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This article addresses recent calls in the literature for advancing our understanding of public affairs consultants and their role conceptions. By testing and further exploring self-perceptions of public affairs consultants the study aims to offer new insight into how consultants define and view their occupational role.

The study draws on a nationwide survey with public affairs consultants in Sweden.

Four main role conceptions were identified (advocate, do-gooder, expert and intermediary). Further, the study tests how personal and professional characteristics correlate with different role conceptions, by viewing professional experience and consultants' selection of clients. Data also suggest that consultants' background in politics does not promote any specific role perception. Finally, the findings also show that how consultants choose clients is a divider in the industry, where some act as passive intermediaries while other take a more active role in their choice of clients.

The findings enhance our understanding of public affairs as a field, and specifically about the modelling of professional roles amongst consultants. The empirical results in this study show how contemporary role typologies needs to be extended to better capture the specificities of consultants' roles in public affairs. By addressing the issue of how consultants choose clients the study engages with the complex debate of whether consultants ought to act as objective or subjective agents and hence join the conversation on ethics in public affairs.

The authors examine how performance measurement systems (PMSs) and academic agency influence the meaning of research quality in practice. The worries are that the notion of research quality is becoming too simplistically and narrowly determined by research quality's measurable proxies and that academics, especially manager-academics, do not sufficiently realise this risk. Whilst prior literature has covered the effects of performance measurement in the university sector broadly and how PMSs are mobilised locally, there is only little understanding of whether and how PMSs affect the meaning of research quality in practice.

The study is designed as a comparative case study of two university faculties in Finland. The role of conceptual analysis plays a notable role in the study, too.

The authors find that manager-academics of the two examined faculties have rather similar conceptual understandings of research quality. However, there were differences in the degree of slippage between the “espoused-meaning” of research quality and “meaning-in-practice” of research quality. The authors traced these differences to how the local PMS and manager-academics’ agency relate to one another within the context of increasing global and national performance pressures. The authors developed a tentative framework for the various “styles of agency”. This suggests how the relationship between the local PMS and manager-academics’ exerted agency shapes the “degrees of freedom” of the meaning of research quality in practice.

Given that research quality lies at the heart of academic work, the authors' paper indicates that exploring the three matters – performance measurement, the agency of manager-academics and the meaning of research quality in practice – in combination is crucial for the sustainability of the academe. The authors contribute to the literature by detailing the way in which local PMS and manager-academics' agency have material impacts on what research quality means in practice. The authors conclude by highlighting the pressing need for manager-academics to exercise the agency in efforts to safeguard a broad and pluralistic understanding of research quality in practice.

This paper aims to identify specific challenges and opportunities when crafting literature reviews of qualitative accounting research. In addition, it offers potential remedies to frequent challenges when conducting such reviews.

This piece is based on recent methodological advice on conducting literature reviews and my own experience when conducting and publishing reviews that primarily cover qualitative accounting research.

The author chart three typical advantages and three typical use cases of literature reviews of qualitative accounting research, as well as the typical process steps and outputs of such reviews. Along with these process steps, The author identifies three overarching specific challenges when conducting such reviews and discusses potential remedies. Overall, this paper suggests that literature reviews of qualitative accounting research feature idiosyncratic challenges but offer specific opportunities at the same time.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is among the first to offer advice on the specific challenges and opportunities when conducting literature reviews of qualitative accounting research.

The main objective of this study is to consider how to benefit efficiently from the significant potential of humanitarian operations by individuals. For this purpose, this study aims to assess failure factors in humanitarian supply chain operations after the Kermanshah earthquake considering the role of all parties, focusing on individuals who did not wish to work with formal organisations on the whole. In the aftermath of the Kermanshah earthquake, which occurred on 12 November 2017, improvised groups of Iranian civilians from all over the country played an important role in humanitarian supply chain operations as individuals. Although most of these groups sincerely intended to help the affected society, victims could not benefit properly from these significant potential humanitarian actions. On the contrary, these potential actions caused some issues during humanitarian operations, such as blocking roads, inappropriate last-mile distribution, wasting resources and so on.

This research study considers mixed methods, including an on-site survey, semi-structured interviewing and a questionnaire designed for statistical analyses. The analysis included 140 responses to the questionnaire, semi-structured interviews with 32 affected families, interviews with 5 emergency managers from the Housing Foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran and on-site survey reports.

This study presents a framework for humanitarian supply chain management to deal with future disasters in the same area or areas with similar characteristics to the case study. In general, the results of this study demonstrate that the nature of humanitarian supply chain operations makes it impossible to consider that these operations are free of challenges. However, several influential factors, such as training humanitarian actors and integrated management, might considerably increase the efficiency of humanitarian operations by individuals.

This study highlights the influential factors of inappropriate humanitarian operations by individuals, derived from an analysis of the Kermanshah case and literature review. The authors suggest a framework to benefit from the significant potential of individuals with wide-ranging experiences and proficiency, for future cases similar to the case study.

The purpose of this article was to identify factors impacting burnout, resilience and quality of life in rural career firefighters. In addition, sources of stress and the impact of generational differences were explored.

An exploratory cross-sectional survey was conducted at a rural career fire department.

The findings of the project indicate that the firefighters had high levels of compassion satisfaction (CS) and relatively low levels of secondary traumatic stress and burnout; displayed moderate to high psychological resilience and the majority felt moderate to high organizational support, but there was a noticeable minority who did not feel supported by the department. Findings indicate that organizational support is significantly related to both burnout and resilience. The majority of the men (88.3%) reported moderate to high risk for alcohol-related problems and over three-quarters (78.6%) reported binge drinking behavior in the past year. Qualitative findings highlight generational differences and chain of command challenges as primary stressors.

This is a unique study in that it focuses on a rural career department. What was found were issues similar to those facing urban career fire departments.

This study aims to explore the relationship between social commerce purchase intention and consumer psychological factors (i.e. resilience, vulnerability and personality traits) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Drawing on social cognitive theory (SCT), an econometrical behavioral model was developed to explore the key determinants of online purchase behavior of 303 students in Greece. The research data were collected with a two-wave online survey (pre- and during the pandemic) which was distributed randomly to students in Generation Z.

A series of regression analyses revealed a positive effect of openness and a negative impact of extraversion and neuroticism on internet, Instagram and Facebook purchases during the pandemic. Findings suggest that loneliness serves as a moderator, while resilience and vulnerability have a positive effect on social media purchase behavior.

This study provides insights and implications for social commerce marketers and sheds light on the determinants of online purchase intentions of young consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Elaborating on SCT, this study provides novel insights into young consumers’ internet use and online purchase behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic (i.e. longitudinal approach), by focusing on consumer vulnerability and resilience while also embedding personality traits and mental health aspects (i.e. loneliness levels during the pandemic).