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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the experience of call centre employees who have been involved in high-involvement innovation (HII) activities to understand what frontline and managerial employees think of these involvement activities.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative case study approach is utilised, drawing on evidence from seven UK call centres. Various sources of data are examined, i.e. interviews, observation, call listening and documentary.FindingsFrom the analysis of the testimonies, it is found that job design, the mechanisms and practices as well as other people's perceptions of involvement influence the experience of frontline and managerial employees. The findings highlight that HII has the potential to intensify jobs (both frontline and managerial employees) when the quantity of ideas submitted becomes a component of the employee performance appraisal system.Research limitations/implicationsThis research has shown that the heightened targets used in many of the cases have reduced the ability of employees to be involved in any innovation activities. What is not clear from the findings is that if performance measures can be used in a more participative way with employees so that they can have less time pressure allowing them to become more involved in innovation activities. Thus, an interesting direction for future research would be to consider the effects of performance measurement systems in the role they play in facilitating HII activities.Practical implicationsThe findings show that HII has the potential to enrich frontline employees' jobs, making them feel more valued and giving them some variety and challenge in their job. Therefore, practitioners should approach employee involvement in the innovation process as something potentially fruitful and not just wasted time away from the phones.Originality/valueThis research is important as it explores what effects these involvement initiatives have on the employees and managers involved in them. This is valuable since there is no real consensus across human resource management, labour process and critical management fields resulting in a limited conceptualisation of the relationship between management practices, employee experiences and the outcomes. This research makes a contribution through the elaboration of current theory to understand the complexities and subtleties that exist between the high involvement management practices and the experience of workers and their managers.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to recognise the importance of the interplay between performance measurement, performance management, employee engagement and performance. However, the nature of this phenomenon is not well understood. Analysis of the literature reveals two dimensions of organisational control, technical and social, that are used to develop a conceptual framework for studying this phenomenon.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted explorative action research involving pilot and control groups from two departments of a UK bank.FindingsThe authors show that an intervention on the social controls has led to changes in technical controls of the performance measurement system resulting in significant improvement in employee engagement and performance.Research limitations/implicationsThe research was undertaken with two cases from a single organisation. Further fine-grained, longitudinal research is required to fully understand this phenomenon in a wider range of contexts.Practical implicationsThe paper contributes to the theory on performance measures and gives guidance on how organisations might design their performance measurement systems to enhance employee engagement and performance.Originality/valueThe study makes three contributions. First, the authors introduce a new theoretical framework based the organisational control theory providing a basis for future research. Second, through nine propositions, the authors establish a causal relationship between performance measurement, performance management, employee engagement and performance. Third, the authors identify a gap in knowledge concerning the design of organisational controls in the context of the process that is being managed.

Government policy agendas in high-cost economies focus on manufacturing competitiveness promoting what they term High Value Manufacturing (HVM). HVM is seen as the solution to the problem of manufacturers in high-cost economies being outcompeted by those in low-cost economies. Despite the ubiquity of the term HVM, there is little academic engagement with it leaving HVM an under-theorised, emerging phenomenon lacking in academic legitimisation. Our purpose is therefore to gain a 'theoretical foothold' to allow the phenomenon of HVM to be characterised. Policy documents from the UK and German governments and the European Commission are empirically analysed to determine the themes within their arguments. A literature consultation is conducted to reveal the underlying theoretical strands informing these arguments. A synthesis follows that relates the themes within the policy documents to the identified theoretical strands. We find that policy uses a plurality of multi-disciplinary, randomly drawn elements. However, despite this, some patterns can be identified with elements drawn from operations strategy, supply chain management and innovation. By defining these elements, this article makes sense of the policy rhetoric and builds a clearer understating of HVM so facilitating sharper and more structured research into its nature and its contribution to contemporary manufacturing competitiveness.

Manufacturing competitiveness is on many policy agendas, born out of a concern for firms in high-cost economies finding themselves outcompeted by low-cost rivals. Government policy makers and manufacturing firm strategists have put their faith in what we label as high value manufacturing (HVM). We see HVM as an incipient phenomenon currently in a situation of prescience, as something that is still "in-the-making," with manufacturing firms trying to find ways to be able to step away from having to compete on price. This paper consults relevant strategy theories with the purpose to pinpoint the issues and problems that need to be accommodated for bringing HVM into being and for creating the effects that are anticipated. We found that HVM must be seen as a distributed activity, thus realizing complex functionality for a system-of-use, while being subjected to path constitution. For HVM to function, the firms involved need to find solutions to the capability problem, the appropriation problem, and the governance problem. We suggest that further research needs to involve itself in problem-solving activity to assist in bringing HVM about while simultaneously further developing strategy theory geared toward firms that are involved in a distributed activity like HVM.

A growing body of research suggests that young women tend to replicate normative feminine cues popularized through mass media in their selfies, or self-taken mobile phone photographs. Among these stereotypical cues are posing behaviors documented in Goffman's gender display framework, which visualize a power imbalance between men and women. We completed a content analysis to investigate gender display in young women's Instagram selfies alongside its relationship to feedback such as likes and comments. In this study, a novel scalar measure of gender display captures both the categorical manifestation and the exaggeration of gender stereotypical cues. We found that gender display is prevalent in women's Instagram selfies but presented in subtle ways. In addition, women who incorporate and exaggerate gender displays in their selfies tend to receive more feedback. We suggest that gender stereotyping in Instagram selfies is related to reinforcing feedback and call for closer measurement and contextualization of gender performance in user-generated content.

Theoretical and empirical evidence suggests disparate racial impact frames may lead to selective sharing on social media and result in differential retransmission rates across racial groups. In this online study, we (1) examined reported exposure to and sharing of content about race on social media among Black, White, and "Other" race/ethnicity college students ( N = 150); (2) experimentally tested how exposure to news story previews with control, implicit, or explicit disparate racial impact frames affected subsequent sharing intentions; and (3) explored reasons students provided for their intentions to share/not share the stories. Black students reported more exposure to and sharing of content about race on social media. Few participants cited discrimination in open-ended responses explaining sharing/non-sharing intentions. Nevertheless, despite holding story topic and source constant, disparate racial impact frames resulted in differences in sharing intentions among Black and White students, demonstrating these frames can influence selective sharing intentions.

The decline in the number and quality of local news media has led to digital platforms becoming more central in circulating local information, affecting what information and issues are accessible to community residents. We demonstrate this by focusing on health disparities related to COVID-19, examining how both news and non-news civic organizations in six Great Lakes communities addressed pandemic-related racial inequities. Our analysis of interviews and a corpus of Facebook posts suggest that (1) very little discussion of health disparities emerged on Facebook from organizations in these communities, and (2) the majority of this content was produced by local news outlets. This article offers a vision of what local content might look like in the absence of robust local news outlets and highlights potential consequences of local civic information infrastructure with digital platforms playing a central role.