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Business schools are vital in promoting responsible management (RM) – a management grounded in ethics and values beneficial to a wide array of stakeholders and overall society. Nevertheless, due to deeply embedded institutional modernistic dynamics and paradigms, RM is, despite its importance, repeatedly marginalised in business school curricula. If students are to engage with RM thinking, then its occlusion represents a pressing issue. Drawing on the United Kingdom (UK) business school context, this paper aims to examine this issue through a framework of institutional theory and consider the role played by (modernistic) institutional accreditation and research assessment processes in marginalisation of RM.

This study used an exploratory qualitative research method. Data were collected from 17 RM expert participants from 15 UK business schools that were signatories to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education through semi-structured in-depth interviews and analysed using the six phases of Braun and Clarke’s thematic analysis.

The study identifies a potent institutional isomorphic amalgam resulting in conservative impacts for RM. This dynamic is termed multiple institutional isomorphic marginalisation (MIIM) – whereby a given domain is occluded and displaced by hegemonic institutional pressures. In RM’s case, MIIM operates through accreditation-driven modernistic-style curricula. This leads business schools to a predilection towards “mainstream” representations of subject areas and a focus on mechanistic research exercises. Consequently, this privileges certain activities over RM development with a range of potential negative effects, including social impacts.

This study fills an important gap concerning the need for a critical, in-depth exploration of the role that international accreditation frameworks and national institutional academic research assessment processes such as the Research Excellence Framework in the UK play in affecting the possible growth and influence of RM. In addition, it uses heterotopia as a conceptual lens to reveal the institutional “mask” of responsibility predominantly at play in the UK business school context, and offers alternative pathways for RM careers.

The purpose of this essay is to explore the opportunities and challenges that early-career researchers (ECRs) face when they seek to contribute to academic knowledge production through research activities “other than” those directly focused on making progress with their own, to-be-published, research papers in a context associated with the “publish or perish” (PoP) mentality.

Drawing broadly on the notion of technologies of humility (Jasanoff, 2003), this reflective essay develops upon the experiences of the authors in organizing and participating in a series of nine workshops undertaken between June 2013 and April 2021, as well as the arduous process of writing this paper itself. Retrospective accounts, workshop materials, email exchanges and surveys of workshop participants provide the key data sources for the analysis presented in the paper.

The paper shows how the organization of the workshops is intertwined with the building of a small community of ECRs and exploration of how to address the perceived limitations of a “gap-spotting” approach to developing research ideas and questions. The analysis foregrounds how the workshops provide a seemingly valuable research experience that is not without contradictions. Workshop participation reveals tensions between engagement in activities “other than” working on papers for publication and institutionalized pressures to produce publication outputs, between the (weak) perceived status of ECRs in the field and the aspiration to make a scholarly contribution, and between the desire to develop a personally satisfying intellectual journey and the pressure to respond to requirements that allow access to a wider community of scholars.

Our analysis contributes to debates about the ways in which seemingly valuable outputs are produced in academia despite a pervasive “publish or perish” mentality. The analysis also shows how reflexive writing can help to better understand the opportunities and challenges of pursuing activities that might be considered “unproductive” because they are not directly related to to-be-published papers.

Across the public sector, and especially in the delivery of health and social care and support, practicing innovation is a difficult and seldom rewarding activity. The organisational barriers inhibiting innovation adoption in healthcare settings have been widely discussed. What is less well understood is what motivates staff to persist with innovation efforts despite these barriers. This paper contributes to recent studies of the role of care and compassion in innovation processes within social care settings not only to generate new insights into the motivations underpinning innovation efforts but also to help illuminate how staff overcome barriers to innovation.

We crafted a series of vignettes from our recent ethnographic studies of innovation across the health and social care sectors in Australia and Denmark, involving semi-structured interviews, observation and field notes. Within the Danish case, we explore an instance involving a formal organisational focus on identifying and sustaining innovation within local service deliver. With the Australian case, we present an informal approach, where the process of identifying and sustaining innovation derives from moments of spontaneous employee engagement and initiative.

Reflecting on the examples of “frugal innovation” presented in these vignettes, the major contribution of this study is to situate care and compassion as critical social, affective and material aspects of the practice of innovation in health and social care settings. Our analysis indicates how the practice of innovation is shaped by diverse relations of caregiving, where compassion emerges as a key source of motivation, aspiration and application that inspires staff to seek novel solutions to enduring healthcare challenges.

We develop our argument with reference to recent interdisciplinary orientations to care and compassion in the healthcare literature, incorporating contributions from feminist scholars and the ongoing articulation of feminist care ethics in the study of innovation.

This study tries to identify important criteria and sub-criteria for the evaluation of suppliers for effective management of supply chain sustainability risks (SCSR). This study also demonstrates the application of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method in a specific case of a company that is managing a short food supply chain and facing difficulty in ranking the suppliers on three dimensions of sustainability.

Literature reviews and expert opinions are used to identify and assess the sub-criteria for each of the three dimensions of sustainability, followed by pairwise comparison as per the AHP methodology. Finally, the proposed framework is used to evaluate the three suppliers that represent approximately 70% of the total tea sourced by the case company.

None of the three suppliers is best on all three dimensions of sustainability. The rank order of suppliers together on the three dimensions is different than the rank order with respect to each of the dimensions separately. The results obtained are useful for the case company to understand the risk associated with each of their suppliers. Also, it helps them develop a proactive plan to address those risks. The results also show that the overall country-level indices may not accurately reflect the individual supplier level, and specific information may help to make better judgements.

The study only demonstrates the evaluation of tier-one suppliers. There are various suppliers in the supply chain (tier two and tier three), and there could be missing or inadequate information about these next-level suppliers that augments SCSR substantially. The study focussed on the countries of three specific suppliers, and sustainability parameters are highly contextual and vary from country to country.

This study proposes a multi-criteria decision framework to evaluate and analyse suppliers based on their performance against SCSR. Using the AHP method, a case application is demonstrated for sustainable supply chain risk management. By considering SCSR in the evaluation process, the case company is able to prioritise prevailing risks, analyse suppliers’ positions against these risks and initiate appropriate risk management strategies. The proposed framework provides a powerful tool for making SCSR decisions in similar contexts.

The results helped the company to effectively and efficiently prioritize SCSR and rate suppliers using the proposed framework. It is also observed from the results that the social criterion related to human rights (0.161) was highest in the case company’s priority, followed by child labour (0.118). This fact adds value to the proposition that although social sustainability has featured less in academia, it is unclear whether this is apparent in practice.

The study uses experts from a case company based in the UK which is in the business of procurement and supply of tea and is managing a short food supply chain. The framework is the first of its kind using all three dimensions of sustainability: environmental, social and economic.

This study aims to identify and assess the factors challenging the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in healthcare workplaces.

The study utilized a mixed approach, that starts with a literature review, then developing and testing a questionnaire survey of the factors challenging the integration of AI technologies in healthcare workplaces. In total, 46 factors were identified and classified under 6 groups. These factors were assessed by four different stakeholder categories: facilities managers, medical staff, operational staff and patients/visitors. The evaluations gathered were examined to determine the relative importance index (RII), importance rating (IR) and ranking of each factor.

All 46 factors were assessed as “Very Important” through the overall assessment by the four stakeholder categories. The results indicated that the most important factors, across all groups, are “AI ability to learn from patient data”, “insufficient data privacy measures for patients”, “availability of technical support and maintenance services”, “physicians’ acceptance of AI in healthcare”, “reliability and uptime of AI systems” and “ability to reduce medical errors”.

Determining the importance ratings of the factors can lead to better resource allocation and the development of strategies to facilitate the adoption and implementation of these technologies, thus promoting the development of innovative solutions to improve healthcare practices.

This study contributes to the body of knowledge in the domain of technology adoption and implementation in the medical workplace, through improving stakeholders’ comprehension of the factors challenging the integration of AI technologies.