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The Dutch Ministry of VROM (Housing, Physical planning and Environment) employs more than 4,000. Discusses its progressive track record over recent years on organization and personnel management. Shows how the Ministry, by a process of “learning by doing”, is adopting and adapting new ways in personnel and organizational development.

Entrepreneurship is increasingly being recognised as a vehicle for bringing about the development of different economic sectors in various geographical regions, and it is believed to result in greater productivity and entrepreneurial performance in agriculture. To date, there are no empirically verified holistic models focussing on the development of agricultural entrepreneurship in an African context. This study aims to fill this gap by developing an agricultural entrepreneurial development model (AEDM) that provides a basis for enhancing entrepreneurial performance in the agriculture sector.

First, a holistic conceptual AEDM was built from the extant literature with a focus on the African context and encompassing dimension of the enabling environment, entrepreneurial performance and its outcomes. Then, the model was tested empirically by conducting a survey with 477 farmers in Namibia who benefit from Namibia’s National Resettlement Programme and the Affirmative Action Loan Scheme. The model was tested statistically using partial least square-structural equation modelling.

The results reveal that a supportive environment, entrepreneurial orientation and agricultural sustainability exert a positive impact on entrepreneurial performance in agriculture, which, in turn, leads to greater agricultural productivity and increased income for farmers.

The study theoretically develops and empirically tests a holistic model of agricultural entrepreneurship development. The value of the model lies in its consideration of a plethora of enabling-environment antecedents of entrepreneurial performance in agriculture, as well as some specific organisational- and individual-level outcomes thereof. Therefore, it offers policymakers and practitioners a blueprint for developing agricultural entrepreneurship in an African context.

According to Boyer (1990, p. 15), “the term ‘scholarship’ was first used in England in the 1870s by reformers who wished to make Cambridge and Oxford ‘not only a place of teaching, but a place of learning,’.…[it] referred to a variety of creative work carried on in a variety of places, and its integrity was measured by the ability to think, communicate, and learn.” Today, the word “scholarship” evokes thoughts of academic articles published in peer-reviewed journals, most frequently written by individuals holding academic ranks in colleges or universities. It is assumed that these articles are an outcome of dedicated and disciplined pursuit of knowledge aimed to enlighten man's thought processes, generate understanding, and enhance the ability to think and make good decisions. Clearly, in the last 150 years, the meaning of the word “scholarship” has changed significantly in higher education.

The purpose of this research paper is to explore the learning process associated with international mergers and acquisitions (M&A) integration strategies.

The paper employs a comparative case study methodology, utilising qualitative data through in‐depth interviews with top management responsible for integration strategies. Three pairs of major international firms from the USA and the UK, USA and Sweden and USA and Germany were studied.

The paper empirically demonstrates that careful and well‐planned integration strategies are responsible for sustainable learning occurring, leading to desirable synergies between firms engaged in a merger process.

The interviews took place at higher/top levels of the organisations. A more comprehensive picture would include other lower levels of each organisation structure.

Based on the data analysis, an integrative model for learning related to M&A is developed. This model would help organisations, planning on engaging in international M&A activity, to maximise the learning from the process.

This is a practical/empirical study, supporting the available theory on the subject in the literature. The research approach was innovative, as it collected relevant data from top executive board members, exploring their own views on the barriers for learning and on the ways to minimise them.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

The authors combine options logic with transaction cost economics to explain why firms maintain, divest or buy out their international joint ventures (IJVs). It is suggested that a decline in environmental risk and higher partner-related risk makes a firm more likely to acquire an IJV but less likely to divest an IJV. The study also investigates how IJV age moderates the effects of a decline in environmental risk and higher partner-related risk.

The study employs competing risks analyses to examine the drivers of different termination outcomes using a dataset consisting of 459 IJVs in the People's Republic of China, of which 110 were either acquired or divested by their foreign parent.

The study finds that changes in environmental risk and partner-related risk affect how firms terminate their IJVs in the People's Republic of China. Specifically, the authors find that the effect of exogenous and endogenous risk are more pronounced for the acquisition of IJVs than for the divestment of IJVs.

The study contributes to international marketing research by complementing options logic with transaction cost economics to provide a theoretical explanation of the different ways in which IJVs in the People's Republic of China are terminated.

IJVs continue to be an important yet often unstable method to serve international markets. Our findings increase managers' awareness of the effect that two important sources of risk may have on the termination of IJVs in the People's Republic of China.

The study provides novel insights into the effect that changes in exogenous and endogenous risk have on a firm's choice of termination mode drawing on novel data on the different ways in which foreign firms have terminated their IJVs in the Peoples' Republic of China.

The purpose of this paper was to evaluate if the concept of team psychological safety, a key driver of team learning and originally studied in the West, can be applied in teams from different national cultures. The model originally validated for teams in the West is applied to teams in Thailand to evaluate its validity, and the views team members have on the antecedents of team psychological safety are analyzed.

The core of the sequential explanatory mixed method research was an experiment with nine teams from a single engineering organization (three teams from each the USA, France and Thailand). Team learning behaviors were analyzed from the conversations between team members. Team psychological safety was analyzed through a quantitative instrument and one-on-one structured interviews with each team member.

The results showed that the original model is confirmed for the teams from the USA and France but not confirmed for teams from Thailand. The thematic analysis of the one-on-one interviews highlights important differences between teams from the USA and France on the one hand and teams from Thailand on the other hand when it comes to the role of the team manager and the views that team members have on the diversity between them.

This research confirms that the concept of team psychological safety, and its impact on the way teams learn, needs to be adjusted if it is to be applied to teams in countries with national cultures different from those prevalent in the West. The implications are that researchers who develop theories in the social sciences field should evaluate how cultural differences impact their models, and that managers who implement learning and solutions should take national cultural differences into consideration.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the microfoundations of customer knowledge acquisition during logistics innovation development. Specifically, the authors explore the activities and behaviors of employees with customer contact (i.e. boundary-spanning employees (BSEs)) to deepen and broaden their knowledge about customers for the development of innovations.

Qualitative research based on multiple semi-structured interviews with BSEs of six logistics service providers was conducted to explore the deepening and broadening of customer knowledge during innovation development. Data were analyzed for similarities and differences in BSEs’ knowledge acquisition and their interactions with customers across six innovations.

Results show that BSEs engage sequentially in deepening and broadening customer knowledge throughout the logistics innovation development process. Yet, the specific sequence depends on the type of innovation developed (customized vs standardized). Customer knowledge tends to be deepened in one-on-one interactions, while knowledge tends to be broadened in interactions with numerous and diverse customer firm members.

In general, this paper contributes to the understanding of the individuals’ behaviors underlying organization-level phenomena, such as logistics service providers’ customer knowledge acquisition.

Findings illustrate that BSEs are well advised to concentrate on either deepening or broadening their customer knowledge in a single stage of the logistics innovation development process but switch between these two knowledge acquisition approaches from stage-to-stage to leverage customer interaction.

By investigating firms’ customer knowledge acquisition at the individual level, this paper addresses the calls in the literature for more research into the microfoundations of organizational phenomena.

In this article we aim to understand how the network formed by fitness tracking devices and associated apps as a subset of the broader health-related Internet of things is capable of spreading information.

The authors used a combination of a content analysis, network analysis, community detection and simulation. A sample of 922 health-related apps (including manufacturers' apps and developers) were collected through snowball sampling after an initial content analysis from a Google search for fitness tracking devices.

The network of fitness apps is disassortative with high-degree nodes connecting to low-degree nodes, follow a power-law degree distribution and present with low community structure. Information spreads faster through the network than an artificial small-world network and fastest when nodes with high degree centrality are the seeds.

This capability to spread information holds implications for both intended and unintended data sharing.

The analysis confirms and supports evidence of widespread mobility of data between fitness and health apps that were initially reported in earlier work and in addition provides evidence for the dynamic diffusion capability of the network based on its structure. The structure of the network enables the duality of the purpose of data sharing.

The paper seeks to explore the effect of academic culture on the implementation of the European Foundation for Quality Management's (EFQM) Excellence Model in UK universities.

A literature review reveals several aspects, which collectively define the academic culture in UK universities. These aspects were explored in four case studies of the implementation of the EFQM Excellence Model in UK universities.

It was found that certain of these aspects had a good “cultural fit” with the EFQM Excellence Model and its underpinning concepts and others acted as cultural barriers to the implementation of the model.

The research only covers four cases and is therefore only generalisable back to theory rather than to the population of UK university academic units. The paper identifies aspects of academic culture.

The paper proposes an ideal mix of cultural aspects to facilitate implementation of the EFQM Excellence Model. Strategies are recommended for dealing with situations where the assessed academic culture does not fit well with the use of the model. These strategies include both attempts to influence and change the academic culture to provide a better fit with model and also suggested amendments to the use of the model to provide a better fit with the academic culture.

This paper makes a contribution to the understanding of academic culture and its effect on the implementation of a quality improvement methodology. Academic managers in universities may find its recommendations useful if planning a similar implementation.