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The case and discussion questions posed will allow the instructors the opportunity to introduce critical strategic concepts from strategic, nonprofit management and social enterprise literature. Specifically, (1) strategic transformation: countering drift and anticipating future trends and crises; (2) types of leadership: transactional versus transformational; (3) hybridity and mission drift; and (4) nonprofit funding models, the starvation cycle and the overhead myth.

Both primary and secondary sources have been used to prepare the case. The first two authors had the opportunity to interview Thomas Tighe, Direct Relief’s (DR) President and CEO in July of 2019. The interview lasted one hour and was transcribed by one of the authors and reviewed by the other two authors for accuracy. In addition, the authors conducted nonparticipant observations in DR’s headquarters in Santa Barbara (California). Given the longevity and media exposure of the organization, extensive internal and external archival data was also available for the analysis.

This real and undisguised case is based on DR, a +70-year-old humanitarian $1.2bn nonprofit organization headquartered in California (USA). From its headquarters in Santa Barbara, DR responds to emergencies and delivers medical support for vulnerable people affected by poverty, natural disasters and civil unrest in all 50 US states, six US territories including Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands, and in more than 90 countries.

The case presents Thomas Tighe, DR’s President and CEO, reflecting in late 2018 on the transformation and growth that the organization had experienced since he started his tenure in 2000. Specifically, he is considering the most effective way to allocate an unrestricted recent cash donation. Should DR spend that money on traditional fundraising, reducing its efficiency rate, or should DR take a long-term approach and use the funds to build long-term capabilities? In addition, the case outlines the history and evolution of DR over its more than 70 years of existence, the CEO’s background and motivations, as well as a detailed description of the organization’s revenue portfolio. Students will have an opportunity to learn about a unique nonprofit named among “the world’s most non-for-profit organizations” by Fast Company; DR was also included in the Charity Navigator’s list of the “10 Best Charities Everyone’s Heard of.” In addition, in January 2009, DR was designated as a Verified-Accredited Distributor by The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, which placed it as the first nonprofit to receive this designation to deliver prescription medicines to all 50 US states. Throughout Tighe’s tenure, DR had been lauded for its fundraising efficiency. The unique distinction to DR’s efficiency is its tradition of adopting new technologies and modern business practices for humanitarian purposes.

Students will learn how DR, under the leadership of Thomas Tighe, reinvented and reinforced the organization’s traditions to retain high levels of efficiency in the face of an ever-larger organizational scale, public scrutiny and demand for humanitarian support across the world. Students will witness many strategic and operational tenets that they may be more familiar with from the for-profit world. The case also will help students to understand the concept of hybrid organizations and different nonprofit funding models.

The case has been written to be used in graduate Nonprofit Leadership Management and Social Entrepreneurship courses. Given the scope and implications, the case could also be used on an upper-level strategy course. To maximize students’ learning, the case should be introduced halfway into the course after students have a solid understanding of what nonprofits are and how they operate. If students are not familiar with some of the concepts introduced in the analysis, the proposed readings will prepare them for a more fruitful discussion.

The chapter focuses on the roles of different socio-economic indicators in explaining the convergence or inclusiveness of income across different income groups in the world. Econometric, statistical and mathematical tools have been used as methodology. As major results, overall greater role of socioeconomic factors of social sustainability (SS) than economic sustainability (ES), have been found. This have caused greater income inequality among these various income groups of the world, with income diverging among various groups of countries, mainly, within Principal Country Groups II, together with slight sign of income convergence among the rest Principal Country Groups I and III respectively. However, greater predominance of inclusiveness aspect of socio-economic factors of ES, is also found among the Groups I and III respectively, together with their significant roles in raising CHI. This may have led to the possibility of slight income convergence within these groups.

This study explores digital transformation in the tea supply chain within developing economies, with a focus on smallholder tea producers in Sri Lanka. Tea is one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world. Among the tea producers, smallholder tea producers account for a substantial portion of total tea production in several countries. Mobile phones play a significant role in providing smallholder producers with access to crucial agricultural information, markets and financial services.

This study adopts a deductive approach, analysing mobile phone ownership, literacy, experience and perception among smallholder tea producers. The chi-squared test of independence and hierarchical clustering methods were used to test the hypotheses and address the research questions.

The study identifies four clusters of smallholder tea producers as Basic Tech Adopters, Digital Laggards, Skeptical Feature Phone Users and Tech-savvy Adopters based on their characteristics towards mobile-based technologies. Approximately 75% of the surveyed sample, which included both tech-savvy and basic-tech adopters, showed a positive attitude toward adopting mobile-based agricultural technologies.

The study suggests developing targeted strategies and policies to enhance the productivity of the smallholder tea production process in developing economies. The study highlights the importance of awareness, access, affordability and availability when implementing digital services for businesses at the base of the pyramid, such as tea smallholdings in developing economies.

The present study aims to address the lack of data-driven empirical studies on the use of mobile phones in smallholder settings. The findings of this study enable the enhancement of entrepreneurship within the tea production supply chain, especially, within stakeholders who deliver digital transformation support services.

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a global initiative that is becoming increasingly important in the industrial and service sectors. This paper analyses how the SDGs are being implemented in the agrifood supply chain by social economy enterprises.

Case study methodology was used to understand how companies implement the SDGs. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with managers from two cooperatives in the agrifood sector.

There are no differences in the way that the SDGs are implemented by social economy enterprises involved in the food sector supply chain. Therefore, the SDG approach is an alternative that can be applied by food sector supply chain companies to achieve the sustainability favoured by the cooperative model.

The value of the present study lies in its analysis of the sustainability of the agrifood supply chain from an SDG-based approach that is more comprehensive than other commonly cited approaches in the academic literature.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of policy uncertainty on firm performance and to examine how the different cultural societies deal with the policy-induced uncertainty.

The authors use data of European non-financial firms to extend the growing literature on policy uncertainty, firm performance and national culture. The authors consider financial as well as market proxies to measure firm performance and use Hofstede's cultural dimensions as a proxy for national culture. The authors apply the generalized method of moments (GMM-system) regression technique on a dataset of 702 non-financial European firms, listed during the period 2002–2018.

The authors find overwhelming evidence that policy uncertainty reduces the performance of the European firms; however, cultural differences among different European countries moderate the impact of policy uncertainty on the financial as well as the market performance of the firms. The results of this study show that European cultures with high power distance, individualism, masculinity and indulgence efficiently deal with the economic policy uncertainty. While the European societies with high uncertainty avoidance fail to cope with policy-induced uncertainty. The results are robust to different regression models, alternate proxies of firm performance and endogeneity issues.

The authors argue that policy uncertainty increases information asymmetry and decreases firm performance, therefore, the policymakers shall be considerate of the consequences of the policy-induced uncertainty in the society and business arena that would not only adversely affect the firms but also the economy.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the role of national culture on the relationship between policy uncertainty and firm performance in the European context.

This paper examines the capital structure decisions of family firms in Southeast Asian (ASEAN) countries, considering the moderating effects of various firm-level and country-level factors.

The authors apply various panel data models to analyze the data of listed firms in six ASEAN countries over the period of 2007–2017.

The authors find that family firms tend to use more debt, particularly short-term debt, than non-family firms, which is explained by family owners' concern about the risk of losing control. The authors further document that family firms would use more debt when they have lower ownership concentration, have more family members on the board of directors and are young firms. The authors also find that the impact of family ownership on capital structure is moderated by the level of investors' legal protection of a country.

This study, for the first time, provides comprehensive analyses of the financing decisions of family firms in ASEAN using a unique hand-collected dataset, which highlights that regional culture and market conditions can shape family firms' financing decisions. The authors also manage to mitigate the endogeneity issues that pervade most research on family firms. In addition, this research further explores the heterogeneous impacts of family control on capital structure given different levels of board involvement, firm age, ownership concentration, and most importantly, institutional differences. Such insights provide useful information for prospective investors as well as regulators to make more efficient investment and legislative decisions.

Despite the popularity of the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) concept, research on its value-adding activities receives less attention. Thus, in this article, the authors investigate the role of EEs in supporting global value chain (GVC) activities.

The authors employ the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) technique to identify practical configurations of EE’s framework and systemic conditions spurring GVC activities in 80 countries.

The findings suggest different configurations of EE`s framework and systemic conditions necessary for various GVC activities regarding input-output structure, geographical scope, upgrading, and forward and backward participation.

This study contributes to the extant literature by pioneering the EE approach to explaining GVC development. Moreover, the findings provide novel insights for understanding the EE – GVC interplay. As a result, the study offers a more nuanced understanding of how the EE supports GVC activities.

Facility management (FM) is picking up steam in Turkey. However, delays in creating standards and adopting FM as a profession by corporate and public institutions led to an unusual predicament, unlike in Europe and the USA. The purpose of this study is to take an inductive and constructivist approach to explore the extent of maturity in the FM industry within Turkey.

Qualitative understanding of the complexity of the Turkish FM sector drives the design used in the study. All data has been collected through an in-depth interview and semi-structured questionnaire with FM stakeholders.

The findings revealed the perceptions of stakeholders working in various businesses and research institutions in Turkey, including FM organizations, supply markets and educational institutions, regarding the key challenges and opportunities in the business environment.

The trend on Turkish FM revealed a slow growth in FM professionalization, which needs the authority’s attention as the professionalization reduces the unemployment rate, reduces cost and enhances the life cycle of the physical property.

This is the first study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, on Turkish FM that provides comprehensive studies on Turkish FM professionalization trends to draw the attention of policymakers to the need to enact policies that would improve FM professionalism.

This paper aims to explore the impact of brand authenticity dimensions (i.e. aesthetic, symbolism, heritage, originality, quality commitment and virtue) on consumer engagement in the context of social media. This study answers to the need of scholars to understand consumer behaviour towards family and non-family firms’ brand authenticity constructs and for practitioners to find the correct levers to increase consumer engagement.

Top 10 European family firms with a retrievable Facebook (FB) page from the Global Family Business Index have been selected. Then, the study analysed family firms’ social media consumer engagement versus their non-family business direct competitors on a sample of 21.664 FB posts over a four-year period, leveraging multi-group analysis.

The results outline that three out of six brand authenticity dimensions posted on FB are statistically arousing more interactions respect to non-authenticity-related contents when posted by family firms. However, there are no statistically significant findings when brand authenticity content is posted by the non-family competitors.

This research is helpful for practitioners and entrepreneurs who might want to strengthen their social media brand strategies. With this regard, the study provides insights on which elements of brand authenticity are perceived by consumers as more engaging and which levers to use when communicating the familiness of the company.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is one of the earliest studies crosscutting the family business and brand authenticity literature streams to conduct an empirical analysis based on official FB data with a data set of over 20,000 observations. Moreover, this study assesses that not every dimension of the brand authenticity construct is relevant in the context of social media and that its effectiveness depends on the firms’ familiness.

The close link between fashion and from a historical and sociological point of view is the focus of this chapter. Since the Industrial Revolution, these two industries have been part of the path toward modernity in Western Europe. The new industrial society created a different relationship with leisure time and bodies. On the other hand, fashion tourism accelerated and intensified this process toward unforeseen outcomes: new social relations and the loosening of traditional morality constraints. The swimming costume represents the point of encounter and overlapping between these two spheres: a significant element of novelty despite its ever-shrinking dimensions.