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The purpose of this study is to determine whether the implementation of a performance management system comprising some traditional management practices (management process and organizational behavior modification) lead to an ethical organizational environment and improved employee performance.

A structural model is theorized and assessed using data from samples of full-time employees in the USA and Brazil. Partial least squares–structural equation modeling is used.

The findings of this study suggest that management process and organizational behavior modification directly and positively impact the ethical environment, and the ethical environment directly and positively impacts employee performance. The management process and organizational behavior modification indirectly impact employee performance through an ethical environment.

Although this theorized model was tested and provided significant results for implementing the management practices suggested, it is strongly recommended that other random data samples be used to analyze the theorized model and assess to reconfirm the results. In addition, incorporating the ethical environment construct within a larger model that includes other potential antecedents, such as management principles, and other potential outcomes, such as organizational commitment, job satisfaction and workplace optimism, is recommended.

This study provides management practitioners with empirical evidence that implementing a performance management system consisting of the management process and organizational behavior modification will enhance both the ethical environment and organizational trust, which, in turn, will lead to improved individual employee performance. Based on the theoretically and statistically supported framework, managers can improve the performance of their subordinates. The results further support the assertions that managers must implement the management process along with organizational behavior modifications to improve employee performance through an ethical environment and organizational trust

The general conclusion from this study is that good management practices in the form of the management process and organizational behavior modification are inherently ethical. Furthermore, when implemented and consistently maintained by managers, these practices will result in an organizational environment that supports ethical behavior and engenders a high level of trust. The results of this study demonstrate a significant contribution to the existing literature, in that good management is tied, in fact, directly to ethics and trust.

The results provide evidence that good management in the form of the management process and organizational behavior modification yields both a positive ethical environment and improved employee performance. Practitioners are provided with evidence that reaffirms the need to define expectations for employees and to provide the necessary resources and positive reinforcement to fulfill the expectations. This study is one of the first to directly assess the impact of traditional management practices on an ethical environment.

This study aims to contribute to the field of customer portfolio management by proposing a novel approach rooted in dialectic critical realism (DCR). DCR, as an ontological theory, enables a fundamental reimagining of customer portfolio management as a dialectic process. The conceptualized dialectic portfolio management is motivated by the concept of “absence”, akin to Hegelian “antithesis”, which highlights limitations, problems and tensions in portfolio management. In essence, “absence” serves as a diagnostic tool that directs portfolio actions towards resolving problems by pursuing a more comprehensive “totality”, similar to the Hegelian notion of “synthesis”.

This conceptual paper theorizes DCR in business marketing and customer portfolio management.

DCR conceptualizes customer portfolios as relational structures characterized by omissions and tensions. These issues are addressed through a dialectic synthesis aimed at achieving a more comprehensive “totality”. Consequently, DCR guides portfolio management to continually re-think the connections and distinctions that define a portfolio within its network context. This dialectic process is facilitated by a novel vocabulary that enhances the understanding of network and portfolio relations, incorporating concepts such as “intrapermeations”, “existential constitutions”, “intra-connections” and “intensive” and “extensive” portfolio practices.

This study aims to foster a fresh and process-oriented perspective on portfolio management, drawing inspiration from the growing demand for enriched dialectic theorizing within the realm of business marketing. The adoption of a dialectic process orientation based on DCR revolutionizes the comprehension of portfolio management by fundamentally reimagining the underlying ontological assumptions that underpin the existing body of literature on customer portfolios. Moreover, DCR asserts that ethical considerations are inextricably linked to human experiences and associated practices, emphasizing ethics as an integral component of customer portfolio management.

Because family businesses are highly complex enterprises, researchers need appropriate theoretical and methodological tools to study them. The neoconfigurational perspective and its accompanying method, qualitative comparative analysis, are particularly well suited to phenomena characterized by complex causality, but their uptake in family business research has been slow and fragmented. To remedy this, the authors highlight their unique ability to address research questions for which other approaches are not well suited and discuss how they might be applied to family business phenomena.

The authors introduce the core tenets of the neoconfigurational perspective and how its set-theoretic epistemology differs from traditional approaches to theorizing and analysis. The authors then use a dataset of family firms to present a primer on conducting qualitative comparative analysis and interpreting the results.

The authors find that family firm resources can be combined in multiple ways to affect business survival, suggesting that resources are substitutable and complementary. The authors discuss how the unique features of the neoconfigurational approach, namely equifinality, conjunctural causation and causal asymmetry, can be fruitfully applied to break new ground in scholarly understanding of family businesses.

This article allows family business researchers to apply the neoconfigurational approach without first having to consult multiple and disparate sources often written for other disciplines. This article explicates how to leverage the theoretical and empirical advantages of the neoconfigurational approach in the context of family businesses, supporting a more widespread adoption of the neoconfigurational perspective in family business research.

The study examines how adopting e-paisa technology (a mobile payment system) enhances micro-entrepreneurs' perceived success and subjective well-being during the COVID-19 global pandemic. The study also theorizes the moderating effects of gender through a moderated-mediation model.

The data are collected from 282 micro-entrepreneurs in Pakistan using a two-week time-lagged approach to test the hypothesized framework. The analysis was conducted using the PROCESS macro moderated-mediation method.

The results affirm that adopting e-paisa technology positively relates to perceived entrepreneurial success, ultimately increasing the entrepreneur's subjective well-being. Furthermore, in hypothesized moderated-mediation paths, the moderation effect of gender was stronger for women than men.

From the perspective of diversity, equality and inclusion, adopting a digital mobile payment system can be regarded as a catalyst for the inclusion of women entrepreneurs in marginalized communities, enabling them to continue their micro-businesses in times of global crises. Further, it is also suggested that public–private sector partnerships are essential for promoting a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem that subsequently leads to social and financial inclusion in marginalized communities.

The mediating role of perceived entrepreneurial success contributes to understanding the importance of psychological functioning among technology acceptance model (TAM) attributes and entrepreneurs' subjective well-being. In addition, theorizing gender differences in TAM and subjective well-being relationships revealed women's advantages, challenging the prevailing belief that women are less fortunate in entrepreneurial endeavors. This raises the need to reconsider and maybe change the perspective to consider women as a disadvantaged group in entrepreneurship.

Following the traditions of stakeholder salience theory, this paper aims to contend that some institutional investor activists and tactics have more power, legitimacy and urgency than others.

The author undertakes an empirical test of a saliency table looking at the effects of institutional investor heterogeneity on portfolio firm responses using ordinal logistic regression.

This study found heterogeneity for institutional investor type to drive firm responses but not tactic type raising the importance of the attributes of each type of investor activist. The author found a rank ordering of public pension plans, hedge funds and then private multiemployer funds in saliency to portfolio firms. In addition, the use of proxy-based tactics did not help or hurt each investor type. Both findings challenge prior empirical work.

The rank ordering based upon the heterogeneity of institutional investor activists and their tactical interactions are tested providing empirical evidence of the most influential activist investors and tactics in one study, which is rare in the literature.

With 43.2 million coronavirus cases and 525,000 deaths in 2022, India ranked second worldwide, after the United States (84.6 million cases and 1 million deaths), according to the latest available June 2022 COVID-19 impact data.

Amid people’s growing mistrust in the government, India’s news media enhanced the nation’s distinguished designation as the world’s largest and most populous democracy. India’s news media inform, educate, empower, and entertain a surging population of 1.4 billion people, which is roughly one-sixth of the world’s people.

Drawing upon the media agendamelding theoretical framework, we conducted a case study research into interplay between two prominent democratic institutions, the media and the government, to analyze the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in redefining India’s networked society.

India’s COVID-19 pandemic aggravated internecine tensions between media and government relating to four key freedom issues: (1) world’s largest COVID-19 lockdown affecting 1.3 billion Indians from March 25, 2020 to August 2020 with extensions and five-phased re-openings, to restrict the spread of COVID-19; (2) Internet shutdowns; (3) media censorship during the 1975–1977 “Emergency”; and (4) unabated murders of journalists in India.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused deleterious problems debilitating the tensions between the media and the government, India’s journalists thrived by speaking truth to power. This study delineates key aspects of India’s media agendamelding that explicates how the people of India form their media agendas. India’s news audiences meld media messages from newspapers, television, and social media to form a picture of the issues, insights, and ideas that define their lives and times in the 21st century digital age.

The purpuse of this study is to answer the following two questions. Do conflict management efforts mitigate the recurrence and severity of civil conflict? If so, how? Do some conflict management strategies fare better than others in these tasks? This study theorizes about the connection between the costliness of a conflict management strategy – with respect to both the disputants and third parties – and civil conflict outcomes. This theory produces two contradictory predictions: that more costly strategies either increase or decrease violence. This study not only adjudicates between these two possibilities but also incorporates the role of timing. The early use of more costly strategies, for example, may encourage disputants to reduce violence in civil conflicts.

To evaluate the predications that the authors derive from their theoretical argument, the authors quantitatively analyze the effect of conflict management strategies’ relative cost on various measures of civil conflict recurrence and severity. The authors first identify the set of international–civil militarized conflicts (I-CMCs) during the period 1946–2010. I-CMCs contain two dimensions – interstate and intrastate – making them the most complex and dangerous form of militarized conflict. To each I-CMC, the authors then link all third-party attempts to manage the I-CMC’s civil conflict dimension. Finally, after developing quantitative indicators, a series of regression equations explore the relationships of primary interest.

Two main findings emerge. First, when third parties use a relatively more costly conflict management strategy to manage a civil conflict (e.g. a peace operation or military intervention, as opposed to mediation), the severity of the conflict increases, while conflict recurrence rates remain unchanged. Second, this study uncovers a trade-off. The early use of a relatively more costly management strategy lowers a civil conflict’s severity in the short-term. It also, however, increases the likelihood – and speed with which – civil conflict recurs. The timing of certain conflict management strategies matters.

Scholars typically isolate conflict management strategies in number (i.e. consider efforts as independent of one another, even those within the same conflict) and kind (i.e. examine mediation but not peace operations). This study, in contrast, includes the following: the full menu of conflict management strategies available to third parties – negotiation, mediation, adjudication/arbitration, peace operations, sanctions and military intervention – over a lengthy time period (1946–2010); theorizes about the relative merits of these strategies; and considers the timing of certain conflict management efforts. In so doing, it highlights a policy trade-off and proposes promising areas for future research.

This paper aims to examine how auditors make sense of the ill-theorized and contentious notion of other comprehensive income (OCI), specifically by uncovering their use of metaphors to make OCI plausible and intelligible.

This interpretative paper draws on a collection of 21 interviews with experienced auditors. The analysis first uncovers metaphors that naturally surface within the talk and sensemaking of auditors about OCI (elicited metaphors). The authors then encapsulate these elicited metaphors into second-order constructs (projected metaphors) to synthesize and further explain auditors’ practical sensemaking.

Auditors conceive OCI as a “safety” that ensures the well-functioning of fair value accounting, metaphorically qualifying this notion as a “necessary evil”, a “passage obligé”, and a “parking lot” resolving fair value-related issues and aberrations. Auditors also metaphorize OCI as a “purifier” that allows “polluted”, “noisy”, and “unloved” items to be “parked” outside net income.

The study’s findings further the understanding of auditors’ tendency to remain uncritical throughout their sensemaking process. Making sense of professional standards of practice through metaphors indubitably involves shadowing and silencing other worldviews.

This paper extends knowledge of auditors’ sensemaking, specifically showing how auditors easily make sense of complex notions even in the absence of conceptual grounds. This study also highlights that metaphors are a powerful sensemaking device that auditors mobilize to render complex notions intelligible and mitigate IFRS inconsistencies.

The paper discusses how the management of a sports and fashion company, which we refer to as NULMA, successfully applied the neo/normative control technology “karma organisation” and gained employee engagement. Whereas other studies have documented employee resistance to organisational cultures when used for managerial control, our case demonstrates resistance to management practices that employees find inconsistent with the dominant karma culture.

The study is based on a six-year longitudinal organisational at-home ethnography conducted by one of the authors using methods of both participant and non-participant observation, semi-structured interviews and collaborative production of secondary data in the case organisation.

While our research shows that management can successfully apply neo/normative control which employees accept and support, we further show that employees mobilise the same values to resist management when it fails to deliver on the commitments and promises of the organisational culture.

The study contributes to the literature on organisational culture and, in particular, neo/normative control by theorising employee resistance as being by “accident”, by which we mean an inherent negative potentiality co-invented and released by managers establishing a “karma organisation”. Our theorising culminates in a discussion of the study’s implications for research and practice.

The purposes of this paper are to delve into the “liability of foreignness” among immigrants and to explore factors that may enhance or moderate such liability while obtaining jobs in host countries. We explore the competition for jobs in a host country among foreign-born individuals from various backgrounds and local residents, by examining such factors as their human capital, as well as, for the foreign-born, their duration of residence in the host country.

Applying configurational theorizing, we propose that the presence of specific human capital can help reduce the challenges associated with the “liability of foreignness” for migrants who have shorter durations of stay in the host country, and, to a lesser extent, for female migrants. Our study draws upon extensive career data spanning several decades and involving 249 employees within a Danish multinational enterprise.

We find that specific human capital helps established immigrants in general, although female immigrants are more vulnerable. We furthermore find a strong “gender liability” in the industry even for local females, including returnees in the host countries. Our findings suggest that for immigrants, including returnees, career building requires a mix of right human capital and tenure in the host country, and that career building is especially challenging for female immigrants.

While the concept of “liability of foreignness” – focussing on discrimination faced by immigrants in the labour market – has been brought to the fore, a notable gap exists in empirical research pertaining to studies aiming at disentangling potential means to overcome such liability, as well as in studies seeking to explore this issue from a stance of gendered experience.