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I use a controlled experiment to examine, in the context of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) crises, whether investors' investment judgments are influenced by a firm's CSR reputation and CSR crisis response strategy. I find that for good CSR reputation firms, the use of a rebuild or deny crisis response strategy does not lead to improvements in investment judgments. However, for bad CSR reputation firms, the use of a deny response strategy leads to improvements in investment judgments while the use of a rebuild strategy does not.

In this chapter, we reexamine the notion that socially responsible behavior by firms will lead to increased financial performance. By identifying the underlying processes, institutional settings, and actors involved, we present a framework that is more attentive to the multiplicity and conditionality of the mechanisms operating in the often tenuous connection between firms’ social behavior and financial performance. Building and expanding upon existing analyses of the CSP–CFP linkage, our model helps to explain the mixed results from a wide range of empirical studies which examine this link. It also provides a novel theoretical account to help guide future researches that are more attentive to conditionalities and contextual contingencies.

The 2008 Crash (the Crash) has been attributed to the dominance of financialized corporate governance, particularly an increased shareholder value rhetoric. Following the Crash, this extreme narrative is understood to have become less financialized through increasingly favouring stakeholders. The purpose of this research is to investigate this often-accepted view using field theory, wherein managers' biases in the value-creating process result from an interconnected, dynamic, multi-actor discourse.

Various domains across the UK’s corporate governance environment, from the perspective of field theory, generate the complex discourse: corporate and regulatory domains, stakeholder organizations such as the press and think tanks. Domain-specific corpora, representative of this multi-actor field, were constructed, with financialization analysed by assessing managers’ altering biases concerning the relative importance of shareholders and stakeholders (amongst other factors like time horizon) to value creation.

Highlights of the multiple findings include the following: corporate narrative about value creation became less financialized following the Crash, yet favouring shareholders, while the multi-actor discourse for the UK economy as a whole became slightly more financialized.

Analysing a multi-actor discourse is complex. And this, to the best of the author’s knowledge, is the first study of its kind, and only made possible with the original methodology of narrative staining. The approach, while having particular relevance to field theory, is applicable to many other narrative-based research scenarios.

The global financial crisis proved profoundly shocking for economic and political life. In the United Kingdom, media reporting of sudden insolvency in the banking sector, its teetering on the edge of collapse and subsequent injection of taxpayer funds by a desperate government thrust sector leaders and negative aspects of their leadership into the public glare. This is particularly significant in light of pre-crisis reporting narratives that ignored negative attributes in favour of financial successes and dealmaking. Many sector leaders had been previously unknown, but where certain individuals had featured in prior media reports, they were often lauded for dynamism, risk-taking and ‘great man’ attributes. However, with the outbreak of a crisis and search for blame and responsibility, previously celebrated or ambiguous values and activities were surfaced for public judgement and found wanting or even dangerous to society. Whilst political and economic aspects of the crisis have since generated a great deal of research, only limited scholarship has focused on narrative understandings and myths generated around positive and negative leadership behaviours. Whilst heroes and villains have served as metaphors for human behaviour since early societies started telling stories, the abrupt nature of this crisis triggered metaphorical narratives to the fore. This chapter will consider the dual phenomena of press coverage generated around negative leadership stories and how patterns of villainy, illegitimacy, demonisation and ruined reputations contributed to shared myths of the crisis.

This paper aims to contribute to understanding of strategy development by reporting a detailed case study of one pharmaceutical company over an 11‐year period using a framework for classifying strategic actions developed from a broader study of strategic behaviour in the industry.

The paper utilises a longitudinal text analysis using published documentary sources to explore the strategic actions and grand strategies realised by Bioglan during 1992‐2002.

The findings develop concepts from the economics, ecology and strategy literature in order to highlight that, rather than strategy research focusing on “with whom and how do firms compete?” the emphasis should be on “with whom and how do firms co‐evolve?”

The paper only explored the realised strategies of one firm during an 11‐year period using only published documentary sources.

Previous research does not appear to have explored the evolution and co‐evolution of a firm's strategic actions prior to its death, a gap that this paper aims to help to fill.

Much in accounting research depends upon equity valuation. Too often, what the stock of publicly traded companies trade at is taken at its face value. Knowing that valuation is a function of performance relative to consensus security analyst expectations, more needs to be known about how these expectations are created and changed. The paper aims to assert that the guidance provided by top-level company management is important to the work product of analysts. The paper develops information from managers involved in these interactions.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 31 high-level executives employed by large USA companies in several industries. What those companies provided was interpreted through the theoretical lens of institutional theory and amounts to a qualitative content analysis approach to the subject.

The authors find that institutional theory well describes the important features of analyst guidance. Participants are aware of the broad societal interest that exists in the outcome of the guidance process. The participants accept the need for independent analyst opinions about their companies and their future prospects. In many ways, executives provide analysts more than just raw information and employ strategic structuring for analysts to produce expectations that will allow their companies a favorable pathway to future success as such is judged by the markets. The result is understood as being in the best interests of all market participants, even if it disproportionately benefits current corporate leadership.

Results are dependent upon the interview process, needing the correct questions to be asked and the willingness of interviewees to speak their lived truth. The paper calls into question traditional capital markets studies that evaluate quantitative relationships between projected accounting balances and subsequent stock market prices as a literal truth or as the result of scientific calculation.

Market participants should be somewhat more skeptical about companies that are routinely able to meet analyst expectations. To a large extent, such displays do not just happen but instead are manufactured to take place by virtual of a careful dance that is mindful of excesses on several sides.

The antagonistic interests of two important groups in the stock market is actually an unrecognized symbiotic dependency that prioritizes continued permission.

The accounting literature is very dependent on the work product of analysts. This is a rare opportunity to peak behind the curtain of their expertise in a critical fashion. The paper breaks ranks with the literature by trying to understand the thinking behind the narratives of capital market participants.

The subject of this paper is wearable computing technology. The purpose of this paper is to determine its potential in libraries to meet the needs of both users and librarians. The specific goals include: description of the main features of wearable computing from the perspective of its potential usefulness in libraries; analysis of areas of wearable computing use in public institutions; discussion of the potential of wearable computing for library users; and discussion of the potential of wearable computing for librarians to determine its potential in libraries to meet the needs of users and librarians.

The method of subject literature overview was used. The state of research from the period 2008 to 2018 on the use of wearable computing in libraries was established based on a search of selected sources Web of Science, Scopus, Elsevier and Emerald databases and LISTA database.

Wearable computing can be used in many areas of library activities to serve the needs of users and librarians. In the context of services for users, wearable computing can be used, among others, to help users navigate the library, to provide resources in new and interesting forms, and in education and entertainment. For the needs of librarians, additional data provided via wearable devices can accelerate the process of cataloguing resources and increase motivation to work via gamification options and features that make it possible to measure personal work efficiency. Librarians can also use the data obtained wearable computing devices to more quickly track, identify, select and organize resources. As with users, librarians can also use wearable computing in their education.

The paper is a viewpoint based on subject literature. It presents only a sketch of potential wearable computing applications in libraries. The aim of the paper is to initiate further discussion on the possibilities of using wearable devices to improve both services for users and internal library processes. The author’s hope is that the concepts presented here will be tested in practice by librarians, which will allow further development of research on this subject.

The results can be widely used in practice as a framework for the implementation of wearable computing solutions in libraries.

The paper can help to facilitate the debate on the role of the implementation of new technologies in libraries.

The issue of the use of wearable computing has not yet been widely discussed in library and information science journals. In the very few publications on similar topics, only the perspective on the application of new solutions in services for users is presented. This paper also shows the potential for improving libraries’ internal processes with the use of wearable computing.

As the repercussions of 3G licensing reverberate across the telecommunications industry, it has frequently been speculated that the European mobile communications industry is about to consolidate around a handful of players. However, many of these speculative comments fail to take into account either the scale of the players concerned or how they have acquired licences in the past. In this paper, we establish licence ownerships patterns, identifying in the process 13 multiple licence owners that collectively own 161 of the 225 second and third generation licences that have been offered to date across Europe. The multiple licence owners are then categorised by their scale and geographical focus, demonstrating in the process the considerable variation that occurs in both of these areas.