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Taking the dialogic organizational development perspective, this study aims to investigate the framing processes when engaging in dialogue for strategy implementation and how these enable the evolution of implementation opportunities.

Through a qualitative exploratory study conducted in a large multinational, the authors analyse the dialogue and interactions among 25 dyads when identifying opportunities to contribute to strategy implementation. The data analysis relies on a process-coding approach and linkography, a valuable protocol analysis for identifying recursive interaction schemas in conversations.

The authors identify four main framing processes – shaping, unveiling, scattering and shifting – and provide a framework of how these processes affect individuals’ mental models through increasing the tangibility of opportunities or elevating them to new value hierarchies.

From a theoretical perspective, this study contributes to the strategy implementation and organizational development literature, providing a micro-perspective of how dialogue allows early knowledge structures to emerge and shape the development of opportunities for strategy implementation.

From a managerial perspective, the authors offer insights to trigger action and change in individuals to contribute to strategy when moving from formulation to implementation.

Rather than focusing on the structural control view of strategy implementation and the role of the top management team, this study considers strategy implementation as a practice and what it takes for organizational actors who do not take part in strategy formulation to enact and shape opportunities for strategy implementation through constructive dialogue.

When improving business processes, process analysts can use data-driven methods, such as process mining, to identify improvement opportunities. However, despite being supported by data, process analysts decide which changes to implement. Analysts often use process visualisations to assess and determine which changes to pursue. This paper helps explore how process mining visualisations can aid process analysts in their work to identify, prioritise and communicate business process improvement opportunities.

The study follows the design science methodology to create and evaluate an artefact for visualising identified improvement opportunities (IRVIN).

A set of principles to facilitate the visualisation of process mining outputs for analysts to work with improvement opportunities was suggested. Particularly, insights into identifying, prioritising and communicating process improvement opportunities from visual representation are outlined.

Prior work focuses on visualisation from the perspectives – among others – of process exploration, process comparison and performance analysis. This study, however, considers process mining visualisation that aids in analysing process improvement opportunities.

This study aims to examine the role of gender balance in forming individuals’ understanding of entrepreneurship as manifested in the graduates’ occupational choices, asking: Does gender balance in entrepreneurship education influence start-up behaviour after graduation? Based on gender mainstreaming, this study builds on the assumption that gender balance influences classroom and student community discourses. This study presents two hypotheses suggesting a positive relationship between gender balance (student and mentor gender balance, respectively) and the likelihood of engaging in start-up behaviour after graduation.

The context is an international one-year master's programme in entrepreneurship and innovation, which adopts an experienced-based pedagogical approach to support learning. This study applies binary logistic regression analysis to test the hypotheses on a sample of 107 graduates who responded to a web-based questionnaire on post-graduation career paths.

This study finds support for the first hypothesis indicating that student gender balance in the classroom has a significant positive impact on graduates' likelihood of engaging in start-up activity post-graduation. In the interpretation of these findings, this study emphasizes that a master's programme in entrepreneurship is an important arena where students' attitudes, values, aspirations and intentions towards entrepreneurship are shaped and their identity developed.

While studies have demonstrated gender bias in the discourses on entrepreneurship education and content, there is little evidence of its consequences or how it is addressed. Findings of this study point directly to this gap by revealing that improved gender balance is not only beneficial to the underrepresented gender, but to the overall student group.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize job immobility concepts, e.g. staying in an unsatisfying job and perceiving limited opportunities to move and apply for another job. The existing literature on this situation of job immobility in which the employee is experiencing stuckness in the job is scattered across research domains, limited in scope and existing constructs are not clearly defined or operationalized.

In this conceptual paper, the authors propose the construct “locked at the job,” by reviewing and building on the job immobility literature and the theory of control and self-regulation.

This study defines the concept that consists of two dimensions as feeling dissatisfied in the current job and inactivity due to perceived limited job opportunities. This study proposes a conceptual model of antecedents and consequences of locked at the job, based on the person-environment fit theory.

This conceptual paper allows value to be added in practice by the conceptualization of locked at the job, in addition to providing a preview with respect to conceptual causes and consequences of this phenomenon.

Research on this job immobility phenomenon is scattered across different research domains, limited in scope and the concept has not been clearly defined or operationalized.

This paper provides the methodology of estimating the risk-return relationship of alternative asset investments within the mean-variance framework. While conducting strategic asset allocation, most of the institutional investors do not take into account the risk-return relationship of alternative assets, or use arbitrary policy numbers that do not properly reflect the characteristics of alternative assets. This paper borrows the concept of reference portfolio in developing the methodology of estimating the risk-return relationship of alternative investments. The reference portfolio is the benchmark portfolio used in strategic asset allocation by pension funds. This can serve as the opportunity costs of alternative investments. We use the realized IRR’s from actual investments, and estimate the risk-return characteristics of alternative investments. We find that by properly estimating the mapping relationship between the reference portfolio and alternative asset classes, we can incorporate the risk-return profile of these non-market assets within the mean-variance framework together with the other traditional asset classes.

The aim of this paper is to examine how managerial ability affects corporate tax aggressiveness.

The study follows the work of Demerjian, Lev, and McVay (2012) and quantifies managerial ability by calculating how efficiently managers generate revenues from given economic resources using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach. The study uses a wide range of measures of tax aggressiveness. Firm fixed-effects regressions and a difference-in-differences approach using information regarding CEO turnover to control for endogeneity are used.

The study finds a negative relationship between managerial ability and corporate tax aggressiveness. Further tests show that this negative relationship is more pronounced for firms with higher investment opportunities or firms with more reputational concerns.

Given the significant costs associated with tax aggressiveness and the negative effect it can have on managerial reputation if discovered, the results suggest that more able managers invest less effort in aggressive tax avoidance activities. This study furthers the understanding of how managerial personal traits affect corporate decision-making.

This paper investigates the challenges and opportunities for the deployment of whistleblowing as an accountability mechanism to curb corruption and fraud in a developing country. Nigeria is the institutional setting for the study.

Adopting an institutional theory perspective and a survey protocol of urban residents in the country, the study presents evidence on the whistleblowing program introduced in 2016. Nigeria’s whistleblowing initiative targets all types of corruption, including corporate fraud.

This study finds that, even in the context of a developing country, whistleblowing is supported as an accountability mechanism, but the intervention lacks awareness, presents a high risk to whistleblowers and regulators, including the risk of physical elimination, and is fraught with institutional and operational challenges. In effect, awareness of whistleblowing laws, operational challenges and an institutional environment conducive to venality undermine the efficacy of whistleblowing in Nigeria.

The study presents a model of challenges and opportunities for whistleblowing in a developing democracy. The authors argue that the existence of a weak and complex institutional environment and the failure of program institutionalization explain those challenges and opportunities. The authors also argue that a culturally anchored and institutionalized whistleblowing program encourages positive civic behavior by incentivizing citizens to act as custodians of their resources, and it gives voice to the voiceless who have endured decades of severe hardship and loss of dignity due to corruption.

Wage employees enter self-employment either directly or in a staged manner and may subsequently undertake multiple stints at self-employment. Extant research on the relationship between entry modes and the persistence and outcomes of self-employment is inconclusive. This study investigates the relationship between wage employees’ initial mode of entry into self-employment and the duration of the subsequent first two stints of self-employment.

This study used a matched longitudinal sample of 9,550 employees who became majority owners of incorporated firms from 2005 to 2016.

The findings demonstrate that the initial mode of entry into self-employment matters for the first two stints at self-employment. Staged entry into self-employment was associated with a shorter first stint and became insignificant for the second stint. Staged entry into self-employment was positively related to the odds of becoming self-employed for the second time in the same firm.

Using a comprehensive and reliable dataset, the paper shifts focus from the aggregated onward journey of novice entrepreneurs (survival as the outcome) to the duration of their self-employment stints. By doing so, the paper offers insights into the process of becoming self-employed and the patterns associated with success/failure in entrepreneurship associated with self-employment duration.