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This study investigates how the interrelated elements of organizational roles – activities, motives, resources and relationships – are mobilized to construct a code of conduct for the proxy advisory (PA) industry in Europe.

This qualitative study uses archival documents from three consecutive regulatory consultations and 16 interviews with key stakeholders. It analyzes how different stakeholder groups (i.e. PA firms, investors, issuers and the regulator) perceive and mobilize the elements of PA firms’ role to construct the accountability regime’s boundaries (accountability problem and action, and users and providers of accounts).

This study shows how PA firms, investors, issuers and the regulator refer to the perceived motives behind PA firms’ activities to construct an accountability problem. The regulator accepted the motives of an information intermediary for PA firms’ role and required PA firms to develop a corresponding accountability action: a code of conduct. PA firms involved in developing the code of conduct formalized who is accountable to whom by aligning this accepted motive with their activities, relationships, and resources into a common role.

The study highlights how aligning role elements to reflect PA firms’ common roles enables the construction of an accountability regime that stakeholders accept as a means of regulation. Analyzing the role elements offers insights into the development and functioning of accountability regimes that rely on self-regulation. We also highlight the role of smaller regional firms in helping shape transnational accountability regimes.

This paper explores the nature and operations of the supply chain that serves disadvantaged groups. With the increasing reliance on supplementary food provision through food aid, the authors seek to emphasise efficiency and sustainability in these supply chains.

Semi-structured interview data from 32 senior managers and experts from both commercial and food aid supply chains were abductively analysed to develop a relationship-based map of the food chains that serve disadvantaged groups.

Disadvantaged groups are served by a hybrid food supply chain. It is an interconnected supply chain bringing together the commercial and the food aid supply chains. This chain is unsurprisingly plagued with various challenges, the most critical of which are limited expertise and resources, operational inefficiencies, prohibitive logistics costs and a severe lack of collaboration.

This study identifies the currently limited role of logistics companies in surplus food redistribution and highlights future pathways. Additionally, the authors present useful actionable propositions for managers, practitioners and policymakers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate a model of collaboration based on the notion of firms having strong working relationships with their suppliers and customers. Whilst issues associated with collaborative relationships between firms and their trading partners are a key theme currently being addressed in the supply chain management literature, there appears to be a lack of clear guidelines as to how such capability can be developed in a practical sense.

Data from 418 Australian manufacturing plants are used to test the model. Two key constructs, customer relationship and supplier involvement, are developed. For predictive validity purposes, these constructs are regressed against firm performance construct.

Results of structural equation modeling analysis show, inter alia, that there is some support for this collaboration model, with both collaboration‐based constructs influencing performance.

The results provide an insight into how firms can develop a level of collaboration capability.

This paper aims to analyze the relationship among measures of resource and service usage and other features of academic libraries in the USA and Canada.

Through the use of a self‐organizing map, academic library data were clustered and visualized. Analysis of the library data was conducted through the computation of a “library performance metric” that was applied to the resulting map.

Two areas of high‐performing academic libraries emerged on the map. One area included libraries with large numbers of resources, while another area included libraries that had low resources but gave greater numbers of presentations to groups, offered greater numbers of public service hours, and had greater numbers of staffed service points.

The metrics chosen as a measure of library performance offer only a partial picture of how libraries are being used. Future research might involve the use of a self‐organizing map to cluster library data within certain parameters and the identification of high‐performing libraries within these clusters.

This study suggests that libraries can improve their performance not only by acquiring greater resources but also by putting greater emphasis on the services that they provide to their users.

This paper demonstrates how a self‐organizing map can be used in the analysis of large data sets to facilitate library comparisons.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the relationship between product nature and supply chain strategy, by using Fisher's model as the framework.

The research collected quantitative data by conducting a questionnaire‐based survey, with a total of 119 respondent organisations (of which 107 were usable), at an adjusted response rate of 8 per cent. The survey results provide the basis for the testing of Fisher's model relating product characteristics to supply chain strategy.

The results indicate that the association between product nature and supply chain strategy as articulated in Fisher's model is not significant. A hybrid strategy (pursuing both efficiency and responsiveness) is found to be employed by most organisations irrespective of the nature of the primary product they supply.

The analysis is based on survey responses gathered within the Australian manufacturing industry. The findings of the study have implications for understanding the drivers of supply chain strategy, and how other factors, in addition to product type, influence supply chain positioning.

The study identifies additional factors which might be influential in the determination of supply chain strategy. It provides practitioners with guidance in choosing an appropriate strategy to deal with supply chain partners.

The contribution of the study lies in extending the body of knowledge of supply chain strategy. It tests an existing framework which has only very limited empirical validation, and provides a broader understanding of the influence of product nature on the choice of supply chain strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to review a sample of the literature relating to the integration and implementation of supply chain management practices from a strategic viewpoint.

The literature is examined from three perspectives. First, supply chain integration covers issues relating to integration of core processes across organizational boundaries through improved communication, partnerships, alliances and cooperation. Second, strategy and planning examines supply chain management as a strategic matter for trading partners, along with factors relating to the amount of planning required. Third, implementation issues concern factors critical for successful implementation, as well as issues specific to inter and intra‐organizational aspects of supply chain initiatives are contained in this sub‐group

An important emergent theme from the literature is the importance of taking a holistic view, and the systemic nature of interactions between the participants. At the same time, it is also apparent that this requirement to take such an holistic and systemic view of the supply chain acts as an impediment to more extensive implementation. The strategic nature of adopting a supply chain wide perspective, on the one hand provides significant potential benefit, and on the other requires trading partners to think and act strategically. This is easier said than done within a stand‐alone organization, let alone across a diverse and dispersed group of trading partners.

The scope of this review is by design limited to a cross‐section of the literature in this area. As such, it cannot, and does not, attempt to be an examination of the full range of the literature, but a sampling of important and influential works.

This review of the literature serves to highlight the inter‐dependence between integration (technologies, logistics, and partnerships), a strategic view of supply chain systems, and implementation approach. All three need to inform and underpin each other in order for management of supply chains to be able to deliver on the promise of benefits for all trading partners.

This study reviews a sample of recent and classic literature in this field, and in doing so provides some clear guidelines for the conduct of future research.

This paper analyzes county-level firm births across the United States using a spatial count model that permits spatial dependence, cross-correlation among different industry types, and over-dispersion commonly found in empirical count data. Results confirm the presence of spatial autocorrelation (which can arise from agglomeration effects and missing variables), industry-specific over-dispersion, and positive, significant cross-correlations. After controlling for existing-firm counts in 2008 (as an exposure term), parameter estimates and inference suggest that a younger work force and/or clientele (as quantified using each county’s median-age values) is associated with more firm births (in 2009). Higher population densities is associated with more new basic-sector firms, while reducing retail-firm starts. The modeling framework demonstrated here can be adopted for a variety of settings, harnessing very local, detailed data to evaluate the effectiveness of investments and policies, in terms of generating business establishments and promoting economic gains.

Empirically, this paper questions whether accounting can help cope with crisis and preserve some form of feminist ideals. Theoretically, this paper aims to explore how accounting affects the division of emotional work in times of crisis.

The paper relies on a qualitative study that investigates “life under lockdown” during the COVID crisis and focuses on middle-class well-educated couples aspiring for some form of gender equality and who introduced accounting tools (schedules, charts, to-do-lists, etc.) in their daily life to achieve it.

The paper argues that accounting tools are not able to prevent couples from adopting traditional ways of carrying out emotional work. By favoring the masculine way of displaying emotions, they make invisible women's efforts for comforting. They even mask the unequal distribution of emotional work under some form of “neoliberal equality”. Also, in a context where middle-class standards are perceived as crucial to meet for both parents to keep their social position, accounting tools, by holding parents accountable for these standards, let no time to find alternative ways of living. Consequently, traditional roles become impossible to reverse.

The paper investigates accounting, gender and emotions by showing the importance of making emotional work visible at a household but also at an organizational and societal level. It calls for an “integrative” emotional display that is crucial for resilience in times of crisis and invites to challenge neoliberal middle-class standards that make household life difficult for most women. Theoretically, it invites for further exploring how accounting tools are constructed and negotiated and how unpredictable elements of life other than emotions affect gender when accounting tools are introduced in times of crisis.

This article contributes to the literature on gender-in-accounting by introducing the concept of emotional work and showing how accounting tools affect the gendered division of emotional work in praxis.

The purpose of this paper is to throw light on both motivation for adoption of innovative technologies, as well as identifying critical organisational factors influencing effective implementation.

Three case studies have been conducted in Australian companies involved in the use of business‐to‐business enabling technologies. The multiple design approach was chosen in order to provide robust findings across a group of similar sites, with the possibility of replicated and comparative results providing extra clarity and insight.

These three cases provide evidence to suggest that at the same time the three theoretical approaches examined – organisational innovativeness, diffusion of innovations and process theory – are found to be individually and collectively present as explanatory models of innovation adoption.

This paper is limited to Australian firms using technologies for the management of their supply chains. The number of firms studied also represents a limitation and generalization of findings therefore needs to be approached with caution.

The practical implication is that adoption and use of innovations is highly situational, and therefore needs to be researched using methods that enable the context to be incorporated and understood.

The evidence indicates that the innovation adoption puzzle can be explained less by a single theory generalised across broad populations of organisations, than perhaps by the complex interplay of all three theories in the context of an individual organisation.