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The objective of this article is to describe processes of substantiations and contributions across contexts and over time through theory building towards theory in business research.

The article provides a seed for discussion, debate and consideration regarding scholarly substantiations and contributions through theory building towards business theory.

The importance of cumulative processes in terms of substantiations and contributions in business research should not be neglected, but its logic and value is currently argued to be often underestimated or ignored.

Sound theory requires sound foundations based upon processes of substantiations and contributions. It is essential that the processes of substantiations and contributions are cumulative and parallel through theory building towards theory.

An important lesson learned is that an original study should not be seen as providing a genuine substantiation and making a solid contribution to business theory until it has been successfully replicated and validated across contexts and over time.

The author concludes that current practices of substantiations and contributions through theory building towards theory are insufficient and contain fatal flaws potentially undermining the well‐being of business research and the perception of business theory being seen as a solid and credible management discipline among other academic disciplines in the worldwide research community.

Future is rarely explicitly addressed or problematized in business network research. This study aims to examine the possibilities of developing a business actor’s future orientation to network studies and imports ideas and concepts from futures research to support the development.

The study is conceptual and interdisciplinary. The authors critically analyze how extant studies grounded in the sensemaking view and process research approach integrate future time and how theoretical myopia hinders the adoption of a future orientation.

The prevailing future perspective is restricted to managers’ perceptions and actions at present, ignoring the anticipation and exploration of alternative longer-term futures. Future time is generally conceived as embedded in managers’ cognitive processes or is seen as part of the ongoing interaction, where the time horizon to the future is not noticed or is at best short.

To enable a forward-looking perspective, researchers should move the focus from expectation building in business interaction to purposeful preparation of alternative future(s) and from the view of seeing future as enacted in the present to envisioning of both near-term and more distant futures.

This study addresses the growing need of business actors to anticipate future developments in the rapidly changing market conditions and to innovate and change business practices to save the planet for future generations.

This study elaborates on actors’ future orientation to business markets and networks, proposes the integration of network research concepts with concepts from futures studies and poses new types of research questions for future research.

The purpose of this research is to compare the levels of EI of male and female students, EI among students of three different academic faculties: business, engineering and nursing and the degree of change in their EI over the course of study. Additionally, the authors set out to isolate and quantify the effects of gender and field of study, independent of each other.

This empirical research is based on a survey of >750 undergraduate college students, in which participants answered a host of Likert-scale questions concerning perceptions of risk, self-efficacy, career path and entrepreneurial intent (EI). The survey also contained a number of demographic questions, including academic field (major) and year of study.

Business students express the highest levels of EI, followed by engineering students and nursing students respectively. Regardless of discipline, students become no more or less entrepreneurial over their years of study. Overall, males were found to be significantly more entrepreneurial than females. However, a comparison of males and females within a given faculty yielded almost no differences in EI between the genders.

These findings suggest that students self-select into fields of study based on traits, personalities and interests. It is these same factors that regulate one's EI and not their gender or field of study. Others have analyzed the effects of gender and field of study, the authors isolated the two and analyzed each independently.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of spinoffs and tradeoffs in business-driven sustainable development in the marketplace based on environmental, economic and social constituents. It is based on the insights gathered from a company’s business-driven sustainable development. It can therefore be used as a teaching case.

An inductive approach based on case study methodology is applied to describe a company’s spinoffs and tradeoffs of business-driven sustainable development in the marketplace.

The study reports how raw material residuals can be recycled and reused in spinoff processes, and tradeoffs done, to optimize the outcome of business-driven sustainable development in the marketplace.

The study reveals that spinoffs and tradeoffs between constituents and related sub-constituents enable to improve the ultimate outcome of business-driven sustainable development in the marketplace. The study also illustrates how environmental, social and economic constituents and related sub-constituents connect and reconnect to each other as a whole through spinoffs and tradeoffs, to optimize business-driven sustainable development in marketplace.

Business-driven sustainable development requires corporate considerations to connect and reconnect the economic, social and environmental constituents and related sub-constituents. It illustrates the pioneering actions of combining existing solutions of business sustainability in conjunction and gaining synergy effects to optimize business-driven sustainable development.

Contribution is based on the actions of combining existing solutions of business sustainability in conjunction and gaining synergy effects to optimize business-driven sustainable development. This study also makes a contribution illustrating a framework based on a company’s business-driven sustainable development fostering CO₂ neutrality and fossil-free fuel in the food and agricultural industries. In addition, it makes a contribution illustrating how raw material residuals are recycled and reused in spinoff processes, so as to optimize the business-driven sustainable development. Furthermore, it makes a contribution illustrating that business-driven sustainable development in the marketplace is neither simplistic nor straightforward, but requires that tradeoffs between constituents and related sub-constituents be made to optimize the ultimate outcome.

BUSINESS SCHOOL GRAFFITI is a highly personal and revealing account of the first ten years (1965–1975) at Britain’s University Business Schools. The progress achieved is documented in a whimsical fashion that makes it highly readable. Gordon Wills has been on the inside throughout the decade and has played a leading role in two of the major Schools. Rather than presuming to present anything as pompous as a complete history of what has happened, he recalls his reactions to problems, issues and events as they confronted him and his colleagues. Lord Franks lit a fuse which set a score of Universities and even more Polytechnics alight. There was to be a bold attempt to produce the management talent that the pundits of the mid‐sixties so clearly felt was needed. Buildings, books, teachers who could teach it all, and students to listen and learn were all required for the boom to happen. The decade saw great progress, but also a rapid decline in the relevancy ethic. It saw a rapid withering of interest by many businessmen more accustomed to and certainly desirous of quick results. University Vice Chancellors, theologians and engineers all had to learn to live with the new and often wealthier if less scholarly faculty members who arrived on campus. The Research Councils had to decide how much cake to allow the Business Schools to eat. Most importantly, the author describes the process of search he went through as an individual in evolving a definition of his own subject and how it can best be forwarded in a University environment. It was a process that carried him from Technical College student in Slough to a position as one of the authorities on his subject today.

This study aims to investigate the trends in existing studies in the field of ethnic entrepreneurship in the context of growing markets in terms of definitions, theories, themes, methodologies and settings.

This study used bibliometric analysis and used Publish or Perish software with Google Scholar as the database. A total of 183 articles published in 122 journals from 1988 to 2018 were selected. This study used systematic data to reveal trends in growing markets and qualitative inductive analysis to define relevant themes within the topic.

The results show that ethnic entrepreneurship is defined as involving immigrants from developing countries. From a theoretical point of view, socio-cultural theories, socio-economic theories and combinations of both have been used to explain the phenomenon. Six research themes have been developed indicating potential explorative and exploitative research themes. This study identified the dominance of the qualitative approach in ethnic entrepreneurship research and found that the typical research subjects are Asian immigrants, especially Chinese, in developed countries. The articles reviewed were mainly conducted in developed countries (68.85%) and a lesser portion in developing countries (13.66%), particularly Asian countries.

This study provides future directions for research on ethnic entrepreneurship, such as gender studies of ethnic entrepreneurs and factors affecting the opening of new businesses in new locations.

This study reveals trends in the ethnic entrepreneurship field based on the country in which the study was conducted, the definition of ethnic entrepreneurship, the theories, the research themes, the methodologies, the research setting and the ethnicity studied. It also used the framework of input–process–output to establish a generic road map of the ethnic entrepreneurship research area.

The study addresses a gap in research concerning the specific purpose of information technology (IT) in business relationships and how it impacts business development and relationship performance. To fill this gap, the purpose of this study is to investigate the prospective effects of IT on business development and relationship performance in the business relationships of industrial firms.

Building on previous research from the industrial business relationship field, 353 relationships between Swedish industrial firms and their customers are analyzed with linear structural relations in LISREL.

The findings show that the effect of IT on relationship performance is not direct but mediated by business development measured in terms of business creation and product development.

The study’s results imply that IT that is integrated in inter-firm operations has to be assigned a specific purpose to effectively influence relationship-specific performance. The results also indicate that more research is needed to provide additional insights about the relation between IT and performance in business relationships.

If the full potential of IT-based solutions could be reached, then this could lead to the generation of new products and technologies and more competitive companies, which in turn would create more jobs and greater wealth.

In conclusion, this study fills a gap in research by highlighting that IT studied with a business relationship approach is particularly important under certain conditions. As such, the study contributes to the research stream seeking to understand the role of IT in industrial marketing and how IT should be used for increasing relationship performance.

The design and implementation of an interpretive framework to study historically marginalized issues in management is a distinct area of research. This paper aims to propose a multi-method interpretive framework, integrating a historiographical approach and an archival investigation, and use the case of business responses to disability in colonial and post-independence India to elucidate the proposed framework.

This paper provides a summary of a proposed framework for the historical study of marginalized social issues using an interpretive paradigm. It also outlines the advantages and limitations of the proposed framework.

This paper makes a methodological contribution in multi-method interpretive research design for the historical study of socially constructed issues, neglected because of deep prejudice and social exclusion, that offer complex challenges for modern businesses seeking inclusive workplace strategies.

This paper proposes a research framework that contextualizes social issues in history (historiographical study) and cases of business responses to these issues (archival study) for the examination of historically marginalized issues in the business–society relationship.

Taking the entrepreneur’s perspective and a broad view of business advisory services, the purpose of this paper is to examine to what degree the need of business advisory services among Swedish start-ups, first-generation immigrants compared to non-immigrants, is fulfilled.

The sample data consist of a unique and comprehensive firm-level database and contain telephone interviews with 2,800 Swedish start-up entrepreneurs. The study examines 20 different kinds of business advice services, in terms of both need and use. Statistical methods such as Mann-Whitney test and regression analysis are used while controlling for entrepreneurial characteristics.

The findings suggest that immigrants’ compared to non-immigrants’ need for business advisory service was not fulfilled. Of the 20 different business advices, ten were fulfilled and ten were not fulfilled. Both strategic advice and operational advice were fulfilled as well as unfulfilled. Apart from ethnicity, other variables did influence the need of business advisory services.

The author was not able to make comparisons between different immigrant groups.

This study offers an explorative approach that contributes on how business advisory services are differentially tailored between start-ups by immigrants and those by non-immigrants. It illustrates to what extent public- and/or private-funded organizations contribute to fulfilment of the needs of immigrant and non-immigrant start-ups.

Few studies take the entrepreneur’s perspective and from such a perspective examine the fulfilment of needs of advice regarding both private and public organizations role in the area. Both the need and the use of business advisory services are studied as well as the kind of business advice that is needed.

Today’s small enterprises are forced to rethink their business-as-usual management and shift toward corporate sustainability. The empirical paper responds to a crucial quest for many modern leaders and entrepreneurs, specifically small business owners in emerging economies. This paper aims to answer what they can do to increase long-term financial performance and enhance stakeholder satisfaction, thereby contributing to long-term business sustainability.

Using a convenience sampling, data were collected from a sample of 280 business leaders and entrepreneurs of small enterprises across industries in an emerging economy of Thailand. This study used a sustainable leadership research framework. Factor analysis and multiple regression analysis were used for data analysis.

Seven valid and reliable leadership factors were uncovered as new underlying leadership constructs to examine business sustainability in small entrepreneurial enterprises in Thailand. Results from multiple regressions revealed two significantly positive factors or drivers (i.e. trusting, innovative team orientation and strong, shared vision) for enhanced two sustainability performance outcomes (i.e. financial performance and stakeholder satisfaction). The findings thus contribute to advance our limited knowledge about the contextualised constructs and possible theoretical development of the developing research realm.

Successful small entrepreneurial organisations in Thailand and other emerging economies that wish to improve their business sustainability are suggested to adopt the essential leadership and management practices (i.e. trusting, innovative team and strong, shared vision). Future studies may examine data from a larger sample size and other countries to expand our limited understanding in different contexts.

The resulting practical insights can be used to guide business leaders, entrepreneurs, practitioners and policymakers towards making strategic priorities and investments for improved business competitiveness, resilience and sustainability in small entrepreneurial enterprises. Overall, this study may be a starting point for further investigation on developing entrepreneurial growth and business sustainability in small sustainable enterprises across emerging economies.

The paper responds to calls for more contextualised research studies in the evolving multidisciplinary field of entrepreneurial leadership and business sustainability, particularly in an emerging economy of Thailand. It also unveils the essential strategic leadership factors that positively drive business sustainability in small entrepreneurial firms. And, it empirically examines the effects of diverse strategic leadership factors and multiple sustainability performance outcomes in a single study. It further proposes an emergent leadership-performance model for entrepreneurial business sustainability in the context-specific study. Above all, it advances the currently limited empirical knowledge in the emerging research front towards more sustainable futures.