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The purpose of this article is to clarify the organisational relationships between facilities management (FM) and core business (CB) and how these relationships vary for strategic and operational support functions.

The research takes a starting point in Michael Porter's theory of value chains but also draws on theory of strategic FM, governance and forms of coordination. The value chains for CBs and support functions are analysed and related to empirical data from a case study on a broadcasting corporation during a major relocation.

A particular support value chain is identified and a typology of archetypes of support functions is developed. The relationship between CB and strategic support is identified as primarily a general business orientation, while the relationship between CB and non‐strategic functions is identified as mainly a specific customer orientation. It is concluded that a market relationship – internally or externally – is appropriate for non‐strategic functions, while it is important to create a kind of coalition between strategic FM functions and the CB management.

The paper provides a theoretical‐ and empirical‐based analysis of the organisation of FM in relation to CB. The proposed solution of creating a strategic coalition has not been suggested before in scientific literature, but a recent example in practice has occurred. This supports the proposal and shows its value for practitioners.

Social movements are made up of organized groups and individuals working together to accomplish shared objectives. Under what circumstances do active groups build and break their coalitions? Five conditions have been identified in the literature as influencing coalition formation: common identity, resources, organizational structure, historical connection, and institutional setting. Whereas coalition dynamics within a movement wave are best understood in terms of institutional opportunities and threats, further research is needed to determine how and to what extent these contextual elements influence coalitions. This chapter examines how threats posed by indiscriminate and selective repression affect the shape and structure of interorganizational coalitions during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protests in Hong Kong. The analysis relies on an original political event dataset and an organization-event network dataset. These datasets were produced utilizing syntactic event coding techniques based on Telegram posts, which Hong Kong protesters used to distribute information, plan future actions, and crowdsource news. Furthermore, Telegram provides detailed information about state activities, event-level coalitions, and violent groups, which is difficult to access from other sources. This study investigates the coalition networks across the movement's four stages, each of which was marked by a particular type and degree of repression. The findings indicate that indiscriminate and selective repression have varied effects on coalition networks. A wide coalition disintegrates as a result of indiscriminate repression. Selective repression, however, leads to the formation of coalitions around activist groups targeted by repression.

The national immigrant rights campaign of 2006 stands as one of the largest mobilizations by people of color in US history, yet less scholarly attention has been given to systematically comparing these mobilizations at the local level. To develop an understanding of what led to sustained mobilization, a comparative case study analysis of seven cities in California's San Joaquin Valley is employed. The empirical evidence is based on interviews with key organizers and participants, newspaper documentation of protest events, census data, and other secondary sources. I find that the presence and size of policy threats explained the initial protest during the spring of 2006 in all localities, but cities with elaborate resource infrastructures (preexisting organizations, histories of community organizing, and coalitions) had more enduring levels of collective action.

The seven most significant forces now at work changing the world out to the year 2025 are (1) population; (2) resource management and environmental degradation; (3) technological innovation and diffusion; (4) the flows of information and knowledge; (5) global economic integration; (6) conflict; and (7) governance. Together, these seven strategic forces will have a significant impact on how the world unfolds over the next two decades and beyond. Leaders need to develop new approaches and organizational structures. Strategic coalitions between governments, international organizations, the private sector, and civil society will be essential to addressing many of these and other challenges that confront us.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the issue of research relevance from the frame of reference of university leaders. Its specific aim is to gain insights into how “relevance” is conceptualised, and the underlying assumptions upon which such conceptualizations are based.

Adopting an inductive approach, the study collects and analyses data from semi-structured interviews with 31 senior research-related university leaders, and archival sources in five Australian universities.

Research relevance is primarily viewed as a means of responding to government and political imperatives, as a pathway to ensuring university legitimacy, and as a means of generating further resources. The authors apply this understanding to develop a framework that adopts a nuanced view of relevance, reflecting what is driving research, and to whom research is principally targeted.

The evidence-base upon which the study is based represents a relatively small number of university leaders of Australian universities. Moreover, restricting the investigation to a few senior hierarchical levels nonetheless offers insights into high level organisational drivers hitherto neglected in the accounting research literature on university strategy, governance and accountability. While not addressing perceptions across the university population, this study focusses on and unpacks the social construction of relevance of this select group as research policy makers.

As one of the few empirically informed investigations exploring the issue of research relevance from the perspective of university leaders, this study provides insights rather than “answers”. Its findings therefore serve as a foundational basis for further empirical and theoretical enquiry.

This chapter presents a personal research journey starting from my interest in firms’ decision-making within the tradition of the behavioral theory of the firm to discovering mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as an ideal decision context to advance the theory. Using my two articles published in the Academy of Management Journal as examples, I showcase how to leverage the specific attributes of M&A together with the institutional context in which they occur to develop and test new theories. Each paper addresses a distinctive research question and provides a unique angle of theoretical insights to the theory of decision-making. In particular, I was able to dig deeper into the mechanisms of institutional logic, power, and coalition building for explaining how firms make strategic decisions, all owing to the significance and versatility of M&A.

The purpose of this paper is to examine formal and informal types of power, and identify the characteristics of corporate communications managers who are in the dominant coalition.

The paper reports on results of a survey sent to a representative sample of S&P 500 corporate communications managers and CEOs in the USA Data about industry sector, company size, annual revenue and profitability were collected for the responding companies and a random sample of 100 non‐responding companies. The responding companies (n=161) did not significantly differ from the non‐responding companies

The paper finds that four attributes of informal power differentiate communications managers who are in the dominant coalition from those who are not: reciprocal trust, strategic business decision‐making, social inclusion and communication expertise.

Future research should explore whether any of the 37 percent of communications managers in the dominant coalition at these top companies come from backgrounds significantly different from those of the executive elite.

The paper supports the organizational theory of the importance of informal power as a prerequisite to be in the dominant coalition – particularly friendship and “being included.” Communications managers who are in the dominant coalition are in a better position to institute ethical and excellent (symmetrical) communication practices. The findings of this study have implications for the likely success (or lack thereof) of managers with diverse backgrounds of being included in the dominant coalition.

The paper provides quantitative, generalizable results based on a representative sample where many previous studies have relied on qualitative data alone.

Social movement scholarship convincingly highlights the importance of threats, political opportunities, prior social ties, ideological compatibility, and resources for coalition formation. Based on interviews with Palestinian, Israeli, and international activists involved in two transnational coalitions in Israel/Palestine, this chapter illustrates the emergence of transnational coalitions, particularly those that cross polarized ethno-national divides, depends not only on such facilitators, but also, and critically, on the belief that such diverse cooperation is strategic. I argue these unique coalitions intentionally formed with individuals and organizations situated in different national communities out of a strategic decision by the Palestinian initiators, given the closed political opportunity structure they faced domestically, to enlarge the scope of conflict by drawing in new people and communities who may have some leverage on the Israeli government. Consequently, this chapter also makes clear that partners in the Global South make intentional choices about who to partner with, and that the agency is not solely linked with their more privileged partners in the Global North (cf., Bob, 2001; Widener, 2007). Finally, it illustrates that coalition partners are recruited not only because of social ties, prior histories of interaction, ideological similarity, and shared organizational framing, but also due to key considerations including perceptions of what the ethno-national diversity, varying networks, and differing privileges make available.

Community coalitions are an important part of the public milieu and subject to similar external pressures as other publicly funded organizations – including changes in required strategic orientation. Many US government agencies that fund efforts such as community-based social marketing initiatives have shifted their funding agenda from program development to policy development. The Florida Prevention Research Center at the University of South Florida (Tampa, Florida, USA) created community-based prevention marketing (CBPM) for policy development framework to teach community coalitions how to apply social marketing to policy development. This paper aims to explicate the framework’s theory of change.

The research question was: “How does implementing the CBPM for Policy Development framework improve coalition performance over time?” The authors implemented a case study design, with the “case” being a normative community coalition. The study adhered to a well-developed series of steps for system dynamics modeling.

Results from computer model simulations show that gains in community coalition performance depend on a coalition’s initial culture and initial efficiency, and that only the most efficient coalitions’ performance might improve from implementing the CBPM framework.

Practical implications for CBPM’s developers and users are discussed, namely, the importance of managing the early expectations of academic-community partnerships seeking to shift their orientation from downstream (e.g. program development) to upstream social marketing strategies (e.g. policy change).

Why are some social movement organizations (SMOs) more likely to participate in coalitions than other SMOs? Drawing on findings from a comparative study of 47 organizations in the women's movement in Buenos Aires, Argentina that were active during the first 20 years of the contemporary democratic period (1983–2003), I examine factors related to participation in coalitions. Using qualitative comparative analysis, I identify three paths for coalition participation that account for 90% of the cases where SMOs participated in coalitions. I find that SMOs cooperated with other groups when they engaged in confrontational protest, when they had broad goals and involved non-members in their work, or when they were inclusive and had a formal division of labor that made it possible to send representatives, as is often necessary in formal coalition work. Along with ethnographic evidence, these findings suggest that scholars should pay more attention to the combinations of organizational factors that influence coalition participation, and the strategic motivations, structural features, and cultural aspects of movement organizations that facilitate cooperation between SMOs.