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Little is known regarding joiners (i.e. early-stage non-founder entrepreneurial employees) and their commitment to joining a new venture vs pursuing a more rational and stable career path. The purpose of this paper is to bring an understanding to this phenomenon, while adding to various management theories of organizational commitment and entrepreneurship.

The authors examine how current employment situations and alternative job prospects impact the relationship between joiner perceptions of distributive justice and organizational commitment by utilizing the equity ownership distribution decided upon by the founding team. The hypotheses are tested using data gathered from 117 joiners.

The findings confirm for traditional organizational research, a positive relationship exists, even in a new venture context, between perceptions of distributive justice and organizational commitment. However, when joiners report having a second (or primary) job, in addition to the new venture, the direct relationship is weakened. In contrast, higher levels of alternative employment options strengthen the relationship between justice and commitment.

Although the authors’ measure of employment options only included a single-item measure, there is precedent in the literature for this approach. Yet, the authors realize this remains a limitation due to the lack of additional information surrounding each joiner’s “other job” characteristics, such as tenure, title, and salary.

Perceptions of fairness and justice appear to provide valuable implications for founders concerned about organizational commitment and employee buy-in when seeking to bring on joiners. Job alternatives and additional employment also provide interesting takeaways for practitioners. The authors suggest that founders take caution when hiring joiners, who have a second (or primary) job, in addition to working for the new venture. Levels of commitment will likely be reduced, to the possible detriment of the new venture.

Although the baseline hypothesis exists in prior literature with respect to established firms, it has not been tested in a new venture context. Furthermore, prior studies within the entrepreneurship literature have yet to examine these issues from the perspective of the joiner and certainly have not taken into account additional employment and employment prospects among these individuals.

This paper brings in relevant entrepreneurial behavior theory to understand the ownership decisions founders make during the nascent stage of new venture creation, and how such decisions impact the viability of the firm.

The authors examine the behavior and decision making of 137 lead founders during the nascent stage of new venture creation. Psychological ownership and environmental uncertainty are measured of lead founders when dividing up firm ownership among the founding team. Using a longitudinal approach, these nascent-stage decisions are then analyzed to understand the impact on the new venture one year later.

Counter to prior research suggesting teams are better off with identical wages and ownership, the authors find such harmony (i.e. “kumbaya”) pursuit to be a detriment to new venture emergence. Specifically, this study finds that nascent ventures are better off with an unequal ownership split among the founding team members. These findings suggest that nascent firms with an unequal split are more likely to move beyond the nascent stage and launch a functional business.

Although the results of this study offer a valuable contribution to lead founders and new businesses, the study looked at each startup independent of another and is therefore not able to draw any conclusions related to competitiveness.

Lead founders and founding teams frequently divide ownership evenly among the founders. This paper shows that, while convenient, the decision to divide ownership equally can hamper a nascent firm as it moves toward the launch phase of the startup process. These results should motivate founders to think deeply regarding the ownership structure decision and, at the very least, consider the possible negative costs associated with the pursuit of founding team unity.

While scholars have brought attention to the nascent stage, few have identified and analyzed the decisions that take place during this critical time of the new venture development process. Furthermore, even is less is known of the impact nascent decisions have on startup launch. This study sheds light on these areas.

Tabulates the numbers of internet users in various countries and assesses the size of the e‐commerce economy in the USA. Discusses the reasons why consumers use the internet, the issues of customer service and product delivery/return, what they buy online and how their concerns over privacy and security might be solved. Notes that business‐to‐business e‐commerce still accounts for most online transactions, predicts continued growth in this area and looks at the use of both intranets and extranets. Briefly considers various technical and other aspects of the internet’s future and sees it as impossible to ignore but warns that not all types of business can be successful online.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and understand the contemporary management of electronic identification (e-ID) development to: identify and formulate challenges and reflect upon the use of a combination of perspectives. To generate knowledge on this issue, we investigate e-ID development in Sweden from: an e-government systems development lifecycle perspective and a project challenge and critical success factor (CSF) perspective.

This is a qualitative case study covering an analysis of the three years in a larger project focusing e-ID in a public e-service setting. Empirical sources have been face-to-face interviews; official documents and different kind of forums for presentations and discussions in, for example, hearings arranged by authorities; meetings with the coordinating agency, and practitioners’ networks events.

This study concludes that there are significant challenges involved in managing e-ID development because of its contextual and integrated character. Challenges involve the organization and management of the program and can be traced back to e-government, general project management literature and theory on path dependency. Based on this study, we can question, e.g. governance models, centralization and a narrow focus on the technical artefact. Our study is also an illustration of a possible way to analyse e-ID within an e-government initiative.

The present study shows that an e-ID can be considered as a back office-enabler for launching e-services, but also highlights the need for management of the artefact as an integral part of e-service development because it is intertwined with the use of e-services from a user perspective. This aspect together with the insights related to challenges and success factors including path dependency provides implications for future practice of e-ID management and development in particular and information systems artefact development in general.

This paper addresses challenges related to the development of e-ID in a public e-service setting. Few studies have theoretically combined a lifecycle perspective on challenges and success factors related to e-ID development while also focusing different dimensions of path dependency as an example of a challenging area within a program frame. Studying e-ID as a contemporary phenomenon from a contextual perspective in line with sociomaterial thinking – with a focus on the interplay between technology and people –can also help us to understand and discuss artefact development in general.

Demographic and health surveys in the Philippines have shown a rise in cohabitation among young people. This chapter aims to provide an in-depth sociological understanding of a more specific phenomenon called serial cohabitation – referring to the dissolution of current cohabitation and entering a new one, and the continuation of the cycle if the new one ends again. By developing the framework of undisplaying and re-displaying family from Janet Finch’s displaying family, this study posits that serial cohabiters experience a cycle of wanting to display an ideal family and having to undisplay every time the dissolution of the cohabiting relationship happens. This study demonstrates how serial cohabiters with children, in response to social stigma, exhibit resiliency toward stepfamily formation and committed sexual relationships. This chapter, therefore, conceptualizes “family acceptance” which refers to embracing the fluidity, reconfigurations, and “imperfections” of their newly formed family and “community acceptance” which covers the same affirmation from friends, neighbors, and extended relatives who are considered as relevant others by serial cohabiters. Family acceptance comes in three forms: first is the acceptance of/by children, second is the acceptance by the parents to the repeated stepfamily formation within their own homes, and third is the acceptance of the woman herself to the possibility that cohabitation is the “happy ever after.” This study argues that once these forms are achieved, serial cohabiters become more capable of undisplaying their previous family and displaying their new family.

Structural factors are central to demographic theories in trying to explain the ups and downs in fertility. In scientific debates two perspectives have often been confronted, one in which the economy is seen as the driving force of change, the other in which culture and new ideas are emphasised. Whether changes in the value of children are driven by economic or cultural factors can be difficult to disentangle. The theory of the demographic transition is a starting point.