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This industry viewpoint paper provides a comprehensive overview and critical viewpoint on the use of collectable toy premiums via instant reward programs (IRP) within the retail industry as a marketing tool.

This paper draws upon the uses of a “free” collectable toy premium promotion with a fixed purchase spend (via an IRP) in the supermarket industry as a marketing instrument to increase customer basket spend and repeat visits. Reflections on the recent use of toy premiums by Australian supermarket retailers are also utilised to highlight the ingredients for a successful promotion but also the controversies associated with such promotions.

One of the key findings suggest that the role of toy premiums is a successful marketing tool by retailers to increase customer total basket spending. However, notable points of caution regarding offering IRPs incorporating collectable toy premiums promotions are established, including environmental concerns and the social, ethical dilemma as to whether these promotions are indirectly targeted at children rather than adult consumers.

The findings have important implications for retailers to attract customer attention, increased market spend and repeat purchases through a desired collectable premium promotion (via an IRP).

This is the first paper to critically review the usage of collectable toy premiums within the supermarket retail industry.

Flatter organisational structures and nonlinear career trajectories mean intrinsic value and subjective career success are increasingly important for motivating, guiding and rewarding contemporary workers. While objective measures of career success have been well explored, more research is needed to understand the dimensions of subjective career success, their relative importance to graduates and potential variations by personal factors. This is critical for supporting graduates’ transition into work and for organisations to attract and retain graduates amid global talent shortages.

Building on assertions of the power to understand how what one seeks in a career affects career achievement, this study investigated the importance and achievement of subjective career success among 324 recent graduates from two Australian universities.

Results include a notable emphasis on financial security and work-life balance, particularly among mature individuals, underscoring the value of adaptable work arrangements. Results suggest shifting priorities, with reduced importance placed on opportunities for innovation and assisting others, potentially indicating a move from collective to more individualised goals. Distinct graduate profiles emerged, showcasing diverse priorities and achievements in subjective career success, spanning from “humanistic” to “self-made” success.

Results underscore the significance of higher education embedding program-wide career development plans across the curriculum, including value-based assessments, labour market analyses and career planning and review processes. Comprehensively supporting students in career development will empower them to explore, understand and actively pursue their career goals in alignment with their values and motivations, enhancing their person-organisation fit, career satisfaction and organisational commitment.

This study aims to consolidate and hone existing spectating and crowd theory. This is achieved by marrying socio-cultural ideas and concepts from related disciplines.

This conceptual review examines what people do when they congregate at an event, and in doing so, answers the question of what they forgo when denied a crowd. Concepts are teased from the literature as to what happens during participatory congregation (in company, in situ), punctuated by relegation without it.

Related concepts are organised into a typology. The metamodel is the essence of the paper and includes four themes: (1) identity construction, (2) interacting with others, (3) producing and co-producing the event and (4) the allure of tribalism.

The paper is conceptual and therefore a typology (not a taxonomy). This implies that while it is likely transferable, it is not generalisable. It is manual and subjective, as opposed to objective and automatic. Notwithstanding future research implications, it is intended to inform those considering running virtual events.

Event organisers are informed as to the “what” and “why” of running community events. It encourages a more circumspect, humanistic view that events are not merely a source of revenue.

This review contributes a macro understanding of human nature, complementing a micro understanding of crowd behaviour.

Virtual event management is a relatively new and burgeoning field. Prior to the Pandemic an event without a crowd was almost inconceivable.

AS A RESULT of present economic problems in Britain and attendant cuts in spending, there is a need to achieve maximum cost‐effectiveness in all sectors of public spending including libraries. This article examines a simple method by which economies could be made in buying multiple copies of books. It is assumed that unless librarians have freedom to buy a single copy of any book they choose, they will not achieve the breadth and depth required of first‐class libraries, be they in the public sector or in academic institutions. Perhaps second copies need cause little concern, but a pilot survey of a polytechnic library revealed cases where as many as four, six or even eight copies of the same edition had been bought on one occasion before the effectiveness of a lesser purchase could have been evaluated.

The purpose of this multi-voiced paper is to propose a prosocial paradigm for the field of performance management and management control systems. This new paradigm suggests cultivating prosocial behaviour and prosocial groups in organizations to simultaneously achieve the objectives of economic performance and sustainability.

The authors share a common concern about the future of humanity and nature. They challenge the influential assumption of economic man from neoclassical economic theory and build on evolutionary science and the core design principles of prosocial groups to develop a prosocial paradigm.

Findings are based on the premise of the prosocial paradigm that self-interested behaviour may outperform prosocial behaviour within a group but that prosocial groups outperform groups dominated by self-interest. The authors explore various dimensions of performance management from the prosocial perspective in the private and public sectors.

The authors call for theoretical, conceptual and empirical research that explores the prosocial paradigm. They invite any approach, including positivist, interpretive and critical research, as well as those using qualitative, quantitative and interventionist methods.

This paper offers implications from the prosocial paradigm for practitioners, particularly for executives and managers, policymakers and educators.

Adoption of the prosocial paradigm in research and practice shapes what the authors call the prosocial market economy. This is an aspired cultural evolution that functions with market competition yet systematically strengthens prosociality as a cultural norm in organizations, markets and society at large.

Women in public accounting firms are still proportionally much fewer in number in the highest levels of the hierarchy than men, whereas recruitment at junior level tends to be increasingly gender‐balanced. This paper aims to analyse the relationships between the glass ceiling and motherhood. The mechanisms explaining the difficulties encountered by auditor mothers in their hierarchical progression within the Big Four in France are identified.

From 24 interviews with male and female auditors of various hierarchical levels, one seeks to reveal the specificity of the difficulties encountered by auditor mothers.

It is argued that, throughout their careers, they are confronted with a dilemma that often leads to their being excluded and excluding themselves from the group of “those who may become partners”. It is shown that public accounting firms place both implicit and explicit obstacles in their way, tied to a desire to neutralise the effects, deemed costly, of motherhood. Moreover, the expectations of the organisation and society as a whole conflict on many points and confront female auditors with a dilemma: how to be a good mother and have a bright career? It appears that women who want to better manage this dilemma shape working practices imposed on the whole team and implement tactics to adapt their work‐life balance (specialisation and lateral move to staff departments). This leads to individual trajectories that break out of the organisational model and account for the scarcity of women in the upper management levels in audit firms.

The paper gives voice to male auditors and shows that managing the professional life/private life dilemma is difficult for fathers as well as mothers, in the long term. Moreover, rather than thinking in terms of horizontal and vertical segregations, this paper invites one to question the concept of the glass ceiling and consider the construction of the scarcity of women in the accounting profession.

This paper investigates online evaluation processes on peer-to-peer platforms to highlight how online peer evaluation enacts neoliberal subjects and collectives.

The paper uses netnography (Kozinets, 2002) to study the online community of Airbnb. It is also based on 18 interviews, mostly with Airbnb users, and quantitative data about reviews.

Results indicate that peer-to-peer platforms constitute biopolitical infrastructures. They enact and consolidate narcissistic entrepreneurs of the self through evaluation processes and consolidating a for-show community. Specifically, three features make evaluation a powerful neoliberal agent. The object of evaluation shifts from the service to the user's own worth (1). The public nature of the evaluation (2) and symetrical accountability between the evaluator and the evaluatee (3) contribute to excessively positive reviews and this keeps the market fluid.

This paper calls for problematization of the idea of sharing in the so-called “sharing economy”. What is shared on peer-to-peer platforms is the comfort of engaging with people like ourselves.

This paper contributes to the literature on online accounting by extending consideration of evaluation beyond the review process. It also stresses that trust in the evaluative infrastructure is fostered by narcissistic relationships between users, who come to use the platform as a mirror. The peer-to-peer context refreshes the our knowledge on evaluation in a corporate context by highlighting phenomena of standardized spontaneity and euphemized evaluation language. This allows evaluation processes to incorporate a market logic without having to fuel competition.

The purpose of this paper is to report the outcome of an interdisciplinary discussion on the concepts of profit and profitability and various ways in which we could potentially problematize these concepts. It is our hope that a much greater attention or reconsideration of the problematization of profit and related accounting numbers will be fostered in part by the exchanges we include here.

This paper adopts an interdisciplinary discussion approach and brings into conversation ideas and views of several scholars on problematizing profit and profitability in various contexts and explores potential implications of such problematization.

Profit and profitability measures make invisible the collective endeavour of people who work hard (backstage) to achieve a desired profit level for a division and/or an organization. Profit tends to preclude the social process of debate around contradictions among the ends and means of collective activity. An inherent message that we can discern from our contributors is the typical failure of managers to appreciate the value of critical theory and interpretive research for them. Practitioners and positivist researchers seem to be so influenced by neo-liberal economic ideas that organizations are distrusted and at times reviled in their attachment to profit.

Problematizing opens-up the potential for interesting and significant theoretical insights. A much greater pragmatic and theoretical reconsideration of profit and profitability will be fostered by the exchanges we include here.

In setting out a future research agenda, this paper fosters theoretical and methodological pluralism in the research community focussing on problematizing profit and profitability in various settings. The discussion perspectives offered in this paper provides not only a basis for further research in this critical area of discourse and regulation on the role and status of profit and profitability but also emancipatory potential for practitioners (to be reflective of their practices and their undesired consequences of such practices) whose overarching focus is on these accounting numbers.

The purpose of this paper is to propose that transportation modal mix in global supply chains is a result of the strategic alignment between industry characteristics and supply chain strategies.

Using annual US trade statistics and manufacturing industry data for the years 2002-2009 between the USA and its top 12 Asian trading partners, this study applies various regression methods to examine key factors associated with the transport modal decision.

The results show that industry characteristics have an impact on the transportation modal mix in global supply chains. Manufacturing industries use more air freight and less ocean freight when facing positive sales surprises, high-monthly demand variation, a high-contribution margin ratio, a high cost of capital, and increased competition.

The findings provide important insights for logistics managers and freight forwarders. While transportation cost remains an important concern, a logistics manager must also consider non-cost factors such as competition, working capital, and demand uncertainties in their modal decisions. Freight forwarders should be supply chain solution providers who consider all of these industry factors and suggest a proper mix of transportation modes for their customers.

This study is among the first efforts to examine the impact of industry characteristics on the transportation modal mix in global supply chains. This study first develops a theoretical framework for the modal choice decision for international transportation movements and then, using an extensive and innovative data set, provides new findings regarding current air freight practices in global supply chains.

Franchisees’ satisfaction is key to a franchise network’s continuance over the years. However, at the moment, no robust scale exists in order to assess franchisees’ satisfaction. The aim of the present study is to fill this gap by providing a reflection on the nature of franchisee satisfaction. In particular, we favor a managerial approach to satisfaction which should provide franchisers with an appropriate tool for assessing the satisfaction of their franchisees and provide a basis for guaranteeing long‐term survival of their network. The study was conducted in France over a representative sample of 401 franchises representing 32 franchise networks and covering all sectors. After a pre‐test phase, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed. The results led to a short, robust and predictive scale of franchisee job satisfaction.