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Adopting Mapping Literature, the purpose of this study is to notice the tendency in defining contextualism through extrinsic aspects neglecting the intrinsic ones generating three theoretical gaps in understanding contextualism, especially in terms of (1) physical/cultural aspects (P/C); (2) traditional vs contemporary architecture (T/C); and (3) place identity (PI).

A directed systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted to investigate the Web of Science and Google Scholar engines for the related studies, resulting in 66 texts of book chapters, conferences, articles and practitioners’ texts. Using the PRISMA reporting method, the study presented the SLR procedure that narrowed the related studies to 66 texts of book chapters, conferences, articles and practitioners’ texts. Both consensus and debates in understanding the relation between contextualism and (T/C, P/C and PI) were re-visited (see Appendix).

According to the findings, the studies tend to address contextualism through either extrinsic or intrinsic values. The undefined balance between extrinsic and intrinsic aspects in understanding and creating contextual architecture seems to be the common reason why the three theoretical gaps exist.

This paper did not only conduct an SLR investigation on the topic, which is limited in the field, but it also highlighted the need for further and constant discussions despite the previous one to improve the understanding of contextual architecture.

Organizations create mission statements and emphasize core values. Inculcating those values depends on the way employees are treated and nurtured. Therefore, there seems to be a strong relationship between human resource development (HRD) practices and organizational values. The paper aims to empirically examine this relationship.

The study measured employees' rather than management perspective. A sample of 239 employees from eight organizations responded to a questionnaire which measured the effectiveness of employee development practices and cherished organizational values.

HRD practices like potential appraisal and promotion, learning/training, performance guidance and development were positively related to organizational values of collaboration, creativity, quality, delegation, and humane treatment. However, performance appraisal system, career planning, and contextual analysis variables were negatively associated with values such as trust and creativity.

The study was exploratory in nature. Further studies are needed on a larger sample to examine why some HRD practices like performance appraisal, career planning and contextual analysis contributed negatively to organizational values such as trust and creativity.

The result of the study can be useful in designing effective employee development programs that promote cherished organizational values.

Little empirical knowledge exists on HRD and organizational values linkages in the context of transitional economies like Malaysia. The paper makes a modest attempt to fill the gap.

The very contextual nature of most mitigating evidence runs counter to America’s individualistic culture. Prior research has found that capital jurors are unreceptive to most mitigating circumstances, but no research has examined the capital sentencing decisions of trial judges. This study fills that gap through a content analysis of eight judicial sentencing opinions from Delaware. The findings indicate that judges typically dismiss contextualizing evidence in their sentencing opinions and instead focus predominately on the defendant’s culpability. This finding calls into question the ability of guided discretion statutes to ensure the consideration of mitigation and limit arbitrariness in the death penalty.

The purpose of this paper is to further research on the Kaplan and Norton (1996) balanced scorecard (BSC) model after having discerned that previous work has so far neglected to explore the interrelationships between the model’s dimensions and the influence contextual factors may have.

The data set used to meet this paper’s main objectives was collected using a structured online survey sent to the member companies of the Catalan Association of Accounting and Management (ACCID). Specifically, the surveys were directed to the heads of the finance departments. From the 3,500 mails sent, 336 companies decided to participate in the study. These figures represent an acceptable response rate of 9.6 per cent. As 83 of the companies declared that they would only use financial indicators, the final study sample totalled 253 firms.

The results demonstrate the mediating effects intermediate constructs have, and highlight how important leadership is in achieving success or high performance. These results follow on from previous empirical literature that analysed other management systems such as the Baldrige, the EFQM or the Deming models. In addition, some differences in the relationships as per the contextual factors studied have been detected. Therefore, the conclusions reached in this paper will be of interest to both academics and professionals in perceiving and understanding the logical flow of consequences any decision taken will produce.

The authors’ main contributions are: to have strictly followed the theoretical BSC model by combining both formative and reflective dimensions using the emerging partial least squares methodology; to have based the study on 253 firms and to have used 37 category indicators which, to our knowledge, are more than any other previous work; to have developed a mediation model designed to appreciate the interrelationships the dimensions in the BSC model have; to have analysed the possible differences there are in the interrelationships between the dimensions using two widely accepted influencing contextual factors in current literature, namely a firm’s size and its typology.

As organizations try to provide quality assurance from ISO certification, the importance of people management through better HR management assumes greater significance. This paper aims to examine this issue. It seeks to compare selected ISO certified SMEs with non‐ISO certified SMEs on several HR practices.

A sample of 292 employees drawn from ten SMEs, five of them ISO certified, responded to a questionnaire which measured the adequacy of the following HRM systems: career system (manpower planning and recruitment, potential assessment, career planning), work system (role analysis, contextual analysis, performance appraisal), development system (training and learning, performance guidance, knowledge sharing, other means of competency development), self‐renewal system (role efficacy, OD practices, action‐oriented research), and HRD system (HRD climate, organizational values, quality orientation, reward and recognition).

The results indicated a moderate rating for most of the HRM systems in all the organizations including those with ISO certifications. However, ISO certified companies were perceived to be doing better on managing career system, conducting contextual analysis for goal setting and quality orientation. In the rest of the cases the differences were not significant.

The findings suggest that organizations need to go beyond quality assurance to organization‐wide quality management through improvement in HR systems and practices.

The paper provides empirical knowledge on HR systems and practices and the relationship of these factors with organizational quest for quality in a developing economy.

Research on sustainable consumption (SC) has shown how, faced with barriers that prevent them from embracing a sustainable lifestyle, consumers experience classic symptoms of distress. Although distress emerges as a constitutive dimension of sustainable lifestyles, research has not yet provided a comprehensive account of how consumers cope with it. This paper aims to provide such an account.

In-depth interviews were conducted with 25 people who defined themselves as sustainable consumers. A hermeneutic approach was adopted for the analysis.

The analysis shows that consumers enact two different coping strategies: adjustment or episodic coping and structural coping or deradicalization. Both sets encompass reappraisals and meaning-making strategies to maintain motivation while simultaneously appeasing tensions. They also comprise the strategic enactment of emotions to energize the self and/or to appease distress. Coping influences how SC is appraised and lived, as these practices are dynamically changed to navigate structural constraints.

SC campaigns have traditionally focused on cognitive empowerment. However, the evidence suggests that emotional empowerment could be a more effective way to promote the practice.

This paper provides the first in-depth examination of the strategies adopted to cope with distress. The analysis shows that consumers reconfigure how SC is appraised and implemented, while emphasizing the crucial role of emotion work in the coping repertoire. Although SC is stressful due to structural and social constraints, consumers are able to remain committed to it to varying degrees.

The current study probes the multi-dimensional link between total quality management (TQM) and knowledge management (KM) and investigates how different TQM's dimensions impacts KM processes and how this nexus impacts organizational performance (operational and financial performance) by considering KM as an intermediating variable between TQM and organizational performance.

Six TQM practices are taken from “Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award”, namely leadership, customer focus, strategic planning, human resource management, process management and information and analysis; KM processes include knowledge creation, acquisition, sharing and application and organizational performance comprises operational and financial performance. The researcher put together data from different sized services and manufacturing firms, from small, to medium and large firms located in the United Kingdom (UK).

The results suggested that a positive correlation existed between TQM, KM and organizational performance. KM is also shown to have quite a strong and positive influence on firm operational and financial performance and partially mediates the relationship between TQM and corporate performance. Dimensional analysis indicates that leadership, strategic planning, customer focus and HRM have a significant positive impact on all KM process, while mixed results have been found for process management and information and analysis. The contextual analysis indicates that except for knowledge creation, TQM plays an equally significant role for the majority of manufacturing establishments and services firms.

The present research makes a significant contribution to the scarce literature on the relationship between TQM and KM (mainly at dimensional level), particularly in the context of the UK, and provides a detailed understanding of the relations between different TQM and KM dimensions, and how their relationship impacts on the operational and financial performance of different sizes of manufacturing and services firms.

Highlights

1. Total quality management (TQM) enhances firms' knowledge management (KM) capabilities

2. KM partially mediates the relationship between TQM and firms' performance

3. Leadership, customer focus and process management indicated insignificant impact on knowledge creation

4. TQM and KM are equally important for all sizes manufacturing and services firms

Total quality management (TQM) enhances firms' knowledge management (KM) capabilities

KM partially mediates the relationship between TQM and firms' performance

Leadership, customer focus and process management indicated insignificant impact on knowledge creation

TQM and KM are equally important for all sizes manufacturing and services firms

This study aims to explore COVID-19-related accounting disclosures using sociological disclosure analysis (SDA) within the context of the developing economy of Bangladesh.

COVID-19-related accounting disclosures from listed banks’ annual reports have been examined using three levels of SDA: textual, contextual and sociological interpretations. Data were gathered from the banks’ 2019 and 2020 annual reports. The study uses the legitimacy theory as its theoretical framework.

The research reveals a substantial shift in corporate disclosures due to COVID-19, marked by a significant increase from 2019 to 2020. Despite regulatory and professional directives for COVID-19-specific disclosures, notable non-compliance is evident in subsequent events, going concern, fair value, financial instruments and more. Instead of assessing the implications of COVID-19 and making disclosures, companies used positive, vague and subjective wording to legitimize non-disclosure.

The study’s insights can inform regulators and policymakers in crafting effective guidelines for future crisis-related reporting like COVID-19. The research adds to the literature by methodologically using SDA to explore pandemic-specific disclosures, uncovering the interplay between disclosures, legitimacy and stakeholder engagement.

This study represents a pioneering effort in investigating COVID-19-specific disclosures. Moreover, it uses the SDA methodology along with the legitimacy theory to analyze accounting disclosures associated with COVID-19.

This article explores the influence of duality in institutional logics on internal accounting, with a focus on a Polish public university. More particularly, we answer the research question: how does illegitimacy risk arising from the divergent pressures of the institutional environment impact management accountings in this institution?

This paper seeks to uncover intricacies of notions of internal legitimacy façade, decoupling and counter-coupling in practice. It explores details of organizational responses involving management accounting aimed at reducing illegitimacy risk. Achieving good organizational access, the authors adopt a qualitative case study approach involving contextual appreciation/document analysis/participant observation/discussion with key actors: facilitating building upon theoretical argumentation through finding things out from the field.

The authors uncover and discuss organizational solutions and legitimizing manoeuvres applied, identifying four adaptation tactics in the struggle to support legitimacy that they term ‘ceremonial calculations’, ‘legitimacy labelling’, ‘blackboxing’ and ‘shadow management accounting’. These can be seen in relation to decoupling and counter-coupling. Ceremonial calculations supported the internal façade. Shadow management accounting supported pro-effectiveness. Legitimacy labelling and blackboxing helped bind these two organizational layers, further supporting legitimacy. In interaction the four tactics engendered what can be seen as a ‘counter-coupling’ of management accounting. The authors clarify impacts for management accounting.

The usual limitations of case research apply for generalizability. Theorizing of management accounting in relation to contradictory logics is advanced.

The article illuminates how management accounting can be understood vis-à-vis contradictory logics.

Elaboration of the tactics and their interaction is a theoretical and empirical contribution. Focus on a Polish university constitutes an empirical contribution.

The purpose of this paper is to explore contextual barriers to supplier development for sustainability (SDS) in global supply chains and managerial remedies to mitigate such barriers.

A dyadic case study design was adopted with a Western European buyer and six of its Chinese suppliers. The database consists of 41 interviews and 81 documents.

Contextual barriers to SDS in global supply chains derive from complexities in the sustainability concept, socio-economic differences, spatial and linguistic distance, as well as cultural differences between buyers and suppliers. Partial remedies include effective joint communications, an open organizational culture, and the fostering of cross-contextual understanding.

The findings contribute to theory development at the intersection of sustainable and global supply chain management research. They help to explain why scarce sustainability-related progress in global supply chains has occurred in recent years.

The identified barriers facilitate managerial decision making that will expedite SDS progress in global contexts.

By diffusing knowledge regarding available remedies, the study contributes to improving SDS effectiveness, thereby fostering sustainability capabilities and performance of suppliers.

This research highlights the criticality of contextual barriers to SDS. The barrier effects that stem from differing real-world conceptions of sustainability may inform future sustainable supply chain management research within and beyond SDS.