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The significance of well-being in social development policy and practice is increasingly acknowledged by scholars and practitioners worldwide. Nevertheless, when examining well-being within the context of Global South trends, existing conceptualisations seem to yield incongruent indicators. Given the background, this paper aims to synthesise theoretical and empirical literature on well-being to foster an understanding of well-being in contemporary Global South.

This article reviews the now large literature on the well-being in the Global South. The article begins with a discussion of the contributions of state-of-the-art developments in well-being studies, a realm experiencing remarkable growth in social policy studies. It then turns to the prominent well-being constructs that have garnered considerable attention within the literature, with an examination of the Global North and Global South context followed by reinterpretation of these concepts to facilitate a comprehensive study of well-being beyond the realms of welfare states. Concluding the narrative, a succinct outline of potential pathways for future research is presented in the final section.

The review reveals that the concept of well-being in the Global South does not necessarily deviate entirely from the prevailing belief that the region is fundamentally distinct from the Global North on a conceptual level. The authors have discovered that three core dimensions of well-being, namely objective, subjective and relational, are observable across societal boundaries due to the diffusion of knowledge and social and cultural practices that have progressively aligned them with Global North-style modernisation. An exception arises in the relational aspect, where the attainment of positive collective relationships precedes individual happiness to some extent. The paper advances a renewed perspective on well-being, portraying it as a situational, interconnected, collective undertaking and continuous process. These approaches empower the researchers to address the overarching question of which analytical foundations can most effectively uncover the intricacies of well-being in diverse and contemporary circumstances.

This paper helps the researchers to address the overarching question of which analytical foundations can most effectively uncover the intricacies of well-being in diverse and contemporary circumstances, thereby facilitating future enhancements in social policy design.

The purpose of this article is to summarize three Luhmannian critiques on morality, illustrate new roles for morality and add constructive interpretations.

Luhmann has recently been described as downright negative toward morality, resulting in a refusal to use ethics as a sociologist, thus leading to a limited use of his theory in moral issues. A constructive interpretation could support a more functional use of morality in social system theory.

First, Luhmann signals that morality can no longer fulfill its integrative function in society but also that society has recourse to moral sensitivity. Second, Luhmann describes how anxiety is crucial in modern morality and indicates which role risk and danger could play. The author builds further on this and proposes the concept of “social system attention” that can provide answers to individual and organizational anxiety. The author proposes that institutionalized socialization can support an integrative morality. Third, Luhmann states that ethics today is nothing more than a utopia but also that the interdiction of moral self-exemption is an essential element. The author adds that a relational ontology for social systems theory can avoid ethics as utopia.

This article is a programmatic plea to further elaborate morality from a system theory perspective in which meaning is relationally positioned.

This article could potentially provide a more functional application of morality in social systems, thus leading to improvements of attempts of ethical decision-making. The originality of the approach lies in the interpretation of basic assumptions of Luhmann social system theory that are not core to his theory.

This work tries to detect the factors that can impact service innovation in the retail sector according to a service ecosystem (SES) perspective. This paper aims to understand whether it is possible to study innovation focusing on the impact of technology on resource integration practices in SESs and to rank different patterns of innovation by evaluating their effects in terms of value co-creation.

To show up the perception of actors, a case study has been carried out through semi-structured interviews. The aggregates of practices and the service innovation archetypes, drawn from the theoretical background, have been used as categories of analysis.

Service innovation is reconceptualised as the result of the application of new technology to resource integration practices in the retail SES, and it is possible to rank its patterns and outcomes by deepening its effects on the emergence of value co-creation phenomena. Shared intentions have been identified as drivers of service innovation, but greater transparency in systems used to embolden a higher willingness to use could be necessary.

Service innovation has been studied by focusing on value co-creation; for this reason, the willingness to use technology emerged as a determinant of service innovation. This result implies the need for a multilevel reinterpretation of contemporary SES, both regarding the technical features of digital solutions and their adherence to users' skills and the effects of willingness or unwillingness to use on value co-creation.

Institutional theory assumes practice adoption and subsequent decoupling. However, there is a range of alternative organizational theories that challenge this view and offer instead their reinterpretation, extension and modification of institutional predictions with regard to the adoption and possible range of various responses and processes that follow the decision to adopt. This paper aims to review this spectrum of theories and suggest how they clarify, supplement, correct, restrict and/or abandon some institutional explanations and predictions.

Extensions and alternatives to institutional theory are mainly motivated by the need to have a theory of practice adoption and variation, and a plethora of alternative practice adoption theories currently exists in the literature. The authors review these theories and compare them against institutional theory and against each other.

The analysis revealed shortcomings and advantages of alternative theories compared to institutional theory and against each other. It is suggested which theory is most useful in each domain of application. The authors review and compare institutional theory, Scandinavian institutionalism, management fashion theory, virus theory and institutional inertia theory and analyze how and whether they are able to reproduce the success of institutional theory and successfully address and resolve its shortcomings and gaps. The authors conclude by discussing whether regular emergences of new theories that account for the idea-handling stage of diffusion signals institutional theory’s limit of validity in this domain.

The problem of idea emergence/diffusion/disappearance and adoption/variation/use are fundamentally different, but both of them motivated researchers to go beyond institutional theory. Despite being the dominant theory of organizations internally consistent and explaining a wide range of empirical observations, it is evident that institutional theory is not a complete theory. This paper contributes to this problem by exploring and comparing existing candidates for practice variation theory.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

This research presents and evaluates a method for assessing the entrepreneurial mindset (EM) of students in higher education.

The research considers EM a multi-variable psychological construct, which can be broken down into several conceptual sub-categories. Using data from a master course in entrepreneurship, the authors show how these categories can be applied to analyze students’ written reflections to identify linguistic markers of EM.

The research reports three main findings: analyzing student reflections is an appropriate method to explore the state and development of students’ EM; the theoretically-derived EM categories can be nuanced and extended with insight from contextualized empirical insights; and student reflections reveal counter-EM categories that represent challenges in the educator’s endeavor to foster students’ EM.

The commitment of resources to researching EM requires the dedication of efforts to develop methods for assessing the state and development of students’ EM. The framework can be applied to enhance the theoretical rigor and methodological transparency of studies of EM in entrepreneurship education.

The framework can be of value to educators who currently struggle to assess if and how their educational design fosters EM attributes.

This inquiry contributes to the critical research discussion about how to operationalize EM in entrepreneurship education studies. The operationalization of a psychological concept such as EM is highly important because a research focus cannot be maintained on something that cannot be studied in a meaningful way.

This study aims to perform a scoping review of the recent studies on critical resources required for the doctoral program by mapping the resources at various levels of Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems and their underlying theories. The study proposes a holistic model of supportive resources in the doctoral education.

The current scoping review is supported by Arksey and O'Malley's five-stage methodological guidance The authors reported sixty-eight articles that were published between 2010 and 2023 and complied with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) checklist.

The study identified two categories of resources that promote doctoral student well-being: personal resources such as research self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation of the doctoral student. Second, the contextual resources provided by supervisors, department, family, peers, institution and Government policy impact the well-being of doctoral students. The study relied on the self-determination and conservation of resources theory to determine doctoral students' stress-free, high-quality research journey.

The study findings can help higher education institutions, supervisors, peers and academicians plan and implement the finest resources to improve the well-being of doctoral students. The institutions can develop a wide range of strategies, tailored supportive programs, and interventions that can help in improving students' mental and emotional health, based on the developed multifaceted resource framework. Doctoral students can also use the review's findings to help them deal with program obstacles by encouraging themselves internally and participating in mentoring programs.

This review article proposes a comprehensive conceptual framework by considering Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems on multilevel resources that help to understand the inter-relationship between resources required in the doctoral student's program.

Prior research has advanced several explanations for social media influencers' (SMIs’) success in the burgeoning computer-mediated marketing environments but leaves one key topic unexplored: the moderating role of SMIs in service failure and recovery strategies.

Drawing on a social constructivist perspective and an inductive approach, 59 in-depth interviews were conducted with millennials from three European countries (Italy, France and the United Kingdom). Building on social influence theory and commitment-trust theory, this study conceptualises four distinct pathways unifying SMIs' efforts in the service failure recovery process.

The emergent model illustrates how source credibility and message content moderate service failure severity and speed of recovery. The insights gained from this study model contribute to research on the pivotal uniqueness of SMIs in service failure recovery processes and offer practical explanations of variations in the implementation of influencer marketing. This study examines a perspective of SMIs that considers the cycle of their influence on customers through service failure and recovery.

The study suggests that negative reactions towards service failure and recovery are reduced if customers have a relationship with influencers prior to the service failure and recovery compared with the reactions of customers who do not have a relationship with the influencer.

This study aims to develop and test a multivariable psychosocial prediction model of subjective well-being in Ukrainian adults (n = 1,248) 1.5 years after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The research design followed the “Transparent reporting of a multivariable prediction model for individual prognosis or diagnosis” checklist. The online survey combined a questionnaire on sociodemographic characteristics and specifics of living in wartime, as well as validated self-reported inventories: The Modified BBC Subjective Well-being Scale, Acceptance and Action Questionnaire – Version 2 and Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale-10.

The initially developed model was tested through regression analysis, which revealed nine variables as predictors of the subjective well-being scores within the sample, explaining 49.3% of its variance. Among them, the strongest were living with a friend and receiving mental health care systematically. They were almost twice as influential as forced displacement abroad and trauma exposure, which predicted lower well-being, and living with a spouse, which forecasted higher well-being scores. Two resilience subscales – adjustment and restoring and resistance – as predictors of better well-being and perceived unsuccess in life and age as predictors of lower well-being were relatively weaker but statistically significant.

The obtained results support the previous evidence on the essential role of accessible mental health services and social support in times of war, as well as the deteriorative effect of trauma exposure and forcible taking refuge on subjective well-being.

This paper aims to formally conceptualize service mega-disruptions as any far-reaching and unforeseen general environmental stressor or threat that impacts a service organization’s ability to provide a desired level of service. The authors differentiate sudden large-scale general environmental threats from traditional service failures in scope and scale of impact via number of customers and sectors affected and duration and speed of the disruption.

This paper draws from service recovery theory to build a conceptual model of service mega-disruptions. The resulting conceptual model maps service failure recovery strategies against a service mega-disruption recovery approach to examine consumer response to changes in service value. This work further articulates additional research needs including conceptualization, measurement and methods as traditional drivers of service recovery and the value of the service experience change in response to service mega-disruptions.

This work proposes a research agenda to investigate whether service mega-disruptions can bypass the need for service recovery due to a consumer self-moderating process. As past research shows, the less control a service provider has over a failure, the more customers attribute fault to the situation and transfer blame away from an organization. This paper suggests that this self-moderating process disrupts the need for service providers to court forgiveness for a failure with perceptions of similarity and controllability providing an alternate pathway to customer forgiveness. Similarly, it is suggested that service mega-disruptions play a role in transforming service ecosystems into tighter, more contractual systems with less agency for service providers and poorer ability to adjust to market conditions. The duration and longevity of effects on service providers’ control, agency and ability to adjust following a service mega-disruption must be researched further.

This paper builds theory to develop a conceptual model of service mega-disruptions and their role in customer engagement and reshaping the service ecosystem. This paper culminates in the proposition of a research agenda that aims to build research capacity among services marketing scholars as service providers’ coordination and market conditions are challenged by service mega-disruptions.