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This issue of the Nordic Journal of Business contains three peer-reviewed articles. In the first article, Pertti Laine, Päivikki Kuoppakangas and Jari Stenvall provide a new perspective on change strategy and its operational definition. The second article by Anna Romberg focuses on shareholder engagement as a risk management strategy related to environmental, social and governance (ESG) responsibilities. Finally, in the third article, Jari Huikku and Aino-Maria Pöyhiä examine the valuation model choices of sell-side analysts.

I hope you enjoy reading the interesting articles included in this issue of the Nordic Journal of Business.

Happy holidays!

Sami Vähämaa
Editor
Nordic Journal of Business

Pertti Laine, Päivikki Kuoppakangas and Jari Stenvall – Change Strategy (CS): Is There Any?

Anna Romberg – Nordic Private Shareholder Engagement as an ESG Risk Management Strategy – From Agents to Stewards

Jari Huikku and Aino-Maria Pöyhiä – Sell-Side Analysts’ Valuation Model Choice: A Case Study

The whole issue as a pdf can be found here.

Guest Editors’ Letter

Special Issue on Business Education

The premise of university education is scientific research and higher education based on theory. However, educators seldom see the opportunity to combine research into their teaching development work. By studying their own work, educators could gain understanding and knowledge on how to improve their practices and create effective teaching and learning methods. Cultivating a research-based teaching development benefits not only educators´ work but also creates student-centered organization culture that supports students´ performance, learning results, engagement to studies, and even graduation. This way research and teaching can support and not fight against others.

In this special issue of the Nordic Journal of Business focused on business education, we want to bring forward selected examples of research-based teaching development. The three articles included in the special issue were first presented at the 2019 Nordic Academy of Management Conference. These articles look at the role of interaction in higher education teaching from different angles and different contexts. However, all of the articles highlight the impact of teacher´s pedagogical role and professional growth in creating successful learning environments.

In the first article, Helena Kantanen, Leena Penttinen, Päivi Rosenius, and Katri Ruth discuss the importance of students´ first-term experience by looking at the teacher-student interaction. A supportive and participative study environment showed to be significant for students´ integration and the development of their professional identities. One of the crucial actors was accessible teachers and their abilities to create interesting courses and use varied teaching methods.

The second article by Henrik Virtanen and Anu Norrgrann focuses on the importance of interaction between students. This study offers an insight into e-learning and learner´s experiences on participation by studying behavior in MOOC-course. Interaction is seen as a key characteristic to improve engagement, learning experience, and skills development. The study revealed that, despite the autonomous nature of MOOC-course, educators´ guidance and encouragement is necessary to enliven interaction. The authors also find that interaction is not important only because of improving engagement and satisfaction but it has also an effect on the development of the business skills of the students.

In the third article, Taina Eriksson, Minna-Maarit Jaskari and Päivi Kinnunen discuss an online course that has been co-taught across universities. The interest here lies in the interaction between teachers, but it offers also insights on students’ experiences of trending ways of organizing courses in collaboration. Co-teaching was found to be a chance for teachers to grow professionally and build collegial relationships and build bridges across disciplines. Despite students recognized some challenges such as overlapping content and conflicting communications, co-teaching offered online learners more timely and efficient guidance and greater satisfaction.

We wish that these three articles inspire business educators to reflect on their experience- and research-based knowledge. Moreover, the ongoing pandemic has challenged educators in an unprecedented way, but at the same time opened us several interesting research paths in the context of digitalization of teaching and learning. Hopefully, these times push us educators to take stronger steps towards creating common ground and building scholarship in business education.

Finally, we would like to thank all the anonymous reviewers that gave their input in peer review and by doing so, building the scholarship on business education.

Minna-Maarit Jaskari & Jenni Kantola
Guest Editors
Nordic Journal of Business

Research Papers

Helena Kantanen, Leena Penttinen, Päivi Rosenius and Katri Ruth – Grasp Your Field! First-Year Business Students’ Engagement with the Study Environment and Their Own Academic Field

Henrik Virtanen and Anu Norrgrann – How Can Interactivity Be Facilitated in a Massive Open Online Course? Lessons from the “Principles of Service Management” Course

Taina Eriksson, Minna-Maarit Jaskari and Päivi Kinnunen – Co-Teaching is Great! – But Only if There is Time: Teacher Perspectives on Online Co-Teaching

The whole issue as a PDF can be found here.

This issue of the Nordic Journal of Business features two peer-reviewed articles. In the first article, Sinikka Lepistö and Anna Rossi from the University of Oulu examine whether the horizontal pay dispersion of white-collar employees influences firm performance. The second article written by Mirja Väänänen, Riitta Forsten-Astikainen, Leena Eskola, Peetu Virkkala, and Eeva-Liisa Oikarinen from the University of Oulu focuses on sales management and the sales capabilities of small and medium-sized Finnish enterprises.

I hope you enjoy reading the interesting contributions featured in this issue of the Nordic Journal of Business.

Sami Vähämaa
Editor
Nordic Journal of Business

Sinikka Lepistö and Anna Rossi – Does Horizontal Pay Dispersion Impair Firm Performance? The Role of Task Complexity

Mirja Väänänen, Riitta Forsten-Astikainen, Leena Eskola, Peetu Virkkala, and Eeva-Liisa Oikarinen – Does Sales Management Matter? A Case of Growth-Oriented SMEs from Northern Finland

The whole issue as a PDF here.

Contents

Lyudmila Gadasina, Sergey Voitenko and Pasi Luukka – The Digital Diversity in Russian Regional Dynamics: Analysis by Machine Learning Methods

Jan Stoklasa, Azzurra Morreale, Tomáš Talášek and Mikael Collan – The Mean & Range Effect – A Sweet Spot Stimulating Risk-Seeking in Managerial Decision Support

Jani Kinnunen and Irina Georgescu – Fuzzy Real Options Analysis based on Interval-Valued Scenarios with a Corporate Acquisition Application

Mikael Collan and Jyrki Savolainen – To Phase or Not to Phase: Quantifying the Effect of Phasing Construction Projects

The whole issue as a PDF here.

Guest Editor’s Letter

This special issue is born of the papers presented at the joint meeting of the North-European Society for Adaptive and Intelligent systems (NSAIS) and the Finnish Real Options Society (FROS) organized in August 2019 in Lappeenranta, Finland. The main context of the joint meeting was that of discussing adaptive and intelligent systems, today better known as “analytics”, and real option analysis in the light of digitalization and modern manufacturing. This is a topical area that seems to bring together analytics and business in more than one way and seemed to also resonate with the participants, as many interesting and fresh contributions were presented. In this vein, this special issue is a collection of four selected papers from the meeting that resonate with the theme in different ways.

In the first paper, Lyudmila Gadasina, Sergey Voitenko, and Pasi Luukka explore and analyze the level of digitalization in different regions of Russia. In a sense, the research belongs to the field of economic geography, but as it touches the issue of digitalization the main points to be drawn are very business-oriented that is, where the regional readiness for digitalization is strong, there businesses based on digitalization can thrive. Also, as most businesses today are digitalizing their processes and in vein with Manufacturing 4.0 also physical production processes are being digitalized and networked, digitalization may become a point of competitive advantage and a pull factor for regions that are strong in this sense.

The authors use a combination of analytics methods based on statistical data – first they identify clusters of the Russian data that represent similar regions in terms of their digital “competence” and second, they classify each region to a cluster. The resulting classification shows that the digitalization in Russia can be characterized as “digital inequality”, as there are considerable large differences between regions. Regions that have been trailing have had a fast development in the recent years, however, large differences remain.

The second paper by Jan Stoklasa, Azzurra Morreale, Tomas Talasek, and Mikael Collan studies human behavior in the context of financial information affecting decision-making. Their work can be said to belong in the stream of literature on behavioral finance, where the study of cognitive biases to decision-making has received a lot of attention – however, their fo- cus is on how different presentation formats used to present information about uncertain out- comes affect decision-making. This focal area has received only limited attention in the past. The authors study how different amounts of information and different formats of information presentation, ranging from simple single-numbers to histograms, and further to continuous distributions, are used to represent the same or similar decision-making situations.

The main finding in the paper is that changing the presentation format of information about uncertain outcomes from presenting only a simple expected value to presenting an expected value and a range of possible values increases the decision-makers ́ propensity to take risk while adding even more information about the nature of the risk, such as presenting histograms or continuous distributions (with or without a mean value highlighted) seems to again reduce decision-makers ́ risk-taking. This indicates that there is a “sweet spot” in terms of what type of presentation format for information induces the higher propensity to take risks. The authors call the effect the “mean & range effect”. Further confirmatory research is presented to validate the obtained results with populations from altogether three countries – what is found is that the effect is manifested in roughly twenty percent of decision-makers. The twenty-percent of decision-makers who manifest the highlighted behavior are further analyzed. The results indicate that the assumption that the perception of risk is invariant may not hold and further- more that we must first understand what is perceived from information before we can study the rationality of decision-making. The implications of the findings presented in the paper are especially important from the point of view of the financial industry that typically and almost invariably deals with information about uncertain future outcomes.

The third paper by Jani Kinnunen and Irina Georgescu presents a new variant for fuzzy real option valuation that is based on using trapezoidal fuzzy numbers with interval-tails referred to as interval valued fuzzy sets. Real option valuation is the latest addition to profitability analysis of real-investments and attacks the problem of understanding the value of potential provided by managerial flexibility. The first fuzzy variants of the traditional option pricing methods arrived in the 1990s, but specific methods designed for fuzzy real option valuation only after the year 2000. The new variant that the authors present is based on the fuzzy Pay- Off Method for real option valuation and more specifically a later version of the method that has been replaced using the possibilistic mean with the center of gravity in the calculation of the single value representative centroid for the positive side of the underlying asset pay-off distribution. The focus is on the variants that use trapezoidal fuzzy numbers and the authors present comprehensively and completely with code (for R) the models on which their new con- tribution is based on.

Fuzzy logic is a precise way of modeling imprecision and in the context of real option valuation imprecision plays a great role, as the analysis is forward-looking and most often based on expert judgment, the new variant presented is designed to perform real option analysis in cases, where the available subjectively perceived information about cash-flows used as the ba- sis of the evaluation is in the form of trapezoids, where the tails of the trapezoids are interval to reflect and to capture the uncertainty about the minimum possible and the maximum possible values. The context of the paper is that of mergers and acquisitions and the authors illustrate the new method-variant with a case from within that context.

The fourth and last paper of this special issue is by Mikael Collan and Jyrki Savolainen and takes the reader to the world of the construction industry and specifically looks at the problem of phasing construction. Phasing is a real option often used in the real world and under- standing it better is highly relevant from the practitioner point of view. The research presented is focused on comparing and analyzing the different types of decision-support that can be reached for phasing of construction with two very different methods available for the job – the first method they present, test, and discuss is perhaps the simplest to use real option analysis method available the fuzzy pay-off method that is based on using two, three, or more managerially estimated cash-flow scenarios to construct a net present value distribution for an asset. They show that the method is usable in producing fast intuitive decision-support for construction-phasing decisions. The method is described as “quick and dirty” and the results given by it are direction-giving, on the other hand, the method does not require precise information and can handle a lot of imprecision with regards to the project. Furthermore, the method does not rely on any specific processes to work, this is beneficial from the point of view of the context of the construction industry, as the processes that govern the prices of real estate are typically very complex and most often unknown.

The second methodology for analyzing and supporting the decision to phase in the construction industry context presented in the paper is system dynamic simulation modeling. The method is a much more “deep going” method and requires much more time and planning, compared to the pay-off method. The methodology requires that a model that depicts the analyzed reality is constructed and in such a way that the dependencies (temporal and otherwise) between variables and parts of the model are taken into consideration. Once a model is built, in this case of a construction investment with the real option to construct in phases, Monte Carlo simulation is performed on the model. In the simulation, input variable values are randomly drawn from distributions for each (input) variable and the simulation continues by drawing values the “environmental variables” for each time-step until the end of the analysis horizon. The model reacts to the drawn environmental variable values according to the pre-set and pre-modeled rules. In the paper, five different construction strategies, or sets of rules, are analyzed and one thousand scenarios for each strategy is run. The novelty of the paper is in that it compares the usability of two methods in the context of the construction industry with numerical cases and presents a critical analysis of the suitability of the methods for the task.

All in all, the four papers of this special issue all present interesting, relevant, and new contributions within the broad topical areas of analytics and real option analysis. From the presented papers one thing emerges – in the study of economic and business phenomena the use of sophisticated analytics methods is on the rise and typically the results gained by using them offer deeper insight into the studied phenomena than what can be reached with only simple and more traditional methods. This is also an indication of the fact that the context of business is very lucrative from the point of view of analytics and that there are great synergies to be found by combining these two disciplines.

Mikael Collan
Guest Editor
LUT-University, School of Business and Management

Mervi Vähätalo and Tomi J. Kallio – Managing Health Services – Tight Integration or Loose Coupling?

Patrick Houweling and Laurens Swinkels – Pension and Insurance Solvency Regulations and Low-Risk Investing: A Comparative Analysis of the Nordic Countries and the Netherlands

The whole issue as a PDF here.

This issue of the Nordic Journal of Business includes two research articles. The first article by Taina Savolainen (University of Eastern Finland), Mirjami Ikonen (University of Eastern Finland) and Helinä Nurmenniemi (Centria University of Applied Sciences) contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by examining the role of trust and resilience in the process of becoming a self-employed entrepreneur. In the second article, Agnieszka Jach and Karl Felixson from Hanken School of Economics analyze comovements among the stocks included in the OMX Helsinki 25 index with respect to different time scales and across time scales.

I hope you enjoy reading the interesting articles featured in this issue of the Nordic Journal of Business.

Sami Vähämaa
Editor
Nordic Journal of Business

Taina Savolainen, Mirjami Ikonen and Helinä Nurmenniemi – Trust and Resilience Supporting the Entrepreneurial Process of Becoming a Self-Employed Entrepreneur

Agnieszka Jach and Karl Felixson – Short-, Long- and Cross-Term Comovement of OMXH25 Stocks

The whole issue as a PDF here.

The current issue of the Nordic Journal of Businessincludes two peer-reviewed articles. The first article by Natalia Semenova (Linnaeus University) and Lars G. Hassel (Umeå University) examines the performance of hidden investor activism in the form of direct dialogues between institutional investors and global companies in relation to sustainability risks. In the second article, Anu Ojala (University of Jyväskylä) focuses on the effects of institutional pressures on the strategic latitude of business schools in balancing the teaching–research nexus.
I hope you enjoy reading the interesting contributions featured in this issue of the Nordic Journal of Business. 
Sami Vähämaa
Editor
Nordic Journal of Business

Natalia Semenova and Lars G. Hassel – The Performance of Investor Engagement Dialogues to Manage Sustainability Risks

Anu Ojala – Trade-offs or Complements? Balancing Diversified Stakeholder Expectations, Institutional Pressures, and Functional Demands in the Strategic Management of Business Schools

The whole issue as a PDF here.

This issue of the Nordic Journal of Business features three accounting articles. In the first article, Amanda Curry, Anders Hersinger and Kent Nilsson from Luleå University of Technology focus on the operations managers’ use of non-financial information in their operational work, and examine whether this use increases their satisfaction with management accounting systems. The second article by Elina Haapamäki (University of Vaasa) investigates the role of country-specific factors in the adoption of the International Financial Reporting Standards and the International Standards on Auditing. Finally, the third article by Eija Kärkinen (Centria University of Applied Sciences) focuses on the financial paths of reorganized firms and examines the relationship between reorganization strategies and the firms’ financial paths after the reorganization decision.
I hope you enjoy reading the interesting articles featured in this issue of the Nordic Journal of Business.

Sami Vähämaa
Editor
Nordic Journal of Business

Amanda Curry, Anders Hersinger and Kent Nilsson – Operations Managers’ Use of (Ir)relevant Management Accounting Information: A Mixed-Methods Approach

Elina Haapamäki – The Role of Country-Specific Factors and the Adoption of a Global Business Language

Eija-Leena Kärkinen – Financial Paths of Reorganizing Firms after Reorganization Plan Confirmation

The whole issue as a PDF here.

This issue of the Nordic Journal of Business (NJB) contains four peer-reviewed articles. In the first article, Per Lekvall (The Swedish Corporate Governance Board) reviews the Nordic Corporate Governance Model and discusses the conceivable sustainability implications of the Nordic model. The second article by Jussi Karjalainen, Jyrki Niskanen, and Mervi Niskanen from the University of Eastern Finland focuses on accounting conservatism by examining whether differences in tax alignment affect the supply and demand for tax-induced conservatism. In the third article, Matti Keloharju and Antti Lehtinen from Aalto University provide a comprehensive descriptive analysis of the demographic patterns in employee and executive stock option grants in Finland. Finally, the fourth article by Antti Rautiainen and Timo Tohmo from the University of Jyväskylä examines the learning approaches and wellbeing of Finnish business students. I hope you enjoy reading these interesting articles.

As the current issue completes NJB’s Volume 67, I take this opportunity to provide a brief retrospective account of our recent activity. During the last two years, NJB has received and processed 41 article submissions. Out of these submissions, 37 percent have been accepted for publication after peer-review, 19 percent are currently in the review process, 20 percent were rejected after review, and 24 percent were desk rejected by the editor without external reviewers. For most of the articles sent to the external peer-review process, the first-round decision has been reached within three months.

NJB has now been operating under the new name and with a refined focus on Nordic business research for four years. Although most articles published in NJB have still been written by scholars from Finnish universities, the authorship of articles has become distinctly more international since the change of the journal’s name to NJB, and about 20 percent of the published articles have been written by authors from Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and U.K. universities and business schools. The five most prolific institutions in terms of authorship, each with a share of about 10 percent, are Aalto University School of Business, Hanken School of Economics, LUT University, University of Jyväskylä, and the University of Vaasa.

NJB’s Editorial Board has remained almost unchanged over the last four years. I am now honoured to welcome two new colleagues Sebastiano Lombardo (BI Norwegian Business School, Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship) and Jon Bingen Sande (BI Norwegian Business School, Department of Marketing) to the Editorial Board. With the addition of Sebastiano and Jon, NJB’s Editorial Board now has 16 members who represent different disciplines of business studies, and come from 12 different universities in six different countries.

I am also happy to announce that NJB is now listed in all official journal and publication channel lists used in the Nordic countries. NJB is indexed in scientific level 1 in the Danish BFI publication list, in level 1 in the Finnish JUFO Publication Forum list, and level 1 in the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers.

Please consider the Nordic Journal of Business as an outlet for your research.

Sami Vähämaa
Editor
Nordic Journal of Business

Per Lekvall – The Nordic Way of Corporate Governance

Jussi Karjalainen, Jyrki Niskanen and Mervi Niskanen – Tax Alignment and Tax-Induced Conditional Conservatism: An Empirical Analysis of European Private Firms

Matti Keloharju and Antti Lehtinen – Stock Option Grants in Finland

Antti Rautiainen and Timo Tohmo – Approaches to Learning, Wellbeing, Study Success and Employment Expectations in a Finnish Business School

The whole issue as PDF here

This issue of the Nordic Journal of Business includes three peer-reviewed research articles. In the first article, Erno Salmela (Lappeenranta University of Technology) and Niina Nurkka (Saimaa University of Applied Sciences) focus on the phenomenon of digital market capture from the viewpoint of market capturers in the startup and early growth stages. The second article by Jörgen Hellström, Yuna Liu and Tomas Sjögren from Umeå University examines the effects of stock exchange mergers on stock market information efficiency. Finally, the third article by Naufal Alimov (Pellervo Economic Research PTT) investigates the performance and portfolio choices of competing Swedish pension funds.
I hope you enjoy reading the interesting articles featured in this issue of the Nordic Journal of Business.
Sami Vähämaa
Editor
Nordic Journal of Business

Erno Salmela and Niina Nurkka – Digital Market Capture – How to Survive in the Death Valley?

Jörgen Hellström, Yuna Liu and Tomas Sjögren – Stock Exchange Mergers and Weak-Form Information Efficiency: Evidence from the OMX Nordic and Baltic Consolidation

Naufal Alimov – Competition as a Driving Force among Institutional Investors: The Case of Swedish Pension Funds

The whole issue as PDF here