This article explores how universities have implemented research performance systems. It considers how researchers working as managers assume the responsibility for research groups, and how they deal with managerial pressures from higher levels of management and outside forces. Drawing on in-depth interviews with research managers, we discuss how this particular responsibility is shaping up in their practices and perceptions. This article shows how role ambivalence enables research managers to view stricter performance requirements as being both problematic and challenging. These managers engage in alternative ways of moulding and legitimizing their activity by negotiating its terms and conditions with the universities and researchers alike. The notion of resilient compliance is put forward to convey the idea that research managers' ambivalence regarding prevalent pressures is subsequently reconciled by introducing new organizing elements into the workplace. We argue that because a focus on agency appears lacking in analyses of performance management in universities, academics' power to deal with potentially adverse situations imposed by managerialism has been largely underestimated.

Based on an extensive literature review on intelligent cities, smart cities, and happy cities, and on their conceptual connections with citizens' well‐being, quality of life, and happiness, we developed a resource‐based view on City Quality: the PESNAT (political, economic, social, natural, artificial, and technological) framework. The concept of City Quality rests on the idea of cities interconnected sub‐habitats—PESNAT—which are powerful analytical categories needed for understanding cities as complex and intricate loci. This framework eventually aims at assessing the cities' power to attract businesses and people, to contribute to a sustainable development of the city and an increased quality of life. Furthermore, two hypotheses are outlined regarding the level of importance of each sub‐habitat in relation to happiness, and the level of controversy of each one for citizens, city planners, and decision makers.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into how research managers and directors conceive, adopt and adapt organizational structures to regulate and stimulate academic research. Design/methodology/approach -The study used principles of a grounded theory approach for collecting and analysing data in interviews with research directors and programme managers working at universities within the discipline of Business Administration in The Netherlands. Findings -In total, four clusters of concepts emerged from the data, related to: the definition of organization structures; the effects and by-products of providing structures; academic research as management object; and using organizational structures. The collected clusters show that research universities adopt all kinds of organization structures (formal, informal, narrow, broad, intentional, emergent) and that the perceptions and practices of research managers are crucial for deciding whether these structures may become "seeding" or "controlling". Originality/value -The "practice turn" in organization studies has highlighted how important work practices of individual knowledge workers are, but so far has not paid systematic attention to the role of management, or has even downplayed that role. Structuration, which is a key management domain, is not inherently "good" or "bad" (seeding vs controlling), nor is avoiding structuration. Research managers as quintessential knowledge managers appear centre stage in making structures work or not. What makes structures "seeding" (or not) is their selection, combination, adjustment and/or intentional ignoration in practices of management knowing. An important mechanism is that of negotiation in attempts to accommodate possibly divergent interpretations. The concept of management knowing introduced and elaborated claims that management knowledge and practices are intertwined and not independent management knowledge categories.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with research managers, this paper argues that academic research management is ideologically close to knowledge management. The research followed a grounded theory approach. This method appears particularly suited for this inquiry, due to the absence of a dominant theoretical framework, the consequent need for extra theorizing, and the appeal to develop a theoretical account that relies on the most privileged sources of this knowledge, namely research managers. The data analysis shows that competing conceptualizations of knowledge and associated management models provide the playground for academic research management. Owing to the impact of cultural and behavioural aspects in the dynamics of knowledge creation, shaping collectively crafted courses of action-rather than managing them-aptly represents the essence of academic research management.