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Fundholding (the opportunity to hold a budget at practice level) has given general practitioners (GPs) purchasing power for medical services within the reformed UK National Health Service (NHS). This new purchasing power equates to financial leverage with the NHS consultants in hospitals. Argues that fundholding is presented as an opportunity for GPs to engage in a “turf battle” with the hospital consultants without this battle becoming publicly visible. Fundholding as an accounting‐based intervention masked the nature of the professional challenge which GPs launched against the consultants and, hence, allowed territorial claims to be renegotiated through the medium of contracting. This circumvented the damage to medical professional ideologies which would have ensued if intra‐professional conflicts had become overt. The empirical study which is referred to indicates that GPs are using contracts to improve processes of case management at the hospital interface (an area where consultants have failed to communicate with GPs) and to have an input into the setting of quality standards within the hospitals. The increased financial flexibility conferred through holding budgets is also enabling GPs to expand in‐house services for primary care. Theorizes the changing power relations between GPs and consultants through exploring four dimensions of intra‐professional differentiation: task specialization; client differentiation; organization of work; and career pattern. Concludes that budgets have constituted a catalyst for professional development through reconnecting the monetary bonds between the polarized professionals in British medicine. This study indicates that, as fundholding progresses, the boundary between primary and secondary care is becoming blurred; that lead fundholding GPs are being managerialized; and that the purchasing dialogue between the GPs and the Trusts is marginalizing the role of the Health Boards (bodies which had previously held sole responsibility for the co‐ordination and delivery of health care but which now have a more limited purchasing/commissioning role).

The purpose of this paper is to examine how decision-maker attributes unfold to precipitate organisational failure. The analysis brings to light how key attributes such as information-processing capabilities and human capital decay interact to bring about business decline and exit.

The study is based on an integrated review and conceptualisation of the literature.

The study articulates how a set of attributes of decision makers, i.e. human capital obsolescence, powerlessness, meaninglessness and institutional linkages, contributes to organisational failure.

The paper concludes by setting out an array of strategies of learning from others’ failures.

In spite of a growing body of research on organisational failure, scholars have placed overwhelming emphasis on ecological explanations and business failure prediction models. The study moves beyond the ecological explanations to offer a more fine-grained analysis of firm-level factors that precipitate business failure.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how knowledge inflows and outflows interact to affect performance outcomes. Though previous studies have dealt with knowledge inflows and outflows, the quality and quantity characteristics of knowledge are often not taken into account, thus leaving a research gap with regards to the effect of their interactions on performance outcomes.

Based on Poisson regression analysis, this quantitative study fills the aforementioned research gaps by analyzing the ambidextrous configurations of knowledge flows from an ambidexterity perspective and examines their effects on two-phase performance (i.e. regular season and playoffs), using a longitudinal data set of National Basketball Association transactions from the 2003-2004 to 2014-2015 season.

The results suggest that the complementarity between knowledge inflows and outflows along the quality and quantity dimensions of knowledge, respectively, has a positive impact on two-phase performance, while the imbalance between knowledge inflows and outflows under the quality and quantity dimensions of knowledge, respectively, has a negative impact on playoffs performance (Phase 2). These findings suggest that organizations can balance knowledge inflows and outflows under a single quality or quantity dimension of knowledge. Furthermore, the interaction between the quantity of the inflows of knowledge and the quality of the outflows of knowledge and the interaction between the quality of the inflows of knowledge and the quantity of the outflows of knowledge are both positively related to two-phase performance. These findings suggest that organizations can balance knowledge inflows and outflows across quality and quantity dimensions of knowledge. Finally, the effects of the interaction between knowledge inflows and outflows on playoffs performance are greater than regular-season.

Organizations should leverage ambidexterity to manage/balance knowledge inflows and outflows across quality and quantity dimensions, further enhancing performance outcomes.

This study, first, provides new insights into knowledge flows by distinguishing between the quality and quantity of knowledge, the inflows and outflows of knowledge, constructing ambidextrous configurations of knowledge flows from an ambidexterity perspective. Second, it contributes to the relationship between knowledge flows and organizational performance by revealing how ambidextrous configurations of knowledge flows exert different effects on performance outcomes. Third, it adds to the literature of ambidexterity-performance relationships and expands it to the context of sports.

This study seeks to examine the reconfiguration of professional groups in welfare service work through the lens of gendered inequalities in order to develop an inclusive research horizon that extends to the middle grade of care workers.

The research design positions workforce change within a wider social and cultural context by highlighting occupational, educational and unionist orders from the viewpoint of Finnish practical nurses.

A weakening anchorage in the welfare state and a differentiation of the patterns of recruitment, employment and industrial relations create segmentation, particular forms of exclusion, and identity instabilities. The article identifies the special vulnerability of the practical nurses institutionally embedded “in‐between” the upper and lower grades, the social and health sector, and the union traditions.

The national policy agenda on workforce change mainly follows the sectoral split and focuses on the established health professions. The unionist agenda of practical nurses in turn reflects interprofessional relationships and tribalism.

This analysis of welfare service work provides insight into social and cultural transformations related to workforce change in a segmented and culturally diverse labour force and offers reflections on the changing nature of craft unionism.

This article argues for the added value of historicised, gender and culture sensitive analysis of the tensions between policy aims, educational, occupational and unionist orders for understanding reconfiguration through inequality‐producing processes.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the aftermath of business failure (BF) by addressing: how the individual progressed and developed new ventures, how individuals changed business behaviors and practices in light of a failure, and what was the effect of previous failure on the individual’s decisions to embark on subsequent ventures.

The authors resort to qualitative methods to understand the aftermath of BF from a retrospective point of a successful entrepreneur. Specifically, the authors undertook semi-structured interviews to six entrepreneurs, three from the north of Europe and three from the south and use interpretative phenomenological analysis.

The authors found that previous failure impacted individuals strongly, being shaped by the individual’s experience and age, and their perception of blame for the failure. An array of moderator costs was identified, ranging from antecedents to institutions that were present in the individual’s lives. The outcomes are directly relatable to the failed experience by the individual. The authors also found that the failure had a significant effect on the individual’s career path.

While predicting the failure of healthy firms or the discovery of the main determinants that lead to such an event have received increasingly more attention in the last two decades, the focus on the consequences of BF is still lagging behind. The present study fills this gap by analyzing the aftermath of BF.

This paper examines the historical background of accountingization, colonization and hybridization in the health services by exploring the relationship between hospital accounting and clinical medicine in Britain between the late 1960s and the early 2000s.

The paper draws on an analysis of professional journals, government reports and other documentary sources relating to accounting and medical developments. It is informed by Abbott's sociology of professions and Eyal's sociology of expertise.

The paper shows that not only accountants but also elements within the medical profession sought to make the practice of medicine more visible, calculable and standardized, and that accounting and medical attempts to make medicine calculable interacted in a mutually reinforcing manner. Consequently, it argues that a movement towards clinical forms of quantification within the medical profession made it more open to economic calculation, which underpinned hospital accounting reforms and the accountingization, colonization or hybridization of health services.

The paper demonstrates that a fuller understanding of the relationship between accounting and public sector professions can be developed if we examine their mutual interactions rather than restricting ourselves to analyzing accounting's effects on public sector professions. The paper moreover illustrates instances of intraprofessional conflict and inter-professional cooperation, and draws on the sociology of expertise to suggests that while hospital accounting reforms have curbed the power of medical professionals, they have also enhanced the power of clinical expertise.

The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) recently proposed a global consulting credential involving a diverse set of professions including accountancy, business law, and information technology. The proposal was widely debated in the professional literature, and was a divisive issue among CPAs. In late 2001, the AICPA membership voted against any further commitment to the credential. The purpose of this paper is to examine the global credential initiative in an effort to understand why professional jurisdictional claims may fail at the theorization stage.

The paper relies primarily on a qualitative review and analysis of archival materials and published articles and commentaries relating to the global credential project.

The analysis indicates that the AICPA failed to establish either the pragmatic or moral legitimacy of the proposed credential in the eyes of the audiences. This failure appears to be attributable to the sociopolitical environment in which the credential was promoted, and to flaws in the rhetoric used by the AICPA to articulate its jurisdictional claim.

The paper demonstrates the importance of legitimacy to the ability to successfully theorize institutional changes.

This paper investigates how the AICPA theorized the global credential knowledge claim, and how theorization failed to persuade the audiences to support the credential.

This paper sets out to explore health professionals' views and experiences regarding the work culture that exists in their hospital units, and further how patients influence these experiences.

The paper employs a qualitative approach involving individual interviews with 60 health professionals in Canada employed in what is conceptualised as “open” (emergency room and maternity care) and “closed” (intensive care, head and neck surgery) units.

The paper finds that the influence of the hospital unit outweighs the influence of professional boundaries but for some groups more than for others. Health professionals in more open units tend to be less satisfied with their work, have more difficult relations with patients, and experience tensions with co‐workers and management. Those in closed units tend to be more satisfied with their work, have relatively better relations with patients and co‐workers, and tend to have more cooperative relations with management. The different structural conditions of work in open and closed units are also clearly important.

The sample for the study was self‐selected from one hospital, which may limit the generalisability of some of the findings.

The insights garnered from the study may help professionals and managers to develop unit‐specific policies to create a more positive workplace culture.

There is a growing body of research on professional culture and oganisational culture that often does not clearly delineate how the two exist concurrently. The paper explicitly investigates this issue by examining work culture across various health professional groups and also across hospital units, and further how patients figure in these experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to enrich extant understanding of the role of both agency and context in the uptake of sustainability assurance. To this end, the authors examine auditors' attempts to promote sustainability assurance and establish it as a practice requiring the professional involvement of auditors.

Applying institutional work (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006) and institutional logics (Thornton, 2002; Thornton et al., 2012) as the method theories, the authors examine interview data and a variety of documentary evidence collected in Finland, a small society characterized by social and environmental values, beliefs in functioning institutions and public trust in companies behaving responsibly.

With this study, the authors make two main contributions to extant literature. First, the authors illustrate the limits that society-level logics related to corporate social responsibility, together with the undermining or rejected institutional work of other agents, place especially on the political and cultural work undertaken by auditors. Second, the study responds to Power's (2003) call for country-specific studies by exploring a rather unique context, Finland, where societal trust in companies is arguably stronger than in many other countries and this trust appears to affect how actors perceive the need for sustainability assurance.

This is one of the few accounting studies that combines institutional logics and institutional work to study the uptake of a management fashion, in this case sustainability assurance.

Technical excess in accounting education has always been a source of discontent among educational reformers, however, two recent developments have rendered these deficiencies even more acute. First, intensified competition for traditional audit services has resulted in an increasingly inhospitable job market for accounting students. Second, predatory practices by educational, professional, and recruiting institutions have compounded the unpredictability and risk in career planning for accounting students. Explores how commercial interests and professional rivalries have settled on a technical education that produces students who are docile and compliant, sometimes bewildered and confused, and generally ill‐prepared for engaging the complexities of the changing job market. Concludes that radical changes in CPA education are needed ‐ specifically, a greater appreciation of the profession’s historical and sociological background ‐ if students are to navigate their careers intelligently.