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1 – 10 of 60Andrea Lučić and Marija Uzelac
This study aims to explore possible behavioural change venues, beyond the traditional approach to financial education, using the capability-opportunity-motivation behaviour…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to explore possible behavioural change venues, beyond the traditional approach to financial education, using the capability-opportunity-motivation behaviour theoretical framework of behavioural change.
Design/methodology/approach
The study included 45, semi-structured, in-depth interviews of young adults to explore which elements of financial behaviour formation should interventions target to be effective.
Findings
To strengthen capability, the study recommends behavioural education and training for boosting financial knowledge and skills, enablement of financial independence and modelling for empowering self-control and reducing impulsiveness. To boost motivation, gamification of modelling is advised for boosting responsible financial behaviour as part of the identity and inducing consideration of future consequences. Persuasion is advised for inducing positive emotions while incentivization and coercion are advised for empowering self-conscious intentions. To rise opportunity, the study proposes incentivization and coercion imposed by parents, and governmental efforts regarding restriction, enablement and environmental restructuring.
Practical implications
The study brings recommendations for developing efficient interventions for strengthening responsible financial behaviour that may help design type-specific education programmes to promote responsible financial behaviour.
Originality/value
The present study attempts to explore new venues in intervention design that break away from the traditional approach of financial education focused on knowledge and skills that is proven to be ineffective
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Eyad Buhulaiga and Arnesh Telukdarie
Multinational business deliver value via multiple sites with similar operational capacities. The age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) delivers significant opportunities…
Abstract
Purpose
Multinational business deliver value via multiple sites with similar operational capacities. The age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) delivers significant opportunities for the deployment of digital tools for business optimization. Therefore, this study aims to study the Industry 4.0 implementation for multinationals.
Design/methodology/approach
The key objective of this research is multi-site systems integration using a reproducible, modular and standardized “Cyber Physical System (CPS) as-a-Service”.
Findings
A best practice reference architecture is adopted to guide the design and delivery of a pioneering CPS multi-site deployment. The CPS deployed is a cloud-based platform adopted to enable all manufacturing areas within a multinational energy and petrochemical company. A methodology is developed to quantify the system environmental and sustainability benefits focusing on reduced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and energy consumption. These results demonstrate the benefits of standardization, replication and digital enablement for multinational businesses.
Originality/value
The research illustrates the ability to design a single system, reproducible for multiple sites. This research also illustrates the beneficial impact of system reuse due to reduced environmental impact from lower CO2 emissions and energy consumption. The paper assists organizations in deploying complex systems while addressing multinational systems implementation constraints and standardization.
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Samuel Heuchert, Bhaskar Prasad Rimal, Martin Reisslein and Yong Wang
Major public cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure or Google, offer seamless experiences for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a…
Abstract
Purpose
Major public cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure or Google, offer seamless experiences for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). With the emergence of the public cloud's vast usage, administrators must be able to have a reliable method to provide the seamless experience that a public cloud offers on a smaller scale, such as a private cloud. When a smaller deployment or a private cloud is needed, OpenStack can meet the goals without increasing cost or sacrificing data control.
Design/methodology/approach
To demonstrate these enablement goals of resiliency and elasticity in IaaS and PaaS, the authors design a private distributed system cloud platform using OpenStack and its core services of Nova, Swift, Cinder, Neutron, Keystone, Horizon and Glance on a five-node deployment.
Findings
Through the demonstration of dynamically adding an IaaS node, pushing the deployment to its physical and logical limits, and eventually crashing the deployment, this paper shows how the PackStack utility facilitates the provisioning of an elastic and resilient OpenStack-based IaaS platform that can be used in production if the deployment is kept within designated boundaries.
Originality/value
The authors adopt the multinode-capable PackStack utility in favor of an all-in-one OpenStack build for a true demonstration of resiliency, elasticity and scalability in a small-scale IaaS. An all-in-one deployment is generally used for proof-of-concept deployments and is not easily scaled in production across multiple nodes. The authors demonstrate that combining PackStack with the multi-node design is suitable for smaller-scale production IaaS and PaaS deployments.
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Umarani Muthukrishnan and Som Sekhar Bhattacharyya
The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that drive superior social enterprise performance for women-led social enterprises. The authors examined the role of individual…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that drive superior social enterprise performance for women-led social enterprises. The authors examined the role of individual entrepreneur cognitive characteristics contributing to social enterprise performance and recommended a framework for women's social entrepreneur development.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted an exploratory qualitative study of 22 women founders of social enterprises using a semi-structured questionnaire. In-depth interviews were conducted, and the transcripts were analyzed using thematic content analysis.
Findings
This study found a significant impact of self-efficacy on the performance of social enterprises among the studied subjects. Social support in the form of material, information and emotional support enhanced the ability of women social entrepreneurs to better achieve business sustenance and continuance of operations. The business skills of the women social entrepreneurs led them to move from just social impact generators to becoming thought leaders. The strong prosocial motivation of the founders contributed to building their resilience in the face of adversity.
Research limitations/implications
This study extended the existing theories on social entrepreneurship by bringing the dimensions of entrepreneurial resilience in driving social enterprise performance along with business skills. Thus, it provided an enhanced explanation to the existing body of knowledge on contributors to superior social enterprise performance.
Practical implications
This study gathered insights into the role of entrepreneurship education focused on business skills, especially for women social entrepreneurs in achieving superior performance for their social ventures. This also reconfirmed the role of social support and how structurally this could be provided by educational systems to aspiring women social entrepreneurs.
Social implications
The practice of social entrepreneurship by women social entrepreneurs has been growing. Its importance in developing economies because of its ability to make grassroots changes at the lower levels of society was substantive. Women have shown more inclination toward social business with an affinity for prosocial contribution. By focusing on nurturing these social enterprises, governments as well as global agencies like the United Nations and the World Economic Forum could accelerate social change. Furthermore, support for the current women social entrepreneurs as change-makers making a difference in society could be achieved.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research study was one of the first studies on women social entrepreneurs focusing on the factors of self-efficacy, social support and entrepreneurial resilience contributing to social enterprise performance. This study combined the social entrepreneurship intention theory with entrepreneurial resilience and business skills to understand the factors leading to successful social enterprise performance for women social entrepreneurs.
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The purpose of this paper is to develop a multistakeholder scale for assessing an excellent human resource (HR) function to demonstrate the extent to which it is focused on…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop a multistakeholder scale for assessing an excellent human resource (HR) function to demonstrate the extent to which it is focused on creating value from the perspective of its key internal and external stakeholders.
Design/methodology/approach
At the first stage, an in-depth literature review was conducted to extract the best practices for an excellent HR function. Then, to test the validation of the developed framework, it was sent to HR academics and practitioners in different countries. The survey responses were analyzed using the methods of the structural equation modeling (SEM) and confirmatory factorial analysis.
Findings
This study proposes an excellent HR multistakeholder assessment scale consisting of ten criteria based on the perceptions of internal and external HR stakeholders.
Research limitations/implications
This study suggests a framework for assessing overall HR excellence based on the perceptions of key internal and external HR stakeholders. In addition, it is recommended that future researchers empirically test the developed scale across various industries and firm sizes.
Practical implications
HR managers, by using this framework, could continuously assess their HR excellence and compare their HR excellence with other companies’ HR excellence in the industry and then plan for continuous improvement in different HR areas to improve their stakeholders’ experiences.
Originality/value
This paper identifies the enablers and results of an excellent HR department and designs a multistakeholder feedback scale to better understand key internal and external HR stakeholders’ perceptions.
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Yongchao Martin Ma, Xin Dai and Zhongzhun Deng
The purpose of this study is to investigate consumers' emotional responses to artificial intelligence (AI) defeating people. Meanwhile, the authors investigate the negative…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate consumers' emotional responses to artificial intelligence (AI) defeating people. Meanwhile, the authors investigate the negative spillover effect of AI defeating people on consumers' attitudes toward AI companies. The authors also try to alleviate this spillover effect.
Design/methodology/approach
Using four studies to test the hypotheses. In Study 1, the authors use the fine-tuned Bidirectional Encoder Representations from the Transformers algorithm to run a sentiment analysis to investigate how AI defeating people influences consumers' emotions. In Studies 2 to 4, the authors test the effect of AI defeating people on consumers' attitudes, the mediating effect of negative emotions and the moderating effect of different intentions.
Findings
The authors find that AI defeating people increases consumers' negative emotions. In terms of downstream consequences, AI defeating people induces a spillover effect on consumers' unfavorable attitudes toward AI companies. Emphasizing the intention of helping people can effectively mitigate this negative spillover effect.
Practical implications
The authors' findings remind governments, policymakers and AI companies to pay attention to the negative effect of AI defeating people and take reasonable steps to alleviate this negative effect. The authors help consumers rationally understand this phenomenon and correctly control and reduce unnecessary negative emotions in the AI era.
Originality/value
This paper is the first study to examine the adverse effects of AI defeating humans. The authors contribute to research on the dark side of AI, the outcomes of competition matches and the method to analyze emotions in user-generated content (UGC).
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Alfred Austin Farrell, James Ashton, Witness Mapanga, Maureen Joffe, Nombulelo Chitha, Mags Beksinska, Wezile Chitha, Ashraf Coovadia, Clare L. Cutland, Robin L. Drennan, Kathleen Kahn, Lizette L. Koekemoer, Lisa K. Micklesfield, Jacqui Miot, Julian Naidoo, Maria Papathanasopoulos, Warrick Sive, Jenni Smit, Stephen M. Tollman, Martin G. Veller, Lisa J. Ware, Jeffrey Wing and Shane A. Norris
This study aims to ascertain the personal characteristics of a group of successful academic entrepreneurs in a South African university enterprise and the prevalent barriers and…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to ascertain the personal characteristics of a group of successful academic entrepreneurs in a South African university enterprise and the prevalent barriers and enablers to their entrepreneurial endeavour.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors used a Delphi process to identify and rank the characteristics, enablers, barriers and behaviours of entrepreneurial academics, with a Nominal Group Technique applied to establish challenges they encounter managing their enterprise and to propose solutions.
Findings
Perseverance, resilience and innovation are critical personal characteristics, while collaborative networks, efficient research infrastructure and established research competence are essential for success. The university’s support for entrepreneurship is a significant enabler, with unnecessary bureaucracy and poor access to project and general enterprise funding an impediment. Successful academic entrepreneurs have strong leadership, and effective management and communication skills.
Research limitations/implications
The main limitation is the small study participant group drawn from a single university enterprise, which complicates generalisability. The study supported the use of Krueger’s (2009) entrepreneurial intentions model for low- and middle-income country (LMIC) academic entrepreneur investigation but proposed the inclusion of mitigators to entrepreneurial activation to recognise contextual deficiencies and challenges.
Practical implications
Skills-deficient LMIC universities should extensively and directly support their entrepreneurial academics to overcome their contextual deficiencies and challenging environment.
Originality/value
This study contributes to addressing the paucity of academic entrepreneur research in LMIC contexts by identifying LMIC-specific factors that inhibit the entrepreneur’s movement from entrepreneurial intention to entrepreneurial action.
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Rishi Kappal and Dharmesh K. Mishra
Executive isolation, also known as workplace loneliness, its factors and impact are major issues for organizational development, future of work for leadership and learning…
Abstract
Purpose
Executive isolation, also known as workplace loneliness, its factors and impact are major issues for organizational development, future of work for leadership and learning culture. The purpose of this study is to examine the Executive isolation phenomenon where relationships between power distance, organizational culture and executive isolation of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) are analysed on how it is considered by their teams. The same is contextualized through the inputs received through interviews conducted with CEOs and employee surveys.
Design/methodology/approach
The qualitative in-depth interviews of five CEOs, and survey across 34 of the 50 employees, were undertaken over the course of two phases of this study. The investigation focused on identifying executive isolation of CEOs and perspectives of employees that can impact the leadership and learning progress of organizations based on work culture, power distance and decision-making; awareness and experience of executive isolation; workplace friendliness and rejection; and management development initiatives to minimize the impact of executive isolation. Qualitative data analysis was conducted using MAXQDA 2022 (Verbi Software, Berlin, Germany), which is a qualitative data analysis software.
Findings
The findings highlight and expose the significant gap between understanding and analysing of the factors due to which the CEOs undergo executive isolation. It also extends to providing details related to the lack of awareness of the teams’ actions contributing to the CEOs’ isolation. It further highlights the fact that the difference of perspectives between the CEOs and teams leads to the organization slowing in its learning activities due to the leaders’ own challenges of executive isolation The findings also provide immense need of developing knowledge assets and management development initiatives for learning interventions, to help understand, analyse and mitigate executive isolation, in the interest of the organizational learning and development.
Originality/value
Earlier research work have contextualized the executive isolation impact on CEOs ability to be a leader. This study extends it to include the implications of leadership and learning culture on the teams that are affected by organization culture, power distance, decision-making and analysing the gap between the understandings about executive isolation of the CEOs. Eventually, it interprets how CEOs courting the executive isolation impacts the overall developmental culture of the organization. This will help in asserting the serious need of new learning frameworks needed to minimize the impact of CEO-level executive isolation.
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Nichapa Phraknoi, Mark Stevenson and Meng Jia
The purpose of this study is to define and investigate the governance requirements of supply chain finance (SCF).
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to define and investigate the governance requirements of supply chain finance (SCF).
Design/methodology/approach
A qualitative analysis of 849 news articles published in UK newspapers (2000–2022) using the Gioia method.
Findings
SCF governance relies on developing capacities for reflexive scrutiny at two stages: (1) prior to entering into an SCF relationship and (2) during its operation. Based on the notion of SCF as a complex adaptive system, we theorise SCF governance requirements as a dual-layered semipermeable boundary. The semipermeability of the two layers allows for a dynamic exchange between the SCF system and its environment. The first layer is the capacity to selectively enable or control the entry and access of certain actors and practices into the SCF system. The second layer is a capacity for ongoing scrutiny of the SCF operation and its development. Further, we identify five aspects of governance to be enabled, i.e. enhancing adaptability, building confidence, improving efficiency, advancing technology and promoting transparency; and four aspects to be controlled, i.e. preventing abuse of power, curbing fraud risk, constraining operational risk and restricting risky extensions to SCF practices.
Practical implications
Our dynamic framework can guide supply chain (SC) members in making decisions about whether to participate, or continue to operate, in an SCF relationship. Moreover, the findings have implications for policymakers and authorities who oversee entry/access and the involvement of SCF providers, particularly, fintech firms.
Originality/value
The study contributes to both the SC and governance literature by providing a systematic analysis of what SCF governance has to accomplish. Our novel contribution lies in its analysis of SCF governance based on a complex adaptive system approach, which expands the existing literature where SCF is described in rather static terms. More specifically, it suggests a need for a dynamic duality of SCF governance through the semipermeable boundary that selectively enables and controls certain SCF actors and practices.
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Joseph Ikechukwu Uduji and Elda Nduka Okolo-Obasi
The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the multinational oil companies’ (MOCs) corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in Nigeria. Its special focus is to…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the multinational oil companies’ (MOCs) corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in Nigeria. Its special focus is to investigate the impact of the global memorandum of understanding (GMoU) on development of enterprising rural women as custodians of seed, food and traditional knowledge for climate change resilience in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper adopts a survey research technique, aimed at gathering information from a representative sample of the population, as it is essentially cross-sectional, describing and interpreting the current situation. A total of 768 rural women respondents were sampled across the rural areas of the Niger Delta region in Nigeria.
Findings
The results from the use of a combined propensity score matching and logit model indicated that the meagre interventions of MOCs’ CSR targeted at the empowerment of rural women as custodians of seed, food and traditional knowledge for climate change resilience recorded significant success in improving the role of women in agricultural production, especially in women’s involvement across value chains.
Practical implications
This suggests that any increase in the MOCs’ CSR targeted at increasing rural women’s access to seed preservation facilities, food processing facilities and extension systems that impact a strong body of knowledge and expertise that can be used in climate change mitigation, disaster reduction and adaptation strategies will enhance women’s responsibilities in households and communities as stewards of natural and household resources and will position them well to contribute to livelihood strategies adapted to changing environmental realities.
Social implications
This implies that MOCs’ GMoUs’ policies and practices should enhance women’s participation, value and recognize women’s knowledge and enable women as well as men farmers to participate in the decision-making process in agriculture, food production and land governance, as women need to be acknowledged and supported as the primary producers of food in the region, able to both cultivate healthy food and climate change resilience through small-scale agro-ecological farming system.
Originality/value
This research contributes to gender debate in agriculture from a CSR perspective in developing countries and explains the rational for demands for social projects by host communities. It concludes that business has an obligation to help solve problems of public concern.
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