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This paper aims to focus on activity-based workplaces, which offer a diversity of typologies and configurations which, instead of being attributed to users, are shared according to the needs of their activities. Indeed, this paper questions the way these activity-based workplaces configure the ways in which individuals and collectives carry out their activity.

To do so, this paper established a two-phase methodology. Three days of observation amid three different units evolving in activity-based workplaces have helped us to identify the uses that emerged from these spatial typologies. Then, a set of two interviews with eight participants have been conducted based on the four dimensions of the situated acceptance model (Bobillier Chaumon, 2013) and on picture elicitation.

The results allow us to understand how activity-based workspaces can be considered as artefacts for the activity that needs to be appropriated to allow the worker to realise his activity.

The results provide an overview of the social and psychological consequences of activity-based workspaces on workers, their work collective and their activity. Thus, the conclusions can be mobilised in activity-based real estate projects, for example, during the design stage.

This research conducted with a situated approach based upon the study of the development of the activity proposes a change from the usual managerial approach about these activity-based workplaces, which prescribe an ideal way of working within the workplace.

The purpose of this paper is to help interfirm-collaborating cluster (ICC) executives examine the relevance of alternative decision rules in practical business contexts. Multi-party-implemented strategies and establishing multi-lateral collaborations are necessary actions for achieving success in new product development by small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This study explores interfirm decision-making heuristics relating to industrial ICCs.

The study examines the relevancy to decision making in ICCs of heurstics such as “fast-and-frugal decision trees” (FFDTs) and “take-the-best” (TTB) to processing possibly influential decision-making cues. The study also examines simple heuristics versus the value of a “fully rational” approach to making decisions – calculating cue values, importance weights, multiplying values by weights, summing and selecting the option having the highest summed score. This study included interviewing executives of the pivotal firm in an ICC.

This study reveals a decision-making solution for shortening the time and processes required in seeking new business collaboration partners in an ICC. This study not only develops a FFDT for six decision-making modules to quickly identify potential collaboration partners, but it also constructs a decision systems analysis (DSA) flowchart to effectively shorten the decision-making process.

This study is in accordance with the general type of industrial interfirm collaboration in Taiwan. The industrial interfirm collaboration could be further divided into the types of formal, semi-formal and informal industrial interfirm collaborations.

This study argues that firms usually find it difficult to develop their own technology because of the high costs of research and development for SMEs. Therefore, firms need to collaborate with partners to maintain their competitive advantage. However, to collaborate, firms must learn to trust their collaboration partners, and the degree of collaboration also strongly depends on the degree to which they trust their collaboration partners.

This study provides the efficient models of FFDT and DSA to quickly identify potential collaboration partners and to effectively shorten decision-making processes.

The extent to which sustainability is integrated into conventional accounting practices, in the light of a more integrated thinking perspective, requires further exploration. This paper aims to investigate how management control systems (MCSs) and sustainability-specific control systems (SCSs) are mobilised and how they interact to support the environmental sustainability strategy of a small- and medium-sized entity (SME).

Through a case study in a waste disposal firm, this paper examines the influence of cognitive, organisational and technical factors on the interaction and integration of MCSs and SCSs to bolster an environmental sustainability strategy.

The MCSs that are mobilised vary according to the type of strategy that is pursued. Even though the technical integration of MCSs with SCSs was not achieved, interaction between them supported strategic decision-making and the pursuit of environmental performance in the light of a more integrated thinking perspective. The role of multidisciplinary teams formed by accountants and environmental scientists to support sustainability management control at the SME also enabled interaction and provided steps for integrated thinking.

Although based on single case study, this research offers practitioners useful knowledge about the potential levers and obstacles relating to the mobilisation of MCSs when a sustainability strategy is conceived and its impact on the development of integrated thinking.

The paper provides insight into how SMEs can mobilise their MCSs to support an environmental sustainability strategy, shedding light on the factors that enhance interaction among MCSs and SCSs.

The increasing responsibility of organisations towards society and the environment has inverted the relationship between accounting and accountability, leading to accountability-based accounting systems. This study aims to explore the debate on accountability for climate change within the integrating thinking (IT) perspective. Ascertaining the most significant trends in the debate around purposes and performance that characterise climate mitigation engagement and their connections, the study would explore if and to what extent organisations are tackling climate actions.

A narrative review of the extensive academic literature developed from the Kyoto Protocol to date was performed. After selecting a representative sample, papers were analysed with the support of a new analytical framework that involves three dimensions – answerability, enforcement and outcome – and governance schemes that emerge from the involvement of the private and public sector and civil society. With the support of NVivo software, themes arisen were analysed and coded. Key items were labelled, creating specific nodes and synthesised into the proposed framework.

A “silo approach” largely characterises the debate on accountability for climate change. The most significant reasons behind the shortcomings of extant climate actions may be retrieved firstly in the weakness of the motivations that guide organisations to operate in a climate-friendly way.

This study underlines the need for a 360° integrated approach for strategically tackling climate actions.

This study would represent a further step towards an integrated approach for studying organisations behaviours in the “climate war”, embracing the connectivity between purposes and outcomes, capitals and the relationships amongst the various stakeholders.

The purpose of this paper is to work out the risk of cost overruns in nuclear power plants (NPPs) and its mitigation through public financial support.

The stochastic process of overruns is simulated and compared with the private company investment to work out the amount of subsidy.

At higher levels of risk proportionately more public finance is sucked in.

International comparison would be valuable.

The paper could provide useful guidance in developing countries regarding how to work out the public or international subsidy.

People may justifiably resist the public subsidy for a foreign investor.

The original calculation using Matlab will certainly be of value.

Integrated reporting (IR) provides a joint overview of an organisation’s financial and sustainability performance and strategies. While the prior literature often critiques IR’s potential to entrench injustice, a systematic approach has not been followed. Therefore, this paper provides a systematic literature review, uncovering IR injustices, informing the development of an IR injustice assessment framework to identify injustices and a research agenda.

Combining Flyvbjerg’s phronetic social science and the phases of the IR idea journey to focus on injustice, this paper reviews published IR articles to inform a critique of IR. As a result, we identify specific injustice(s), the actors responsible for them, as well as the victims, as a basis for recommendations for praxis through the development of an IR injustice assessment framework and a research agenda.

We find that different approaches are needed in each phase of the IR idea journey. In the (re)generation phase, a pluralistic approach to IR is needed from the very beginning of the decision-making process. In the elaboration phase, the motivations and the features of IR are assessed. In the championing phase, IR champions support radical innovation, whereas IR opponents are obstructing its spread. In the production phase, the extent to which IR and integrated thinking are linked to the business model is assessed. Finally, we find that IR’s impact is often limited by the symbolic implementation of its tenets.

The findings suggest a need for companies to rethink the ways in which IR is implemented and used to analyse the ways in which IR is supported and disseminated within and outside the organisation, to focus on internal processes and to reflect on the expected impact of IR on the company’s stakeholders.

This study represents the first systematic approach to identifying IR-related injustices, involving how IR adoption might create injustices and marginalise certain stakeholder groups, and offering recommendations for praxis. Furthermore, the paper details the role of IR in either mitigating or amplifying these injustices and develops a research agenda.

The resources and mechanisms required to complete a value proposition are generally considered as crucial aspects in designing a company business model. However, research in the third party logistics (3PL) arena concerned with studying how 3PL providers define their value creation architecture to meet different shippers’ requirements has so far been inadequate. The purpose of this paper is to fill the gap, providing a detailed investigation on how the 3PL providers’ capabilities and logistics expertise can add value to their shippers’ processes.

A qualitative exploratory research was conducted involving, first, a systematic combining process to understand the main factors and operational strategies whereby 3PL providers can create value and build a comprehensive framework of their value creation architecture. Second, a qualitative survey was conducted on 44 leading 3PL providers operating in Italy to understand how these providers can organise themselves to create value for shippers.

The 3PL providers’ value creation architecture is presented within a clear and comprehensive framework, together with 30 potential operational strategies that can be used by 3PL providers and the related factors that enable value to be created for shippers. Three main value creation models (volume-oriented 3PL providers, process-oriented 3PL providers and innovation-oriented 3PL providers) are identified. The importance of the different factors enabling value creation is highlighted for each model, identifying the distinctive operational strategies and those adopted most frequently.

From a managerial perspective, 3PL providers will find these results useful for developing suitable strategies to compete on the market. From their side, shippers can understand and evaluate how 3PL providers are able to offer value to their logistics processes, allowing them to select the logistics partner who best fits their needs.

The present paper fulfils the identified need of examining the 3PL providers’ business model in detail. A set of distinct value creation models is identified and thoroughly investigated to reveal the different competitive advantages available to shippers.

This study aims to provide a picture of the current state of art in the use of big data for decision-making processes for the management of health-care organizations.

A systematic literature review was carried out. The research uses two analyses: descriptive analysis, describing the evolution of citations; keywords; and the ten most influential papers, and bibliometric analysis, for content evaluation, for which a cluster analysis was performed.

A total of 48 articles were selected for bibliographic coupling out of an initial sample of more than 5,000 papers. Of the 48 articles, 29 are linked on the basis of their bibliography. Clustering the 29 articles on the basis of actual content, four research areas emerged: quality of care, quality of service, crisis management and data management.

Health-care organizations believe strongly that big data can become the most effective tool for correctly influencing the decision-making processes. Thus, more and more organizations continue to invest in big data analytics, and the literature on this topic has expanded rapidly. This study seeks to provide a comprehensive picture of the different streams of literature existing, together with gaps in research and future perspectives. The literature is mature enough for an analysis to be made and provide managers with useful insights on opportunities, criticisms and perspectives on the use of big data for health-care organizations. However, to date, there is no comprehensive literature review on the big data analysis in health care. Furthermore, as big data is a “sexy catchphrase,” more clarity on its usage may be needed. It represents an important tool to be investigated and its great potential is often yet to be discovered. This study thus sheds light on emerging issues and suggests further research that may be needed.

Social loafing in knowledge contribution (namely, knowledge contribution loafing [KCL]) usually happens in group context, especially in the mobile collaboration tasks. KCL shows dynamic features over time. However, most previous studies are based on static assumption, that is, KCL will not change over time. This paper aims to reveal the dynamics of KCL in mobile collaboration and analyze how network centrality influences KCL states considering the current loafing state.

This study is based on empirical study design. Real mobile collaboration behavioral data related to knowledge contribution were collected to investigate the dynamic relationship between network centrality and KCL. In total, 4,127 chat contents were collected through Slack (a mobile collaboration APP). The text data were first analyzed using the text analysis method and then analyzed by a machine learning method called hidden Markov model.

First, the results reveal the inner structure of KCL, showing that it has three states (low, medium and high). Second, it is found that network centrality positively influences individuals involved in medium and high loafing state, while it has a negative influence on individuals with low loafing state.

The limitations are related to the single machine learning method and no subdivision of social network. First, this paper only uses one kind of text classification model (TF-IDF) to divide chat contents, which may not be superior to other classification models. This paper considers the eigenvector centrality, and not further divides the social network into advice network and expressive network.

This study helps companies infer tendency of different KCL and dynamically re-organize a mobile collaborative team for better knowledge contribution.

First, previous studies based on static assumptions regarding KCL as static and the relationship between loafing reducing mechanisms and team members KCL does not change over time. This study relaxes static assumptions and allows KCL to change during the process of collaboration. Second, this study allows the impact of network centrality to be different when members are in different KCL states.

Voluntary non-financial reporting aims at fairly reporting a firm’s non-financial performance. In particular, integrated reporting (IR) displays in a single report the contribution of different forms of capital to the firm’s value creation. Drawing on both legitimacy and voluntary disclosure theory, the main purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which a company’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance affects the content and semantic properties of intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) found in IRs.

To test theoretical hypotheses, content and tone analysis is used to assess the disclosure strategy associated with ICD, whereas a regression analysis tests the variation in semantic properties of ICD according to firms’ ESG performance. A total of 79 reports by European listed firms from 2011 to 2016 were downloaded via the Integrated Reporting Emerging Practice Examples Database and analyzed.

Results show that ESG performance contributing more to optimistic ICD tone is governance, although in mixed ways. Integrating vision and strategy positively contributes to ICD tone, whereas information on poor treatment of shareholders’ rights tends to be manipulated and associated with an optimistic tone of the ICD. Moreover, eco-efficient product innovation and healthy and safe job conditions play a positive role in enhancing optimistic ICD tone.

This chapter contributes to the current literature on voluntary disclosure by introducing new evidence on the disclosure strategy in IR. By analyzing the effect of the single dimensions of ESG performance on ICD tone, this study extends respectively ESG literature.