Gastronomy program at Kristianstad University has since many years been working with innovative processes and have created a number of courses aimed at developing innovative generic skills among their students. One of such courses is “Creative concept and product development in the foodstuff”.  The course presents the students an opportunity to develop new and exciting food stuff products in team of learners. The course has now run for 4 years and students have expressed satisfaction with their innovative skill development and the usefulness of skills acquired in their future career.  While the course have received many positive evaluations, a systematic evaluation of its structure and implementation has not yet been performed. This project aimed at evaluating how different aspects of team work (e.g. diversity and experiences) relate to students' development of innovative skills within the course. The study’s theoretical base lays in the field of collaborative learning (e.g. Bruffee, 1993), team learning (Slavin, 1978) and well as acquisition of generic skills in the collaborative and team learning processes. The project utilized an Input-Process-Output (Ilgen, et al. 2005) model where exploration diversity, team process and self-perceived outcomes and relationship between those have been investigated by the means of qualitative and quantitative methods. Relying on the surveys and reflective diaries of the course participants the study showed how various diversity aspects of the teams related to their processes and self-assessed outcomes, as well as show how students reason about collaboration in diverse groups. Based on the findings the study puts forward suggestion of how to manage the team work in increasingly diverse classes in the institutions of higher education and which method both students and instructors could employ to rip the benefits of this diversity.  

The study explores how top management teams’ shared leadership is related to organizational ambidexterity in public-sector organizations, theoretically and empirically considering how this relationship is contingent on the management control system. Using a sample of 85 Swedish municipal housing corporations, we find that shared leadership has a positive relationship with organizational ambidexterity in public-sector organizations. Moreover, increasing use of new public management control systems, based on combined reward and performance controls, positively moderates this relationship. The study also finds that traditional public management control systems, based on combined planning and administrative controls, do not moderate the relationship between top management teams’ shared leadership and organizational ambidexterity. Accordingly, this article contributes to the public and strategic management literature, as well as to managerial practice.

Purpose

This paper seeks to explain how auditors’ professional and organizational identities are associated with commercialization in audit firms. Unlike previous studies exploring the consequences of commercialization in the firms, our study directs its attention toward the potential driver of commercialization, which we argue to be the identities of the auditors.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper is based on 374 responses to a survey distributed to 3588 members of FAR, the professional association of accountants, auditors and advisors in Sweden. The study used established measures of organizational and professional identity and introduced market, customer and firm process orientation as aspects of commercialization. The study explored the data through descriptive statistics, principle component analysis and correlation analysis and tested the hypotheses with multiple linear regression analysis.

Findings

The findings indicated that the organizational identity of auditors has a positive association with three aspects of commercialization: market orientation, customer orientation and firm process orientation. Contrary to the arguments based on prior literature, our study has found that the professional identity of auditors is also a positively associated with commercialization. This indicates a change of the role of professional identity vis-à-vis commercialization of audit firms. The positive association between professional identity and commercial orientation could indicate the development of “organizational professionalism.” The study also found differences between the association between professional identity and commercialization in Big 4 and non-Big 4 firms. While in Big 4 firms, professional identity is positively associated only with the firm’s process orientation, in non-Big 4 firms, professional identity has a positive association with all three aspects of commercialization.

Originality/value

The paper provides insight into how auditors’ identities have influenced commercialization of audit firms and into the normalizing of commercialization within auditing. The study also developed a new instrument for measuring commercialization, one based on market, customer and firm process orientation concepts. This paper suggests that this instrument is an alternative to the observation through proxies.

The purpose of this study is to explore how external auditors experience their decision to rely on internal auditors’ work. This study employs both qualitative and quantitative methods consisting of semi-structured interviews and questionnaires administered to external auditors in Sweden. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with external auditors who are working in Big 4 audit firms in Sweden and have engagements with internal audit functions. A questionnaire was administered to authorized/approved auditors, members of the Swedish Association of Certified Public Accountants (FAR). Findings indicate that external auditors use the work of internal auditors as they gain efficiency in performing their work. Nevertheless, external auditors may compromise their independence and professionalism through closer involvement with internal auditors, which may lead to uncritical evaluation and use of the reports prepared by internal auditors. At the same time, while relying on the internal auditors’ reports, external auditors appear to be conscious of the consequences for the audit quality they deliver. The study highlights the dilemma faced by external auditors in their cooperative work with internal auditors and the balance/imbalance in their opinions concerning efficiency gains, independence, professionalism and audit quality.

This paper explores whether and in what way “dual learning” can develop understanding of the relationship between structure/judgement and explores audit student’s perceptions of the audit profession. Work Integrated Learning (WIL) module, serving as a tool of enabling dual learning, represents the context for this exploration. The study is based on a focus group and individual interviews conducted with students performing their WIL. Our data and its analysis indicates that when in a WIL context, students develop awareness of the use of standards and checklists on the one hand and the importance of discretional judgement on the other. Based on these results, we theorise as to how dual learning manifests itself in students’ experiences and understanding of the relationship between structure and judgement.