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Performance measurement has benefited from several management accounting innovations over the past decade. Guiding these advances is the explicit recognition that it is imperative to understand the causal linkage that leads a firm to profitability. In this paper, we contend that the relationship quality experienced between two organizations has a measurable impact on performance. Guided by prior models developed in distribution channel and relationship marketing research (Cannon et al., 2000; Morgan & Hunt, 1994) we build a causal model of relationship quality that identifies key relationship qualities that drive a series of financial and non-financial performance outcomes. Using the healthcare industry to illustrate its applicability, the physician practice – insurance company relationship is described within the context of the model’s constructs and causal linkages. Our model offers managers employing a causal performance measurement system such as, the balanced scorecard (Kaplan & Norton, 1996) or the action-profit-linkage model (Epstein et al., 2000), a formal framework to analyze observed outcome metrics by assessing the underlying dynamics in their third party relationships. Many of these forces have subtle, but tangible impacts on organizational performance. Recognizing them within performance measurement theory adds explanatory power to existing performance measurement systems.

The employee-organization relationship (EOR) has increasingly become a focal point for researchers in organizational behavior, human resource management, and industrial relations. Literature on the EOR has developed at both the individual – (e.g. psychological contracts) and the group and organizational-levels of analysis (e.g. employment relationships). Both sets of literatures are reviewed, and we argue for the need to integrate these literatures as a means for improving understanding of the EOR. Mechanisms for integrating these literatures are suggested. A subsequent discussion of contextual effects on the EOR follows in which we suggest that researchers develop models that explicitly incorporate context. We then examine a number of theoretical lenses to explain various attributes of the EOR such as the dynamism and fairness of the exchange, and new ways of understanding the exchange including positive functional relationships and integrative negotiations. The article concludes with a discussion of future research needed on the EOR.

It is widely recognized by scholars that superhero stories tend to glorify vigilante justice; after all, these stories often maintain that extralegal acts of violence are necessary for combatting existential threats to personal and public safety. This scholarly common sense fosters a widespread dismissal of superhero stories as uncomplicated apologia for an authoritarian politics of law and order that is animated by hatred of unpopular people and ideas. However, some prominent contemporary Batman stories, including those told in the graphic novels of Grant Morrison and in the blockbuster movies of Christopher Nolan, are ambivalent: in their portraits of Batman and Joker as dark twins and secret colleagues, these stories both legitimize and challenge the countersubversive politics of American law and order.

The sustainable transition towards the circular economy requires the effective use of artificial intelligence (AI) and information technology (IT) techniques. As the sustainability targets for 2030–2050 increasingly become a tougher challenge, society, company managers and policymakers require more support from AI and IT in general. How can the AI-based and IT-based smart decision-support tools help implementation of circular economy principles from micro to macro scales?

This chapter provides a conceptual framework about the current status and future development of smart decision-support tools for facilitating the circular transition of smart industry, focussing on the implementation of the industrial symbiosis (IS) practice. IS, which is aimed at replacing production inputs of one company with wastes generated by a different company, is considered as a promising strategy towards closing the material, energy and waste loops. Based on the principles of a circular economy, the utility of such practices to close resource loops is analyzed from a functional and operational perspective. For each life cycle phase of IS businesses – e.g., opportunity identification for symbiotic business, assessment of the symbiotic business and sustainable operations of the business – the role played by decision-support tools is described and embedding smartness in these tools is discussed.

Based on the review of available tools and theoretical contributions in the field of IS, the characteristics, functionalities and utilities of smart decision-support tools are discussed within a circular economy transition framework. Tools based on recommender algorithms, machine learning techniques, multi-agent systems and life cycle analysis are critically assessed. Potential improvements are suggested for the resilience and sustainability of a smart circular transition.

Since the 19th century, peace movements have consistently called on women to oppose war based on their roles as mothers and citizens. The women's rights and women's peace groups that participated in the anti-war movement of the 2000s continue this pattern drawing on both maternalist and egalitarian frames in their mobilizations. This chapter seeks to understand the forces that shape individual perceptions of the persuasiveness of these frames using face-to-face survey data collected at three 2004 demonstrations. The analyses show that different frames appeal to people with different levels of movement experience. The maternalism frame is negatively correlated with social movement experience and the egalitarian feminist frame is positively correlated. I extrapolate from this finding that that the maternalism frame may serve as a recruitment frame and that the egalitarian frame may serve as a retention frame. The conclusion theorizes that rather than thinking of women's groups that use different framing in oppositional contexts, it may be useful to think of the two sets of social movement organizations as working together in a symbiotic relationship that draws in new participants and maintains existing adherents through the use of distinctly different frames. This paper applies social movement framing theory in two unconventional ways: (1) it focuses on framing reception and the way that frames link individuals with organizations; (2) it encourages social movement scholars to think about the relationship between different frames within a broader movement and proposes an alternate conception of frame competition.

Circular economy (CE) has gained the attention of the business community with the promise of several trillions of dollars to be gained from finding productive uses for waste materials, and developing new business models focused on extending and reimagining the useful life of products. Industrial symbiosis (IS) involves the shared management of resources among multiple firms, most often within some geographic proximity. IS is particularly focused on the reuse of secondary materials, such as industrial by-products, for which conventional recycling does not exist. IS and CE represent a radical reconceptualization of business models from individual to collective competitive advantage with private and public benefits. IS has been recognized as a novel strategy for businesses and regions interested in implementing the CE. In this chapter, we explore the conditions and circumstances in which IS could play a pivotal role in increasing circularity and sustainability in diverse supply networks.

As comparativists of education are well aware, over the second half of the 20th century there was a dramatic increase in the pace of educational expansion around the world. This revolution has made the world a schooled place both in terms of enrollment rates and increased average total years in schooling. What has been particularly noticeable is the degree to which governments in all types of nations have come to see that education plays a central role in the future development of the nation's human capital, and in turn governments have become the main providers of schooling. This alone is a significant shift from anything ever seen before the 20th century. Further this remarkable expansion of education has fostered notable homogeneity of goals, aims, and basic organizational forms of elementary and secondary schooling and, more recently, higher education.

There is an evolving literature on criminal entrepreneurship which situates it as a sub-topic of the organised crime literature and either mythologies and elevates the criminal entrepreneur to Mafioso status or ascribes it to being an activity carried out by criminal cartels; or else it trivialises and minimises it as being ‘White-Collar Criminality’. In reality, entrepreneurship pervades everyday criminal life as it pervades the everyday practices of policing. In this chapter, the author acknowledges the existence of a ‘Crimino-Entrepreneurial Interface’ populated by a cast of criminal actors including the ubiquitous ‘Businessman Gangster’. These criminally entrepreneurial actors operate within a specific milieu or ‘Enterprise Model of Crime’ and operate alongside the legitimate ‘Entrepreneurial Business Community’. Within the two conjoined systems, there is a routine exchange of interactions either parasitical or symbiotic and these coalesce to form an ecosystem of enterprise crime in which it is not only the ubiquitous criminal entrepreneur who is present but a veritable cast of entrepreneurially motivated criminal actors. As well as the established business community there is a parallel, alternative community which is situated in the so-called ‘Criminal Areas’ where the traditional criminal fraternity carry out their nefarious entrepreneurial activities. Within such areas, an underclass exists which provides the criminal workforce for organised crime. The traditional criminal ecosystem is the natural habitat for the police, and it is around this activity that police are traditionally organised. A perpetual cycle of crime is set up which requires policing, but this leaves an unpoliced void which the entrepreneurial criminals exploit. It is necessary to understand the criminal places and spaces exploited by Organised Crime and what roles other criminal actors and facilitators play in the enterprise model. It is also necessary to understand the so-called ‘Perverse Model of Policing’ which distorts and magnifies the true scale of the problem and to appreciate how Serious and Organised Crime corrupt and infiltrate the legitimate ‘upperworld’ before one can understand the true scale of entrepreneurialism in policing and criminal contexts.

The chapter demonstrates that one way to read recent developments in national curriculum in nations around the globe is as both expressions of and responses to globalization. Additionally, the chapter argues that curriculum making today is affected by ever-changing imbrications between local, national, regional and global relationships. Examples of this include the curriculum impacts actual and potential of the OECD's testing regime and aspirations in relation to curriculum and the EU's creation of a European education policy space. The more recent rise of new nationalisms and ethnonationalism is seen to have potential impact on national curriculum. Some consideration is also given to the content of the curriculum and the contemporary focus on both disciplinary knowledge and on what sorts of people schools should produce; both it is argued are responses to globalization. The ways the message systems (curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation) sit in a symbiotic relationship with each other and the impact of the strengthened significance of international and large-scale assessments on the enactment of the curriculum are also documented. Some brief account is provided of the enhanced involvement of EdTech companies producing online curricula and the ways the pandemic has accelerated this development with the concerning potential for the privatization of the curriculum.

An issue that is becoming yet more relevant to modern manufacturers is that of flexibility. As life cycles become shorter a manufacturing firm can easily be left with redundant stock and dated processes. In Taiwan this issue has been addressed at several levels, this case study describes one such project. A Taiwanese academic conducted a study, gaining business acceptance of a hierarchical set of theoretical flexibility factors, then rearranging these via pictorial representations of fuzzy logic-derived plane surfaces, and finally re-presenting them to business as a set of ordered propositions designed to identify the key factors contributing to flexibility. The learning points relate, first, to the empirical facts uncovered about the specific factors that have a major bearing on manufacturing flexibility. These factors are, of course, specific to Taiwan and the current environment there. Second, though, is the more enduring illustration of a mixed-method case approach; where interviews, fuzzy logic analytical methods, and pictorial representation of the fuzzy logic output all combine to give clear guidance to managers of an industrial sector under stress, and to the policy makers who exert significant control over their environment.