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This study aims to understand how practitioners use their insights in software development models to share experiences within and between organizations.

This is a qualitative study of practitioners in software development projects, in large-, medium- or small-size businesses. It analyzes interview material in three-step iterations to understand reflexive practice when using software development models.

The study shows how work processes are based on team members’ experiences and common views. This study highlights the challenges of organizational learning in system development projects. Current practice is unreflective, habitual and lacks systematic ways to address recurring problems and share information within and between organizations. Learning is episodic and sporadic. Knowledge from previous experience is individual not organizational.

Software development teams and organizations tend to learn about, and adopt, software development models episodically. This research expands understanding of how organizational learning takes place within and between organizations with practitioners who participate in teams. Learnings show the potential for further research to determine how new curriculums might be formed for teaching software development model improvements.

In this article, we highlight ways in which disability critical race theory (DisCrit) (Annamma et al., 2013), inclusive education and community-based participatory research (CBPR) can be used within professional development schools (PDS) to provide students with disabilities with more access to inclusive classrooms. At a grade 4–6 elementary school, we developed a model of a critical PDS to promote inclusive education and facilitate the transition of students of color with disabilities from self-contained to inclusive classrooms. We conducted semi-structured interviews and used action plan meetings with school administrators, teachers, professionals and students with disabilities and their parents to assess the impact of our critical PDS model. Findings suggest this model had a positive impact on administrators’ and teachers’ critical consciousness, ideological and instructional practices, students of color with disabilities’ social, academic and personal outcomes, as well as a schoolwide culture of inclusion and social justice. This study can inform tailored professional development efforts to improve educators’ inclusive practices.

We conducted semi-structured interviews and used action plan meetings with school administrators, teachers, professionals and students with disabilities and their parents to assess the impact of our critical PDS model.

The findings of this study suggest this model had a positive impact on administrators’ and teachers’ critical consciousness, ideological and instructional practices, students of color with disabilities’ social, academic and personal outcomes, as well as a schoolwide culture of inclusion and social justice.

This study can inform tailored professional development efforts aiming to improve educators’ inclusive practices.

We developed a model of a critical PDS to promote inclusive education and facilitate the transition of students of color with disabilities from self-contained to inclusive classrooms.

It has been demonstrated that AI-powered, data-driven tools’ usage is not universal, but deeply linked to socio-cultural contexts. The purpose of this paper is to display the need of adopting situated lenses, relating to specific personal and professional learning about data protection and privacy.

The authors introduce the results of a case study based on a large educational intervention at a fully online university. The views of the participants from degrees representing different knowledge areas and contexts of technology adoption (work, education and leisure) were explored after engaging in the analysis of the terms and conditions of use about privacy and data usage. After consultation, 27 course instructors (CIs) integrated the activity and worked with 823 students (702 of whom were complete and correct for analytical purposes).

The results of this study indicated that the intervention increased privacy-conscious online behaviour among most participants. Results were more contradictory when looking at the tools’ daily usage, with overall positive considerations around the tools being mostly needed or “indispensable”.

Though appliable only to the authors’ case study and not generalisable, the authors’ results show both the complexity of privacy views and the presence of forms of renunciation in the trade-off between data protection and the need of using a specific software into a personal and professional context.

This study provides an example of teaching and learning activities that supports the development of data literacy, with a focus on data privacy. Therefore, beyond the research findings, any educator can build over the authors’ proposal to produce materials and interventions aimed at developing awareness on data privacy issues.

Developing awareness, understanding and skills relating to data privacy is crucial to live in a society where digital technologies are used in any area of our personal and professional life. Well-informed citizens will be able to obscure, resist or claim for their rights whenever a violation of their privacy takes place. Also, they will be able to support (through adoption) better quality apps and platforms, instead of passively accepting what is evident or easy to use.

The authors specifically spot how students and educators, as part of a specific learning and cultural ecosystem, need tailored opportunities to keep on reflecting on their degrees of freedom and their possibilities to act regarding evolving data systems and their alternatives.

The authors have carried out a research project on artisanal salt activity in the Gulf of Cadiz, providing a new vision of the theories of intangible cultural heritage. The main objective has been to characterise artisanal salt activity in terms of its cultural and sustainable values, a perspective that had not been addressed until now. Moreover, the replacement of this activity by a more industrialised one has contributed to problems in the preservation of this heritage and a transformation of its places.

The research has combined qualitative methodology, based on observation and fieldwork, with a statistical review of the phenomenon under study. Finally, the data has been triangulated to understand the heritage and sustainable value, as well as its historical evolution.

All this contributes to understanding the importance of artisanal salt activity as an element of the intangible cultural heritage of the region, for the conservation of biodiversity and sustainable ways of life in the marshes of the Gulf of Cadiz, and the possibility of preserving it in the face of the problems of globalisation.

To date, there has been no research that combines sustainability and heritage in the field of salt activity. Likewise, until this study was carried out, there had been no research on salt activity from the perspective of intangible cultural heritage.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical historical analysis of the business (mis)behaviors and influencing factors that discourage enduring cooperation between principals and agents, to introduce strategies that embrace the social values, economic motivation and institutional designs historically adopted to curtail dishonest acts in international business and to inform an improved principal–agent theory that reflects principal–agent reciprocity as shaped by social, political, cultural, economic, strategic and ideological forces

The critical historical research method is used to analyze Chinese compradors and the foreign companies they served in pre-1949 China.

Business practitioners can extend orthodox principal–agent theory by scrutinizing the complex interactions between local agents and foreign companies. Instead of agents pursuing their economic interests exclusively, as posited by principal–agent theory, they also may pursue principal-shared interests (as suggested by stewardship theory) because of social norms and cultural values that can affect business-related choices and the social bonds built between principals and agents.

The behaviors of compradors and foreign companies in pre-1949 China suggest international business practices for shaping social bonds between principals and agents and foreign principals’ creative efforts to enhance shared interests with local agents.

Understanding principal–agent theory’s limitations can help international management scholars and practitioners mitigate transaction partners’ dishonest acts.

A critical historical analysis of intermediary businesspeople’s (mis)behavior in pre-1949 (1840–1949) China can inform the generalizability of principal–agent theory and contemporary business strategies for minimizing agents’ dishonest acts.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

This paper aims to analyse the role of a network in the development of female business experiences through the study of the Industrie Femminili Italiane (I.F.I.) (Italian Women’s Cooperative Enterprise), founded in 1903 in Rome to promote women’s work and their economic conditions.

This study applies the embeddedness theory for women’s empowerment that provides a valuable lens to explore the interactions between female entrepreneurs and their social, cultural and economic contexts.

With this study, the authors found that the network structure was used at the beginning of the past century in Italy as a useful instrument for female emancipation and empowerment, extending to common/not exceptional women entrepreneurial opportunities otherwise reserved for rich and noble women. In the interplay among the different “contexts” (political, social, cultural and cognitive), it seems to emerge the incidence of female social relationships in facing an unfavourable political and cultural context, breaking out the norms and allowing the business to exist and influencing, with the activity of the high social standing women, the cognitive structure of the other female workers, make them active participants in this entrepreneurial activity.

This is a single case study that has shed light on a specific female network, and the authors’ findings and considerations are influenced by the shortage of data and sources available. Demonstrating that I.F.I. is the result of the collaboration of women from different social classes involved at different organisational levels, this work shows, from a historical perspective, the importance of female mutual support for their emancipation and the role played by the network structure as an amplifier of possibilities otherwise limited to rich women, the emancipation of women and minorities in countries characterised by important barriers to entrepreneurship.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper analysing a female entrepreneurial network from a historical point of view and its role in overcoming gender barriers within the analysis of the interplaying contexts.

The paper aims to provide a decision-support model to ensure a proper use of the limited resources, financial and not, for the enhancement of the cultural heritage and comprehensive development of small towns from sustainable perspective.

The assessment model is set up using a multi-criteria method that combines elements of linear planning with a performance indicators system that may represent the complexity of the territory’s cultural identity as a result of existing cultural-historical assets.

The model reliability is tested in a case study in a Municipality in southern Italy. The case study’s findings highlight the advantages for the public/private operators, who can consciously choose which preservation and restoration projects to fund while taking into account the effects those decisions will have on the economic, social and environmental context of reference.

Due to the suggested operational approach and the selection of variables for accounting economic, social and environmental impacts by the renewal project, the research findings may not be generalizable. Therefore, it is recommended that researchers look into the suggested theories in more detail.

The study offers implications for designing a user-friendly tool to help decision-making processes from a private–public viewpoint in a reasonable allocation of financial resources among investments for cultural property asset enhancement.

The suggested operational approach provides a reliable information apparatus to depict the decision-making process under small-town development in accordance with sustainability dimensions.

This study examines how informal business networks achieve marketing goals in socially uncertain contexts. Drawing from multiple historical sources, Shangbangs, a type of business network that thrived in pre-1949 China, are analyzed.

The Critical Historical Research Method (CHRM) undergirds a study of Shangbangs’ historicity (i.e. their socio-historically embedded multiplicity, including organizational forms, activities and connotations.

As informal regional, professional, project-based, special-product-based or mixed marketing networks, Shangbangs relied on “flexible specialization” and coupled multiple business needs to market goods and services, business organizations, specific social values and, when necessary, to debrand business rivals.

This analysis extends theories about marketing networks by probing their subtypes, diverse marketing activities, multipronged channels and relationship building with social entities (including underground societies, business associations and guilds) in response to pre-1949 China’s market uncertainties. Substantiating an alternative approach to “flexible specialization” and marketing innovations within the pre-1949 Chinese economy shows how a parallel theoretical framework can complement western-based marketing theories.

This first comprehensive analysis of Shangbangs, an innovative historical Chinese marketing network outside the conventional market-corporate dichotomy, can inform theory building for marketing strategy-making and management conditioned by social contexts.

This study aims to apply the appreciative inquiry approach (AI) to develop a tourism strategy for poverty alleviation in marginalised communities. The focus is to provide practical insights for leveraging tourism to drive positive socio-economic change for the impoverished, using Rosetta, a port city in Egypt with cultural and historical significance, as a case study.

This qualitative applied study uses the four-D phases of AI and thematic analysis to strategise tourism development in Rosetta. Through interviews, focus groups and field visits, the study identifies tourism potential, stakeholder aspirations and actionable strategies for sustainable development. The approach prioritises a bottom-up, community-centric and stakeholder-involved process, aiming for inclusive and equitable growth.

The study revealed Rosetta’s underutilised tourism potential, emphasising heritage tourism. Although tourism offers some economic benefits, its impact on alleviating poverty in Rosetta remains limited. A holistic strategy for tourism development in Rosetta is proposed for economic growth and poverty reduction, focusing on sustainable management, local empowerment, enhanced marketing, improved infrastructure and diversified tourism offerings.

While AI is not new in qualitative studies, the novelty of this study lies in its application to tourism planning for poverty alleviation in a marginalised community like Rosetta, introducing a comprehensive tourism strategy with an original framework applicable to comparable destinations. The study’s significance is emphasised by providing actionable strategies for policymakers, valuable insights for practitioners and enriching the discourse and methodology on pro-poor tourism for academics, representing a step towards filling the gap between theoretical concepts and practical strategies.