Search results

In a society of abundance, complexity, uncertainty and secularisation, consumers seek extreme market offerings. They thereby avoid the grey middle ground and rather seek white or black, or rather utopia or dystopia, in their experiences. This consumer behaviour is coined the Polarity Paradox. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the Polarity Paradox on travel and tourism and specifically highlight how darker and dystopian type of tourism experiences can add value to the overall tourist experience.

The paper is based on literature and trend report reviews to support the direction of the Polarity Paradox trend and the opportunities it presents to the hospitality and tourism industry.

Travellers do not seek only beauty and happiness when travelling. Examples of the thrilling or dystopian side of the Polarity Paradox clearly illustrate travellers’ emerging needs to look for the extreme. In fact, new travel and hospitality experiences are all about originality and understanding that whether the experience triggers positive or negative emotions matter less in a market where consumers want to be “shaken up”, surprised, taught something or seek a deeper meaning. The difference with the past is that these same thrill seeking tourists, also seek “white” and chilling experiences and that demands a new approach to market segmentation.

Until now, the Polarity Paradox has been described as a general consumer trend. In this paper, the authors are the first to analyse its possible impact on hospitality and tourism and in detail describe that black, dystopian and thrilling experiences can be positive when they trigger emotions and reactions meaningful to the traveller. The authors further show that “playing it safe” will not be the future to build successful hospitality and tourism experiences. The examples explore how the hospitality and tourism industry can add elements of “dystopia” and by doing that actually add value to the overall travel experience.

Previous literature has identified human resources as a key source of competitive advantage in organizations of all sizes. However, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) face difficulty in comprehensively implementing all recommended Human Resource Management (HRM) functions. In this study, we shed light on the field of HRM in SMEs by focusing on the context of Greek Small and Medium-sized Hotels (SMHs), which represent a dominant private sector employer across the country.

Using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and 34 in-depth interviews with SMHs' owners/managers, we explore the HRM conditions leading to high levels of performance, while taking into consideration the influence of internal key determinants.

We uncover three alternative successful HRM strategies that maximize business performance, namely the Compensation-based performers, the HRM developers and the HRM investors. Each strategy fits discreet organizational characteristics related to company size, ownership type and organizational structure.

To the best of the authors' knowledge this is among the first empirical studies that examine different and equifinal performance-enhancing configurations of HRM practices in SMHs.

Recognizing novel entrepreneurial opportunities arising from a crisis is of paramount importance for firms. Hence, understanding the pivotal factors that facilitate firms in this endeavor holds significant value. This study delves into such factors within a representative empirical context impacted by a crisis, drawing insights from existing literature on opportunity recognition during such tumultuous periods.

The authors conducted a qualitative inspection of 14 Italian firms during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The authors collected a rich body of multi-source qualitative data, including 34 interviews (with senior managers and entrepreneurs) and secondary data (press releases, videos, web interviews, newspapers, reports and academic articles) in two phases (March–August 2020 and September–December 2020).

The results suggest the existence of a process model of opportunity recognition during crises based on five entrepreneurial influencing factors (entrepreneurial knowledge, entrepreneurial alertness, entrepreneurial proclivity, entrepreneurial personality and entrepreneurial purpose).

Various scholars have highlighted that, in times of crises, it is not easy and indeed very challenging for entrepreneurs to identify novel entrepreneurial opportunities. However, recent research has shown that crises can also positively impact entrepreneurs and their capacity to identify new entrepreneurial opportunities. Given these findings, not much research has analyzed the process by which entrepreneurs identify novel entrepreneurial opportunities during crises. This study shows that some entrepreneurial influencing factors are very important to identify new entrepreneurial opportunities during crises.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the importance of colour on the communication of financial data in management and to encourage future discussion on related topic.

Hypothesis was designed building on relevant literatures. Quantitative discrete data were collected through a mini-test activity in a lecture from students. The results were reviewed and evaluated by relevant statistical tool.

The authors found consistent statistical significance results in the mini-test. The findings support that users prefer to choose the financial data presented in cool colours in business management context.

Gaining the understanding of colour’s influence on decision making and behaviour is subjected to complexity. There are many other contextual factors should be taken into consideration in practice. Although the design of the mini-test in this study is relatively simple, it still provides clues for the issue. With the discussions and findings of this paper, the authors shed some light on the direction of potential uses of colour on the communication of financial data in management context. The findings could also be used by management educators to facilitate related discussions among students regarding the complexity of business communication and the importance of perception in decision making. For example, decision making could be affected by various factors (such as colour) outside verbal and text.

Managers often need to use financial data in communication for various purposes in work place. The authors believe this is the first time that a study like this had been conducted to specifically review and discuss the importance of colour on the communication of financial data in management. Hopefully, the work reported in this paper could be viewed as reference for management educators, researchers and managers in future research or practical applications on related topics.

Over the last couple of decades, health has become a central part of the subject content in physical education (PE) curricula in many countries. As a result, issues of health have been foregrounded much more clearly in the teaching of PE. The aim of this study was to explore how Swedish PE teachers make sense of health in relation to their teaching practices. This was done through investigating conceptions and theories about health in the teachers' descriptions of their teaching practices.

The data analyzed in this paper were collected through focus group and individual interviews with PE teachers in the grades 7–9 within compulsory schools in Sweden. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis.

Four dominant themes were identified in the data: 1) Health as a healthy attitude, 2) Health as a functional ability, 3) Health as fitness, 4) Health as mental wellbeing. There is a clear impact from healthism and obesity discourses on the teachers' accounts of health, but there is also an impact from holistic views and approaches to health. The authors contend that teachers should be explicit in what they mean by health in relation to what they teach, how they teach and why they teach health in a certain way.

The knowledge produced by this study is crucial since teachers' assumptions regarding health affect the subject content (what), the pedagogies (how), as well as the reasons (why) they teach health and therefore what students learn regarding health.

While it is argued that entrepreneurship provides considerable freedom, it is also underlined that it might have the potential for exclusion and oppression. The study contributes to this debate and aims to investigate how entrepreneurs with disabilities (EWD) ascribe meaning to freedom in a contested terrain informed by entrepreneurial autonomy as well as constraints due to impairments and an ableist social environment.

The study uses a qualitative approach and builds upon the critical concepts of negative, positive and social freedom as a theoretical lens for the in-depth analysis of the twenty-nine semi-structured interviews with EWD in Hungary.

Findings indicate that EWD experiences freedom in ambivalent ways. Engaging in the discourse of entrepreneurship offers a subversive discursive toolkit to debunk the constraints established by ableism, enabling both negative and positive freedom. However, individualism being at the heart of entrepreneurship results in othering and undermines social freedom. Thus, while entrepreneurship offers greater individual freedom in both a negative and a positive sense for people with disabilities (PWD), it nevertheless fails to promote collective social change.

Contributing to the critical disability literature, findings contrast the view that having an impairment only reduces a person's abilities and highlight that it also affects the very nature of liberty. Contributing to critical studies on entrepreneurship, the case of EWD provides empirical evidence for understanding the simultaneous emancipatory and oppressive character of entrepreneurship through the interplay of the subjective experience of freedom related to disability and entrepreneurship.