality, the contracting authority should retain a degree of discretion, so as to be able to reward good-quality performance in observable but non-verifiable quality dimensions; options to extend the contract and subjective assessments of quality are two possibilities. The main findings are that EMAT and more complex scoring rules are used more often when the contracting authorities report that they experience substantial uncertainty concerning delivered quality and actual costs and that these factors tend to decrease the weight given to price, in line with the predictions. However, the authors also find that this result is mainly driven by variations between authorities, rather than by between-products variation for the same authority. This is from a training of professionals and regulation perspective of policy relevance.

Contract allocation based on habits rather than rational ground could implicate the waste of resources (tax payers money) as it adventures the matching of the preferences of the public sector (the objective, subject matter, of the procurement) and what the potential supplier offers in its tender.

Although the principles for supplier selection are regulated by law they give the contracting authority substantial freedom in designing the scoring rule and in choosing what quality criteria to use. The tension between different objectives and the more general question whether the choices made by authorities reflect rational decision making or institutional inertia together motivate the current study. While the design of the supplier-selection mechanism is an important consideration in procurement practice, it has attracted relatively little attention from the academic community.

Since 2006, higher education institutions (HEIs) in Sweden, should according to the Higher Education Act, promote sustainable development (SD). In 2016, the Swedish Government asked the Swedish higher education authority to evaluate how this study is proceeding. The authority chose to focus on education. This paper aims to produce a report on this evaluation.

All 47 HEIs in Sweden were asked to write a self-evaluation report based on certain evaluation criteria. A panel was appointed consisting of academics and representatives for students and working life. The panel wrote an evaluation of each HEI, a report on general findings and recommendations, and gave an overall judgement of each HEI in two classes as follows: the HEI has well-developed processes for integration of SD in education or the HEI needs to develop their processes.

Overall, a mixed picture developed. Most HEIs could give examples of programmes or courses where SD was integrated. However, less than half of the HEIs had overarching goals for integration of SD in education or had a systematic follow-up of these goals. Even fewer worked specifically with pedagogy and didactics, teaching and learning methods and environments, sustainability competences or other characters of education for SD. Overall, only 12 out of 47 got a higher judgement.

This is a unique study in which all HEIs in a country are evaluated. This provides unique possibilities for identifying success factors and barriers. The importance of the leadership of the HEIs became clear.

This paper is an empirical analysis of first-price sealed-bid procurement auctions in Sweden, with and without combinatorial bidding. The data comprises procurement auctions of identical contracts (road resurfacing) with identical bidders conducted under the same time period (2009-2011) in two different regions in Sweden. Given the comparison of the suppliersʼ offered price per tons of asphalt, we cannot reject the hypothesis of identical distribution of standalone bids generated in both types of auction. The distribution of package bids within the combinatorial format is significantly lower than the distribution of standalone bids within the non-combinatorial format, suggesting substantial cost reduction of allowing package bidding. Also, within the combinatorial format, our analysis of data indicates higher costs when packages are predetermined by the purchaser rather than chosen freely by the suppliers.

Combinatorial procurement auctions are increasingly being employed in the private and public sector as an alternative to simultaneous single contract auctions. This mechanism has the advantage that it enables suppliers to express synergies across bundles of public contracts. This mitigates the exposure problem and also has the potential to both lower the price paid by the procuring authority and to enhance efficiency. This paper provides stylized facts of recently performed combinatorial public procurements in various markets in Sweden.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue and outline its major themes and challenges, their relevance and the research opportunities the field presents.

The paper reviews prior literature and outlines the need to view public procurement as a policy tool to introduce the contributions to this special issue.

Public procurement has been consistently used to further public policies in a wide range of fields. The collection of articles in this special issue contributes to a broader understanding of the role and potential of public procurement in delivering desired policy outcomes in society. The articles show that public procurement largely has strategic aspirations, and its potential to deliver on wider societal issues is attractive to policy makers. The issues raised in this collection of articles, however, also demonstrate that public procurement often lacks strategic maturity and critical issues, notably around how to demonstrate and evaluate its impact and “success”.

This paper aims to stimulate interdisciplinary research into the role of public procurement as a policy tool and its ability to achieve public value.

This paper discusses theoretical and empirical findings that highlight the importance of public procurement for achieving public value. The special issue examines the interdisciplinary literature on public procurement and shows how it is being used to achieve public value.

Paul D. Bliese is currently the commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Unit – Europe. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Social Psychology from Texas Tech University. His research interests include multilevel methodology, leadership, and occupational stress. He is a consulting editor for the Journal of Applied Psychology, and also serves on the editorial boards of Leadership Quarterly and Organizational Research Methods. His work has appeared in the Human Performance, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Organizational Research Methods.Kristina A. Bourne is a doctoral candidate in Organization Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she also obtained a M.B.A. and a Women’s Studies Graduate Certificate. Her academic interests include gender and organization as well as family-friendly policies and benefits. She is currently working on her dissertation in the area of women business owners, and on a collaborative research project focusing on part-time work arrangements.Gilad Chen is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from George Mason University. His research focuses on work motivation, teams, and leadership, with particular interests in modeling motivation and performance in work team contexts and the examination of multilevel organizational phenomena. His work has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Human Performance, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Organizational Research Methods.Jae Uk Chun is a doctoral student in Organizational Behavior in the School of Management at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he is also research assistant of the Center for Leadership Studies. His major research interests include leadership, group dynamics and group decision-making, and multiple levels of analysis issues.Vinit M. Desai is a doctoral student and researcher in Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations at the Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. His research interests include organizational learning, sensemaking, and error cognition in high reliability organizations.Shelley D. Dionne is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and Leadership in the School of Management at Binghamton University, and a fellow in the Center for Leadership Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Binghamton University. Her research interests include leadership and creativity, levels of analysis issues, and team development and training.Daniel G. Gallagher (Ph.D. – University of Illinois), is the CSX Corporation Professor of Management at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Management, and Industrial Relations (Berkeley). His current research interests include the multi-disciplinary study of contingent employment and other forms of work outside of the traditional employer – employee relationship.David A. Hofmann (Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University) is currently Associate Professor of Management at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include safety issues in organizations, multi-level analysis, organizational climate/culture and leadership, content specific citizenship behavior, and the proliferation of errors in organizations. In 1992, he was awarded the Yoder-Heneman Personnel Research award by the Society for Human Resource Management. His research appears in a number of journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process, and Personnel Psychology. He has also co-authored several book chapters, edited a book (Safety and Health in Organizations: A Multi-level Perspective), and presented papers/workshops at a number of professional conferences.James G. (Jerry) Hunt (Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is the Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Management, Trinity Company Professor in Leadership and Director of the Institute for Leadership Research at Texas Tech University. He is the former editor of the Journal of Management and current Senior Editor of The Leadership Quarterly. He founded and edited the eight volume leadership symposia series, and has authored or edited some 200 book and journal publications. His current research interests include processual approaches to leadership and organizational phenomena and the philosophy of the science of management.Kimberly S. Jaussi is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and Leadership in the School of Management at Binghamton University and a fellow in the Center for Leadership Studies. She received her doctorate from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include unconventional leader behavior, creativity and leadership, identity issues in diverse groups, and organizational commitment.Lisa M. Jones is a doctoral candidate in Organizational Behavior at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and her M.B.A. and M.A. from Brigham Young University. Her research interests include leadership, collective personality, and innovation implementation.Kyoungsu Kim is Associate Professor of Organization in the College of Business Administration, Chonnam National University. His major fields of interest are culture and leadership at multiple levels of analysis. His research focuses on charismatic leadership, organizational structure, roles, culture, and multiple levels of analysis.Barbara S. Lawrence is Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior at the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management. She received her Ph.D. from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. Dr. Lawrence’s current research examines organizational reference groups, the evolution of organizational norms, internal labor markets and their effects on employees’ expectations and implicit work contracts, and the impact of population age change on occupations.Craig C. Lundberg is the Blanchard Professor of Human Resource Management at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. He works with organizations facilitating organizational and personal development and publishes extensively (over 200 articles and chapters, five co-authored books). His current scholarship focuses on organizational change and culture, consultancy, alternative inquiry strategies, and sensemaking and emotions in work settings.Kenneth D. Mackenzie is the Edmund P. Learned Distinguished Professor in the School of Business at the University of Kansas. He is also the President of a pair of consulting companies which support and enrich his research. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He serves on various editorial boards and has published numerous books and articles. He received a B.A. in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of California at Berkeley. He has spent his career trying to overcome the handicap of “excessive theoretical education.”Peter Madsen is a doctoral student at the Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. His thesis work examines the processes by which organizations attempt to learn from past failures and the organizational actions and characteristics that facilitate such learning. His other interests include organizational reliability, strategic management, the work-life interface, and ethics.John E. Mathieu is the Northeast Utilities and Ackerman Scholar Professor of Management at the University of Connecticut. He received a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Old Dominion University in 1985. He has published over 50 articles and chapters on a variety of topics, mostly in the areas of micro- and meso-organizational behavior. He is a member of the Academy of Management, a Fellow of the Society of Industrial Organizational Psychology, and the American Psychological Association. His current research interests include models of training effectiveness, team and multi-team processes, and cross-level models of organizational behavior.Sara Ann McComb is an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She obtained her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering at Purdue University. Her research interests include alternative work arrangements and project teams. Currently, she is examining mutually beneficial links between organizations and part-time workers, particularly in the service sector. She is also studying the way in which project teams share information, a project for which she was award the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award.Jone L. Pearce is Professor of Organization and Strategy in the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Irvine. She conducts research on workplace interpersonal processes, such as trust, and how these processes may be affected by political structures, economic conditions and organizational policies and practices. Her work has appeared in over seventy scholarly articles and her most recent book is Organization and Management in the Embrace of Government (Erlbaum, 2001). She is a Fellow of the Academy of Management and served as the Academy’s President in 2002–2003.Amy E. Randel is an Assistant Professor and the Coca-Cola Fellow in the Calloway School of Business & Accountancy at Wake Forest University. She received her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include identity in organizations, diverse group dynamics, group efficacy, cross-cultural management, and social capital.Richard Reeves-Ellington is currently Professor Emeritus in the School of Management at Binghamton University and an Associate Dean at Excelsior College. He taught at the American University in Bulgaria and Sofia University in Bulgaria as a Fulbright Senior Scholar. His fields of interest revolve around cross-cultural aspects of global organization, marketing, and business strategy. He also served on the Fulbright Selection Committee for SE Europe, the Muskie Foundation for students from the CIS, and the Fulbright Senior Scholars Program. His initial 33-year career in the pharmaceutical industry included 19 years of living in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.Christine M. Riordan is a faculty member in the Department of Management and also the Director of the Institute for Leadership Advancement in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. Chris’ current research, which includes the study of labor force and cross-cultural diversity, has been published in journals such as the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Organizational Research Methods, and Research in Personnel and Human Resource Management.Karlene H. Roberts is a Professor of Business Administration at the Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. She has been on the review boards of many major journals in her field. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society and the Academy of Management. Her current research interests are in the design and management of organizations in which errors can have catastrophic outcomes. In this area she explores cross-level issues.Denise M. Rousseau is the H. J. Heinz II Professor of Organizational Behavior and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. An organizational psychologist, her research focuses on worker-employer relationships and multi-level processes in organizational change. She is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Organizational Behavior, and in 2003–2004, President of the Academy of Management.Melissa Woodard Barringer is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She obtained her Ph.D. in Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. Her research interests are in the areas of total compensation and alternative work arrangements. She is currently studying part-time work in the service industry, and contingent work in the accounting and academic professions.

In rural Malawi, money constantly circulates. As soon as villagers, poor as they are, get some money in hands, it is swiftly spent. Tracking how money – and other valued items like food and soap – are pushed and pulled around through an extremely poor community offers profound insights into women’s everyday survival tactics. Central to these women’s survival is the ability to mobilise support in times of need. Material wealth is found to be both a prerequisite and a threat to this ability. It can best be spent quickly, in particular ways, so as to transform it into potential sources of future support in times of need. Maximizing access to potential future support while minimizing blockage – by always appearing able to reciprocate and not giving others socially acceptable justifications to withhold support – are concerns that to a great extent shape the village women’s everyday decision-making. Understanding the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that both result from and trigger these survival tactics is important for social scientists and policy-makers as these have far-reaching consequences, including women’s HIV risk-taking, which are difficult to explain from other vantage points.

Tourism in Coimbra today is influenced by the fact that the Univer(s)city was distinguished as a World Heritage Site in 2013. The number of visits has grown very significantly in recent years, but the diversification of the tourist offer is still weak and unable to take advantage of existing resources. This paper aims to present genealogy tourism as an alternative urban cultural tourism in Coimbra.

Methodology involved mapping the Jewish culture elements in the city of Coimbra, and a route was outlined and proposed.

Genealogy tourism resources are identified in the historic centre of the city. These alternative spaces need urban rehabilitation and (re)functionalisation, which allowed the authors to rethink tourism in Coimbra. They are the motivation to visit for all urban cultural tourists, especially Israelis/Jews, and provide contact with places where the experiences of ancestors combine with the history and memory of places, with recent discoveries and the elements of Jewish culture in the city.

It is concluded that the quantity, diversity, authenticity and singularity of the heritage resources that bear witness to the Jewish presence in Coimbra are sufficient assets to create a route, to enrich the tourist experience in the city and to include the destination in the Sephardic routes.

The purpose of the study is to compare features of career development and fandom in frequent festival attendance in the context of Finnish music festivals.

The study uses a mixed methods research approach and employs two theoretical frameworks: theories of career development and fandom.

In frequent festival attendance, both festival career development and festival fandom are most clearly present in motivation development and social dimensions.

Strategically, frequent festivalgoers should be considered as crucial stakeholders, who might mobilize the co-creation of a sense of community or festival brand.

Music-related fandom has been previously investigated in relation to artists and specific musical genres, but not so much in relation to music festivals in general. Career studies, on the other hand, concentrate heavily on sports events. There is a scarcity of research scrutinizing both career development and fandom in the festival context within the same study, and festival attendance as part of music tourism is an under-researched area.