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The article investigates whether and to what extent outsiderness is gendered in Western Europe, both in terms of its spread and degree. It thus explores which male and female post-Fordist social classes are more exposed to the risk of this phenomenon. It also scrutinizes whether such a gendered characterization has varied over time and across clusters of Western European countries.

Relying on a comparative analysis of the data provided by the European Social Survey (ESS) dataset and comparing two points in time – the early/mid-2000s and the late 2010s – the work provides both a dichotomous and continuous variable of outsiderness, which measure its spread and degree in the female and male workforces of a pooled set of growth models.

The empirical analysis shows that outsiderness is profoundly gendered in Western Europe and thus a feminized social phenomenon. However, the comparative investigation highlights that outsiderness has been genderized in diverse ways across the four growth models. Different patterns of gendered outsiderness can be identified.

The article provides a comparative and diachronic analysis of outsiderness from a gender lens, putting into a mutual dialogue different literature on labour market, and shows that outsiderness represents a key analytical dimension for assessing gender inequalities.

At the beginning of the 21st century, a new class of information workers, the “information have-less” has risen. This class of workers alleviates the influence of information and communication technologies (ICTs) revolution on poverty and unemployment. The purpose of this study is to investigate the presence of this class of workers in Egypt and assess the size and potential growth of this category of workers.

The study clarifies the conceptual framework of the new division of labor, in the information age. The Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and Information and Decision Support Center websites provided secondary data for this study. These data are used to assess the size of “the information have less” in Egypt.

The division of work and class, in the 21st century, depends on the level of skills possessed to work with ICTs. So, class and labor nowadays could be divided into self-programmable labor (Innovators). Information have-less labor class, adding value to the economy by learning skills and presenting repetitive work. Generic labor class, who cannot work with ICTs, and work in jobs, that do not need computers or other ICTs. The study has shown that the “information have-less” labor class is present in Egypt since the beginning of the 21st century, in all its categories; entrepreneurism, the service sector and the manufacturing sector. There are approximately 50% of this labor class in the service sector and only 13% of the information have-less works in manufacturing sector despite the great opportunities that Egypt has to expand manufacturing to absorb more employment. The inclusion of information technology (IT), in all domains, has not decreased employment in Western countries but has reallocated information have-less employment toward the service sector, and there would probably be the same effect in Egypt.

The study highlights the need for Egyptian policymakers to encourage the manufacturing and service sectors to provide huge working opportunities. The Egyptian government has to change the educational policies, at all stages, to include digital learning skills so IT can be incorporated in a wide range of economic activities. Further research includes: conducting a survey to measure the contribution of the entrepreneurial part of the information have-less employment in Egypt. In addition, a model may be developed, by the researcher to examine the reallocation of employees in Egypt.

Studying employment, in Egypt, using the conceptual framework of the information age is rarely being done.

This work aims to offer a better understanding of the inevitable challenges related to the digital transformation in the family-owned low-tech SMEs, examining the role assumed by familiness in this specific context. To this end, it examines the main factors that influence the adoption and implementation of digital technologies in the family-owned low-tech SMEs.

The study uses a multiple case studies approach, by investigating the case of family-owned low-tech SMEs operating in the winery sector and located in the South-Italy area.

Based on the empirical evidence, findings show how familiness influence the digital transformation of family-owned SMEs and highlight three main factors – individual, process and organization – relevant for the introduction and use of digital technologies in the productive and innovative activities of these organizations.

This paper fills the research gap existing in the literature on the family business. Firstly, it focuses on the digital transformation phenomenon and underlines how familiness, within family-owned low-tech SMEs, can differently influence the firm's innovation processes primarly based on the use of digital technologies oriented to enable business improvements. Then, it identifies diverse dimensions that can act as “barriers” or “facilitators” for adopting advanced digital technologies within the organizations here examined.

Stakeholder theory understands business in terms of relationships among stakeholders whose interests are mainly joint but may be occasionally conflicting. In the latter case, managers may need to make trade-offs between these interests. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of managerial decision-making about these trade-offs.

This paper draws on the ordonomic approach which sees business life to be rife with social dilemmas and locates the role of stakeholders in harnessing or resolving these dilemmas through engagement in rule-finding and rule-setting processes.

The ordonomic approach suggests that stakeholder interests trade-offs ought to be neither ignored nor avoided, but rather embraced and welcomed as an opportunity for bringing to fruition the joint interest of stakeholders in playing a better game of business. Stakeholders are shown to bear responsibility for overcoming the perceived trade-offs through the institutional management of social dilemmas.

For many stakeholder theorists, the nature of managerial decision-making about trade-offs between conflicting stakeholder interests and the nature of trade-offs themselves have been a long-standing point of contention. The paper shows that trade-offs may be useful for the value creation process and explicitly discusses managerial strategies for dealing with them.

The purpose of this article is to explore how agency is distributed between human actors and nonhuman elements in entrepreneurship.

It is based on an inductive longitudinal case study of a garden in a rural community in northern Sweden. The methodology includes an ethnography of the garden, spanning the course of 16 years, and a careful investigation of the entrepreneurial processes contained within it.

This article identifies and describes different practices to explain how agency is distributed between human actors and nonhuman elements in the garden's context. Three different practices were identified and discussed, namely “calling”, “resisting”, and “provoking”.

Agency/structure constitutes a longstanding conundrum in entrepreneurship and context. This study contributes to the on-going debate on context in entrepreneurship, and introduces a posthumanist perspective—particularly that of distributed agency—to theorising in entrepreneurship. Rather than focussing on a human (hero)-driven change process, induced through the exploitation of material objects, this novel perspective views entrepreneurship as both a human and a nonhuman venture, occurring through interactions located in particular places and times. Coming from the agency/structure dichotomy, this article reaches out for elements traditionally established on the structure side, distributing them to the agency side of the dichotomy. As such, it contributes to an understanding of the agency of nonhuman elements, and how they direct entrepreneurship in context. This theoretical development prepares entrepreneurship theories to be better able to engage with nonhuman elements and provides example solutions for the ongoing climate crisis.

Like several of its neighbouring countries, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has seen a move away from an oil-based economy towards a knowledge-based economy in recent decades. Research productivity in the Kingdom is increasing quickly along with international collaborations. Nonetheless, postgraduate research at universities in KSA is a relatively young domain, which certainly is a core factor in the evolving research management structures in the country.

Going forward, increased openness in research, along with continuing significant investment into higher education and research both by the government and the strong private sector points to a need for refined research governance and policy frameworks with designated expert research management staff developing and facilitating the underlying processes to enable Saudi institutions to engage at the forefront of academic research.

The debate on digitalization in the public relations (PR) literature has fragmented considerably over the past decade because of its focus on upcoming media-technological innovations, required professional skills and management concepts. Yet the field has difficulties in developing an integrative perspective on the implications of digitalization as a broader socio-technological transformation with a balanced consideration of prospects and risks.

This paper proposes an integrative perspective that focuses more on the enduring imaginaries of how digitalization can transform society for better or worse. It traces the historical roots of five imaginaries of digitalization, which have already emerged over the past century yet have experienced a significant revival and popularization in the current debate. Based on these five imaginaries, the authors performed a narrative literature review of the digitalization debate in 10 leading PR journals from 2010 to 2022.

The five imaginaries allow for a systematization of the fragmented digitalization debate in the field, reconstructing recurrent narratives, prospects and risks.

The originality of this contribution lies in its reconstructive approach, tracing societal imaginaries of digitalization and their impact on the current disciplinary debate. This approach provides context for a balanced assessment of and engagement with upcoming, increasingly fragmented digital advancements in PR research and practice.