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This paper aims to explore the experience of one large Irish youth work organisation, Foróige, to measures introduced during the initial phase of COVID-19 in 2020. In the face of the unprecedented crisis including the closure of schools and curtailment of many youth services, this paper examines how the organisation responded and adapted its service offering.

Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 senior managers and youth officers in Foróige to explore their perspectives on the organisation’s response. Participants were purposively sampled from across the operational management functions and also from regional levels and youth workers engaging in work “on the ground”.

Shifting from a face-to -face, relationship-based to a distanced mode of engagement with young people, colleagues and volunteers required significant adaptation of Foróige’s service model. Innovation took place both in the delivery platform and fundamentally, in its service orientation. The accelerated move to online youth work brought about by the pandemic enabled the organisation to embrace and learn from the challenges and opportunities posed by digital technology. Responding to the immediate and tangible needs of young people in receipt of services, staff found themselves working with families at the more basic levels of intervention.

This paper provides new insights into the nature of non-profit service innovation during a time of unprecedented crisis management. It highlights characteristics of organisational agility that can assist organisations in managing crises, while also pointing the way towards a more flexible operating model for youth work service delivery.

This study aims to explore the characteristics and backgrounds of social entrepreneurs, particularly in relation to what motivates them to start new social ventures, through an empirical examination of the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship in the specific context of Egypt.

The study adopts a qualitative methodological approach based on a triangulation of data sources, including extensive interviews from five social entrepreneurs, interviews with senior executives in their organisations and industry experts, as well as secondary data.

The paper proposes a model that integrates common characteristics and motivations among individuals who start social ventures. Findings confirm the characteristics of social entrepreneurs as compassionate risk-takers with entrepreneurial mindsets who seek to address social issues in innovative ways. They also have the perseverance to face the inefficient institutional frameworks prevalent in developing economies. Social entrepreneurs are motivated by social problems and challenges, inspiration, and previous personal experiences, as well as their social networks.

There are limitations pertaining to the limited sample size and single country focus.

This research offers useful and practical insights for current and future social entrepreneurs, particularly in developing economies. Moreover, the study contributes to expanding future research on social entrepreneurship in similar contexts.

This study makes several contributions to the literature on social entrepreneurship. First, by presenting an integrated model for the characteristics/traits and motivations of social entrepreneur. Second, it provides deeper understanding of social entrepreneurship in emerging economies. Third, it highlights the importance of personal inspiration and informal social networks as two sources of motivation for social entrepreneurs, in emerging countries.

Shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) across the United States at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic created entrepreneurial opportunities for sewists and makers. In the United States in March and April 2020, masks were not readily available to the general public from existing retailers and PPE for medical use was being rationed for healthcare workers. Sewists and crafters, professionals and amateurs alike, began making and selling and/or donating masks. For individuals with sewing skills and time, sewing and selling masks became a lifeline financially, personally, and socially. To understand the experiences of people who made and distributed handmade masks during the early months of the pandemic in the United States, an interdisciplinary team developed an online cross-sectional survey instrument using a qualitative-dominated approach with both open and closed questions. This chapter explores themes identified from a sample of 94 participants, predominantly female-identifying, who created an enterprise or added a product line to an existing business. The sample includes individuals who did not identify as a ‘creative entrepreneur’ prior to the pandemic but did identify as an entrepreneur after starting a mask-making venture. Informed by entrepreneurship literature, the authors observed that these nascent entrepreneurs articulated recognisable motivations for social entrepreneurship, showed signs of pre-existing entrepreneurial mindsets, and employed business models and marketing tactics of entrepreneurs, largely without any business training. Implications for the study include increased recognition of latent entrepreneurial readiness, interest of women in social entrepreneurship, and higher levels of business knowledge among women than previously recognised.

The aim of this study is to empirically investigate the additional motives, aside from the social interests that motivate social entrepreneurs. This paper does so by using an inductive approach and specifically carrying out a re-examination of two pieces of research examining social entrepreneurship that were carried out independently by the two researchers in South Africa and Ireland.

The method used for the paper is content analysis. Research using qualitative content analysis focuses on the characteristics of language, talk and conversation (Sarantakos, 2005) with attention paid to the content or contextual meaning of the text. Thus, a qualitative content analysis is concerned with an examination of the uses of language. According to Downe-Wambolt (1992, p. 314), the aim of content analysis is “to provide knowledge and understanding of the phenomenon under study”.

The findings indicate that the informants do have additional motivations with respect to their business ventures including lifestyle motives, receiving acknowledgement and generating profit.

Few published papers investigate the motives of social entrepreneurs and explore if there are indeed any additional motivations aside from community interests. The results in this study identify that indeed social entrepreneurs are motivated by an array of motivations. The motivations we discovered in our research illustrate an individual who is mutually concerned with their communities, the environments in which they live in, lifestyle interests, acknowledgement and profit which may suggest that such community contributions could be sustained over time.

The purpose of this paper is to examine perceptions of local service change and concepts of change amongst participants in a UK nationwide randomised controlled trial of informal, structured, reciprocated, multidisciplinary peer review with feedback to promote quality improvement: the National Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Resources and Outcomes Project (NCROP).

The paper takes the form of a qualitative study, involving semi‐structured interviews with 43 hospital respiratory consultants, nurses and general managers at 24 intervention and 11 control NCROP sites. Thematic analysis resulted in adoption of Joss and Kogan's quality indicators as an analytic framework.

The paper finds that peer review was associated with positive changes, which may lead to sustained service improvement. Differences existed in perceptions of change among clinicians and between clinicians and managers. “Generic changes” (e.g. changes in interpersonal relations or cultural changes), were often not perceived as change.

The study highlights the significance of generic change in evaluations of change processes. Most participants were clinicians limiting inter‐professional comparisons. Some clinical staff failed to recognise changes they accomplished or their significance, perceiving change differently to others within their professional group. These findings have implications for policy and research. They should be considered when developing frameworks for assessing quality improvements and staff engagement with change.

This is the first qualitative study exploring participants' experience of peer review for quality improvement in healthcare. The study adds to previous research into UK health service improvement, which has had a more restricted focus on inter‐professional differences.

The study seeks to introduce a new media model that (1) clearly illustrates the role of mass media in the transmission of cultural messages, and (2) helps to explain variations in the reception and employment of cultural messages by members of the same culture.

Drawing on decades of theorizing in cultural sociology and communication studies, as well as data from two qualitative content analyses, a new model was developed, explained, and then applied to a specific cultural phenomenon.

Mass media are significant transmitters of cultural messages and play an influential role in shaping culture, yet the process is complex. There is great variety in what messages are accepted by different consumers, how they are interpreted, and how they ultimately are employed (or not). Further, cultures that include contradictory messages are more likely to inadvertently promote deviant paths to culturally valued goals.

First, the model only addresses one dimension of the relationship between mass media and culture; it does not explain cultural influences on mass media. Second, the model does not specifically address recent changes in the media landscape, though an accommodation is suggested. Finally, the model needs additional testing before its utility can be reasonably determined.

First, a new model is introduced that clearly illustrates the complex process by which cultural messages are transmitted to receivers via mass media. Second, the model introduces the concept of “cultural capacity” to complement existing concepts and advance understanding of the operation of culture.

Libraries—international DIK LEHMKUHL, ‘Harvesting books for the world’, Library Journal. 15 May 1946 (vol. 71, no. 10), pp. 728–30. [A report on the work of the Inter‐allied Book Centre, London.]

A CORRESPONDENT complains that he has undertaken a course for his final examination, after spending six years from Dunkirk to the Elbe far removed from library opportunities—only to find that librarians and libraries are building up their staffs now. The Times Literary Supplement, he says, carries column after column of advertisements of desirable posts for which he, as he thinks, is a desirable and legitimate aspirant, but he is barred by his academic obligations. This appears to be a genuine grievance and we place it first in these notes in the hope that authorities, and especially librarians, may be induced to consider it. It may be answered that there is a present urgent need to tune up libraries of every kind to meet the great public need and that many of them have already waited some years. It is perhaps a pity that they did not wait a little longer so that the men who deserve most of the country could have been brought into the competition.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the process of why a Brazilian digital startup company reached unicorn status the fastest.

After the literature review, the authors conducted the questionnaire containing 13 questions used in 18 in-depth interviews conducted in the case study. Saturation point combined with the independent and in-depth analysis of the researchers is used to achieve internal and external validity. The primary data collected underwent an analytical approach, followed by a resource-based view (RBV). RBV does not deal with time. There is a gap in the literature and an opportunity here: to analyze the fastest company to become a unicorn under the RBV lens.

The case reveals that value can be found in traditional sectors, as is the case of the real estate sector. This is a case of a company in the direct home-buying space.

The contribution of this paper is both practical, with the seven lessons, and theoretical. Resources allocated to a specific context in a specific geographic region shift the attention away from the absolute value of resources to the timing of aggregating them. Thus, the contribution accounting for time is new to the RBV.

The originality lies in the analysis of the dynamics of digital businesses with exponential growth.

The purpose of this study is to help us understand social entrepreneurs’ lived experiences, reflecting the comprehensive entrepreneurial processes that encompass their past, present and future.

A narrative approach was used to explore the meaning of experiences in social entrepreneurs’ professional lives through the stories retold and restructured by social entrepreneurs. A total of 11 social entrepreneurs in the Midwest region of the USA were interviewed.

The authors identified three time-sequential themes: past (looking backward at the origin), present (living life as a social entrepreneur) and future (looking forward). Seven sub-themes emerged, revealing social entrepreneurs’ aspiration, self-knowledge, identity-defining moments, their sustainability-oriented leadership and how they build an organizational structure, partnership and handle the burden of work and the organization.

The findings offer useful information for future social entrepreneurs as they can learn from the perspectives of experienced social entrepreneurs in terms of what to prepare for and expect so they can achieve their full entrepreneurial potential. It can also aid in further development of social entrepreneur curricula in business and non-business schools.

The existing literature does not portray sufficient detail about how social entrepreneurs live the lives they have created and chosen to understand their lived experiences. This study also provides a comprehensive definition of social entrepreneurship, incorporating “collective perspective” with a mentality of “it’s not about me, it’s about us”.