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This paper explores budgetary practices in a Tanzanian university after decentralization.

Data were collected through interviews, document analysis, and observation. Moreover, Bourdieu's theory was used in open and axial coding procedures for data analysis.

The findings show that decentralized budgeting was a disillusionment. Administrators failed to transfer financial authority to resource recipients. Budgetary practices were shaped by the social structure/budget cycle (field), resources possessed by budgetary actors (capital) and the sincerity patterns of actors in budgetary practices (habitus). Most resource recipients had insincerity in budgeting habitus deploying subversive strategy, while the minority had sincerity in budgeting habitus, deploying submissive strategy. On the other hand, administrators had sincerity and insincerity in budgeting habitus, deploying conservative strategy.

In order to enhance effective decentralization, resource recipients should be provided with adequate financial resources and budgeting skills. Furthermore, they should be trusted and recognized. Moreover, in order to shape budgeting strategies and practices towards achieving organizational objectives, managements should identify and work on internal, external and technical budgetary constraints. In addition, they should promote sincerity in budgeting habitus as habitus can be created, altered, and reproduced through knowledge.

This is the first paper to investigate budgetary practices in a university setting, employing all Bourdieu's six theoretical concepts. It contributes to Bourdieu's theory by introducing a submissive strategy. In addition, it introduces “episteme” concept as the opposite of “doxa.” Moreover, the paper responds to the call by Deering and Sá (2018) to investigate what guides budgetary practices in a university setting. The paper has also demonstrated the role of approval organs and subordinates which were neglected in prior studies. It proposes a theory of budgetary practice in a University setting when budgeting is decentralized. It thus responds to the call to investigate and theorize the role of actors in calculative practices (such as budgeting) in a University setting (Argento et al., 2020; Aleksandrov, 2020; Grossi et al., 2020; Ozdil and Hoque, 2017).

To sustain firm profitability, it is critical for sales managers to direct business-to-business (B2B) salespeople to generate revenues by simultaneously acquiring new customers and selling to current customers. However, emerging research indicates territory-based B2B salespeople have a preferred customer engagement orientation that reflects a tendency for engaging in selling activities to new (i.e. hunters) and/or existing (i.e. farmers) customers, suggesting that managerial ambidexterity directives could have deleterious effects on salespeople. This paper aims to address this possibility by investigating the moderating effects of salesperson regulatory focus on the relationship between managerial directives for salesperson ambidexterity and salesperson job satisfaction.

The study uses a mixed-method approach by using a field study of 106 matched sales manager–salesperson dyads from a large Fortune 500 B2B industrial distributor sales force and an experiment involving 152 B2B salespeople from a cross-section of industries.

The results indicate that sales manager ambidexterity requests reduce salesperson job satisfaction. However, the findings also demonstrate that salesperson regulatory focus moderates these negative effects such that the negative effect of manager ambidexterity requests on job satisfaction is reduced for salespeople with high vs low levels of regulatory focus ambidexterity balance. The results from the cross-sectional experimental study illustrate the cognitive mechanism that helps explain why this occurs.

The Fortune 500 firm used in Study 1 uses a territory-based generalist sales force model where salespeople are not incentivized to prioritize hunting over farming (and vice versa). As a result, the findings may not generalize to firms with hunting/farming incentive systems or to those that operate in particular industries requiring a focus on either hunting or farming.

The findings show why managers attempting to direct territory-based salespeople to increase their ambidexterity behaviors may undermine the job satisfaction of certain salespeople by triggering a decrease in motivation while the same directives have the opposite effect for other salespeople. The findings also demonstrate salesperson reactions to ambidexterity requests, which provide additional insights for effective salespeople hiring, training and management.

The findings have implications for better understanding the effectiveness of sales management leadership directives. The study also offers a promising direction for future research to investigate salesperson receptivity to managerial controls.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the core tenets of social marketing communications in managing acute infectious disease outbreaks based on a historical review of two major pandemics in South Korea.

Two researchers reviewed newspapers, journal papers, archived documents and other historical materials to examine social marketing communications used in both Spanish flu and COVID-19 pandemics by South Koreans.

Despite two events being a century apart and the social context of two eras being starkly different, behavioral recommendations for both pandemics were nearly identical. Two major lessons arose from the review. First, a full disclosure of the pandemic-related information is important. Second, proper management of conflicting information is highly desired as an integral part of pandemic social marketing communication campaigns.

Understanding the importance of social marketing in raising public awareness, this paper provides a historical comparison between the 1918–1919 Spanish flu and COVID-19, focusing on the social communications used during these two pandemics. The paper contributes to the health marketing literature as well as to practice by drawing implications relevant to social marketing communication used in disease pandemics.

The objective of this research is to synthesize evidence on the relationship between context, strategies and performance in the context of federally qualified health centers (FQHCs), a core safety net health services provider in the United States. The research also identifies prior approaches to measure contextual factors, FQHC strategy and performance. Gaps in the research are identified, and directions for future research are provided.

A systematic review of peer-reviewed journal articles published between the years 1997 and 2017 was conducted using a bibliographic search of PubMed, Business Source Premier and ABI/Inform databases.

28 studies were selected for the analysis. Results supported associations among contextual factors (organizational and environmental) and FQHC strategy and FQHC performance. The research also indicates that previous research was primarily emphasized on clinical performance with less focus on other types of FQHC performance. In addition, there exists a wide variability in terms of measuring context, FQHC strategy and performance.

Operating in resource-scarce and highly constraining environments, FQHCs have demonstrated the ability to stay innovative and competent as serving often unhealthier and costlier patient populations. To date, there has been no study that reviewed the relationships between context, FQHC strategy and FQHC performance. In addition, there is an absence of consensus on how context, FQHC strategy and FQHC performance are measured. This study is the first that examined context–strategy–performance relationships in the context of FQHCs.

This paper aims to contribute industrial marketing literature by examining the relationship between market orientation and performance based on multiple perspectives and measures. Although the relationship between market orientation and firm performance has been examined in prior research a gap in the literature exists, as this relationship has not been examined from separate perspectives of managers, salespersons and customers. In addition to this gap in the literature, a further gap exists as these multiple assessments of market orientation have not been examined relative to both subjective and objectives measures of industrial firm performance.

The research is based on data obtained from 111 sales branches of a Fortune 500 industrial supplier.

The results indicate that managers, salespersons and customers all indicate a positive relationship between market orientation and perceived performance. Market orientation and actual branch performance were not related when assessed by any of the three respondent groups. Only salespersons were able to significantly relate perceived firm performance to actual performance.

These findings add a new dimensions to the existing stream of literature on the industrial marketing orientation and performance relationship.

These findings add new dimensions to the existing stream of literature on the industrial marketing orientation and performance relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between country-of-origin (COO) and brand positioning in the context of the high-involvement service of health care. This paper compares and analyzes different positioning strategies used in Europe, North America and the Middle East.

This paper uses content analysis of promotional materials for a sample of 168 health-care organizations located in 14 countries to identify brand positioning strategies used, such as foreign, local and global consumer culture positioning. A chi-square analysis and post hoc testing is used to examine how positioning strategies differ among regions.

The findings indicate that European and Middle Eastern health-care organizations most frequently use foreign consumer culture positioning, while North American institutions tend to use global consumer culture positioning. The findings indicate that health-care organizations in countries with a better reputation for care use different positioning strategies than in countries with a lesser reputation for quality care.

The findings are of value to international advertising and marketing professionals and hospitals seeking to attract patients globally in a competitive marketplace. Hospitals must consider their positioning relative to both domestic and international competitors and the COO of their target audience.

COO is important in high-involvement service industries because consumers lack the information needed to evaluate service quality. Consumers may rely on COO and brand positioning signals more heavily relative to goods or low-involvement services. However, little prior research exists examining COO effects and brand positioning for high involvement services and for health care specifically. This paper makes a unique contribution by filling this gap.

The purpose of this paper is to present researcher's reflexive writing about emergent events in research collaborations as a way of responding to the process-figurational sociology of Norbert Elias in the practice of organizational ethnography.

Drawing parallels between Norbert Elias' figurative account of social life and auto-ethnographic methodology, this paper re-articulates the entanglement of social researchers in organizational ethnographic work. Auto-ethnographic narration is explored as means to inquire from within the emerging relational complexity constituted by organizational dynamics. Writing about emergent events in the research process becomes a way of inquiring into the social figurations between the involved stakeholders; thus nurturing sense-making and increasing the awareness and sensitivity of the researcher to her own entanglement with the relational complexity of the organization under study.

In the paper, we argue that the writing of auto-ethnographic narratives of emergent field encounters is a process of inquiry that continuously depicts the temporal development of the relational complexity in organizations. Viewing that from the perspective of Elias' concept of figuration, we find a common commitment to the processual nature of research processes, which insists on moving beyond objectifying empirical insights.

This paper encourages awareness of the interdependency between ourselves as social researchers and field actors as we engage with the field. It moves beyond simplifying the ethnographic research agenda to that of “studying” and “describing” organizations. It offers unique insights into the organizational context, and increased sensitivity toward the social entanglement of the experiences that we, ourselves, as researchers are part of.

Using a meta-regression analysis, we quantitatively review the empirical literature on the relation between effective tax rate (ETR) and firm size. Accounting literature offers two competing theories on this relation: The political cost theory, suggesting a positive size-ETR relation, and the political power theory, suggesting a negative size-ETR relation. Using a unique data set of 56 studies that do not show a clear tendency towards either of the two theories, we contribute to the discussion on the size-ETR relation in three ways: First, applying meta-regression analysis on a US meta-data set, we provide evidence supporting the political cost theory. Second, our analysis reveals factors that are possible sources of variation and bias in previous empirical studies; these findings can improve future empirical and analytical models. Third, we extend our analysis to a cross-country meta-data set; this extension enables us to investigate explanations for the two competing theories in more detail. We find that Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, a transparency index and a corruption index explain variation in the size-ETR relation. Independent of the two theories, we also find that tax planning aspects potentially affect the size-ETR relation. To our knowledge, these explanations have not yet been investigated in our research context.

The purpose of this paper is to explore power-resistance plays, or organisational change (OC) politics, from a discourse theory perspective to deepen our understanding of the political and emotional dimensions of these phenomena.

The paper deploys Laclauian concepts of hegemony, fantasmatic narrative and empty signifiers alongside a recently-developed logics of critical explanation approach in the case study of an English local authority formulating a project of integrated commissioning in response to austerity.

The paper demonstrates how OC politics are played out in multiple ways, from social and political negotiations over the meaning of commissioning to the refuelling of the authority’s fantasmatic narrative.

The paper’s key value is to illustrate how and why discourse theory can contribute, alongside other discursive frameworks, to the in-depth qualitative and political study of organisational issues such as change.

This exploratory research examines environmental, institutional, and behavioral factors that affect interorganizational knowledge development and transfer between United Kingdom business schools and business. Three theoretical bases—transaction cost economics, extension of transaction cost economics, and power properties—are integrated in order to understand and identify the antecedents and dynamics of the interorganizational interface. Results support the hypothesis that interface collaboration and face‐to‐face communications are important mediators of academic‐business outcomes—learning business practices and cooperative research.