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This article provides an in-depth study of leader resilience during the prolonged COVID-19 crisis.

The research is based on interviews with leaders in the hotel, retail and manufacturing industries during the pandemic. The analytical framework is individual resilience as both a process and an outcome. The analysis method is a combination of deductive and inductive content analysis.

This study offers a rich description of the interaction among the behavioural, situational and individual factors influencing leaders during the various stages of the global COVID-19 crisis.

Highlighting the role of leaders' personal reflections on the interaction between resilience factors and leaders' identity work, this paper contributes to the field by introducing an extended model of leader resilience.

Based on insights from the buying process, the purpose of this study is to align selling firms to the buyer’s efficiency needs that are grounded on the different types of purchases.

Using thematic analysis, this study conducted 35 in-depth interviews with business-to-business buyers and salespeople on the changing buyers’ sourcing needs.

In line with buyer enablement, buyers prefer personal selling when they perceive the sales offer as highly risky for the buying organization, whereas they have a strong preference for a direct marketing approach by the selling firm when they are purchasing low-risk purchases.

This paper is a qualitative study. Future research should collect secondary company data to validate the results.

This paper addresses the buyer’s sourcing needs and presents how direct marketing channels and personal selling should be balanced to increase the return on salesforce resources.

This is one of the first studies to examine how sales organizations can create value by facilitating the buying process. Depending on the buyer’s categorization of the sales offer, this study highlights how a choice between direct marketing or personal selling improves the buyer’s perception of the sales organization.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how a foresight project supports institutional positioning efforts through joint sensemaking.

This paper describes a case study that investigated the design, implementation, and outcomes of a foresight project at a Finnish higher education institution that selected sales and services as its institutional focus areas. According to the institutional strategy, all students should have acquired solid sales and service skills before the completion of their studies. The foresight methods used in this study were e-Delphi, futures workshops, and futures narratives. The data gathered in this iterative foresight process resulted in the delineation of eight future sales and service roles and their related competences, which were subsequently used for redesigning curricula, new programme development, and personnel training.

With the careful choice of foresight methods, the organisation was not only able to define future competence needs based on the collective wisdom of its stakeholders, but also fostered the organisation’s strategic transformation process.

This paper gives insight into how to use a foresight process to foster institution-wide change.

This is one of only a few studies on how higher education institutions could implement their positioning strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Finnish higher education institutions communicate market differentiation on the admissions webpages of their international business and technology programmes when attempting to appeal to prospective students and distinguish themselves from other institutions.

The sample included admissions webpages of 68 bachelor’s and master’s programmes representing both Finnish universities and universities of applied sciences. The analysis method was a qualitative content analysis.

The international programmes heavily accentuated their labour market relevance in their advertising and generated strong claims regarding the future career prospects of the graduates. In addition, the programmes emphasised their pedagogical methods and international atmosphere. References to non-academic life were not observed.

The analysis was only based on text and included two study fields.

The results of this study can be used by marketers to critically examine their own marketing differentiation efforts and promises made to students.

Finnish business and technology programmes send an unequivocal marketing message that education has an instrumental value and students are considered consumers of education.

This study is the first comprehensive study of the marketing communication practices of international higher education programmes in Finland. Moreover, this study contributes to the study of global international market mechanisms and research on marketing communication practised by higher education institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a research on collaborative personal knowledge registration (PKR). It seeks to explain the interrelationship between records professionals and human resource (HR) and training professionals, as well as the views of management and quality managers on collaborative PKR. It aims to raise awareness of records professionals as specialists in information management, including personal knowledge.

Qualitative methodology was used to conduct the research. It was a multiple-case study, covering 12 organizations in Iceland. In these organizations, 32 professionals were interviewed. The research sought to understand how PKR was being facilitated, as well as how personal knowledge was made accessible and usable for employees.

The organizations had not been as successful as anticipated in PKR. The role and responsibility of records professionals was limited in the PKR process. Different professionals seemed unaware of the possible synergy effect of collaborative PKR.

There is a lack of studies that explore the juxtaposition and collaboration of records professionals and HR and training professionals in organizations. The aim of this research was to bridge this gap. Its originality lies in how it approaches diverse professions and their collaborative PKR effort. This research provides a valuable practical and theoretical contribution to a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of information and records management. It can lay the foundation for further research into the field.