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The purpose of this paper is to extend research on boundary making and breaking through alternative football clubs. These entities have borne out of the disappointment caused by the neoliberal turn of the football industry, which excluded traditional fans from being active actors and therefore call for study and generalization of specific forms of alternative accountability.

The study looks at emerging trends in the accounting and sport literature by drawing on two concepts that emerged in critical scholarship: critical performativity and critical dialogical accountability, with the aim of better understanding how these elements are developed and shaped within an alternative form of football organization. The focus on Football Club United of Manchester drives the ethnographic approach with data collected via participant observation, field-notes, documental analysis and semi-structured interviews.

The research shows that the pillars of the club's ethos, pushing its critical performative interventions toward setting new boundaries, are democratic governance and accountability, favoring participation and inclusion, and strictly linked to this, a responsibility to local communities. However, the study also highlights the difficulties of maintaining these boundaries when core values are threatened by degeneration.

The study makes a novel contribution to the field of accounting and sport, showing how an alternative football club adopts inclusive accountability systems that go beyond mainstream neoliberal practices. Such an inclusive approach can stimulate critical performativity, moving away from means-end rationality.

Since the beginning of the 2000s, investors have more frequently invested into professional football clubs, thereby radically changing the industry landscape. This review's purpose is to analyze and synthesize the state of research to understand motives, roles and implications of football club investors, and to provide recommendations for further research.

The paper presents an integrative literature review by identifying relevant English articles based on the search terms investor, owner, investment, ownership, shareholder and stakeholder in combination with soccer or football. Around 2,431 articles were reviewed. A total of 129 relevant articles was analyzed and synthesized within eight subject areas.

Investors in professional club football is a young research stream with a clear European focus. Investor motives and roles are diverse and implications are multidimensional. Investors mostly aim for indirect returns rather than pure profit- or win-maximization.

Football clubs comprise an own investment class for which the identified, unique specifics must be considered to develop a financially successful investment model. Thorough academic research of investors' inherent characteristics, investor-club pairings and the pillars of long-term strategies for successful investor-club liaisons are avenues of future research. Furthermore, the results illustrate the need for research outside of Europe.

The paper is the first systematic, integrative review of existing literature in the domain of equity investments into professional club football. The findings genuinely show that, depending on the investor type and ownership structure, investors have a wide impact in professional club football.

The aim of this paper is to develop and test a behavioral theory of chief executive officer (CEO) succession and its performance consequences in family firms. Building upon performance feedback and slack research, the study hypothesizes that the effect of selecting a non-family outsider CEO on post-succession firm performance is contingent upon pre-succession firm performance aspirations level and the available slack resources.

The hypotheses are tested using a panel of 430 CEO successions in Italian family firms.

The findings show that a non-family outsider CEO is particularly valuable when performance resides far below aspiration levels, and there is a high availability of slack resources.

The study provides novel insights of the benefits and drawbacks of selecting non-family outsider CEOs offering behavioral-based theoretical explanations of performance consequences of CEO successions.

Open innovation is an issue that has aroused great interest in recent years. The need to create an environment that facilitates the creation of ideas is essential for the implementation of a series of changes in organizational practices and routines that lead to the launch of new products. However, due to the more behavioral nature and the lesser externalization of these changes introduced in the company's internal processes, how this process occurs has not been studied in depth. The objective of this study is to analyze the effect of an open innovation climate on both incremental and radical product innovation. Moreover, it specifically analyzes the mediating role played by hidden innovation in this relationship.

The methodology used in this study was based on a survey of 213 Spanish SMEs, subsequently applying the structural equation methodology to contrast the results.

The results indicate that open innovation climate offers significant competitive advantages to SMEs. First, the open innovation climate in SMEs favorably influences product innovation (both incremental and radical). Secondly, it is observed that hidden innovations are essential to obtain product innovations. Finally, evidence of the mediating effect of hidden innovation has been obtained.

Although the literature often focuses on visible innovation, materialized in product development, this study demonstrates the importance of other types of innovations that are necessary to launch new products. This is especially relevant for SMEs that, with limited resources, must be creative enough to involve their personnel in introducing changes that will lead to new products. This paper attempts to strengthen the previous literature on hidden innovation by contributing to the understanding of how SMEs improve their innovative processes. However, the study has the limitations derived from using a single informant to obtain data, using subjective-type scales and being a cross-sectional research.

Managers of SMEs involved in innovation processes should favor the creation of an open innovation climate and invest in organizational innovation. Governments should promote policies to support hidden and open innovation.

The main interest of this work is based on the importance of hidden innovation for the development of innovations. This study shows how organizations must make a series of organizational changes prior to the implementation of more visible innovations materialized in products. For this task, the creation of a favorable climate for the development of new ideas becomes a fundamental task. On the other hand, this study has focused on SMEs, which tend to have fewer means for the development of the right conditions for innovation and are often more neglected by scientific research.

This conceptual, multi-voiced paper aims to collectively explore and theorize family entrepreneuring, which is a research stream dedicated to investigating the emergence and becoming of entrepreneurial phenomena in business families and family firms.

Because of the novelty of this research stream, the authors asked 20 scholars in entrepreneurship and family business to reflect on topics, methods and issues that should be addressed to move this field forward.

Authors highlight key challenges and point to new research directions for understanding family entrepreneuring in relation to issues such as agency, processualism and context.

This study offers a compilation of multiple perspectives and leverage recent developments in the fields of entrepreneurship and family business to advance research on family entrepreneuring.

Many organizations around the world currently are facing board diversity issues and challenges. Hence, this empirical paper investigates the relationship between board diversity and firm’s financial performance. We use a sample of 35 companies from five countries in Southeast Europe (Macedonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Greece) for the period between 2008 and 2012 to find that, on average, companies with well-educated board members are more profitable and overvalued on the market. When running the regression again to test the levels of heterogeneity, we also find that the companies with more women on board tend to be overvalued on the market, while those with more foreigners on board are subject of undervaluation. The paper mostly contributes to the literature on corporate governance and board diversity. First, we postulate the impact of each of the board diversity variables on the financial performance and then show the extent of this impact and its economic interpretation. Our findings have important practitioners’ implications for corporate regulators and policy-makers since the demonstrated positive impact of the well-educated board members on firm’s financial performance gives a new impetus in building a corporate strategy that will intend to engage more people holding PhD on board.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a holistic understanding of extant studies addressing the impact of commercialization on fans of elite sports.

In doing this, the authors performed a structured review of 42 academic articles published between 1992 and 2020 that all focus on how fans respond and are affected by the commercialization of elite sports.

The structured review shows that the impacts of commercialization on fans relate to four different themes. These are (1) fan identity, (2) fan attitudes, (3) fan emotions and (4) fan behaviours. However, the analysis also shows that research within each category is largely scattered, and more research within each category is needed.

The paper highlights the complex and dynamic nature of commercialization. It presents a research agenda for future research and emphasizes a need to integrate the interests of several stakeholders when managing the impacts of elite sport commercialization.

Building on upper echelons theory, the authors advance the literature on the influence of diversity on innovation by studying the link between top management team (TMT) gender diversity and innovation performance and the link's boundary conditions.

The authors analyze survey data from 390 manufacturing establishments in Germany and India through an ordinary least square (OLS) regression analysis.

TMT gender diversity is positively related to innovation performance. The influence of gender diversity on innovation performance is not strengthened by team level attributes, including cognitive proficiency and openness to external information. In contrast, TMT gender diversity enhances innovation performance more strongly in Germany than in India, indicating the relevance of country-level cultural norms for leveraging gender diversity.

The authors' study is built on data from two countries only, based on TMTs in the manufacturing sector and cross-sectional. Future studies may address these limitations by considering more countries, examining TMTs in the service sector and applying experimental or longitudinal research designs.

Executives should establish gender diverse TMTs to enhance innovation performance and leverage diverse views of male and female managers effectively. Managers located in countries with strongly hierarchical cultural norms should promote egalitarian values at the organizational level to increase the effectiveness of gender diverse TMTs.

This is the first study which examines the moderating effect of country-level cultural norms on the relationship between TMT gender diversity and innovation performance.

The purpose of this paper is to deliver further insights into empirical research on corporate governance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) by systematizing existing knowledge, identifying current investigation backlogs, and deriving specific implications for future empirical research to address the lack of empirical knowledge in this field.

The study follows a literature analysis approach through a systematic, quantitative analysis of broad-based database queries from EBSCOhost and Web of Science to derive recommendations for future empirical research on SOE-oriented corporate governance.

The results indicate that empirical SOE-oriented corporate governance research is a growing field with wide-ranging opportunities for investigation. Given the lack of qualitative empirical research (representing only 21.7 percent of the studies identified) and the massive focus on regression analyses (69.9 percent) and secondary database data (77.2 percent), future empirical approaches should consider different methods and data sources. More qualitative research is needed for exploratory designs and canonical correlation-based statistical methods seem helpful for confirmatory approaches. In addition, 50.4 percent of the studies identified have a Chinese background, indicating room for studies from different cultural contexts.

Given the range of the research field and the eclectic nature of the analytical approach, it is unlikely that every relevant scientific publication is included.

Since this study is the first of its kind, it contributes to SOE-oriented corporate governance research by drawing on a wide-ranging selection of studies and analyzing them to derive straightforward recommendations for future empirical research.