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This paper aims to explore the value of transdisciplinary dialogues for advancing critical perspectives on international business. Specifically, it seeks to consider how conceptualisations of transnational corporations as embedded social communities can be advanced through dialogues and collaborations between two broadly defined scholarly communities, economic geographers and organizational sociologists.

The paper is conceptual and reviews existing work by economic geographers and organizational sociologists useful for studying transnational corporations. Specifically the paper considers how economic geographers' work on the affects of institutions on firms can be brought together with organizational sociologists' work on identity regulation to generate new lines of enquiry about the role of transnational identity regulation in firms.

It is shown that pragmatic rather than adversarial dialogues can overcome the limitations of disciplinary approaches and develop new questions about, and more sophisticated studies of, international business and transnational corporations, as long as the inherent dangers of transdisciplinary working are recognised and avoided.

The paper takes a different approach to existing discussions of the value of transdisciplinary collaboration for studying international business, explicitly advocating a pragmatic approach that involves collaboration between researchers from related paradigms so as to generate new questions for research rather than an approach that involves critique and counter‐critique of work from starkly contrasting research paradigms.

The leading frameworks of internationalization have contributed significantly to our knowledge of how firms internationalize, but do not fully explain how firms actually create and capture value from customers when internationalizing their activities. Understanding the value creation and capture activities defining their business model(s) is critical for firms moving into less familiar markets, and is particularly relevant for service firms where variability is an inherent feature of the firm/client experience. To address this gap, we take a business model perspective to analyze 144 internationalization events of 10 professional service firms. We find that the case firms adopted four different business models when internationalizing, and that single firms may utilize portfolios of business models. Our findings contribute to both the services internationalization and business model literatures by showing how variability in the internationalization process substantiates the need for business model portfolios.

Legal information work has expanded with the growth in knowledge management and emergence of a new type of knowledge/information manager, the professional support lawyer. This study aims to investigate competency requirements for library‐based information work in UK law firms, including the specialist subject knowledge required, methods of development and the impact on information professionals of professional support lawyers.

The investigation used a pragmatic mixed‐methods approach, including a mainly quantitative questionnaire, administered online to 64 legal information professionals, followed by eight semi‐structured interviews and a focus group with four participants. A literature review informed the questionnaire design and contextualised the findings.

The survey confirmed a broad range of competency requirements and clarified the specific subject knowledge needed. Participants favoured a varied combination of formal, and informal learning. Most participants also wanted specialised professional education for the sector.

The nature of the sample and use of categorised questions were limiting factors, partly compensated by inviting open‐ended comments and follow‐up interviews. A larger study using qualitative methods with professional support lawyers and fee‐earners would provide a fuller more rounded picture.

The findings indicate that the subject knowledge needed for legal information work in law firms is more extensive than for other sectors and suggest that information science departments should strengthen and extend curriculum content to reflect this need.

The study has advanced the understanding of the competency, education and training needs of UK legal information professionals, challenging assumptions about academic/professional qualifications and illuminating the blend of competencies needed.

Purpose: The purpose of the work is to study the approaches to classification of modern business systems from business managers through the prism of making of managerial decisions.

Methodology: The methods of classification, comparative and systemic analysis, induction, deduction, and formalization are used.

Conclusions: As a result of the research, five conceptual approaches to classification of modern business systems are distinguished: organization-oriented, externally-oriented, management-oriented, socially-oriented, and innovations-oriented. Within each of them, various (mutually supplementing) criteria of classification are used, which allow distinguishing a lot of types of modern business systems. In the conditions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which includes transition to Industry 4.0, a new classification of modern business systems according to the criteria of their technological mode is offered, and the systems of the mode 3.0 and 4.0 are distinguished. Transition to the new technological mode is connected to additional business risks, which complicates the process of making of managerial decisions.

Originality/value: The performed analysis of classification of modern business systems from business managers showed that all peculiarities of these systems influence the process of making of managerial decisions in them, including the sectorial structure of business environment, size of business systems, sphere in which business systems function, involvement in business environment, internal and external integration of business systems, scale and complexity of business environment, organizational and legal form, business structure and business culture of business systems, types of benefits that they sell, level of legitimacy, responsibility, innovational activity, and technological mode of business systems.

IN every decade some word is thrown to the surface of men's minds and proves powerful enough to colour and condition their thinking. At present the word is automation. We see it as the crucible to resolve all our production problems, the formula to express our hopes for the future.

This paper aims to investigate whether and why the base of the pyramid (BOP) actors display passive innovation resistance because of which they reject service innovations without evaluation and forfeit potential to improve their well-being. The resourceness concept, referring to the outcome of how actors appraise and integrate resources in pursuit of a purpose at hand, is used as a theoretical lens to investigate the everyday consumption behaviour of BOP households and helps to investigate how and why passive innovation resistance occurs. The outcomes of the study help address important theoretical and practical considerations for the development of successful new service concepts at the BOP.

Narrative interviews with 29 households in Zambia provide data, from which patterns in how potential resources do or do not become real are identified and related to the concept of passive innovation.

Economic, social and other factors in the BOP context clearly influence non-random patterns of resource integration which are correlated with passive innovation resistance. This can lead to service innovations being ignored and/or misunderstood prior to evaluation for adoption. This is a risk to the potential positive impact of service innovation for poverty alleviation at the BOP.

Service innovation at the BOP must begin with a deep understanding of “how” and “why” consumers typically appraise and integrate potential resources to achieve a beneficial outcome in their context. To overcome the barrier of passive innovation resistance, marketing education must stimulate an understanding of potential benefits and motivation towards the change associated with the adoption of service innovation.

The findings support more successful service innovation strategies for the BOP, which can provide vital infrastructure for the alleviation of poverty.

The application of a service-dominant logic perspective in the BOP context and the conceptual linkage between resourceness and passive innovation resistance is novel. Valuable insights are gained for service practitioners at the BOP and for further conceptual development of innovation resistance in the BOP context.

This paper aims to analyse the longitudinal performative effects of accounting, focusing on how accounting shapes the stability/instability of economic frames over time.

To explore the performative effects of accounting over time, a longitudinal case study narrates the transformation of a large, listed manufacturing company's financial strategy over 20 years. Using extensive document collection, the authors trace the shift from an “industrial” frame to a “shareholder value” frame in the mid-1990s, followed by the gradual entrenchment of this shareholder value frame until its decline in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008.

Our findings show how accounting has different performative temporalities, capable of precipitating sudden shifts between different economic frames and stabilising an ever-more entrenched and narrowly defined enactment of a specific frame. We conceptualise these different temporalities as performative moments and performative momentum respectively, explaining how accounting produces these performative effects over time. Moreover, in contrast to extant accounting research, the authors provide insight into the performative role of accounting not only in contested but also “cold” situations marked by consensus regarding the overarching economic frame.

Our paper draws attention to the longitudinal performative effects of accounting. In particular, the analysis of how accounting entrenches and refines economic frames over time adds to prior research, which has focused mainly on the contestation and instability of framing processes.

The major purpose of this paper is to answer the overarching questions of how multinational corporations (MNCs) address the multiple institutional logics of accountability and pressures of the field in which they operate and how the dominant logic changes and shifts in response to such pressures pre- and post-disaster situation.

In-depth interpretive textual analyses of multiple longitudinal data sets are conducted to study the case of the Fundão dam disaster. The data sources include historical documents, academic articles and public institutional press releases from 2000 to 2016, covering the environment leading to the case study incident and its aftermath.

The findings reveal how MNCs' plurality of and, at times, conflicting institutional logics shape the organizational behaviors, actions and nonactions of actors pre-, peri- and post-disaster. More specifically, the predominance bureaucracy embedded in the state-corporatist logic of the host country before a disaster allows the strategic subunit of an MNC to continue operating while causing various forms of environmental damage until a globally visible disaster triggers a reversal in the dominant logic toward the embrace of wider, global, emergent social and environmental accountability.

This paper contributes to discussions regarding the need to explore in depth of how MNCs respond to multiple institutional pressures in practice. This study extends the literature concerning disaster accountability, state-corporatism and logic-shifting by exploring how MNCs respond to the plurality of institutional logics and pressures over time and showing how, in some cases, logics not only reinforce but also contrast with each other and how a globally exposed disaster may trigger a shift in the dominant logic governing MNCs' responses.

The aim of the study is to understand how the hiring process develops in cases where there are no explicit or formal requirements. How do implicit and informal criteria and requirements impact the process of selecting the right candidate?

A qualitative approach was employed through the use of semi-structured interviews with 47 external recruitment consultants in the south of England.

In contrast to what is assumed in mainstream Human Resource Management literature, employers do not rely on a comprehensive implicit understanding of what is needed in cases where there are no explicit criteria and requirements. Instead, high uncertainty makes the development of criteria and requirements incremental and negotiable but also problematic. The analysis shows that three mechanisms compensate for the lack of certainty in the hiring process. First, interviews with applicants shape how the hiring criteria develop. Second, market signals of what is available in the labour market help construct the criteria and requirements. Third, criteria and requirements are interpreted and negotiated during interactions with recruiters and others.

Hiring without explicit requirements and criteria is often understood as rather unproblematic and/or not fundamentally distinct from hiring with them. The study shows that in these cases the process becomes more unpredictable and more open to interpretation and negotiation.