In this article, we study how meritocratic systems and gender equality concerns are negotiated across different organisational spaces in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Based on a case study of the organising of a tenure track system in a Swedish university, we suggest that the intersection of meritocratic processes and gender equality work can be analysed as a set of negotiated orders in these spaces. This fragmentation may imply problems for advancing gender equality agendas in relation to established notions of meritocracy but may also imply opportunities for change as existing organisational spaces can be reconstructed or new ones created. Our notions of fragmentation and negotiated orders thereby suggest that the current situation is both stable and legitimate and that re-negotiations need to involve reconstructions of the various spaces and not only interventions into them.

This study explores the role of network administrative organizations (NAOs) in science diplomacy (SD) by means of a qualitative case study approach. The case in point is a Swedish government initiative to coordinate the internationalization efforts of domestic funding agencies. We examine how the NAO IntSam balances between governmental directives and agency autonomy. Utilizing primary data from semi-structured interviews supplemented by internal documents and policy reports, the analysis delves into the challenges and potential of NAOs in harmonizing top-down directives with agency autonomy. The findings highlight IntSam’s role in facilitating collaboration and aligning domestic and international policy landscapes, while also revealing inherent tensions due to divergent governmental and agency priorities. This study contributes to understanding the complexities of coordinating cross-border Science, Technology, and Innovation efforts, offering insights into the nuances, potentials, and limitations of NAOs in the realm of SD.

Established firms are increasingly forming alliances with green start-ups, i.e. newly-started ventures dedicated to eco-innovation. This study explores the rationales for the initiation and continuation of such alliances. We investigate how established firms leverage these alliances to facilitate eco-innovation adoption alongside their pursuit of legitimacy. Findings from a case study on seven alliances focused on food waste reduction initiatives in Italy and Sweden indicate that legitimacy-seeking rationales are predominant during alliance formation. As alliances evolve, they transition into a phase where firms identify opportunities for eco-innovation, while ambitions of capability-building and new revenue creation shape the development of the alliances. This study contributes to eco-innovation and environmental alliance literature by showcasing how the pursuit of legitimacy facilitates established firms’ adoption and implementation of eco-innovation through alliances with green start-ups.

Firms configure their sustainability-oriented partnerships differently depending on the sustainability issue, partnership types, and mechanisms (product, process, policy, and awareness raising) and target change at various levels (firm, industry, supply chain, and society). We study how sustainability-oriented partnerships in the textile industry are configured by analyzing 444 partnerships using a mixed-method approach. Textile firms partner to tackle environmental issues such as circularity, waste, and sustainable materials, utilizing product and process mechanisms and create firm-level change. In contrast, these firms address social issues such as education and job development, labor and working conditions, poverty, and inequality through cross-sector partnerships that target change beyond firm boundaries. We discuss these findings critically by drawing on and contributing to two literature areas: sustainability-oriented partnerships that study partnership configurations and the sustainability in textiles. Our findings highlight the importance of issue and context specificity when partnering for sustainability.

What has boosted crowdfunding’s growth? In the case of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, we highlight the role of consumers’ distrust in banks. We offer evidence that distrust in banks likely triggers individuals to supply funding toward crowdfunding and away from bank deposits. We highlight that a distrust mindset promotes questioning default choices and considering alternatives, and fosters comparisons focusing on dissimilarities. Our findings suggest US states whose residents express greater distrust in banks are more likely to fund P2P loans and, conditional on funding, lend higher amounts. This relationship is more pronounced when funding small loans or borrowers with less banking access.

Sustainable entrepreneurship, that is, venturing with the aim of contributing to a shift of practices towards environmental and social sustainability, is an increasingly prominent phenomenon. This article investigates how sustainability ventures orient between dual – commercial and environmental – logics when conducting the legitimation work necessary to secure their first major partnership with an incumbent firm. Specifically, we study multiple cases of partnerships on food waste reduction. This setting is characterised by limited tension between the two logics, which implies that ventures are not forced into hybridity. We find some indications that ventures are able to draw on both types of logic to legitimate their ventures. However, the dominant pattern is that sustainability ventures tend to orient their legitimation work around a salient founding logic. Our analysis suggests that this pattern can be attributed partly to organisational imprinting, but also to legitimation work in this context being inherently logic-specific to a significant degree. This seems to be particularly true for ventures with a salient environmental logic. .

Classifications of higher education institutions into categories that are more or less clearly differentiated through prestige and status are legion in the world of higher education. The notion of parallel categories with comparable statuses, such as those of different types of universities, is however much less well understood. This paper investigates how universities navigate between such alternative categories. We examine boundary work and institutional change involving Swedish higher education institutions with significant activity in engineering sciences in order to analyse how actors relate to ideas regarding the category ‘technical university’ as an ideal potentially distinct from that of the broad, comprehensive university. Analysis of two cases in the second half of the twentieth century shows that for engineering faculty, a focused technical university was an attractive alternative to the institutional model of the broad university. In contrast, analysis of two twenty-first-century cases suggests that aspirations to be recognised as a technical university were largely driven by adaption to external stakeholders’ interests. We discuss these findings in light of the emergence of the global hegemonic category ‘research university’. We also suggest that the organisational identity of a HEI may be tied to ideas about an organisational category through imprinting and path dependency. Moreover, we propose that changes over time in how categories are perceived may serve as an impetus to organisational change.

Political discourse and policy reforms worldwide have highlighted the importance of promoting the knowledge economy by stimulating academics’ societal engagement (ASE). Such narratives partly aim at influencing academics’ attitudes and behaviors. Earlier work that has investigated such influence has tended to overlook the development in humanities and social science, and focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. This paper contributes to filling this gap. Based on the assumption that academics’ views are, to a significant extent, shaped during their early years in academia, we investigate whether there are generational differences in attitudes to ASE. Four different higher education systems, including both Napoleonic and Humboldtian models, are investigated: Germany, Sweden, Portugal, and Argentina. Our analysis of the results of the international Academic Profession in the Knowledge Society survey reveals marked country-level differences in the way academics perceive the importance of ASE activities. Overall, there is no strong evidence that the current generation of HSS academics has very different attitudes to ASE than previous generations. We do, however, find indications that post-2006 academics are more likely to consider ASE activities from an instrumental perspective.

A vast digital ecosystem of entrepreneurship and exchange has sprung up with Bitcoin’s digital infrastructure at its core. We explore the worldwide spread of infrastructure necessary to maintain and grow Bitcoin as a system (Bitcoin nodes) and infrastructure enabling the use of bitcoins for everyday economic transactions (Bitcoin merchants). Specifically, we investigate the role of legal, criminal, financial, and social determinants of the adoption of Bitcoin infrastructure. We offer some support for the view that the adoption of cryptocurrency infrastructure is driven by perceived failings of traditional financial systems, in that the spread of Bitcoin infrastructure is associated with low trust in banks and the financial system among inhabitants of a region, and with the occurrence of country-level inflation crises. On the other hand, our findings also suggest that active support for Bitcoin is higher in locations with well-developed banking services. Finally, we find support for the view that bitcoin adoption is also partly driven by cryptocurrencies’ usefulness in engaging in illicit trade.

This study investigates the relationship between mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and entrepreneurial spawning in labour-intensive service sectors. We discuss two sets of theoretical mechanisms. First, M&As may push employees into entrepreneurship by lowering the average barriers of leaving the current employment (i.e. being associated with general deterioration of working conditions). Second, M&A activities may generate new entrepreneurial opportunities, which are first and foremost accessible by employees directly affected by M&As. Results on entrepreneurial spawning in 3,198 Swedish firms during the time period 2000–2009 confirm that the number of firms spawned from a specific incumbent increases following an M&A. Push-oriented factors are found to contribute to this effect, but a dominating part of the total effect remains in the presence of proxies for push-effects. This suggests that pull-oriented explanations of opportunity creation in the wake of M&As constitute an important avenue for further research on the antecedents of new firm formation.