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The high and persistent unemployment rates of people with intellectual disabilities (PwID) reveal the wide gap that still remains to be bridged. Entrepreneurship combinedly with a high enterprising tendency could improve PwID's life satisfaction.

A mixed-method approach was used, based on questionnaires and structured face-to-face interviews on 37 PwID who had recently become entrepreneurs. Data were firstly quantitatively analyzed using partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM), and qualitative data were used to enable robust findings.

The entrepreneurial tendency of PwID who had recently become entrepreneurs was found to be a positive to their life quality (LQ), job satisfaction and life satisfaction.

This study revealed that entrepreneurship among PwID who had high enterprising tendency enhances their LQ, job satisfaction and life satisfaction. However, further research could evaluate whether becoming an entrepreneur is in itself enough to change PwID's life to better, such that a comparison could be done between PwID who become entrepreneurs and PwID who have a salaried job.

New aspects in the design of public social policies to improve PwID's life satisfaction are suggested. These include the facilitation of both entrepreneurship and enterprising tendency for PwID to enhance their life satisfaction.

There are very few occasions in which PwID set up businesses. This is one of the first studies to analyze the benefit of entrepreneurship and enterprising tendency on the LQ, the satisfaction at work and the life satisfaction of PwID.

Addressing workforce shortages in operations and supply chain management (OSCM) necessitates adaptive measures by both individuals and organizations, with a pivotal role played by Human Resources (HR). This impact pathway delves into how healthcare organizations can effectively manage workforce shortages, informed by HR practices. Through an in-depth understanding of healthcare organizations, the authors pinpoint challenges and concerns linked to workforce shortages. Pathways are proposed to stimulate future OSCM research and collaboration, leveraging innovative and creative methods from the HR field.

Data was collected from various representatives from healthcare organizations to explore how healthcare organizations for people with intellectual disabilities address the challenges stemming from contemporary workforce shortages.

Three pathways were outlined to address workforce shortages in healthcare supply chains, utilizing intellectual disability care as a representative example. These pathways comprise optimizing the potential of the current workforce, illustrating innovative HR practices for enhancing their performance, and proposing strategies for retaining these valuable workers.

Despite its potential, the HR domain remains relatively underdeveloped within OSCM research. The authors show how HR practices can potentially mitigate impending workforce shortages. While utilizing intellectual disability care as a representative example, this paper proposes that the impact pathways identified can be extended to various other healthcare settings.

This paper aims to derive a reduced-order model for the heat transfer across the interface between a millimetric thermocapillary liquid bridge from silicone oil and the surrounding ambient gas.

Numerical solutions for the two-fluid model are computed covering a wide parametric space, making a total of 2,800 numerical flow simulations. Based on the computed data, a reduced single-fluid model for the liquid phase is devised, in which the heat transfer between the liquid and the gas is modeled by Newton’s heat transfer law, albeit with a space-dependent Biot function Bi(z), instead of a constant Biot number Bi.

An explicit robust fit of Bi(z) is obtained covering the whole range of parameters considered. The single-fluid model together with the Biot function derived yields very accurate results at much lesser computational cost than the corresponding two-phase fully-coupled simulation required for the two-fluid model.

Using this novel Biot function approach instead of a constant Biot number, the critical Reynolds number can be predicted much more accurately within single-phase linear stability solvers.

The Biot function for thermocapillary liquid bridges is derived from the full multiphase problem by a robust multi-stage fit procedure. The derived Biot function reproduces very well the theoretical boundary layer scalings.

China’s foreign aid efforts in Africa remain contentious. Chinese foreign aid tends to be different from “traditional” development assistance in that it frequently involves firms as the implementing agents of projects. Firms bring unique resources to public–private partnerships (PPPs) formed with government agencies, but their possible self-interested nature also gives rise to concerns over their development impact. Yet, on a larger scale, little is known about the characteristics of Chinese PPPs in foreign aid. Using project-level data available for 1,308 Chinese aid projects in 50 countries across Africa, the author characterizes the projects undertaken by firms and government agencies in a PPP and contrasts them to those executed by Chinese government agencies without firm involvement. This exploratory data analysis suggests that important differences apply, as Chinese PPPs tend to target different sustainable development goals (SDGs), work on the basis of distinct aid conditions, and implement projects that tend to be larger than those that are solely run by government agencies. Such observations raise important questions of an ethical, theoretical, and international nature, and warrant further research. The author develops a research agenda that aims at issues particularly important for business ethics scholars, organization theorists, and international business scholarship.

Job advertisements are important means of communicating role expectations for management accountants to the labor market. They provide information about which roles are sought and expected. However, which roles are communicated in job advertisements is unknown so far.

With a text-mining approach on a large sample of 889 job ads, the authors extract information on roles, type of firm and hierarchical position of the management accountant sought.

The results indicate an apparent mix of different role types with a strong focus on a classic watchdog role. However, the business partner role is more often sought for leadership positions or in family businesses and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME).

The main limitation is the lack of an agreed-upon measurement instrument for roles in job offers. The study results imply that corporate practice is not as theory-driven as is postulated and communicated in the management accounting community. This indicates the existence of a research-practice gap and tensions between different actors in the management accounting field.

The results challenge the current role discussion of professional organizations for management accountants as business partners.

The authors contribute the first study, which explicitly analyzes the communication of roles in job offers for management accountants. It indicates a discrepancy between scholarly discussion on roles and management accountants' work from an employer's perspective.

We aim to help better understand how organizations can develop their human capital in virtual teams through technological advances in the metaverse. To this end, we examine how virtual team collaboration with virtual reality technologies in the metaverse compares to traditional videoconferencing. Our study demonstrates how the metaverse can facilitate collaboration in virtual teams and examines the factors that are critical to successful team collaboration in the metaverse.

We conduct a lab experiment comparing Meta Horizon Workrooms with Zoom. Using a between-subjects design, we observe virtual team collaboration in five teams. All teams solved the Lost on the Moon Exercise used by NASA to train teamwork. We collected data during and after the experiment to explore emerging collaborative behaviors based on audio and video recordings, a quantitative survey, and qualitative feedback.

We find higher levels of immersion, social presence, and collaboration among team members in the metaverse. We further identify new opportunities for social interaction and greater focus on team members and shared tasks. Our study suggests that the metaverse can enable effective collaboration in virtual teams and uncovers related guidance for organizations.

We connect the research streams on the metaverse, team collaboration, and human capital. We add empirical evidence to the largely theoretical discussion on the metaverse and explore collaboration tools for virtual teams, helping to enable effective collaboration of organizations’ virtual teams. We hope to stimulate further research to unlock the full collaborative potential of the metaverse and establish the metaverse for effective development of human capital.

Amid multiple crises and increasing volatility, sustainable development is a pressing concern. Higher Education for Sustainable Development, especially Responsible Management Education (RME), drives transformative change by fostering new perspectives on work, decision-making and leadership. Conferences serve as pivotal sustainability discussion platforms, yet many remain traditional and lack interactive student engagement. This hinders active involvement and collaborative problem-solving. The Global Goals Design Jam, a dynamic, nontraditional format explored in this study offers an alternative approach. By blending design thinking and playful learning and constructivist learning methods, the Global Goals Design Jam offers a space for collaborative and creative Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) solutions. At the ninth Responsible Management Education Research Conference (RMERC) in September 2022, students from various universities took part in a Global Goals Design Jam. The current prestudy postulates that participation in a Global Goals Design Jam is primarily associated with positive attributes related to emotions and a sense of coherence. The potential for empowering learners to navigate real-world complexities and contribute to sustainability is highlighted, establishing formats like the Global Goals Design Jam as a valuable addition to educational conferences with a sustainability focus. The results also highlight potentials and limitations of the format and provide insights into further research requirements.

This study aims to assess the alignment of South Korea’s government-certified social enterprises (GCSEs) with prevailing social enterprise (SE) models, notably the entrepreneurial nonprofit, social cooperative and social business models delineated in the “Emergence of Social Enterprises in Europe” (Defourny and Nyssens, 2012, 2017a, 2017b) and the “principle of interest” frameworks (Defourny et al., 2021). Thereby, it seeks to situate these enterprises within recognized frameworks and elucidate their hybrid identities.

Analyzing panel data from 2016 to 2020 for 259 GCSEs, this study uses tslearn for k-means clustering with dynamic time warping to assess their developmental trajectories and alignment with established SE models, which echoes the approach of Defourny et al. (2021). We probe the “fluid” identities of semi-public sector SEs, integrating Gordon’s (2013) notion that they tend to blend various SE traditions as opposed to existing in isolation.

Results indicate that GCSEs do align with prevalent SE frameworks. Furthermore, they represent a spectrum of SE models, suggesting the versatility of the public sector in fostering diverse types of SEs.

The concept of a semi-public sector SE model has been relatively uncharted, even though it holds significance for research on SE typologies and public sector entrepreneurship literature. This study bridges this gap by presenting empirical evidence of semi-public SEs and delineating the potential paths these enterprises might take as they amalgamate various SE traditions.