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How does career boundary-crossing affect an entrepreneur’s new venture? When entrepreneurs cross industry or functional boundaries to lead startups, they may lack specific experience needed for performance. Conversely, the diverse experiences they carry can enhance exploration and lead to the emergence of innovation in startups. We highlight important consequences of career boundary-crossing, using a multi-industry longitudinal sample of high-technology firms. We find that entrepreneurs who cross functional boundaries are more likely to lead their startups into new product areas. We also find that entrepreneurs’ industry boundary-crossing is associated with startup failure, but it also increases the probability of an IPO.

Sustainable development requires multiple stakeholders to work and learn across practices, in other words, it requires boundary crossing competence. To prepare students for their future sustainability professions, higher education should facilitate the development of boundary crossing competence in its curricula. This study aims to confirm whether boundary crossing learning can be stimulated by workshop-based support in multi-stakeholder projects.

This quasi-experimental intervention study (N = 122) investigates the effect of a series of supporting workshops on students’ boundary crossing learning in multi-stakeholder projects. The workshops allowed students to adopt four learning mechanisms (identification, coordination, reflection and transformation) theorised to stimulate learning across boundaries between practices. Students followed zero, one, or two workshops. By analysing the student learning reports, the study examines the effect of the workshop intervention on students’ self-efficacy for stakeholder collaboration, the number of reported student-stakeholder collaborative activities and the reported boundary crossing learning mechanisms.

The results show that a series of two workshops increase the number of reported collaborative activities and activates the students’ boundary crossing learning in terms of reflection and transformation.

These findings support the evidence-based design of multi-stakeholder learning environments for sustainable development and contribute to the body of knowledge regarding learning across practices.

Boundary crossing competence receives increasing attention as an asset for sustainable development. The added value of this study lies in its confirmation that the boundary crossing theory can be translated into directed educational support that can stimulate students’ boundary crossing learning.

Minority teachers is a growing phenomenon that is encouraged as part of a quest to diversify teaching staff. Among minority teachers, there exists a group of boundary-crossing teachers whose “otherness” contrasts with the different student population and/or staffroom composition. The study aims to examine parent, teacher and student attitudes toward teachers crossing two types of “borders” that are central to Israeli society: the Jewish-Arab rift and the religious-secular rift.

A representative sample of 182 Jewish Israeli parents, 201 Jewish Israeli students grades 10–12 and 101 Jewish Israeli teachers completed questionnaires regarding their attitudes toward boundary-crossing teachers.

The overall attitudes toward cross-boundary teaching were positive. Attitudes were found to be associated with political affiliation, religiosity and age. The more left-wing participants were, the less religious and older the more they supported boundary-crossing teaching. Students were significantly less supportive of teachers crossing the Jewish-Arab divide compared with adults. The attitudes toward boundary-crossing ultra-orthodox teachers in a secular school showed a distinct pattern, as it received support from all divides of the research participants.

The findings point to the vicious cycle of segregation in Israeli society whereby the lack of contact between Jews and Arabs leads to intergroup anxiety which in turns leads to less support in further contact through boundary-crossing teaching, especially among high school students.

The minority teachers’ literature often refers to the need to diversify the teaching staff or examines teachers and their relations with students. This study if the first to examine how other stakeholders’ view the idea of minority teachers.

This paper aims to reveal learning potential in crossing disciplinary boundaries in facilitated workshops by exploring the research goal definition process of interdisciplinary research teams. It uses multilevel boundary crossing as a theoretical framework to illustrate the multilevel nature of team learning mechanisms in interdisciplinary research.

This study uses a qualitative case study approach. The data was collected from semi-structured interviews and collaborative workshops of interdisciplinary researchers. The data analysis is based on pre-existing theory and the process of analysis is both data and theory driven.

The results indicate that although defining interdisciplinary research goals is a complex and demanding task, collaborative and facilitated workshops may support boundary crossing on intrapersonal, interpersonal and institutional levels. The team members efforts in defining their shared research interest revealed dialogical learning mechanisms of identification, coordination, reflection and the first phases of transformation, particularly at the interpersonal level. However, the transformative actions seemed to require intentional team facilitation.

This case study enriches the existing literature and allows better understanding of how team facilitation can promote agenda setting, transformative learning mechanisms and the definition of joint research goals in interdisciplinary settings.

Organizational life and policy making is increasingly conceived in terms of a “three sector” model – public, private and “third”. The purpose of this research paper is to examine a little‐studied phenomenon that increasingly characterises societies in both the “developed” and the “developing” worlds. It aims to argue that these “sectors” have permeable boundaries, and that increasing numbers of activists and professionals operate across such boundaries, with important implications for policy and work.

The research paper reports on a set of new ethnographic life‐work history data from the UK, Bangladesh and Philippines to explore experiences of people who cross between, or straddle, the third sector and the public sector.

The paper constructs a preliminary typology of boundary crosser archetypes for purposes of further analysis. This is based on motivations and levels of boundary crossing. Boundary crossing of this kind is linked with the concept of “work role transition”, and with the micro‐politics of policy contention.

The paper concludes by suggesting that such work may offer new practical insights into strengthening the capacity of both third sector and government agencies.

The paper aims to be original in opening up this new topic for further discussion (and in particular problematizing the idea of sector boundaries), and through using the life history method to as part of organisational ethnography.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature and role of career boundaries for enabling/constraining career self-management (CSM) for occupational boundary-crossing in the UK graduate labour market (GLM).

The data are provided by career history interviews with 36 UK graduates. The analysis contrasts transitions for those who started careers in low-, intermediate-, and high-skilled segments of the labour market.

Availability of development and progression opportunities were the most prominent career boundary experienced. Ease of boundary-crossing differed by career stage and educational background. Boundaries enabled CSM by acting as psychological/external push factors, but push factors only aided progression to high-skilled segments for a third of graduates who started careers in underemployment. For the rest, an adaptation of expectations to labour market realities was observed.

Although career history interviews limit generalisability, they contextualise boundaries and deepen understanding of career actors’ subjective experiences and responses.

The study highlights the role of labour market and demand-side constraints for career transitions as well as proactive career behaviours. This has implications for career counsellors, employers, and individuals.

This paper provides a distinctive “boundary-focused” analysis of emerging career boundaries in the GLM. The findings point to the intricate interplay between structure and agency for career development.

This chapter proposes that enterprise education when applied to vocational education should be reconsidered according to a capability approach. This approach aims to improve students’ active participation and also their ability to make informed choices. Moreover, we believe that enterprise education needs an underpinning learning theory which can account for the collective nature of learning, innovation and movement across organisations. This new theoretical framework can be expansive learning. This chapter describes a case study carried out in 2014 in an Italian vocational course in hospitality. It documents the implementation of the theory of expansive learning for enterprise education within a series of workshops and evidences how a capabilities approach has been effectively utilised. During work experience, vocational students belong simultaneously to diverse activity systems such as school and work, which creates discontinuities in action and interaction. The basic principle of the workshops is that with the help of the researcher, vocational students, teachers and work tutors discuss the issues that students are having during work experience.

This chapter begins with a discussion on the role of enterprise education in vocational education, and continues by showing how the capability approach can contribute to education and entrepreneurship. The third section explains why and how the theory of expansive learning can underpin entrepreneurship education and how it was utilised in the model of workshops which incorporate enterprise education theory. Section four describes the case study in an Italian vocational secondary institute. The data presented includes excerpts of discussions during the fourth workshop, the student’s answer to the final questionnaire and the follow-up after two years. The conclusion draws out the learning mechanisms which characterised the workshops, what the students learnt in term of enterprise education and how the workshops are connected to a capability approach.

This paper presents emerging findings from an ongoing research project which aimed to explore online lesson study (OLS) as a vehicle for teacher collaborative professional learning.

Two parallel OLS cycles with two OLS teams were facilitated by the author using Zoom and Google Drive as digital collaborative tools. Each OLS team comprised three primary teachers who taught in three different schools, with both teams' research lessons taking cross-curricular science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) focus. In order to explore the influence of OLS on teachers' collaborative professional learning outcomes in STEM, a qualitative case study approach was adopted, with data drawn and thematically analysed from OLS meeting transcripts, semi-structured interviews with teachers and the author's reflective diary. Boundary crossing is used as a theoretical lens to ascertain the potential of OLS as a vehicle for teacher collaborative professional learning.

Findings suggest that OLS facilitated collaborative learning and positively contributed to teacher participants' co-construction of knowledge in relation to STEM teaching approaches.

The study described in this paper represents the first OLS conducted in the Irish context and also represents the first inter-school lesson study (LS) conducted in the Irish primary context.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an analytic framework for studying interdisciplinary learning in collaboration between schools and child support services. The analytic framework connects the concept of boundary crossing with the social–psychological processes of trust and identity formation.

The paper is written from a theoretical point of view. Empirical research data from two schools are used to illustrate the use and merit of the proposed framework.

The framework proved to be useful for identifying the level of co-work in the two schools. In addition, the framework helped to shed light on how the support for trust and identity formation by the school management aids interdisciplinary learning.

The most essential feature of the suggested framework is its use of complex theoretical concepts. Examining each concept in detail would ignore the interconnected nature of concepts in the framework, as well as the fact that it is not yet known how this interconnectedness works. Therefore, the framework is based on a generalised use of the concepts.

The contribution of the framework for practice lies in its potential to shed light on how processes in interdisciplinary collaboration can be shaped. The framework can be used to inform contextual interventions that seek to optimize collaborative structures.

The paper contributes to understanding the complex processes that constitute interdisciplinary learning in collaboration.

The purpose of this study is to provide an alternative approach to teacher learning on top of the usual practices of listening to experts' lectures and conducting school-based activities among peers in China. A boundary-crossing lesson study (BCLS) through school-university partnership served as an example to illustrate how a class teacher's mindset changed towards her students in equal interactions with university scholars.

With the lenses of action science theory and boundary-crossing learning theory, the study used qualitative research approach to collect and analyze data. One Chinese primary school class teacher from a workshop on narrative action research was selected as the case for this study. Interviewing, observation and document analysis were used to collect data. Data analysis methods included categorization and contextualization of the teacher's mindset change towards her student.

The case teacher, Mrs. Li, collaborated closely in paired teaching with her university partner AP Yu in all the four phases of their BCLS. Each phase was marked with an interactive event such as dialogic illumination, reflexive theorization, embodied conversation, and fusion of teacher and trainer roles. With inspirational trust as a major interactive mechanism, Mrs. Li jumped out of her single-loop learning (changing strategies according to results) to double-loop learning (changing both strategies and values/values). As a result, her mindset changed from attribution to appreciation towards her low-achieving student.

This study made contributions in two ways. First, it examined a class teacher's mindset change towards her student, rather than that of subject matter teachers towards their teaching materials and methods. Second, it revealed how reflective interactions in a special kind of BCLS by school teachers and university scholars may promote the teacher's mindset change. The findings further confirm that having differences as boundaries is not enough for teacher learning. For deep learning like Mrs. Li's mindset change, it requires a respectful and inspirational relationship between school teachers and university scholars in the BCLS.