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This issue of the Nordic Journal of Business includes three peer-reviewed articles. The first article by Saara Julkunen (University of Eastern Finland), Jonna Koponen (University of Eastern Finland), and David Nickell (University of West Georgia) examines how value is created from a customer relationship perspective when the seller employs both digital and in-person communications during the solution selling process. In the second article, John Paul Broussard (University of Oklahoma) and Mika Vaihekoski (University of Turku) investigate the price differences between the voting and limited-voting share classes in the Finnish stock market. The third article by Juha Mäki (University of Vaasa) focuses on the role of external investment property appraisers and Big-4 auditors in reducing information asymmetries in the real estate industry.

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

Research articles

Saara Julkunen, Jonna Koponen and David Nickell – Understanding Value Creation through Digital and In-Person Communication in Solution Selling Process

John Paul Broussard and Mika Vaihekoski – Time-Variation of Dual-Class Premia

Juha Mäki – External Appraisal, Auditing, and Information Asymmetries in the Real Estate Industry: European Evidence

You can read the entire issue as PDF here.

This issue of the Nordic Journal of Business includes three peer-reviewed articles and a research note.

In the first article, Antti Talonen (University of Helsinki), W. Jean Kwon (St. John’s University), Jukka Mähönen (University of Oslo) and Päivikki Kuoppakangas (Tampere University) examine how the managers of mutual insurance companies understand and communicate the influence of customer ownership when organizing operative activities. The second article by Olga Iermolenko (Nord University) discusses the role of care as an integral part of management control systems in large-scale construction projects. In the third article, Nikolas Breitkopf (Aalto University), Samuli Knüpfer (BI Norwegian Business School) and Elias Rantapuska (Aalto University) provide a descriptive analysis of the ownership patterns of stocks and mutual funds in the entire Finnish population.

In addition to the three articles, this issue includes a research note by Agnieszka Jach (Hanken School of Economics) in which a high-frequency analysis of stock market activity, liquidity, and volatility during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic is presented.

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

Sami Vähämaa
Editor
Nordic Journal of Business

The current issue of the Nordic Journal of Business includes three articles. The first article by Maria Ihamuotila, Eva Liljeblom and Benjamin Maury focuses on the role of experience for acquiring firms when conducting acquisitions of high-tech target firms. In the second article, Tuomas Honkamäki, Markus Mättö and Hannu Ojala examine how the choice between fair value and cost-based accounting models influences the quality of financial reporting. Finally. the third article by Priyanka Shrivastava, Mirjami Ikonen, Taina Savolainen and Enkh-Otgon Dorjgotov investigates the lifecycle of organizational transformations and how it influences the development and sustenance of trust within employees.

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

Sami Vähämaa
Editor
Nordic Journal of Business

The whole issue as a PDF here.

This issue of the Nordic Journal of Business contains three peer-reviewed articles. In the first article, Pirkko Jaatinen, Lili-Anne Kihn and Salme Näsi from Tampere University investigate the historical development of information technology innovations in financial accounting. The second article written by Pekka Belt and Juha Tuunainen from the University of Oulu focuses on the work-related well-being of entrepreneurs. Finally, in the third article, Henrik Keinonen from Hanken School of Economics examines the relationship between ownership concentration and firm performance within the Nordic corporate governance model.

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

Pirkko Jaatinen, Lili-Anne Kihn and Salme Näsi – Historical Development of IT-Related Innovations: From Manual and Paper Bookkeeping to Automated and Digital Financial Accounting

Pekka Belt and Juha Tuunainen – The Work-Related Well-Being of Solo, Micro, and Small Business Entrepreneurs

Henrik Keinonen – Blockholders and Firm Performance within the Nordic Corporate Governance Model: Finnish Evidence

The whole issue as a PDF can be downloaded here.

The current issue of the Nordic Journal of Business includes three interesting and timely articles.

In the first article, Matti Keloharju and Antti Lehtinen from the Aalto University School of Business provide a comprehensive descriptive analysis of the ownership patterns of publicly traded Finnish firms. The second article by Saara Julkunen (University of Eastern Finland), Markus Raatikainen (University of Eastern Finland), Minna Rollins (University of West Georgia), and Mikael Pennanen (University of Eastern Finland) focuses on the European esports environment and the business ecosystem formed around competitive video gaming. Finally, in the third article, Mikael Paaso (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Vesa Pursiainen (University of St. Gallen), and Sami Torstila (Aalto University School of Business) discuss the business outlook and financing alternatives of the Finnish small-and-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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

Sami Vähämaa
Editor
Nordic Journal of Business

Matti Keloharju and Antti Lehtinen – A Quarter Century of Shareholdings and Trades of Finnish Stocks

Saara Julkunen, Markus Raatikainen, Minna Rollins and Mikael Pennanen – Understanding the European Business Environment in esports: An Ecosystem Perspective

Mikael Paaso, Vesa Pursiainen and Sami Torstila – Business Outlook and Financing Alternatives of Finnish Entrepreneurs During the COVID-19 Crisis

The whole issue as a pdf can be found here.

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.