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Community‐based business models attempt to profit from the value created by individuals interacting in virtual communities. An interesting variant of this model is the programmable autonomous business. A programmable autonomous business is an automated business built entirely in software, that once developed can profitably operate without any human involvement. We know little about how to systematically design such businesses. Existing research on designing virtual communities does not address how to transform them into autonomous businesses, nor is it clear whether all the design principles for virtual communities are relevant to an autonomous business. The research reported in this paper takes an inductive, business‐centered approach to understanding how to design autonomous businesses. The information activity in a successful, yet basic autonomous business is analyzed and its functions compared with those in a conventional business. From this analysis a set of design guidelines for a prototypical autonomous business are inferred. The paper ends with a discussion of various ways researchers can use a programmable autonomous business as a test bed for consumer‐related e‐business systems.

Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) are internet-native self-governing enterprises where individual groups, communities, agencies, consumers and providers work together using blockchain-led smart contracts (SCs). This study aims to examine the role of DAO marketplaces in technology-led autonomous organisation design for enterprise technology sourcing industries, with algorithmic trust and governance.

The authors examined the importance of an enterprise marketplace governance platform for technology sourcing using DAO as a decentralised/democratised business model. A total of 98 DAO products/services are evaluated across 11 industries that envisage DAO as a strategic choice for the governance of decentralised marketplace platforms.

The research findings validate how a DAO-led enterprise marketplace governance platform can create a cohesive collaboration between consumers (enterprises) and providers (solution vendors) in a disintermediated way. The proposed novel layered solution for an autonomous governance-led enterprise marketplace promises algorithmic trust-led, self-governed tactical alternatives to a strategic plan.

The research targets multiple industry outlooks to understand decentralised autonomous marketplace governance and develop the theoretical foundation for research and extensive corporate suitability.

The research underpinnings boost the entrepreneurs’ ability to realise the practical potential of DAO between multiple parties using SCs and tokenise the entire product and service offerings over immutable ledger technologies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is unique and the first of its kind to study the multi-industry role of algorithmic trust and governance in enterprise technology sourcing marketplaces driven by 98 decentralised and consensus-based DAO products across 11 industries.

Purpose – The main aim of this chapter is to analyze Spanish internal and external territorial conflicts, mostly associated with the border effect between two continents with different economic and cultural systems. We assess the impact that the emergence of the new economy, represented by new technologies, R&D, privatizations, and foreign direct investment, has had in South-Spain, particularly in Andalusia, throughout the period 1995–2010. Special attention has been paid to the dynamics of convergence–divergence processes in terms of per capita income with respect to its neighboring different economic and cultural areas: Europe and the Maghreb.

Methodology – For the aforementioned purposes, we suggest applying the game theory approach to solve domestic secessionist conflicts, and the method followed by Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) to address economic conflicts by means of promoting convergence with Europe. We propose economic competition between cities as a way to deal with external territorial conflicts concerning neighboring countries.

Findings – The main results obtained from econometric applications indicate that privatization processes, foreign direct investment, research and investment, and investment in new technologies allow for the real convergence of Spain and Southern Spain with European economies.

Research limitations – This chapter does not address smaller conflicts.

Social implications – Conflicts resolutions promote peace in both continental borders.

Originality – This chapter analyzes the most relevant domestic and external Spanish conflicts. The most important domestic conflicts are the linguistic and cultural conflicts in bilingual regions. The major external Spanish conflicts analyzed herein are both territorial conflicts between Spain and Morocco and Muslim immigration.

In the spirit of ‘Europe of the Regions’, local authorities are responsible for responding to the main interests, needs and preferences of the country’s citizens. Regional and local administrative authorities provide citizens with the necessary public goods, which reflect the trend towards ‘glocalisation’ in public administration at the European level, more significantly in the states in which the political system recently became democratic. With this background, the effectiveness of local self-government depends not only on local authorities’ decision-making freedom but also on (financial) support for it through decentralisation, and the member states of the European Union (EU) employ different strategies to achieve the same goal, with varying degrees of success. Within this context, our chapter offers a comparative analysis of the administrative, financial and local self-government decentralisation in member states, which include the southern and eastern regions on the outer edges of the EU. The general goal of our study is to identify the main trends in the present administrations and their challenges, as well as best practices that can offer lessons to other member states which are reforming their administration through decentralisation. In addition to the identified challenges, solutions and best practices, our study reveals a tendency towards consolidation at the level of regional government not only in the terms of legal responsibility but also of administrative budgets, thus generating an assumption of improvement in the general quality of governance in the member states.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether the protection that some football teams submit to the football players from its region has a positive effect on the quality of the football players from these regions. Particularly, it is analyzed the natural experiment offered by the Basque Country.

First are evaluated the productivity of the regions and thereafter it is analyzed the efficiency of the regions using a production function approach. Lastly, it is evaluated the evolution of the human capital from the under-19 to the absolute national team to determine if the human capital protection of the Basque Country clubs is effective in improving the human capital.

The main finding is that the protection's effect to the productive factors submitted into a competitive environment, exerts a positive influence on the development and growth of this factor, because the protection offers more possibilities of promotion and improving his productive capacity.

To the best of knowledge there is no paper that has analyzed the effectiveness of a human capital protection policy.

Going beyond the traditional approach of formal and informal institutions as antecedents of entrepreneurship (directly) and development (indirectly), this paper seeks to explore knowledge institutions as a necessary input for entrepreneurship and the development of societies.

Institutional economics lenses are utilized to observe other factors (e.g. the number of R&D staff and researchers from the public sector) that involve laws and socialization processes, which at the same time create knowledge useful for entrepreneurs and society. These ideas are tested through a sample of 281 observations from 17 autonomous communities and two autonomous cities in Spain. The information coming from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), Ministry of Economics, Industry, and Competitiveness, and INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística), was analyzed through 3SLS, which is useful for a simultaneous equation strategy.

Knowledge institutions such as the number of R&D staff and researchers from the public sector are found positively associated with entrepreneurship, which is a factor directly and positively linked to economic development across Spanish regions.

The findings help the operationalization of other institutions considered in institutional economics theory and its application to entrepreneurship research. Moreover, the results bring new insights into the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship in the public sector, in which the institutional analysis is implicit.

The recent move towards system‐wide diversity in the Israeli educational system has made the structure of public schools increasingly complex and fragmented, and has greatly influenced many aspects of the principalship. Today, principals in public schools are moving towards a dynamic definition of their role. Principals are being required to move from being routine‐managers to leader‐managers. This role change is reflected in four pivotal areas including: resource allocation, organizational framework, governing system and market structure. Contrary to traditional roles, Israeli principals are increasingly required to be environmental managers who mobilize resources and manage professional organizations with pluralistic governing systems in a competitive market structure. The success of local school initiatives depends upon principals′ abilities to adapt their roles to new realities inherent in such dynamic, diverse school networks.

This paper studies social inequality in the vital field of employment in Spain during the crisis period 2009-2014.

Factor analysis is used to build a synthetic index of employment exclusion. The starting information matrix collects data from a wide set of employment variables for all 17 Spanish autonomous communities and the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Based on this information, four factors are extracted which explain employment exclusion in different situations of vulnerability, such as unemployment, temporality, poverty or low pay.

In the territorial ranking, Madrid, Basque Country, Aragon and Catalonia show the lowest risk of employment exclusion, whereas Ceuta, Andalusia, Extremadura and Canary Islands show the highest ones.

The main value of this research is that it confirms the need for coordination of public policies in order to foster social and territorial cohesion in Spain.

Quality management systems are being used more frequently in educational institutions, although their application has generated a certain amount of disagreement among education experts, who have at times questioned their suitability and usefulness for improving schools. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this discussion by providing additional knowledge on the effects in educational institutions of implementing quality management systems. Specifically, this study investigates teachers’ and managers’ perception of the impact that quality management systems have on one essential dimension of schools, the teaching–learning processes, with impact being understood as sustained medium- and long-term organisational change.

The responses were analysed and classified into a set of sub-dimensions linked to quality management processes in a total of 29 Spanish primary and secondary education schools that have used such systems for at least three years.

The results showed that, according to the respondents, the following sub-dimensions were improving as a result of implementing quality management plans: teaching and learning processes, the analysis of student results, tutoring, consideration of attitudes and values and assessment processes. Conversely, quality management systems did not seem to have a clear impact on the teaching methodologies used by teachers or on family involvement in student learning. In fact, the perceived impact in these sub-dimensions varied among teachers of public and private schools as well as when comparing different regional autonomous communities.

As the main objective of a school is to guarantee student learning, one of the essential purposes of school quality assurance systems is to perform all the activities aimed at ensuring high levels of student performance.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how funders and stakeholders influence the performance of Spain’s most autonomous cultural institutions. As the first of its kind to focus on Spain’s independent cultural spaces, the paper is exploratory in nature. It seeks to contribute to the field of research on best practices in cultural management and marketing through its study of the performance of all seven independent cultural spaces that belong to the Red TransIbérica de Espacios Culturales Independientes.

The paper employs a mixed-methods case study analysis. Relying on in-person observations and interviews, online surveying, online review analyses and cultural engagement data synthesis, it supports quantitative data with qualitative data, and uses methodological triangulation techniques to validate findings.

The paper indicates that despite their autonomy, the type of funding and the number of stakeholders that independent cultural spaces boast appear related to their marketability.

Using all seven member organizations as the sample group, this research is able to build generalized conclusions for the country’s population of independent cultural spaces. By highlighting key themes for further research, the paper offers insight into an understudied section of the sector.