This article explores literatures from various sources to highlight and understand differences among key players surrounding the perceived nature and role of civil society in research from different literature streams. Including Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in research activities is an integral part of a broad drive towards integration of science and society. Interest in CSO inclusion in research is widespread, but lacks a coherent focus and clarity on what CSOs are. Without this clarity, CSO-inclusive research, or policy, may be ineffective. This article addresses this gap in knowledge by presenting findings from an exploration of academic, policy and research project literature in order to come to a view on CSOs in research. This culminates in a typology of CSOs and provides a means of identifying types of CSOs. The typology shows four main types of CSO (common cause, shared voice, research-oriented, commercially oriented) and provides a definition for each type, along with a basis for the definition; an example of each; some typical terminology; typical area of activity; properties; typical mission; key areas of interest and their ‘action logic’ in research.

While volunteer literature presents diverse insights into the motives, personal dispositions, and sociodemographic characteristics of volunteers, researches comparatively seldom focus on the incentives and organizational context affecting volunteers. This review aims to shed light on the organizational factors affecting volunteers collectively and to discuss the coordination of volunteers. Systematic research of the literature revealed 386 publications that are relevant to volunteer coordination. Their abstracts were analyzed in a process of open and selective coding, which led to the identification of three main clusters. This literature review produced the following propositions: it is argued that the practices and instruments of volunteer management (Cluster 1), and, even more strongly, the organizational attitudes towards volunteers as well as the organizations’ embedded values (Cluster 2), co-determined by social processes (integration and production of meaning), are crucial factors affecting volunteers. The review also deals with structural features that limit the action space of volunteers and volunteer coordination (Cluster 3). It concludes by discussing the limitations present in the current volunteer research and provides implications for future research endeavors. Thus, this piece of work presents a holistic view on volunteer coordination and theory building by carefully synthesizing information about the organizational context of volunteering from different disciplines and research traditions, resulting in different intervention logics, and by integrating these data in an analytical framework.

This study presents an interdisciplinary systematic review of the literature on donation-based and reward-based crowdfunding. The literature to date has explored differences in crowd’s behavior and incentives for participating in the platform, as well as the factors governing funding and post-funding success. The authors summarize the main findings to date and synthesize the different theoretical explanations for the decision-making behavior of the crowd. The investigation reveals how the literature to date has upheld the importance of crowdfunding as a social and democratic tool, one that demonstrates wise judgment and clairvoyance in recognizing potential successes and creating value for society.

The rise and global reach of the corporate foundation (CF) phenomenon has attracted the attention of academic researchers and practitioners and led to a plurality of definitions and understandings. This definitional fuzziness notwithstanding, the term hybridity is widely used as the defining characteristic to describe a CF’s position between business and civil society and its diverse interlinkages with its founding company. However, the extant literature has seldom explained what hybridity signifies, when it occurs and how it is shown. This paper presents the findings of a systematic review of the academic and gray literature on CFs. Based on 80 publications covering 30 countries worldwide, this study proposes 15 characteristics along four global themes as a comprehensive set to account for the complexity of CFs. It develops propositions for a fine-grained understanding of what constitutes the hybrid nature of CFs at the strategic, organizational and contextual levels. Accordingly, this study suggests ways forward by revealing questions that require further research toward a better understanding of the CF phenomenon.

The concept of legitimacy—i.e., being regarded as “lawful, admissible, and justified” (Edwards in NGO rights and responsibilities: a new deal for global governance, The Foreign Policy Center, London, 2000)—is pivotal within civil society research. Recently, the concept has applied to wider notions concerning the civil sphere and civic action. The introductory article of this special issue aims to provide an overview of conceptualizations of legitimacy within civil society research and to point at new avenues for future research. We depart from Suddaby et al.’s (Acad Manag Ann 11(1):451–478, 2017) configurations of legitimacy within management literature: as property, perception, and process. While these configurations are also reflected in civil society literature, with legitimacy as property being prominent, they do not capture the full scope of civil society literature on legitimacy, given its multidisciplinary nature, its inclusion of multiple levels of analysis, and the presence of complementary conceptualizations of legitimacy. We posit that the legitimacy-as-relations-in-processes perspective is valuable for advancing research in civil society organizations.

Coffee is a widely consumed beverage, which has been extensively studied for its potential effects on health. We aimed to map genetic evidence for the effect of habitual coffee consumption on health. We searched PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature and two preprint repositories from inception to 30 September 2022, and included fifty-nine studies, spanning 160 disease or biomarker associations. We evaluated the articles for certainty of evidence using a modified GRADE tool and robustness of the associations by comparing Mendelian randomisation (MR) sensitivity analyses. Coffee consumption was associated with smaller grey matter brain volume in one study, and there was probable evidence for an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease and younger age of onset of Huntington’s disease. MR studies provided probable evidence for an association with increased risk of oesophageal and digestive cancers, but protective effects for hepatocellular carcinomas and ovarian cancer. We found probable evidence for increased risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, menopausal disorders, glaucoma, higher total cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol and ApoB, and lowered risk of migraines, kidney disease and gallstone disease. Future studies should aim to understand underlying mechanisms of disease, expand knowledge in non-European cohorts and develop quality assessment tools for systematic reviews of MR studies.

Systematic review registration: PROSPERO registration number CRD42021295323

Within disciplines that aim to understand past cultures by studying the objects they made, research methodologies can move between example-based object-specific investigations and whole-of-corpus data-driven analyses. And when the count of extant objects is relatively small, every single individual object has the potential to uniquely contribute to new knowledge or transform existing paradigms. But how does a researcher know how many objects there are, where they are, how they have been studied and written about in the past, and which may be awaiting closer examination? This article introduces an object-literature framework that connects objects to the literature that mention them and creates an error-corrected resource that enables the tracing of objects through published literature and through time. The specific example described here applies the framework to khipus (knotted-cord recording devices from the Andes), to create the “khipu-biblio cross-reference.” Key findings include comprehending the pattern of khipu publications, identifying understudied khipus, and updating the count of known khipus and their locations. By applying the framework to any collection of objects, researchers and collections teams can draw substantial benefits and accelerate the generation of new knowledge.

With a growing body of research exploring how employees perceive and respond to human resource management (HRM) practices, the strategic HRM field faces the challenge of assessing how insights have evolved and which theoretical perspectives have shaped them. This study presents a bibliometric review of 292 empirical research on employee perceptions of HRM practices, focusing on (1) the major research interests explored, (2) the theoretical perspectives applied, and (3) their evolution over the last 25 years. The analysis reveals a reoccurring emphasis on performance-oriented variables, such as engagement, suggesting a tendency to rely on quantifiable outcomes while sidelining alternative constructs like employee well-being. It also highlights the dominance of a limited set of theoretical perspectives commonly applied, with alternative perspectives remaining underutilised. By mapping how topical areas and theories intersect, this study refines the classification of theoretical perspectives and contributes to a more critical understanding of the strategic HRM field. Potential implications are discussed to outline actionable recommendations for future research.

A growing experimental literature studies the endogenous choice of institutions to solve cooperation problems arising in prisoners’ dilemmas, public goods games, and common pool resource games. Participants in these experiments have the opportunity to influence the rules of the game before they play the game. In this paper, we review the experimental literature of the last 20 years on the choice of institutions and describe what has been learned about the quality and the determinants of institutional choice. Cooperative subjects and subjects with optimistic beliefs about others often vote in favor of the institution. Almost all institutions improve cooperation if they are implemented, but they are not always implemented by the players. Institutional costs, remaining free-riding incentives, and a lack of learning opportunities are identified as the most important barriers. Unresolved cooperation problems, like global climate change, are often characterized by these barriers. The experimental results also show that cooperation tends to be higher under endogenously chosen institutions than exogenously imposed institutions. However, a significant share of players fails to implement the institution and they often perform poorly, which is why we cannot conclude that letting people choose is better than enforcing institutions from outside.

This semi-systematic literature review examines signed language corpus research in the Nordic countries, with a quantitative and qualitative assessment of corpus research. The article first describes some critical components and functionalities of signed language corpora. It then outlines the evolution of Nordic corpus research, highlighting Sweden’s pioneering role and subsequent developments in Finland and Norway. The findings suggest a progression from method-focused publications to those exploring linguistic phenomena within and across (signed) languages. Although the number of research publications is modest, there is a discernible shift towards comparative studies and applications in signed language teaching and learning.

The emergence of smart Product-Service Systems (smart PSS) presents numerous challenges for enterprises. The complexity of designing smart PSS adds to the need for consistent support for manufacturers. Both academia and practitioners highlight the importance of methodological support for successful development of smart PSS. This paper therefore investigates the suitability of existing support for smart PSS. Based on a systematic literature review, 17 support methods are identified and their key characteristics are discussed in the context of real PSS use cases.

This paper presents a mapping of theory use in the design discipline based on the corpus of the published ICED and DESIGN conference papers since 2010. We searched the resulting 4,451 papers for occurrences of theories and compared them with an existing ontology of named theories through natural language processing (NLP). The results yielded a variety of analyses, illustrating, for example, the most-used theories and which disciplines these theories stem from. This paper presents a rich overview of the theories relevant to the design discipline and a novel approach to bibliometric analyses.