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Given declining tuition funds and government grants, Kenyan universities need to develop strategies, including increased research grants and collaborations, to diversify their income sources. Well-managed doctoral students can boost a university’s teaching and research outputs. However, numbers of students enrolled in doctoral programmes at Kenyan universities are low, and graduation rates and time-to-graduate statistics are disturbing. Research undertaken elsewhere underline the important role played by supervisors and peers in facilitating students’ sense of belonging and their success. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the influence of supervisory and peer support on PhD students’ sense of belonging and their success at Kenyan universities.

In this cross-sectional study, data were gathered through an online questionnaire from 614 students admitted to doctoral programmes at Kenyan universities between 2010 and 2018. We used multi-item scales to collect data on PhD students’ self-efficacy, supervisory and peer support and a sense of belonging.

Structural equation modelling results revealed that PhD students’ modes of study and self-efficacy were significantly associated with the quality of supervision, peer support and a sense of belonging. However, only age, a sense of belonging and the quality of supervision were directly linked to their success.

This study contributes to the literature on doctoral-level education, responding to the need for research on the influence of relationships with supervisors and peers on PhD students’ sense of belonging and their success, especially in developing countries.

This study aims to explore the constructs of spirituality (SP) and entrepreneurial performance (EP) and their measurements to identify their connections. Attending to the needs of entrepreneurs to face the current global crisis, this research establishes a framework that integrates SP to enhance EP.

This study focuses on a comprehensive literature review and a comparison between constructs to come across with the proposal of a conceptual framework.

For SP, spiritual well-being was found as a good measure which, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, has never been used in entrepreneurship. EP has been typically measured by economic indicators, but recently, noneconomic benefits and effects on stakeholders have also been considered, so an integrated approach is proposed. The main contribution is a framework called holistic entrepreneurial inventory (HEI), which integrates the main elements of the constructs in a matrix showing their interconnection. It is accompanied by a scorecard for entrepreneurs to identify strengths and weaknesses in SP and EP.

This is a theoretical research and proposal; further empirical research could help confirm the present conceptual findings.

To help entrepreneurs identify the areas where they would like to improve, understanding the connection between SP and EP, which are dynamic states in constant change.

EP has been mainly focused on exogenous causes. The HEI scorecard may give entrepreneurs a different perspective from the innermost part of their being.

With the goal of helping consumers bounce back from the financial challenges they faced as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many firms developed and announced consumer-targeted resiliency programs (e.g. Walgreens waived delivery fees, Associated Bank allowed deferred mortgage payments). However, there is a paucity of research examining the unique features of these programs, and whether firms' investors (the first external stakeholder group to provide them with feedback regarding their strategies) were receptive to these programs during a period of time in which firms themselves were suffering financially. Drawing on resilience theory and stakeholder theory, the present research incorporates an event study of consumer-targeted resiliency program announcements to understand their financial implications for firms, and to learn whether firms witnessed different financial effects as a result of firm- and program-specific factors.

This study referred to business news publications and newswire services to collect a comprehensive list of consumer-targeted resiliency programs announced by publicly traded U.S. firms during the pandemic. The resulting dataset consisted of 145 announcements made during the period of February–June 2020. An event study was conducted in order to precisely measure the main effect of consumer-targeted resiliency programs on firm value, as manifested through abnormal stock returns. Finally, a moderation analysis (regression) was conducted to uncover whether firm characteristics or specific features of firms' consumer-targeted resiliency programs lead certain firms to witness stronger financial effects than others.

The main effect of consumer-targeted resiliency programs on firm value was found to be positive – a 1.9% increase on average. The moderation analysis finds that non-financial firms were rewarded more positively than financial firms (e.g. banks and credit card companies). In addition, financial aid (i.e. allowing customers to defer their payments to a firm for its products/services, versus a reduction in the price of a product/service or offering it for free or giving cash back to customers) and temporal characteristics (i.e. an offer being framed as limited-time, vs being indefinite or for the foreseeable future) are not found to have a moderating effect.

This theory-driven empirical study uncovers practical implications for managers of firms interested in whether investing in corporate social responsibility during times of crisis is a wise allocation of resources. Any form of financial aid for consumers, regardless of temporal limitations, is received positively by investors.

The circular economy (CE) has been endorsed as representing a model that is able to achieve environmental protection through decreased use of raw materials, together with changing economic values and social inclusion thanks to its demand for a wide variety of skill profiles. This has motivated many policy initiatives to support the implementation of the CE. The purpose of this study is to follow such policy initiatives in three geographically anchored industry-specific networks.

The study contributes to the research debate on the CE through a spatial approach with a focus on how the implementation of the CE is conditioned by spatial and regional contexts. The authors investigate three different networks in Sweden for CE with different locations and industrial profiles.

The findings reveal the difficulty that exist in relation to the implementation of the CE. The network and support functions in combination with private industry are vital. The risk of sustaining an uneven regional economic development is evident.

Although research on the development of the CE has proliferated, geographical approaches to this development are comparably rare to date. The authors seek to contextualise the strategy development and policy implementation of a CE policy.