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Actor engagement (AE) literature shows inconsistent understandings of engagement intensity. However, a holistic picture of the nature of AE intensity is foundational to advance empirical AE models and measurement frameworks. This paper provides a nuanced understanding of what engagement intensity is and how it unfolds on different network levels.

This conceptual study draws from a literature review and offers a comprehensive classification scheme of AE intensity. The literature review extends beyond marketing and service research and draws from the etymology of AE intensity in management and social science, specifically, the fields of student, employee and civic engagement.

The classification scheme clarifies that AE intensity at the individual level refers to actors' affective and cognitive tone and varying magnitudes (i.e. efforts, duration, activeness) of resource investments. At the dyad level, AE intensity represents relational strength, and at the network level, it refers to the degree of connectedness in the network.

The research reconciles conceptual inconsistencies in the AE literature. Our classification scheme goes beyond the individual actor and actor–actor dyad and offers a holistic overview of possible ways to operationalize AE intensity in networks.

The classification scheme can be used as a strategic checklist to include AE intensities of individual actors (e.g. customers and employees), relationships between these actors and network connectedness, when further developing engagement measurement tools and benchmarks.

This is the first study providing a comprehensive understanding of AE intensity from an individual, dyadic and network perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to review the development of engagement research in pursuit of improved sustainability accounting and performance and to identify issues in the further development of this field. In particular, the authors consider the implications of this research for practice, policy and theory following the publication of a special issue on the topic in 2007 in the Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal.

The authors performed a systematic review of the relevant literature in selected accounting journals for the 11 year period 2007–2017 inclusive. The authors identified the methods, topics and theories addressed by researchers and the academic journals that are more likely to publish engagement research.

The authors found a significant increase in engagement work over the decade since publication of the special issue and a marked increase in the volume and complexity of data collected in studies. There is a marked difference in the openness of different journals to engagement research and the type of engagement research published across accounting journals. Contrary to the argument made by critics of engagement research the authors found that this field of research not only uses theory, but develops theory.

Through the examination of methods and theories used and topics considered, the authors identify avenues for further research – and the journals likely to be receptive to it.

The study demonstrates that the collective body of engagement research aimed at improving sustainability accounting and performance has significant potential to inform practice and policy developments with the same aim.

The study examines an emerging approach in an emerging field of research with significant academic, practice and policy potential.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the potential of engagement research by exploring the literature on engagement research. Engagement research in social and environmental accounting (SEA) aims to enhance the social, environmental and ethical accountability of organizations and conceives that understanding SEA demands engaging with the (social and organizational) fields in which SEA is envisaged and practiced.

In this respect, the paper suggests a dialogue between the expectations about engagement research and what has been delivered in the literature. This paper reviews 32 articles publishing engagement research studies to explore the methodology of engagement research.

The paper concludes that this methodology is consistent with notions of research in the context of application and extended peer-review communities. Further, this study shows a promising cross-fertilization between interpretive insight and critical enlightenment in engagement research. The paper also explores in more depth three methodological issues: what is specific about engagement research, particularly compared to stakeholder engagement; that the decision about the locus of engagement research does not seem to be driven by the characteristics of organizations, but by the potential insight and enlightenment that the empirical setting can yield; and, finally, that engagement research requires more space for reflexivity.

This paper provides a reference for the methodological design of engagement research studies.

This research investigates the role of customer forgiveness as the result of online service recovery transparency in predicting customer engagement. It also examines the moderating roles of timeliness and personalization in this proposed model.

An online survey study using retrospective experience sampling and a scenario-based experimental study were conducted to test the proposed hypotheses.

Customer forgiveness positively influences customer engagement and plays a mediating role in the relationship between service recovery transparency and customer engagement. Additionally, timeliness and personalization moderate the positive influence of service recovery transparency on customer forgiveness. The positive influence of service recovery transparency on customer forgiveness is more apparent when levels of timeliness and personalization decrease.

To retain focal customers' engagement after a service failure, firms must obtain their forgiveness. One of the firm's online complaint handling strategies to increase the forgiveness level of focal customers is to provide a high level of service recovery transparency (i.e. responding to their complaints in a public channel), especially when the firm is unable to respond to online complaints quickly or provide highly personalized responses.

This research provides new insights into the underlying mechanism of customer engagement by applying the concept of customer forgiveness. It also contributes to the social influence theory by applying the essence of the theory to explain how other customers' virtual presence during the online complaint handling influences the forgiveness of focal customers in order to gain their engagement. Additionally, it provides insight into the conditions under which the role of service recovery transparency can be very effective in dealing with online complaints.

Employee engagement (EE) is a highly popular topic within workplace research, but has been studied almost exclusively from a quantitative, survey based approach, both in academic and consultancy led research. Yet, employee engagement is essentially an individual concept, concerning self, and this highly personal dimension fails to be captured in positivistic surveys. This paper offers a novel methodology in an attempt to address this deficit.

This complex concept needs to be studied from a more interpretivist and ethnographic angle, acknowledging that EE exists within a cultural context. The paper proposes the use of a contemporary, and somewhat contentious, form of ethnography, autoethnography (AE) that weaves together the researcher's personal and participants' experiences to illuminate the phenomenon.

This paper briefly reviews extant literature on employee engagement, explains autoethnography and argues that AE is a highly suitable method to capture both the individual and social nature of self in employee engagement.

To understand how employee engagement works, we need to get at the depth of the concept, and the paper offers an innovative methodological contribution to achieve this. To date, this approach has received limited attention and only minimal anecdotal evidence is presented to support the argument for AE. However, there is substantial scope for further research adopting this novel, collaborative approach.

An autoethnographic approach provides both emic (insider) and etic (outsider) perspectives on the phenomenon, thus harnessing both the experiences of those involved in AE initiatives (e.g. HR practitioners managing EE and employees being engaged) but also the researcher's experiences and interpretations of being engaged in their work, to elicit more rich, layered insights. Such nuanced understanding can help facilitate more appropriate, authentic and realistic interventions to harness employees' whole self and engagement.

Autoethnography provides an innovative approach to studying employee engagement, offering an appropriate alternative to quantitative, snap-shot studies and is more in keeping with the founding scholar's intentions for research on this topic.

The topic of customer engagement has been growing in relevance and complexity in the last decade. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to systematically review and critically analyse the research about customer engagement and address the research question: “What marketing research has been conducted on customer engagement until now and what could be future avenues for research?”

A systematic review of the existing literature is performed based on the Web of Science and Scopus electronic databases. A total of 144 articles are included in the final analysis.

Customer engagement is perceived as a multidimensional concept with different definitions and sub-forms associated. There is an increasing number of authors studying the concept in different industries and geographies, with empirical studies being widely used. The concept emerges from specific theoretical pillars. Different constructs are associated with customer engagement, being studied as antecedents and/or outcomes. This study presents 8 major paths for future research.

This type of approach has a certain level of subjectivity, associated to the methodological process for choosing the articles to be included in the final analysis and the applied filters.

Through this study, readers become aware of the state of the art on customer engagement and associated constructs, the gaps found in past research, the research contexts and also have a glimpse about what can be the future of this field of research, as well as research questions to be addressed.

While being largely studied in organizational research, job engagement has rarely been empirically investigated in the context of higher education. In this study, this paper aim to examine the effects of leader performance expectation and coworker pressure on research engagement of lecturers and the moderation of achievement value.

The authors based the survey on the data collected from public higher educational institutions in Vietnam.

The findings contribute to the literature of job engagement in higher education from an organizational behavior perspective by explaining the mid-level impacts of departmental factors affecting research engagement.

The authors develop an organizational behavior perspective related to middle-level factors to understand factors influencing one specific research job of lecturers in higher education in a non-Western developing nation.

The purpose of this study is to diagnose the trajectory of influential conceptual articles in developing a research stream. The authors uncover the knowledge diffusion through influential conceptual articles and identify characteristics that make conceptual articles influential in their field.

This study draws on scientometrics, specifically an integrated approach combining quantitative citation counts with qualitative citation practices analysis that offers a comprehensive understanding of the nature and context of citations. The authors use the case of customer engagement – a prominent contemporary marketing and service research stream – to explore the trajectory of influential articles in shaping a new research stream.

This research shows that influential articles contribute to the reciprocal knowledge diffusion within and outside their home discipline. They provide anchor points for conceptual framing, conceptual refining and conceptual reconciliation – three application patterns of citations that are pivotal to navigate theory discovery and theory justification in a research field.

The study analyzes the early impact period of two influential customer engagement articles to understand the developments leading to the establishment of a new research stream. Future research drawing on automated citation and bibliometric methods may consider extended time periods.

This study traces the trajectory of influential articles in marketing and service research. The authors identify characteristics of influential conceptual articles, and recommend practices to develop a conceptual paper with the potential for an influential trajectory. It shows that while marketing and service research has a tradition of “borrowing” theories from other fields, seminal articles “lend” theories to other fields.

Despite recognition that organizations operate in interrelated service systems, extant literature has focused strongly on dyadic engagement relationships (e.g. customer-to-brand). Taking into account the multiple engagement foci that exist within a service system, the purpose of this paper is to examine the interdependence among engagement with these multiple foci in a higher education setting. Specifically, the research investigates different configurations of engagement dimensions with the service provider and brand as they pertain to engagement with the study context.

A total of 251 students were surveyed in regards to their engagement with a service provider (lecturer), brand (university) and study context. Data analysis utilized Fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to identify the unique combinations of causal condition consistent with high student engagement with the study context.

Five solutions were identified, each with a different constellation of engagement dimensions. Most solutions entailed engagement with both the service provider and the brand, and cognitive processing (service provider) emerged as a core condition for every solution. This suggests service providers should seek to engage with consumers, particularly from a cognitive perspective, understanding this will support engagement with the context of study.

This research provides evidence that students can engage with their study context through different configurations of engagement with the service provider and the brand. Thus, it demonstrates the need to examine constellations of engagement dimensions related to multiple focal objects to understand their interdependencies and potential influence on engagement at a higher level of aggregation in a complex service environment.