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Informal entrepreneurship challenges sustainable economic performance and is a barrier to productive entrepreneurship. In this context, the level of development of formal and informal institutions and their impact on informal entrepreneurship is crucial. This chapter examines the informal sector entrepreneurship in Kosovo using institutional theory lenses. Using a survey with 500 owners/managers of private companies, the study finds that the service industry has the highest participation in the informal economy compared to other sectors. On average small firms, compared to larger ones, report a higher percentage of unreported incomes. Our findings also suggest that when informal entrepreneurs perceive penalties for tax avoidance from tax authorities as high, they tend to have higher compliance with reporting their income. In addition, our findings indicate that the higher the vertical (trust in formal institutions) and horizontal distrust (trust in business partners), the higher the involvement in the informal economy. The chapter concludes with some policy implications for tackling the informal economy in Kosovo and similar institutional contexts.

Cross-national research on cultural differences can help understand what drives, in differing contexts, mentors' commitment to school-based mentoring programs. This comparative study aims to explore whether adult volunteers, from Scotland and Italy, experience being mentors of vulnerable youth differently.

Data from interviews (n = 20) and questionnaires (n = 114) were used to test hypotheses concerning volunteer mentors' perceptions of their role and abilities, as well as motives for participation. According to cross-cultural theories, Scottish mentors should be more likely to identify mentoring with establishing friendly relationships with mentees and promoting youth self-empowerment. They should also be more self-confident and value-driven as volunteers.

Despite the mixed support for the assumptions concerning how the mentor role is conceived, Scottish mentors were less likely than Italians to doubt their abilities and more driven by other-focused and generative concerns.

The study reveals significant variations in how volunteers from countries featuring different welfare regimes and cultural orientations experience mentoring. The research advances the understanding of how culturally sensitive approaches can foster mentors' engagement.

This study explores how emotional intelligence, customer orientation, deep acting and surface acting influence job satisfaction among middle managers in their interactions with customers, colleagues and business partners. By examining these factors, we aim to provide insights into their collective impact on job satisfaction and interpersonal dynamics within organizational contexts.

By involving 95 middle managers at Indonesian Internet service providers as respondents, this research used a questionnaire to collect data. Next, the data were analyzed using the partial least square-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique, which evaluated measurement models and structural models. A total of twelve hypotheses were tested in this study.

This study found that customer orientation does not have a significant effect on deep acting, thereby nullifying its indirect effect on job satisfaction. Conversely, it's demonstrated that both deep acting and surface acting serve as partial mediators in the relationship between emotional intelligence and job satisfaction. Furthermore, surface acting emerges as a partial mediator in the connection between customer orientation and job satisfaction.

By exploring the relationship between customer orientation, emotional intelligence and job satisfaction among employees, this study seeks to reveal novel insights. The study examines the impact of these critical elements, which are necessary for middle managers to effectively manage their emotions and cultivate significant connections, on their overall job satisfaction and interpersonal dynamics in their diverse responsibilities.

This study aims to use emotions-as-social information theory to investigate how physical (customer perceived store atmosphere) and social servicescapes (customer information searching) influence the effects of employees’ positive affective displays on customer outcomes via customer positive moods and positive expectation disconfirmation.

This research included two studies, each using a distinct research design, to empirically test the proposed model. Study 1 involved 200 observational data points on objective purchase amounts from designer watch shops. In Study 2, data were collected from 230 customers in designer jewelry stores.

The results of path analyses revealed that: employee positive affective displays are positively associated with customer purchase outcomes; employee positive affective displays had positive indirect effects on customer purchase outcomes by enhancing customer positive moods and positive expectation disconfirmation; these positive indirect effects were strengthened when customers engaged in information search behaviors; and these positive indirect effects were attenuated when customers perceive store atmosphere as favorable, indicating a substitution effect of customer perceived store atmosphere.

Previous research has not thoroughly examined the role of the servicescape in moderating the effects of employees’ positive affective displays on customer purchase outcomes. This present study not only clarified the affective and cognitive mechanisms that link employees’ positive affective displays on purchase outcomes but also identified servicescape as a critical boundary condition of these effects.

Despite widespread recognition of the importance of place in entrepreneurship research, much less attention has been paid to the methodological challenges that inquiries into place presents. Understanding the relationship between place and entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly important as focus turns to sustainable entrepreneurship and as policy makers turn to ‘place-based’ approaches to regional sustainability challenges. This chapter provides insight one researcher’s experiences engaging stakeholders in discussions about the relationship between a place-based university programme for sustainability and local sustainability agendas. The chapter reveals the struggles experienced by both researcher and participants in articulating what places and the local region means to both individuals and to the programme. The findings provide an important insight into how researchers studying place need to be cognisant of the limitations and flexibility of language when engaging research participants in discussing the relationship between place, sustainability, and entrepreneurship.

This scientific article aims to evaluate the efficacy of the drug Doxorubicin for treating hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in Egypt. The study analyzes data from patients referred to a multi-disciplinary consultation at the National Cancer Institute, Cairo University. The study includes 40 intermediate-stage HCC patients who underwent treatment with either Doxorubicin-Lipiodol or Doxorubicin-loaded drug-eluting beads-trans-arterial chemoembolization (DEB-TACE).

Patients referred to a multi-disciplinary consultation at the National Cancer Institute, Cairo University with a possible diagnosis of HCC in the intermediate stage were eligible for the study.

The study finds that the plasma peak concentration of Doxorubicin is significantly higher in patients treated with Lipiodol compared to those treated with DEB-TACE. The median plasma peak concentration of patients treated with Lipiodol was significantly higher 424 (202.5–731) than the peak level of patients treated with beads 84.95 (26.6–156.5) with p-value = 0.036. However, there is no significant difference in other pharmacokinetic parameters between the two treatment groups. The research article also investigates the genetic polymorphisms in HCC patients treated with Doxorubicin-Lipiodol and Doxorubicin-loaded DEB-TACE. It identifies a significant association between the ABCB1 gene (C3435T) and the concentration of Doxorubicin in plasma. Patients with the CCand computed tomography (CT) genotypes of ABCB1 have higher concentrations of Doxorubicin compared to those with the TT genotype. Furthermore, the study examines the progression-free survival rates and tumour response in the two treatment groups. It demonstrates that DEB-TACE patients have a higher progression-free survival rate compared to cTACE patients. DEB-TACE also leads to better tumour regression.

The current study helps to increase the understanding of the genetic factors that may contribute to HCC susceptibility in the Egyptian population. However, it is essential to consider that genetic polymorphism is just one aspect of HCC risk, and other factors such as environment, lifestyle and viral infections also play crucial roles. Further research is needed to elucidate the complex interactions between genetic and environmental factors in HCC development among Egyptians.

Consumer forgiveness is an important concept in service failure and recovery research. To advance knowledge and develop future research agenda in this domain, this paper provides a systematic review of the literature on factors influencing consumer forgiveness while adopting the customer journey perspective.

Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol, a systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted of 102 peer-reviewed journal articles, on factors influencing consumer forgiveness, published between January 2000 and December 2020.

The authors' analysis offers a detailed account of the factors influencing consumer forgiveness across the three stages of the service journey: pre-transgression, transgression and recovery. From the review, the authors identified significant gaps relating to the interactions between the relevant factors influencing forgiveness throughout the various stages of the consumer service journey. Based on the findings, the authors offer several research questions to help managers optimize customer forgiveness following a service failure throughout each stage of consumer service journey.

The authors' review synthesizes the literature on factors contributing to consumer forgiveness and integrates these factors into the customer service journey. The authors' findings inform directions for future research and provide insights regarding the measures that service providers should take to understand and encourage consumer forgiveness.

The work connects classic theories of selfing to the COVID-19 pandemic to make fresh connections between pandemic-induced trauma to the self and digital resources. This research introduces the concept of the “traumatized self” emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to digital disadvantage and digital hyperconnectivity. From Cooley’s original “looking glass self” to Wellman’s “hyperconnected” individualist self, social theories of identity work, and production of the self have a long and interdisciplinary history. In documenting this history, the discussion outlines key foci in the theorizing of the digital self by mapping how digital selfing and identity work have been treated from the inception of the internet to the epoch of the pandemic. The work charts the evolution of the digital selfing project from key theoretical perspectives, including postmodernism, symbolic interactionism, and dramaturgy. Putting these approaches in dialogue with the traumatized self, this research makes a novel contribution by introducing the concept of digitally differentiated trauma, which scholars can employ to better understand selfing processes in such circumstances and times.

Social enterprises (SEs), part of the third sector, are hybrid organizations combining the pursuit of social scopes with commercial business solutions. In seeking for social value, they pair for-profit and non-profit features, thereby compensating for shortcomings of both the public sector and the commercial market. Therefore, the performance management of such organizations assumes a crucial relevance. Among the available tools, the balanced scorecard (BSC) aims to capture performance multidimensionality, at the same time fostering legitimacy towards stakeholders.

In general terms, the BSC has the limit to follow a linear and static logic of construction and functioning. For this reason, scholars combine it with system dynamics (SD) to create dynamic balanced scorecards (DBSCs). However, literature seems to devote scarce attention to the adoption of such analytic tools in the third sector, particularly in SEs. This chapter wants to contribute to bridging this gap by proposing a tailored application in the context of a social cooperative, active in the clothing recycle and in the re-integration of disadvantaged social categories. By referring to previous literature about DBSC, two modelling strategies are identified: the BSC-driven and the SD-driven. The latter, based on inductive reasoning, is the one privileged for the study because of its wider flexibility. The modelling outputs consider different perspectives than the ones within traditional BSCs, contain elements of circular causality and show how financial and non-financial performances interplay and co-determine each other. Insights from the proposed model can be useful to support both decision-making and stakeholder engagement.

Athletes have leveraged their social platform and reach to advocate for a variety of social causes. Most recently, given the persistent impacts of climate change on sport, the sport sector has been leveraged to engage and educate fans, sport participants, and athletes to promote climate action while consuming sport and in their everyday lives. This chapter conceptualizes the term sport eco-activism and presents a rich history of the early stages of this form of activism and its interaction with sport. Specifically, we provide historical context and examples of how athletes and activist sport organizations (e.g., Surfers Against Sewage, Protect Our Winters) have drawn attention to the impacts of climate change on sport. We also highlight how these entities encourage spectators and participants to change their behaviors and further advocate for collective climate action. In addition, we offer insights on future directions of eco-activism within sport and how such activists can best resonate with their target audiences to create positive change through sport.