Publications

The extant literature largely ignores the micro-governance of collaborative networks (CNs), that is, the day-to-day functions that CN coordinators need to perform to produce a collaborative environment that stimulates joint action. This paper aims to identify which configurations of micro-governance functions foster an internal collaborative environment in CNs. We collected data from 36 CNs for water protection in Brazil and performed a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). Results show two configurations that may be adopted in different situations. Although the first configuration requires all six micro-governance functions to be performed, the second one does not require high monitoring. This configuration is adopted by CNs whose stakeholders do not have a previous history of conflict. Our study advances the theory of collaborative governance by empirically demonstrating how micro-governance functions enable effective implementation in natural resources management. We contribute to the practice of collaborative governance by describing how CN coordinators may enhance their day-to-day activities.

The shift to hybrid work has introduced new organizational challenges for higher education institutions (HEIs), especially when balancing academic freedom, managerial oversight, digital infrastructure, and global mobility. This study explores how three German universities are developing hybrid work policies in the context of institutional complexity. Using the Field-Level Deduction framework and the institutional logics perspective, we examine how these universities balance professional, managerial, market, and digital logics in their formal policies on mobile work and workation. Drawing on a comparative case study of mobile work agreements and expert interviews with the involved key actors, we identify three emerging modes of creative assembly: (1) flexibility oriented toward academic freedom, (2) structured balance through procedural clarity, and (3) standardization with strong risk aversion. Although these universities operate under the same legal framework, their hybrid work models vary considerably, suggesting different ways in which institutional logics can be selectively coupled. The study provides exploratory insights into the diversity of hybrid work in German HEIs and introduces creative assembly as a conceptual lens for understanding how universities navigate institutional complexity. The findings are not statistically representative but serve the purpose of analytic generalization, offering conceptual insights. These insights lay the theoretical groundwork for future empirical research examining the effects of different assemblies on outcomes such as academic productivity, collegiality, student engagement, and international competitiveness.

The rise of remote work, coupled with evolving traveler preferences, has created a new phenomenon called workations. This study explores the impact of workations on the hospitality industry and their role in the New Work paradigm. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory and New Work concepts, we examine the motivations of workationers, and the adaptations hospitality providers have made to serve this emerging market. Through qualitative analysis of interviews with five hospitality industry experts and six workationers, we uncover key drivers behind the workation trend, including the desire for improved work-life integration, escapism, and the pursuit of novel experiences. Our findings reveal that successful workation offerings depend on providing environments that support autonomy, competence, and relatedness - the core tenets of self-determination theory. Destinations looking to capitalize on the workation trend could improve infrastructure and amenities, foster community integration, enhance work-life balance opportunities, and expand their long-term stay offerings. All in all, this study contributes to the growing body of literature on the intersection of work and tourism and offers insights into how destinations can leverage the workation trend to increase their competitiveness and resilience in a rapidly evolving tourism landscape. The analysis suggests that workations are more than a temporary trend. Instead, they represent a fundamental shift in how work, leisure, and travel are conceptualized and experienced in the era of New Work.

Despite widespread concern about levels of administrative burden within universities, understanding of the associated dimensions and drivers remains limited. Addressing the resulting lacuna, this paper presents a granular analysis of what academic staff within one national university system regard as the key dimensions and specific drivers of the administrative burdens they encounter at work. The data underlying our analyses are drawn from responses to an in-depth survey on administrative workloads from 350 academic staff working at 37 Australian universities. Our findings reveal that while generic administrative responsibilities add administrative burden, such burden is perhaps most acutely felt in the core academic work domains of teaching and research. In terms of perceptions of drivers, we find that two major strategies that universities have pursued to gain efficiencies—administrative centralization and administrative service automation—have resulted in what is widely experienced by academic staff as an intensification of their administrative burden.

Mauritius is widely praised for policies that have minimized tensions between ethno-religious groups. Other types of groups, however, are excluded from that sociopolitical ordering of society. In particular, LGBTQI+ Mauritians have long been stigmatized and criminalized by an anti-sodomy law, enacted by the British colonial administration. Despite a reputation for a strong commitment to human rights, the Mauritian government never repealed that law. Drawing in large part on interviews with LGBTQI+ activists in Mauritius, this article analyzes how and why they challenged that anti-sodomy law in court, what they achieved and what the implications are. It argues that the state’s and political parties’ emphasis on traditional cultures made it difficult to convince the government to act, leaving strategic litigation as the best option for getting LGBTQI+ rights recognized. Grounded primarily in constitutionally guaranteed rights and harnessing support from international nonstate actors, their court cases succeeded in carving out greater space for LGBTQI+ rights within the conservative multicultural framework, even though the verdict was rather limited in scope. Significant pressure will be needed to achieve more political and social change, potentially including more strategic litigation, which poses a significant challenge to LGBTQI+ activists.

In recent years, the issue of administrative burden in universities has received growing attention around the world. Although professional staff are central to the operation of universities, little effort has been made to understand how these staff see these administrative burdens impacting their work, and to harness their views on how to best tackle such burdens on the ground. Examining the Australian case, this focused paper presents key findings from a nationwide survey capturing the perspectives of universities’ professional staff on manifestations and implications of administrative burden within their workplace. In the majority, professional staff reported that administrative burden had been increasing for all university staff, ultimately making for a less collegial work environment. Our participants identified fewer organisational restructures, better staff involvement in digital design, and better formal recognition of administrative workloads as key to reducing administrative burdens within universities.

Internationalization and globalization of higher education represent one of the key features of contemporary global (knowledge) economy and society. By performing the functions of education, research and third mission, higher education institutions are social institutions through which countries participate in the global society. One of the features of internationalization of higher education is the increasing use of English language as medium of instruction, research and outreach. This chapter presents key conventional theoretical perspectives—such as sociolinguistic theory of social and linguistic capital, and decolonial critical theory—often used to account for language policies and practices pertaining to internationalization of higher education in non-Anglophone multilingual societies. The chapter brings global examples, but also experiences of African higher education institutions vis-à-vis the use of English for academic purposes. The chapter’s assumption is that English is increasingly becoming and being perceived as essential and hegemonic in internationalizing African higher education, despite the challenges non-Anglophone African academic community face in using English for academic purposes. The chapter argues that the Anglicization of African academia reinforces the domination of Global North’s science over the Global South’s, as well as the global inequalities in knowledge production and dissemination.

Since conflict is a ubiquitous phenomenon in inter- but also intra-organizational work, conflict management behavior (CMB) is a preconditioning factor for successful cooperations. Prior research shows, that CMB can be individualistic or collectivistic in orientation and highlights the episodic nature of CMB. However, in focusing on analyzing specific conflicts and conflict dynamics in cooperations, research paid less attention to how conflict and CMB are influenced by structural patterns and thus might overstate the role of individual agency compared to the role of the general structure of the cooperation. We address this issue by investigating the inter-organizational cooperation of IT-freelancers and their client organizations. Based on 18semi-structured problem-centered and expert interviews with IT-freelancers, representatives of client organizations and agencies, we show that the CMB orientation depends on the very institutionalized sequential stages of the cooperation. While individualistic CMBs dominate the pre-contract sequence, in which recruitment processes and negotiations take place, parties switch to collectivistic CMB in the contract sequence, in which the actual cooperation iscarried out. The post-contract sequence serves for reflections on the cooperation and thereby affects the readiness for future collaborations andinforms future pre-contract sequences, again. Thus, with focus on the IT industry the paper addresses research gaps related to the specific temporality and temporal structuring of contingent work. It introduces a sequence-oriented framework and analysis of conflict and conflict management in inter-organizational projects and thereby complements the established episodical perspective on conflicts by taking into account a rather structural viewpoint.

In 2018, a Tanzanian government official announced a crackdown on homosexuality. International actors rapidly expressed their disapproval and temporarily suspended some foreign aid, which elicited a negative response from the Tanzanian government and soured donor–recipient relations. The incident was short-lived, however, and expressed mainly at the symbolic level and does not appear to have achieved any change in policies or practices either among the donors or in Tanzania. How should one interpret this sudden eruption of frictions and its lack of impact and what are its implications? I argue that international actors felt pressure to take quick, visible action, regardless of how ineffective those steps could be expected to be. Politicians from Tanzania's ruling party seized this occasion to ramp up anti-LGBT+ and anti-donor rhetoric, attempting to strengthen their standing domestically. Both sides used the opportunity to express their identity as either defenders or opponents of LGBT+ rights. This case shows how donor–recipient frictions can be primarily performative and reflect both sides' desire to please their own constituencies without implementing any lasting changes to aid flows or domestic policy in the recipient country.

In some instances, two basic development cooperation principles appear to be in direct contradiction: on the one hand, the Sustainable Development Goals prescribe universal social inclusion under the leitmotif of “leave no one behind”, mandating an emphasis on the most marginalized. On the other hand, the cornerstone of development cooperation is “ownership”, which recognizes that countries must be free to choose their own priorities and strategies. To what extent can these two principles be reconciled in “hostile environments”, places where certain groups, such as LGBTQI+ people, are marginalized and even persecuted and criminalized? I argue that, while the SDGs are clear about the need for radical inclusion, the ownership principle lacks precision about who “owns” the concept. Adopting an emancipatory conceptualization of ownership, under which the ultimate beneficiaries should be the ones to determine priorities and strategies, eliminates the apparent contradiction and legitimizes support to marginalized groups even if their own governments disagree.

In the era of Agriculture 4.0, agricultural cooperatives are struggling to understand the challenges and threats the digital platforms of large agribusiness corporations represent for the competitiveness of cooperative systems. An opportunity in this context is for agricultural cooperatives to enter the platform economy and collaboratively develop their digital platform. This study aims to analyze the process of creating a digital platform through the collaboration of agribusiness cooperatives. The action research method, which involved four interconnected cycles, was followed. The first cycle aimed to generate strategic alignment among thirty cooperatives to promote digital innovation. The second cycle referred to conceptualizing and establishing the project's governance structure and developing three minimum viable products. The third cycle involved the construction of the digital platform. The fourth and final cycle focused on instantiating the platform through diffusion and utilization by the cooperatives. A digital platform was developed, considering the potential for building relationships and adopting cooperative concepts. The platform gives participants access to a digital business ecosystem and direct access to the community of users, the infrastructure and the data. This means the cooperatives can manage them without subordination to large multinational companies that may threaten their long-term survival. The study contributes to theory by proposing a systematic method to create digital platforms following a cooperative approach. It also contributes to the managerial practice by revealing the steps and challenges managers may face when implementing digital platforms in the context of cooperatives. The platform attracted over 13,000 active users in three years and represented more than 1,700,000 ha of land for food production in Brazil.

In this article, I argue that pioneer African writing (in the frame of the empire writing back) hinges its anti-colonial aesthetics and politics on what I see as the African natural world—a space of nonhuman–human entanglement ruled by the natural order of things. In confronting colonial discourse, the writers, in most cases, resort to deploying the natures (I prefer the plural form) and the nonhuman elements of their traditional societies, which constitute what many scholars see as the cultural context of their writing in postcolonial reading practice. By way of shifting the paradigm, I propose an ecocentric reading practice that unbundles the notion of cultural context to reveal its heavy reliance on the African natural world. The recourse to natures, I argue, is a decolonial strategy, in that the writers deploy the natural world to counter the Western civilisation imposed on their epistemological order. In the end, the natural world remains the forte of the African writer in presenting a civilisation that claims to be more all-embracing (of humans and their nonhuman others) than the Western one with emphasis on human exceptionalism. I then read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino as illustrations of how African writers of the colonial moment anchor their counter-discourse on the African natural world. It is hoped that this reading practice will inspire a revisionist reading of African literature that places indigenous ecology at the centre of decolonial philosophy and practice.