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This paper argues for the benefits to international business (IB) of taking a much longer view at the engagement by multinational enterprises (MNEs) with host locations.

The authors showcase a project tracking the engagement by MNEs with Australia over the past two centuries. Extensive archival work has been undertaken to identify and document modes of entry, home countries, industries, operational modes and company types among the MNEs operating in Australia. The authors also describe the shifting nature of Australia as a host location.

The authors demonstrate the historical and ongoing diversity of ways in which MNEs interact with a host. They show that different organisational forms have prevailed over time, and that considerable operational mode changes can best be observed when a long lens is adopted. The authors show how these mode changes interact with host country dynamics, and also the broader context of the MNE and its altering strategies.

The authors urge IB scholars to embrace longer timeframes to capture the complexity of MNEs’ growth and adaptation more meaningfully.

By taking such a long-run perspective, the authors shed new light on the importance of moving beyond simple snapshots to analyse key IB constructs and phenomenon.

This study investigates investor trading behaviour around regular and one-off public holidays on the Sydney Stock Exchange (SSX) from 1901 to 1950. The purpose is to examine whether trading patterns differ between regular holidays, which are known in advance, and one-off holidays, which are unexpected. The study provides insights into the predictability of holidays and its influence on market activity, contributing to the broader literature on investor inattention and market anomalies.

Using a novel dataset constructed from handwritten share price lists covering 14,224 trading days, we perform quantitative analysis to assess trading volume before and after regular and one-off public holidays. Ordinary least squares regression models are employed to identify the presence of a holiday effect, accounting for various fixed effects and time-varying factors such as geopolitical events.

We find that trading volume is significantly lower on the day before regular holidays and higher on the day after, consistent with the investor inattention hypothesis. In contrast, no significant holiday effect is observed for one-off holidays. This suggests that predictability plays a crucial role in influencing investor behaviour, with irregular, less predictable holidays having less impact on trading patterns.

The study is limited by the historical nature of the data, which may not fully capture the diversity of modern trading environments. Additionally, the analysis is restricted to the SSX and may not be generalisable to other markets or time periods. Future research could explore similar effects in different contexts or with more recent data.

This research provides valuable insights for market participants and regulators by demonstrating how the predictability of holidays influences market activity. Understanding these patterns could help in making more informed decisions during periods of expected low trading volumes.

The study underscores the role of public holidays in shaping investor behaviour, with broader implications for understanding how societal events influence financial markets. This is particularly relevant in discussions about the impact of unexpected events on market stability.

This is the first study to compare the effects of regular and one-off public holidays on trading volumes in a historical stock market context. Our findings highlight the importance of event predictability in financial markets, offering a new perspective on how historical market behaviours can inform current financial theories.

In a recent report into new research directions in management accounting a geographically and philosophically diverse group of eight scholars argued for a convergence of different and complementary approaches to the subject. They concluded that, “[n]ew directions and advances in management accounting research depend on researchers actively seeking synergy among different research methods and disciplines” (Atkinson et al. 1997, p. 98). The authors argued specifically that management accounting research can benefit from integration with advances in economic, organisational, and social theory. In another recent assessment, Foster and Young (1996, p. 75) have called for “management accounting academics to gain broader and deeper institutional knowledge [and]…a longer term perspective”. In this essay we particularise these general calls by arguing that powerful synergies exist between the study of accounting and business history in Australasia. Historical evidence can be usefully employed to further our understanding of how management accounting systems (hereafter MAS) develop in our leading contemporary corporations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the conceptual construct of social innovation in business as distinct from social innovation implemented by civil society and the state. The general absence of sustained research and analysis of this phenomenon, and the dominance of grey and policy-oriented literature, mean that a broadly accepted definition of how social innovation theorises the changing role of business in society is missing

An integrative review of the representative literature on social innovation was conducted. The analysis focused on the key arguments made about the involvement of business actors in processes of social innovation and interweaved in this study to build a logically coherent definition of what social innovation in business means for the bulk of those who write and speak about it today. The scope of the literature review was expanded by integrating insights from the extant “business in society” and social innovation literatures, thereby adding clarity to the authors' conceptualisation.

The findings indicate that social innovation is best understood as a process driven by human relations, morality and creative capacity breaking routines and path dependencies. It fundamentally relies on the socially constructed dynamics between business and social actors who carry ideas, focus their energies, mobilise competences and create new complementarities to tackle social problems. Economic gain, in this approach, is at best an outcome of social innovation, not its engine.

What this literature review unveils that is unique about social innovation, and contributes to an enrichment of the “business in society” debate beyond the business case and win-win scenarios depicted by most scholars in this field, is that it best manifests itself as an informal social process that comes into existence at the margins of conventional ways of thinking and organising business activities. Business actors involved in social innovation are framed as self-directed and self-organised around the moral purpose of fostering social progress.

This chapter compares programmes for urban housing regeneration in France and England, showing how ideological similarities reflected in policy ideas and programmes played out differently in significantly different contexts.

The chapter draws on results of several major research programmes, including in-depth extensive fieldwork in a number of cities and regions in France and England. Field research included participant observation in participatory planning events, interviews, home visits, guided walks in the districts, etc. These enabled a multi-site and multi-perspective understanding of urban housing renewal at different sites.

In both contexts, early promises for participation in housing renewal gave way to an imperative for demolition, justified on purely technical grounds that were not shared with participants. The linking of social mix and demolition for local ‘improvement’ also then appeared to be a contradiction between different policies that few residents could endorse, other than selected beneficiaries. Participation, social mix and demolition thus formed an unholy trinity in urban renewal policies.

Housing renewal requires much greater commitment to the experience of residents, to avoid exacerbating social problems rather than relieving them.

The chapter reflects on a wealth of in-depth research over more than a decade to consider the broader implications and outcomes of housing renewal programmes in two countries. It highlights the different balances of power in the two cases and the trajectories of respective urban social politics, including the overlaps between policy objectives and similarities in the government of housing renewal. It also highlights the determination and commitment among residents to the value of housing that is judged from the outside to be ‘poor’.

French Republican Model and ‘laïcité, the French version of secularism’, are supposed to protect the citizens, at work or elsewhere, against any form of discrimination and France has a long history of immigration. Ethnical and racial discriminations at work are nevertheless observable towards visible minorities today. People from North African ascendance as well as those from French overseas territories ¹ ’ origins are heavily penalized in the job market. Neither direct and indirect laws nor the ‘voluntary initiatives’ introduced by companies seem able to solve this problem at a time when massive unemployment and terrorist Islamic attacks on the French soil are creating a situation of crisis.

Digital learning has become a global trend. Partly or fully automatic learning systems are integrated into education in schools and universities on a previously unseen scale. Learning systems have a lot of potential for re-education, life-long learning and for increasing access to educational resources. Learning systems create massive amounts of data about learning behaviour. Analysing that data for educational decision making has become an important track of research. The purpose of this paper is to analyse data from an intermediate-level computer science course, which was taught to 141 students in spring 2018 at University of Turku, Department of Future Technologies, Finland.

The available variables included number of submissions, submission times, variables of groupwork and final grades. Associations between these variables were looked at to reveal patterns in students’ learning behaviour.

It was found that time usage differs per different grades so that students with grade 4 out of 5 used most time. Also, it was found that studying at night is connected to weaker learning outcomes than studying during daytime. Several issues in relation to groupwork were revealed. For example, associations were found between prior skills, preference for individual vs groupwork, and course learning outcomes.

The research was limited by the domain of available variables, which is a common limitation in learning analytics research.

The practical implications include important ideas for future research and interventions in digital learning.

The importance of research on soft skills, social skills and collaboration is highlighted.

The paper points a number of important ideas for future research. One important observation is that some research questions in learning analytics need qualitative approaches, which need to be added to the toolbox of learning analytics research.

This paper aims to unpack the sets of policy ideas underpinning the use of social innovation, thus permeating the allegedly politically neutral language of the concept.

Drawing on Daigneualt (2014), this paper adapts a four-dimensional approach to investigate the sets of ideas underpinning different conceptualisations of social innovation, particularly in relation to who the actors driving social change are, the nature of the problems addressed, the objectives pursued and the means used to achieve these objectives.

Applying the four-dimensional approach to a corpus of literature, this paper found evidence of two different perspectives along each dimension, namely, a radical empowerment approach and an incremental market-oriented one.

A limitation of the study is the focus on academic literature, whereas a broader focus on policy discourse may give further insights. However, this paper argues that this study can be the ground for future research to investigate whether and how the two approaches identified have been adopted in different institutional and policy contexts.

The paper contributes to the development of social innovation research by boosting and encouraging further investigation on how different sets of ideas underpin social innovation discourse and its use as a policy concept.