Business & Economics

Creative industries are a growing and globally important area for both economic vitality and cultural expression of industrialized nations.  The growth and dynamism of creative industries depends on “continuous innovation” that must manage inherent tensions such as novelty to attract consumers and sustain artistic expression and familiarity to aid comprehension and stabilize demand for cultural products.  

In this volume, the macro-structural conditions that shape creative industries – their institutional, categorical and structural dynamics- are examined to provide an overview of new trends and emerging issues in scholarship on this topic.  Creative industries offer products and services that range from the prosaic to the sublime and provide meaning to our lives, and this volume features a wide range of examples, from advertising, to architecture, art markets, Champagne wine, fashion and music.  Contributors examine topics such as the micro-interactions of brokerage relations; how actors transform a brokerage role from control to co-production to enact creative leadership; how investors provide legitimacy to the new categories such as abstract art; how technological disintermediation creates alternative category processes such as authenticity; how social relations shape social evaluation; how prototypical producers can trespass categories and avert negative evaluation; how personal styles enable social evaluation; and how the ambiguity of a category, such as Swing music, facilitated its adaptability and longevity.  The volume concludes with an Afterword examining research on creative industries as a form of cultural product and a category in itself.  

Strategy research and practice has a long tradition of using frameworks, models, tools, and processes to describe, and guide the strategy work of managers. These are the cognitive aids that guide cognition, i.e., the way managers make sense of the world. Why, and how, do these tools interact with cognition?

The sixth volume in the New Horizons in Managerial and Organizational Cognition series examines cognitive aids in strategy. Cognitive aids of strategy have a profound impact on the way managers learn about, conceptualize, share, and enact strategy and strategies in their organizations, yet these aids are often presented without reference to the underlying cognitive theory that might explain why the aid is useful.

Cognitive Aids in Strategy brings together contributions by twelve strategy scholars, reflecting on a range of cognitive aids and their theoretical foundations, focusing attention on the importance of cognitive aids in strategy, and inspiring further research. It represents a new horizon for the study of managerial and organizational cognition.

Industry clusters promote innovation in the Arab World, through collaboration among businesses, research institutions, and governments. Benefits include the creation and sharing of knowledge, professional networking, access to spill-over knowledge, and specialized talent pools. These are the necessary elements to support the blossoming of innovation. In addition, clusters have the capacity to foster economic development in the region as a whole. They are key determinants in improving micro and small firms’ performance through company linkages and access to internationalization opportunities.

Industry Clusters and Innovation in the Arab World presents research and case studies in a range of Arabic-speaking countries, and proposes a series of reforms to build and promote industry clusters in the region. Challenges facing the establishment and the competitiveness of such clusters are also explored, and real-world applicable recommendations are provided. This break-through research highlights opportunities, and also macro-environmental threats. This is essential reading for researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners.

Managing big data and data analytics poses unique challenges to many organisations. The effective use of such data is essential to planning business strategies and ensuring future corporate success. Organizations need to know how best to capitalise on the information that they have access to.

Enabling Strategic Decision-Making in Organizations through Dataplex breaks down the role of data in strategic decision making, examining the organizational benefits but also utilising real-world examples of limitations and challenges and how these can be overcome. Dataplex allows for the central management of all data resources in the cloud, removing data silos while also maintaining ethical considerations and policies – the intellectual fabric of data provides a path to centrally monitor, manage and rule the data.

The use of case studies, frameworks and applied models makes this text applicable to data practitioners, managers and strategic planners, as well as researchers focusing on problem solving at the organizational level.

Public spending accounts for a significant share of national GDP and is perceived as a critically important way for overcoming periods of economic and social crisis, but is often criticised as inefficient and ineffective, giving raise to calls for new processes of reform. Because most public resources are raised through taxation from citizens and businesses, accountability and assurance are key in the democratic process, and auditing attempts to fulfil this public interest role. This in turn leaves public sector auditing under increasing public scrutiny and political pressure.

Through a comparative analysis of the development of auditing practices in governments across the globe, Auditing Practices in Local Governments: An International Comparison provides a contemporary overview of public sector auditing practices at both local and state level. By focusing on countries which have experienced differing implementation processes, and which are characterised by different administrative and political cultures, the authors provide a comparative analysis of countries across the globe, including major European states, China, Australia, and New Zealand.

Written by scholars and practitioners in the fields of public sector auditing, this first volume of Emerald Studies in Public Service Accounting and Accountability provides readers both researchers and practitioners with a thorough overview of international public sector auditing practice.

Mónica Santana and Ramón Valle-Cabrera’s wide-ranging study explores vital research and industrial issues that are central to understanding the concepts of the Future of Work and address key challenges in this evolving area of debate.A global cast of leading research specialists provide chapters examining a broad spectrum of areas relating to the Future of Work including leadership, talent management, AI and digitalisation, digital skills, new forms of work, industrial relations, vulnerable workers as well as well-being, happiness, satisfaction and burnout. Each chapter offers insights on how individuals and leaders can make choices to shape the future of work and effectively respond to changing contextual conditions, demystifying the future of work from a set of interesting insights into specific actions and choices that will help imagine, invent, and implement a work setting that works.

New Directions in the Future of Work is illuminating reading for scholars of HRM, Talent Management, Leadership, Industrial Relations, and all those seeking to understand directions of travel for the workplaces of the future.

There is a growing class of entrepreneurs who, for a range of reasons, are working to create viable alternatives to mainstream production and consumption models. Existing literature that cuts across multiple fields illustrates the unique features, challenges, and value propositions of alternative forms of entrepreneurship. Yet, the complexities associated with how alternative marketscapes form and function remain “fuzzy.” Volume 29 of Advances in the Study of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Economic Growth asks, “How alternative are alternative marketscapes?”

In doing so, greater clarity is gained on the underlying economic, organizational, and social conditions and environments within which alternative marketscapes develop. The volume includes theoretical arguments and case studies that view alternative entrepreneurship not as co-existing with, but rather transforming mainstream entrepreneurship, and challenge the understanding of alternative entrepreneurship as being inherently altruistic.

The exploration of ingenuity and innovation, in conjunction with cases that illustrate the diversity of alternative market contexts, generates organizational and system-level applications. The volume authors provide entrepreneurs and companies a concise understanding of alternative marketscapes that paves the way for development and success.

Addressing the topic of emotions in the classroom is largely done by education and psychology scholars, not those in management fields. Occupying this gap, the chapter authors emphasize self-awareness and management of emotions to strengthen student engagement, well-being and performance in complex and ambiguous societal and economic VUCA environments.

Honing Self-Awareness of Faculty and Future Business Leaders prepares 21st century managers and teachers in business schools and other higher education institutions – not only be able to deal with emotions that arise in the classroom, but to emanate heightened emotional intelligence themselves – aiding personal and interpersonal development and forming the foundation of leader self-awareness.

Given the potential size of some of the markets involved and the comparative advantages in serving them, it is surprising to see a relative sparsity of airline activity in developing countries. Lack of suitable data, limited interest, and the comparatively small scale of aviation markets in many of these countries provide some of the explanations for this relative neglect.

Airlines and Developing Countries works to address some of the key challenges that are confronting airlines and public policy makers, helping to fill a number of voids in our knowledge. The approaches of the various expert contributors offer a range of technical, empirical, historical, and institutional analyses that consider long-term patterns of economic development and look at how airlines have influenced this going back as far as the 1930s.

Fostering Sustainable Businesses in Emerging Economies presents a series of case studies and exploratory studies, using quantitative analysis, scientific studies, and qualitative studies showing how innovation and technology enable emerging economies to achieve business sustainability and also achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Most of all, the authors answer the question: What are the most important lessons policymakers need to consider when promoting sustainable business development?

Diversity in Action: Managing Diverse Talent in a Global Economy examines one of the most important and topical issue related to diversity management, namely implementing effective strategies for managing diverse talent groups. Highlighting both theoretical issues regarding diversity management and their practical implications, Marina Latukha’s wide ranging collection investigates how different management practices focusing on diverse talent groups are realised in order to provide systematic assessments on existing diversity challenges.

Diversity in Action uniquely features diversity within diversity as the main topic within its analysis. Content covers different types of employees in its focus of diversity management practices in global economies. Groups explored in relation to human resource and talent management practices include but not limited to management of different generations and migrants and diaspora’ representatives employed in modern organizations. There is also discussion of gender-focused initiatives to present the dialog about female talent management and the way it influences organizational results.

Diversity in Action highlights the latest development in relation to strategies and practices on diversity management, providing specific examples of how different talent diverse groups should be involved in organizational business processes and effectively managed.

Our everyday lives are structured by the rhythms, values, and practices of various organizations, including schools, workplaces, and government agencies. These experiences shape common-sense understandings of how 'best' to organize and connect with others. Today, for-profit managerial firms dominate society, even though their practices often curtail information-sharing and experimentation, engender exploitation, and exclude the interests of stakeholders, particularly workers and the general public.
This Research in the Sociology of Organizations volume explores an expansive array of organizational imaginaries, or conceptions of organizational possibilities, with a focus on collectivist-democratic organizations that operate in capitalist markets but place more authority and ownership in the hands of stakeholders other than shareholders. These include worker and consumer cooperatives and other enterprises that, to varying degrees:

• Emphasize social values over profit
• Are owned not by shareholders but by workers, consumers, or other stakeholders
• Employ democratic forms of managing their operations
• Have social ties to the organization based on moral and emotional commitments

Organizational Imaginaries explores how these enterprises generate solidarity among members, network with other organizations and communities, contend with market pressures, and enhance their larger organizational ecosystems. By ensuring that organizations ultimately support and serve broader communities, collectivist-democratic organizing can move societies closer to hopeful 'what if' and 'if only' futures. This volume is essential for researchers and students seeking innovative and egalitarian approaches to business and management.

Winner of the inaugural 2022 Joyce Rothschild Book Prize from the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations.

Breaking new ground in research on temporary organizations, this volume of Research in the Sociology of Organizations brings together papers that examine how temporary organizations navigate the tensions and deal with the paradoxes that are the consequences of temporal limitation.

This volume explores diverse forms of temporary organizations including: animation festivals, cultural celebrations, unconferences, start-up accelerators, humanitarian emergency response, strategic initiatives, projects and megaprojects, project portfolios and networks of projects. This volume uses 3 key questions to unify this empirical diversity:

1. The pace and rhythm of temporary organizing: how do conflicting temporal norms shape work and life in temporary organizations? 

2. What are the tactics and practices that temporary organizations develop when dealing with the tensions and paradoxes they confront? 

3. When relying for resources and working on behalf of permanent organizations, how do temporary organizations deal with the tensions between attachment to, and detachment from, permanent organizations.

The COVID-19 pandemic showed how transport plays a role in societal responses to global events at all levels, from governments to transport operators and individuals. Transport and Pandemic Experiences consolidates these lessons from a range of geographies and practices.

Attard and Mulley bring together leading experts in the field, examining various entities in their response to the coronavirus pandemic, using the experience of COVID-19 to inform issues of resilience and policy. Chapters provide an in-depth analysis of how the impact of the pandemic varied between demographic groups and global location, between passenger and freight modes, highlighting how transport and travel behaviour changed. Along with providing an overview of policy responses to the pandemic from the freight and air transport sector, to analysing the development of working-from-home policies with their inherent effects on public transport, Transport and Pandemic Experiences discusses how the accumulated knowledge of the pandemic needs to be capitalised in our fight against climate change and helps to identify future research imperatives for better understanding and greater policy transferability.

The Transport and Sustainability series addresses the important nexus between transport and sustainability containing volumes dealing with a wide range of issues relating to transport, its impact in economic, social, and environmental spheres, and its interaction with other policy sectors.

This book contains an Open Access chapter.

Volume 41 of Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management offers several original scholarly contributions written by thought leaders in the field of human resources management. These chapters feature the latest research exploring emerging novel areas of HRM.

Contributions include an analysis of professional touching behaviour, ideas about the state of our science in HRM, an Open Access chapter on work-life flexibility issues, processes that occur in expatriate turnover, suggestions concerning the state of human resource process research, and some comments on the contribution of this series to facilitating research in HRM issues

Contemporary firms face complex dynamic environments notoriously difficult to predict, even impossible to foresee, where extraordinary events can inflict major disruptions. Interactive collaborative decision processes appear as better drivers of strategic adaptation. Yet, firms show vastly different ways of dealing with the challenges imposed by extreme exposures as environmental conditions change.

The research presented here is developed from analyses of extensive European and North American datasets (1995-2019) spanning periods of economic expansion, recession, and recovery and explores how firms manage in a world with extreme exposures and how their failure and success affect the distribution of financial returns. Refined analyses show how left-skewed returns are associated with negative risk-return relations where high-performers generate better average returns at lower levels of risk. These results can also derive from firms with heterogeneous adaptive capabilities, which we model and use in computational simulations to show how it produces negatively skewed performance distributions and inverse risk-return outcomes.;

The Emerald Studies in Global Strategic Responsiveness aspires to disseminate new inspiring research insights as a potential catalyst for the development of effective approaches to deal with the exposures imposed by dynamic complexities in the global business environment.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems constructed by disadvantaged entrepreneurs often exist beside, within, and in opposition to 'mainstream' ecosystems focused on high growth high technology entrepreneurial ventures.

Disadvantaged Entrepreneurship and the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem addresses the lack of current research concerning disadvantage using an entrepreneurial ecosystem lens, and the failure of entrepreneurship policy to widen engagement in entrepreneurship for disadvantaged people and places. Drawing together issues affecting disadvantaged entrepreneurs as they struggle to access, interact with, and benefit from, the traditional entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE), these findings highlight the importance of their motives for entrepreneurial activity, their resources, and how access to these are affected by issues such as gender and migrant status.

The research in this book also suggests policymakers need targeted, supportive, business-support programs taking into consideration the multiple challenges disadvantaged entrepreneurs typically face.

The vast majority of national authorities have made a public commitment supporting a single set of high-quality global accounting standards as of January 13, 2021 requiring or permitting the use of IFRS Standards for domestic, publicly accountable companies and institutions. This includes all member states of the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA), in which IFRS Standards are mandatory for all companies whose securities trade in a regulated market.

Despite this, there still remains a lack of research on International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) implementation and this inaugural volume of Contributions to International Accounting (CIA) aims to address this vital gap, focusing on providing relevant and timely information for local and international policymakers.

Institutions such as trade unions that were once relied upon to protect workers’ wages, conditions and job security are eroding. In response, new forms of worker protections are emerging.

Protecting the Future of Work examines new forms of regulation that have emerged in response to increasing social concern about poor labour practices, growing inequality, and detrimental working conditions. It looks at how trade unions, community organisations and other actors have mobilised to raise public awareness and pressure businesses and governments to improve working conditions.

Featuring a balance of texts on the changing nature of and the history of trade union change and transformation, the series Trade Unionism gives space for in-depth, detailed analysis and captures key themes on the nature of internationalism and trade unionism.

Focusing on research that examines both individual and organizational behavior relative to accounting, Advances in Accounting Behavioral Research provides an in-depth analysis and exchange of peer-reviewed knowledge across all areas of accounting behavioral research and the development, discussion, and expansion of theories from psychology, sociology, and related disciplines.

From the effects of organizational commitment, the impact of stressors on performance, and responses to narcissism to the effects of auditor familiarity and the examination of personality traits, chapters in Volume 26 compile innovative and new explorations into the behavioral aspects of accounting and auditing. Working on both the individual and organizational level, this collection is essential reading for accounting students and educators, providing a unique, interdisciplinary forum with valuable insights on practice for those working in the field to better understand accounting domains.

Research and development infrastructures are a critical success factor in the platform of science and technology. In turn, an R&D preliminary feasibility study is essential to establish fairness and social credibility of a plan, including expert review, information disclosure and alternative setting.

Preliminary Feasibility for Public Research & Development Projects explains how to evaluate R&D business by exploring the five key features of policy implication, policy improvement, preliminary feasibility study, R&D evaluation, and R&D strategy. Presenting policy measures to ensure the sustainability of R&D projects, Preliminary Feasibility for Public Research & Development Projects will help develop strategic measures for R&D preliminary feasibility studies while proposing ways to enhance the effectiveness of these studies, promote efficiency in public investment projects, and enhance the financial efficiency of large investment projects.