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By mobilizing the empirical setting of a megaproject, this study problematizes public budgeting as participatory practice. The authors suggest that megaprojects are prone to democratic legitimacy challenges due to a long history of cost overruns, which provides stakeholders with a chance to dramatize a budgetary controversy.

Through article and document data, the authors reconstructed a controversy that emerged around the budget of Stockholm/Åre’s candidature for the Olympic Winter Games 2026. The authors used Boltanski and Thévenot's (2006) orders of worth to systematically analyze the justification work of key stakeholder groups involved in the controversy.

This study illustrates that a budgetary controversy was actively maintained by stakeholder groups, which resulted in a lack of public support and the eventual demise of the Olympic candidature. As such, the authors provide a more nuanced understanding of public budgeting as a controversy-based process vis-à-vis a wider public with regard to the broken institution of megaprojects.

This study suggests more attention to the disruptive power of public scrutiny and the dramatization of budgeting in megaprojects. In this empirical case, the authors show how stakeholders tend to take their technical concerns too far in order to challenge a budget, even though megaprojects generally provide an ill-suited setting for accurate forecasts.

While studies around the financial legacies of megaprojects have somewhat matured, very few have looked at pitching them. However, the authors argue that megaprojects are increasingly faced with financial skepticism upon their approval upfront.

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC), popularized by Kaplan and Norton (1996a, 1996b), has become widely discussed and used (see, for example, Olsson, Karlsson, & Sharma, 2000). The basic notion of the BSC is that organisational performance ought to be evaluated from more than simply a financial perspective. This notion is sound and was an improvement over the traditional focus upon only financial performance. However, there is a fundamental problem with the version of the BSC proposed by Kaplan and Norton (1996b). Specifically, the Balanced Scorecard version proposed by Kaplan and Norton (1996b) is based upon the notion that “four perspectives” ought to be used to evaluate organisational performance: customer, internal business processes, learning and growth and financial. While this has intuitive appeal, the basic problem is that Kaplan and Norton (1996a, 1996b) have not provided any empirical support for these particular “perspectives.” We do not know whether these are the correct perspectives to be used as a basis for assessing organisational performance. This can have serious consequences for organisations. Managers are implicitly being encouraged to focus upon these four factors, when others might be more significant. In addition, this paper also questions the meaningfulness of the four perspectives proposed by Kaplan and Norton in terms of their construct validity. This is not just an academic quibble. The significance is that if the factors used in a strategic management system, such as a BSC, are invalid, managers can focus upon the wrong things and this, in turn, can potentially be damaging to companies, investors, and in turn, optimal societal resource allocation. Instead of the four perspectives proposed by Kaplan and Norton, there is evidence that there are actually six “key strategic building blocks” of successful organisations (Flamholtz, 1995; Flamholtz & Aksehirili, 2000; Flamholtz & Hua, 2002), and these should be used (in addition to financial results) to provide true balance for both performance measurement and strategic management. This should not be viewed as invalidating the original concept of the Balanced Scorecard, but rather as the next logical generation or iteration of its development.

The goal of this research is to investigate the relationship between two different sets of practices, lean startup and business planning, and their relation to entrepreneurial performance.

The authors collected data from 120 entrepreneurs across the US about a variety of new venture formation activities within the categories of lean startup or business planning. They use hierarchical regression to examine the relationship between these activities and new venture performance using both a subjective and objective measure of performance.

The results show that talking to customers, collecting preorders and pivoting based on customer feedback are lean startup activities correlated with performance; writing a business plan is the sole business planning activity correlated with performance.

This research lays the foundation for understanding the components of both lean startup and business planning. Moreover, these results demonstrate that the separation of lean startup and business planning represents a false dichotomy.

These findings suggest that entrepreneurs should engage in some lean startup activities and still write a business plan.

This article offers the first quantitative, empirical comparison of lean startup activities and business planning. Furthermore, it provides support for the relationship between specific lean startup activities and firm performance.

The Journal of Human Resource Costing and Accounting has achieved critical mass and recognition as a primary place for publishing both scientific and practical applications of Human Resource Accounting (HRA). This paper reviews the state of the art of the development of HRA as it has appeared in the JHRCA since its inception. The paper assesses contributions and categorizes them according to studies which (1) underscore the importance of reporting human resource assets on the financial statements, (2) present empirical evidence, case and field studies on the various methods of reporting human resource assets and implementing HRA in various organisations, (3) analyse methods for measuring human resources, (4) demonstrate the use of HRA in human resource management decision‐making, (5) identify bottlenecks to the growth of HRA, (6) identify controversies in the field, and (7) discuss recent developments such as the balanced scorecard. The paper draws conclusions on the state of the HRA and suggests recommendations for future research and development.

To enhance the understanding of entrepreneurial communication strategies in the start-up phase of the business, a resource dependence perspective is presented. Resources can be categorized in several ways. Penrose (1959), one of the pioneers in the resource-based view, and the subsequent work of, for example, Wernerfelt (1984) and Barney (1991), have brought the individual, the entrepreneur and especially resources within the business into focus. The process school of the resource-based view focuses on processes and activities and internal strategic capabilities (Tucker, Meyer, & Westerman, 1996). Furthermore, capabilities are based on developing, carrying and exchanging information through the business's human capital (Tucker et al., 1996). Grant (1991, p. 122) defined such capabilities as ‘complex patterns of coordination and cooperation between people, and between people and (tangible) resources’. Baum, Locke, and Smith (2001) and Lee, Lee, and Pennings (2001) found that new businesses’ internal capabilities are the primary determinants of the businesses’ performance. One of the intangible resources could be a business reputation (Deephouse, 2000). A positive reputation creates advantages in order to obtain, for example, financial capital.

In this chapter, my aim is to describe and analyse conceptually and provide direction for the identification, selection and use of assistive technologies (ATs) to support the education and development of young children with disabilities. The chapter discusses the quality of early intervention practices and the pragmatic role of ATs in delivering effective early intervention impacts. In making this case, the chapter draws upon Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory to illuminate how ATs can be selected and used effectively in schools to enable all young children to thrive in their learning and development in inclusive classrooms.

This monograph is on developments and trends in vocational education and training in Europe. An overview is given of what is being planned in Western Europe. This is illustrated by a detailed description of the educational systems of a selection of EC and non‐EC countries (Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Sweden and Switzerland), followed by discussion of the current provision for vocational education and training within those systems and also in commerce and industry. Also provided are additional information on the work of CEDEFOP and of the European Commission, further reading, useful addresses and a glossary of some European language vocational education terms.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the National Hockey League (NHL) Ottawa Senators’ Twitter activity influences (if at all) their followers’ activity online, examine whether followers’ Twitter activity level consequently influences their perception of and perceived inclusion within the online central fan group that surrounds the Senators, assess whether membership can potentially influence followers’ enrichment of social identity, and investigate if fans’ identity – and thereby commitment to the team – is impacted by their level of Twitter activity.

The study adopted a case study method focusing on the NHL’s Ottawa Senators, and collected data through a two-phase approach. In the first phase, a focus group was conducted to obtain breadth and depth, as well as to inform and refine the development of questions to be used in the second phase: survey method. In the second phase, a survey was employed to enrich the explanations and attain deeper and broader understanding regarding the research questions.

The results showed that time spent in reading and engaging in tweets are predictive of commitment. This study also showed that it is not strictly an individual’s Twitter activity in relation to the Senators (i.e. replying and retweeting) which dictates their membership within the fan group. Rather, it is a person’s activity level with other Senators community members which determines their membership in the team’s fan nation. Findings also suggest that both the evaluative and emotional components of forming a group are lacking within the Twitter communication. This only furthers the argument as to why the Senators need to engage in dialogue with their followers.

This was a study of one team over several months of only one season and, therefore, does not take into account a more long-term-oriented strategy to help formulate social identity and team commitment.

The findings of the study informed us that the only predictor that reflected a significant impact on the construction of a Senators fans’ social identity was the number of minutes an individual spent reading the team’s tweets per day. However, the study also showed that the expansion of the network with other fans is a critical feature of increasing the fan group identity; thus, sport organization’s should play a role in helping to foster further engagement with others.

In this study, we investigated the dilemma of devising an operational family business definition in the SME context. The existing family business literature mostly agrees with the validity of a theoretical model called F-PEC, which identifies family businesses by evaluating three dimensions: power, experience, and culture. Nonetheless, empirical studies on family SMEs still use just one or a few elements with many different thresholds to operationally define family SMEs, highlighting an unsolved definitional divergence among scholars, which limits the possibility of investigating the potential effects of family attributes on firms’ goals, structures, processes, and performance.

Employing ancestry searching, online databases, and issue-by-issue searches from two decades (1990–2019), we analyzed 255 empirical studies that specified a family business’s operational definition (despite posing different research questions) and used a sample of small-sized and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Results showed ownership and governance/management are the most used elements in the operational definitions provided in the literature to date, but that there still is not a universally adopted operational definition of family SMEs in use today.

This paper is one of the first to comprehensively analyze and review the operationalized use of family SME definitions in the literature.