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This paper aims to deal with the concepts of “institutions” and “institutional logics” in the context of business-to-business (B2B) marketing systems and uses institutional theory as a framework to look at value co-creation.

By integrating the literature on value co-creation, institutional theory and institutional entrepreneurship, the paper argues that the boundaries of B2B marketing systems are continuously reshaped through legitimation processes occurring through actors’ institutional work, thus making co-created value the only legitimate value.

The paper proposes a conceptual framework and furthers the conceptual development of value co-creation and augments the literature on service-dominant logic and the notion of co-created value by assuming a legitimacy-based B2B market systems perspective.

This paper presents a number of propositions that serve to illustrate several managerial implications. These arise from organizations co-creating value by conforming to the various institutional logics that maximize their legitimacy.

The paper makes a contribution by developing a critical theoretical framework based on the application of institutional theoretical constructs/concepts (e.g. ceremonial conformity, decoupling, considerations of face, confidence and good faith).

Determining the skills required for salespersons to maximize their effectiveness was the main driver for conducting the present study. In order to identify those necessary skills, this study aims to review various research techniques drawn from multiple disciplines and applied that knowledge to salespersons.

This study used a mixed-method methodology. This study began by conducting a literature review and then interviewed experienced salespersons with varied backgrounds to develop a comprehensive list of sales skills and themes and categorize them into competency categories. This study then conducted a quantitative analysis to determine the respective importance of the skills and themes by surveying a sample of internal stakeholders of a multinational company. Finally, this study calculated the reliability and validity of the themes.

A total of 206 relevant skills (later reduced to 110) and 28 themes were identified and grouped into three competency categories: conceptual, human/interpersonal and technical. Survey respondents rated the skills and themes higher than the “somewhat important” score of 3 out of 5, with the overall mean importance for skills being in the “important” range (score of 4.27 out of 5). All identified skills were believed to be important to a salesperson’s success.

This study’s expanded list of sales skills will improve employability, reduce turnover among employees and build better groundwork for fostering learning through work, resulting in better performance. These skills represent a 2020 updated list that could be used for future academic research and training and research in the business world.

This article looks at girls who fight in order to evaluate theories of education for marginalized girls. As oppositional culture and educational resistance theories suggest for boys’ misconduct in school, girl fights are found to be a product of deindustrialization, family expectations, and peer culture. Within peer groups of marginalized students an oppositional culture develops such that girls gain respect from their peers by fighting because they demonstrate a necessary toughness. Girls who fight have a complicated relationship to education. Contrary to oppositional culture theory, these girls value educational achievement. However, the girls’ relationships with teachers are strained. Teachers do not appreciate “tough” girls. Race, class, and gender together construct a student culture that produces girls who fight in school.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to examine the components of a gang culture in conflict with society, and second, to explore how gangs, the community, and law enforcers externalize the gang problem from the vantage point of worldview and worldmaking.

The researcher gathered news articles from the Nexus-Lexis research database system within a one-year period (from February 2012 to February 2013). The data was randomly selected and representative of newspapers published throughout the USA. The news articles were coded based upon the aspects of culture (lens of perception, motives for human behaviors, criteria for evaluation, basis of identification, means for communication, justification for social stratification, and mode for production and consumption). A thematic analysis was also conducted to determine: the aspects of gang culture in conflicts with society; and how the gangs, the community, and the law enforcements externalize the gang conflict.

Results suggest that gang violence is largely due to issues of identity, values, and gang cohesiveness rather than the result of the pathologically based environmental conditions. Criteria for evaluation and issue of identity constituted 66 percent of the violent conflict with society. In the context of worldviews and worldmaking, gang members and law enforcement personnel are more likely to adopt a rigid, win-lose framework while members of the community are more likely to prescribe to a flexible and holistic perspective toward the gang problem. In sum, gang violence is not necessarily a deviant or antisocial act; rather, it is a result of the conflicting narratives between the gang cultures and the culture-at-large.

In dissecting gang behavior from a cultural perspective, it is easy to categorize gangs as a collective subculture. However, gang members may not view themselves as a subculture nor consider themselves as belonging to a subculture community.

By examining the function of culture – in this case, the gang culture – as it conflicts with society at large, one may better able to develop an action plan that emphasize identities, cultures, and values rather than crime and punishment. Also, it may help shed light on how the various stakeholders (i.e. the gangs, law enforcements, and the community) perceive the conflict, which may assist researcher to develop a comprehensive and holistic approach toward intervention. Finally, implementing a culturally based gang violence intervention may reduce cost.

This research is unique in that it analyzes the function of gang violence in relation to the society-at-large. Also, the research addresses the issue as to how the various stakeholders interpret the “gang problem.” Finally, this research is innovative in that it employs news articles as units of analysis rather than the traditional qualitative interviews or quantitative surveys.

The purpose of this paper is to explore factors that drive officer support for body-worn cameras (BWCs).

Results of an officer perceptions survey completed as part of an evaluation of the Chicago Police Department’s BWC project are presented. The influence of treatment- and outcome-oriented justice concerns on officer support for BWCs is explored with a variety of covariates.

Outcome-oriented concerns are a significant predictor of officer support for BWCs, while treatment-oriented concerns are not.

The research enhances understandings of the applicability of procedural justice theorizing in policing generally, and offers direction important to the meaningful use of BWCs.

This finding runs counter to dominant relational models of procedural justice that concentrate on the perspective of subordinates, but lends support to arguments advocating the centrality of role (authority vs subordinate) in the formation of justice evaluations.

This manuscript aims to integrate the relationship and knowledge-based theoretical perspectives of open innovation to provide a framework that identifies and classifies eight critical dimensions that influence the effectiveness of interfirm open innovation.

The literature on interfirm open innovation is reviewed. Internal firm factors and external interfirm factors of open innovation are explored.

The manuscript identifies four internal firm factors of absorptive capacity, control of knowledge input, relational capability and coordination capability. Further, the synthesis identifies four external firm factors of distribution of knowledge input, appropriation of knowledge output, network position and network diversity.

The organizing framework facilitates the development of eight research propositions to guide future empirical investigation. Moreover, the findings aid managers in understanding what dimensions they should consider to improve the effectiveness of their interfirm open innovation activities.

By considering both the relationship and knowledge-based perspectives, the manuscript integrates various perspectives of open innovation to provide direction for practicing managers and for future research on interfirm open innovation.

Children are becoming consumers at younger ages; a variety of influences and experiences shape their as well as their family’s consumer habits. With the changing economic scenario, power has been shifting toward the new emerging economies. These nations are rapidly developing, where the children population is high, parents are young and have money to spend. This study aims at exploring family’s consumer decision-making process to understand the influencing role of young Indian children in a family setting.

This study analyzes young children and their parents through semi-structured interviews with the families. The phenomenological interviews with six families in the National Capital Region of India capturing 23 informants were conducted.

Children’s influence is omnipresent, in all the product categories as well as buying stages. For products of their direct use like books, clothes and snacks items, they are very much involved and their level of influence is highest from both the parents’ and children’s perception. Role of siblings and joint collaboration with the grandparents are also parts of the findings.

This study attempts to actively listen to young children’s voices. However, it is acknowledged that in some families, the parent’s presence may have affected the results.

There are just few studies that have tapped the family’s consumer decision-making intricacies. There exists an enormous research gap which needs to be filled by more empirical research into the arena of family consumer decision-making. Also, India has a distinct cultural entity as compared to Western nations; to understand how children influences in such traditional setting is insightful.

This qualitative study aims to use the conceptual lens of figured worlds to explore how a 10-year-old child positions her identity and participates in systems of power through her engagement in writing.

Data was generated across an 18-week ethnographic case study in one fourth-grade classroom located in the Midwestern USA.

Findings highlight how children’s writing reflected both an adherence to and a rejection of the mandated curriculum as well as other aspects of the figured world of schooling. In turn, this study offers suggestions about how, by reading children’s writing with a figured world lens, their identities and positionings may become more apparent.

This study challenges teachers and researchers to read beyond “the basics” emphasized in the mandated curriculum to better attend to the ways children navigate standardized curricula, negotiate identities and positioning and use writing to (re)inscribe identities and positionings.

Earlier research confirms the positive effect of innovation in shaping growth ambitions of entrepreneurs. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the effect of innovation on growth ambitions of entrepreneurs is contingent on the role of institutions, namely, culture and economic freedom. In other words, the authors’ objective is to provide an institutionally contingent understanding of the role of innovation in shaping growth ambitions of early-stage entrepreneurs.

The authors applied hierarchical linear modeling technique on the data of 100,566 early-stage entrepreneurs in 109 countries that participated in annual surveys of Global Entrepreneurship Monitor.

The authors find that the effect of innovation on shaping growth ambitions of early stage entrepreneurs is contingent on the role of culture such that, in secular cultures, innovation benefits growth ambitions more than traditional cultures. Further, the authors found that the effect of innovation on growth expectations is dependent on the level of economic freedom in the country in which the firms operate so that in the countries with higher level of economic freedom, early-stage entrepreneurs expect more growth out of their innovation as compared to their counterparts in the depressed economies.

The results contribute to our understanding of entrepreneurial growth aspirations as a result of the interplay of entrepreneur–firm–environment nexus.

This paper aims to estimate the effects of gun possession arrests made by a specialized, proactive police patrol unit in the Houston Police Department (HPD).

Time series analyses are used to estimate the effects of weekly gun possession arrests on weekly counts of gun crimes in Houston, TX. Models isolate the effects of arrests made by the proactive patrol unit from gun possession arrests made by other HPD officers.

Citywide and beat‐level analyses show that the proactive unit made meaningful contributions to existing levels of illegal possession arrests. Time series analyses using weekly data show that these additional arrests are associated with significant declines in offences committed with guns. Findings support existing evidence that shows police can affect serious crimes by targeting firearms that are illegally possessed and carried.

The analysis can not precisely determine whether additional patrol presence or arrests are the precise mechanisms that might be influencing gun crimes.

The findings are consistent with existing evidence and suggest that focused police work to seize illegally possessed firearms from the streets and arrest those in illegal possession of firearms will impact offences committed with firearms.

The analysis extends existing work that tests the effects of proactive patrol activities on offences committed with firearms. The analysis is distinct from existing research on this topic because it estimates the effects of gun possession arrests rather than the effects of gun seizures.