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The purpose of this paper is to explore how and why corporate social responsibility (CSR) is diffused within the organisation and investigate the factors that influence the diffusion of CSR in the context of a developing country.

Drawing on the diffusion of innovations theory, data were collected from a Nepalese airline company through semi-structured interviews supported by relevant documentary scrutiny.

The findings of this study indicate that the airline company’s CSR practices are aimed at enhancing organisational performance. The adoption of CSR is also seen as a proactive strategy to avoid any future risk associated with their environmental impact. The findings reveal that organisations’ strategy, cultural values and beliefs and top management support are important predictors of the adoption of CSR.

The empirical findings of this study provide valuable insights into how CSR can enhance organisations’ performance if CSR is used in a strategic way. The study also highlights the important role of cultural values and beliefs in the secondary stage of adoption (or internal diffusion), as successful implementation of CSR is highly unlikely to happen without focusing on appropriate culture within the organisation.

This study extends research on diffusion of innovations literature by focusing on both the initial and post-adoption process (primary and secondary stage of diffusion) of CSR within a single airline company operating in a developing country, Nepal.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how personality traits influence participative behaviour in an Online Cancer Community (OCC).

Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 42 users of one of the largest OCCs in Australia – Cancer Council Online Community in New South Wales (NSW).

The results showed that extraversion, emotional stability and agreeableness traits influence posting behaviour, whereas the conscientiousness trait influences lurking behaviour. The openness trait did not affect either posters or lurkers’ online behaviour.

The research highlights the pivotal role of personality traits in users’ decisions to post or lurk using a multi-theory perspective that combined the social exchange theory and the Five-Factor Model. Future studies should explore personality traits that can benefit from online participation in an OCC to transition only lurkers who may benefit from posting.

Insights from the study inform OCC practitioners and moderators when designing the OCC platform. Except for the openness trait, lurkers and posters exhibited different attitudes, which indicates that integrating these findings in the OCC design can facilitate adopting strategies to elicit more participation by OCC users.

This is the first study that explored the role of personality traits in users’ decisions to participate in an OCC.

As educational technologies are more widely adopted in higher education teaching and learning, publishers often include online resources to accompany their textbook offerings. The purpose of this paper is to report the results of a study forming part of a larger ongoing evaluation of the third party software product WileyPLUS.

The paper describes the integration of the publisher's tools into a specific curriculum context and takes a critical look at the pedagogical effectiveness of the software in this context. A mixed‐methods approach is taken in the study, using a small postgraduate accounting unit as a case study.

While many students reported positive experiences with the third party resources, technical issues were a barrier to their effectiveness and many students did not engage with the optional resources. The unit convenor's experience was largely positive.

Although it may be tempting for unit convenors to adopt these tools and resources as readily available and easy to use, it is important that they are integrated into the curriculum and that students are supported in their use.

Outcomes include a list of critical success factors and an evaluation framework that could be of use to other academics seeking to embed third party resources into their teaching.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of performance measurement systems in organisational effectiveness in the context of the financial services sector within a developing country.

Using the mail survey method data were collected from 69 financial institutions operating in Nepal. Multivariate analysis, in particular multiple regression analysis was employed to test the hypotheses.

The results suggest that non-financial measures and feedback are tightly intertwined with organisational effectiveness. While institutions are focused on using the performance measures concerning internal business process perspective, less emphasis is placed on using customer and employee-related performance measures because they are considered less significant to organisational effectiveness. The findings also reveal that strategy-related feedback is considered more critical by management, as opposed to performance and staff. The study also provides evidence that 40.58 per cent of the financial institutions in Nepal had implemented the Balanced Scorecard, which is considered to be high when compared with other developing countries.

The findings provide managers with valuable insights pertaining to the role of non-financial performance measures and the importance of feedback in improving organisational effectiveness, which could assist them in (re) aligning their performance measurement practices.

The findings of this study contributes to the limited management accounting literature on performance measurement and the impact on organisational effectiveness by providing evidence from the financial services sector within the context of a developing country.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a way of thinking about the technical and social subsystems in the context of e‐commerce adoption.

An interpretive research approach was used to investigate the employee management issues in service industries as they implemented B2C e‐commerce. Two case studies were selected, both retail banks in Australia. One case study was a major bank, the other a smaller bank in a niche market.

Employees who interact with customers using B2C technologies require different levels of skill and capability than those required in face‐to‐face interactions. This has implications for human resource management processes such as job design, recruitment and retention, performance management and training.

The study was small in scale and therefore limited in scope. Other service organisations and industries may have quite different information ecologies and business strategies.

The coactive commerce system provides a concrete way for researchers and practitioners to better align technology, customers and employees to achieve competitive advantage.

This research shows that it is important to understand B2C e‐commerce technologies in conjunction with business practices and in their broader context. It is important to understand how a service organisation's business strategy, technology strategy, business processes and employee management work together to provide an appropriate level of service to customers and achieve sustainable competitive advantage and strategic positioning. This is a complex set of factors.

The coactive commerce system extends the socio‐technical framework to provide a more explicit way to analyse both the social and technical subsystems in an organisation by integrating the human resource management aspects into the theoretical mix in the electronic commerce and information systems literature. This is important because the employee interaction with the customer is the way the customer perceives the organisation.

The paper aims to introduce this special issue on LEAD, the research management system under which the papers collected in this issue were produced. The paper explains the background that led to the establishment of the system, presents a short history of LEAD, describes how it is managed, and details the various stages of a typical LEAD “cycle”. It concludes with a brief description of the papers to follow.

Reflective description.

LEAD is a successful collaborative system for organising “action research” in learning and teaching within a business faculty. The papers in this issue serve to demonstrate the system's outcomes.

The paper is essentially descriptive. The described system illustrates one way of organising collaborative research in a university faculty, in this instance focused on research into learning and teaching in a business faculty.

LEAD provides a model for managing collaborative university research, one that could be applied in any university faculty and across different research areas. Apart from illustrating the potential of the system, each of the papers collected in this issue is of interest in its own right, as a study of learning and teaching in a particular disciplinary context.

The LEAD system is a novel way of organising learning and teaching research in a university context.