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This article focuses on the assessment of entrepreneurship competence by selected vocational teachers in Italy. The exploratory research question addresses the extent to which entrepreneurship assessments are competence based, and the research seeks to identify fully fledged assessment programmes with both a formative and summative component, and the use of assessment rubrics. It also explores the extent to which entrepreneurship competence is referred to in school documentation and later assessed, and the tools and strategies used for such assessment.

This case study is part of a larger European research project promoted by Cedefop; in Italy it focused on six selected vocational IVET and CVET programmes and apprenticeship schemes. It used a wide range of instruments to ensure triangulation and multiple perspectives: analysed policy documents and undertook online interviews with experts and policy makers. At VET providers' premises it deployed: analysis of school documents; observations of learning environments; interviews and focus groups with (in schools) teachers, directors and vice directors, learners and alumni (in companies) instructors, company tutors and employers, apprentices and alumni.

Assessment tasks were rarely embedded within fully fledged assessment programmes involving both formative and summative tasks, and assessment rubric for grading. Most of the time, entrepreneurship programmes lacked self-assessment, peer assessment and structured feedback and did not involve learners in the assessment process. Some instructors coached the students, but undertook no clear formative assessment. These findings suggest institutions have a testing culture with regard to assessment, at the level of both policy and practice. In most cases, entrepreneurship competence was not directly assessed, and learning outcomes were only loosely related to entrepreneurship.

One limitation concerned the selection of the VET providers: these were chosen not on a casual basis, but because they ran programmes that were relevant to the development of entrepreneurship competence.

At the policy level, there is a need for new guidelines on competence development and assessment in VET, guidelines that are more aligned with educational research on competence development. To ensure the development of entrepreneurship competence, educators need in-service training and a community of practice.

So far, the literature has concentrated on entrepreneurship education at the tertiary level. Little is known about how VET instructors assess entrepreneurship competence. This study updates the picture of policy and practice in Italy, illustrating how entrepreneurship competence is developed in selected IVET and CVET programmes and apprenticeships.

The purpose of this study is to determine which metadata schemas are used in the museums and university collections of the main universities in Spain and other European countries. Although libraries and archives are also university memory institutions (according to a Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums perspective), their collections are not included in this study because their metadata systems are highly standardized and their inclusion would, therefore, skew our understanding of the diverse realities that the study aims to capture.

The analysis has three components. The first is a bibliographic review based on Web of Science. The second is a direct survey of the individuals responsible for university collections to understand their internal work and documentation systems. Finally, the results obtained are complemented by an analysis of collective university heritage portals in Europe.

The results of this study confirmed the hypothesis that isolation and a lack of resources are still major issues in many cases. Increasing digitalization and the desire to participate in content aggregation systems are forcing change, although the responsibility for that change at universities is still vague.

Universities, particularly those with a long history, have an important heritage whose parts are often scattered or hidden. Although many contemporary academic publications have focused on the dissemination of university collections, this study focuses on the representation of information based on the conviction that good metadata are essential for dissemination.

This study aims to examine the relationship between financial inclusion, CO₂ emissions and financial sustainability across 17 African countries.

Data were sourced from the World Development Indicators for the period 2004-2021. The study performs the principal component analysis, panel fixed effects model and quantile regression estimations to investigate the relationship between financial inclusion, CO₂ emissions and financial sustainability.

The study finds that an increase in automated teller machine (ATM) penetration rate, savings and credits increases CO₂ emissions. Findings also reveal that financial sustainability reduces financial inclusion, with significant negative effects on the conditional mean of CO₂ emissions and the conditional distribution of CO₂ emissions across quantiles.

This study is beneficial for policymakers, particularly in the age of digitalization and drive for low-carbon emissions, to develop green credits for energy players and investors to take up renewable and green energy projects characterized by high levels of carbon storage and carbon capture. Further, the banking sector’s credits and liquid assets should be used to finance alternative banking energy-related equipment and services, such as solar photovoltaic wireless ATMs, and fewer bank branches.

Given the important role of change capability for organizational development and competitive advantage, the purpose of this study is to clarify the influences of transformational leadership (TL) on organizational change capability (OCC) via mediating roles of two specific aspects of trust in leadership namely disclosure-based trust and reliance-based trust.

Structural equation modeling is applied to test the degree of influences of TL and employee trust on OCC via empirical data collected from 376 participants in 115 small and medium firms in China.

The results show the positive and significant impacts of TL and aspects of employee trust in leadership on OCC. It indicated that disclosure-based trust in leadership has a greater influence on change capability in comparison with the effect of reliance-based trust in leadership. Especially, the findings have shown the evidence supporting the mediating mechanism of aspects of employee trust in leadership between TL and OCC.

This study provides the practical initiatives that highlight the importance of applying TL style to build and improve the trust of employees in their leadership for fostering OCC.

The paper has significantly advanced and deepened insight of how transformational leaders nurture employee’s specific shades of trust in leadership for fostering OCC. The valuable findings of this study contribute to enriching the theoretical basis of organizational behavior and change management, and can be used to analyze and explain the relationships between TL, employee’s trust in leadership and organizational capability for change.

Despite increasing focus among scholars and practitioners on the design of product-service systems (PSS), there exists no compilation of current knowledge on the role played by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in designing such systems. Thus, this paper sets out to identify and organise the existing research and suggest questions for future research.

A systematic literature review was performed to identify and provide in-depth details on key themes in the literature addressing the design of PSS in SMEs.

This paper identifies five themes in the literature on the design of PSS in SMEs: motives, challenges, SME characteristics, methods and digitalisation. The themes are interrelated, and SME characteristics seem to be at the core as they are related to all the other themes. Gaps in the current knowledge are identified, and questions for future research are suggested.

The suggestions for future research provide a starting point for expanding the research on PSS design and devising practical support for SMEs.

This study aims to explore the engagement between accounting and music in the social and relational construction of accountability. The authors conceive this construction as a dynamic and recursive interplay between the giving of different accounts and the responses that these accounts provoke. The authors investigate the emotional dimension of this interplay, as it is also triggered by music, feeding back into how accountability is constructed and evolves over time.

This study relies upon a historical analysis of archival and secondary sources about the main music concert organized in 1913 by the founder of “Accademia Chigiana”, one of the leading music academies in Italy. The concert celebrated the first centenary of the birth of Giuseppe Verdi, a worldwide famous Italian music composer, and icon of Italian national sentiment.

This study shows that music and accounting were profoundly intertwined in the social and relational construction of accountability for the 1913 concert. Accountability evolved through different accounts, also linked to music, and the complex emotional reactions these accounts provoked in the audiences, citizens, media and institutions, leading to always further responses and accounts in the ongoing construction of accountability.

This study extends prior literature on the chameleonic nature of accountability, as well as on its relational and emotional dimensions. The study shows that accountability is relationally constructed and evolves over time through the giving of accounts and the emotional reaction they provoke from others, feeding into further responses and accounts of the accountable subject. The authors show how the chameleonic nature of accountability permeates not only the accounts and the relations of accountability but also the subjects giving and demanding the accounts: these subjects change as chameleons through their interactions and emotions, feeding into the dynamic construction of accountability. The authors also show how arts, like music, can participate in the chameleonic nature of accountability and of its subjects, precisely by engaging with their emotional reactions and responses.

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.

The objective of this research is to analyze how omnichannel consumer journey design (OCJD) influences the online customer experience (OCE) and e-satisfaction in consumers' multirooming behavior (searching for information in online and offline channels and purchasing the product online).

The problem-solving theory and experiential marketing perspective are the theoretical background that enables the establishment of five hypotheses. A survey is conducted on multiroomers who had purchased a product online, following an online and offline research journey.

The results showed that OCJD directly and indirectly (through online consumer experience) influences e-satisfaction. Females and younger individuals exhibited higher levels of e-satisfaction.

First, this research analyzes consumers' multichannel search strategies. Second, the consumer journey is incorporated into the study of multichannel retailing. Third, an emergent typology of cross-channel free-riding behavior is analyzed: multirooming.

In an era marked by heightened geopolitical uncertainties, such as international conflicts and economic instability, the dynamics of energy markets assume paramount importance. Our study delves into this complex backdrop, focusing on the intricate interplay the between traditional and emerging energy sectors.

This study analyzes the interconnections among green financial assets, renewable energy markets, the geopolitical risk index and cryptocurrency carbon emissions from December 19, 2017 to February 15, 2023. We investigate these relationships using a novel time-frequency connectedness approach and machine learning methodology.

Our findings reveal that green energy stocks, except the PBW, exhibit the highest net transmission of volatility, followed by COAL. In contrast, CARBON emerges as the primary net recipient of volatility, followed by fuel energy assets. The frequency decomposition results also indicate that the long-term components serve as the primary source of directional volatility spillover, suggesting that volatility transmission among green stocks and energy assets tends to occur over a more extended period. The SHapley additive exPlanations (SHAP) results show that the green and fuel energy markets are negatively connected with geopolitical risks (GPRs). The results obtained through the SHAP analysis confirm the novel time-varying parameter vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) frequency connectedness findings. The CARBON and PBW markets consistently experience spillover shocks from other markets in short and long-term horizons. The role of crude oil as a receiver or transmitter of shocks varies over time.

Green financial assets and clean energy play significant roles in the financial markets and reduce geopolitical risk. Our study employs a time-frequency connectedness approach to assess the interconnections among four markets' families: fuel, renewable energy, green stocks and carbon markets. We utilize the novel TVP-VAR approach, which allows for flexibility and enables us to measure net pairwise connectedness in both short and long-term horizons.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the fine wine market is efficient between homogeneous lots and heterogeneous lots.

Auction price data for homogeneous (or solid) lots of fine wines was analyzed to create price prediction models. Those models were used to predict the expected auction price for the bottles within heterogeneous lots. Lastly, models were created to explain and predict the differences between expected and realized prices for heterogenous wine lots.

The results show that large inefficiencies exist. The more complex and expensive the heterogeneous lot, the greater the discount relative to what would have been realized if the bottles had been sold individually. This discount can exceed 50% of the expected auction price.

Heterogeneous lots may arise as a practical requirement from the auction house. Restaurant buyers probably have little interest in such lots because of the inclusion of wines the restaurant will be unable to sell. Collectors may be uniquely positioned to benefit from this price discount.

These results are unique in the literature, because the price dynamics of heterogeneous (or mixed) lots of fine wines have not previously been studied.