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This article examines the use of mobile telephones by teenagers in Norway. The data for this study are based on two sources; first they draw on qualitative interviews with a sample of 12 families with teenagers in the greater Oslo area. In addition, they use a quantitative study of a national sample of 1,000 randomly selected teenagers. The data show that it is boys, most often those who work, that own mobile telephones. The qualitative analysis shows that the motives for owning mobile telephones are accessibility, safety and micro‐coordination. In addition, the mobile telephone serves as a symbol of emancipation. Metaphors surrounding the telephone allow for discussions of status construction and identification.

Earlier Nordic comparative studies show variation between countries in child welfare practice, reflecting cultural differences, and that case workers share the norms, values and attitudes of their society. Can cultural factors be concretised for discussion? Child welfare workers in Denmark, Iceland and Norway were presented with five child care stories (vignettes) that focused on the ‘threshold’ between preventive measures and out‐of‐home care (consensual or compulsory). Vignette themes included parental neglect, maternal alcohol misuse and youth problems. Study participants gave written answers to the vignettes and took part in group discussions with colleagues. The results showed significant differences between countries in case workers' responses. Variations in arguments, decisions, use of compulsion and working style reflected national views and priorities. A central dimension was how case workers balanced parental interests with children's needs: in Denmark they were reluctant to intervene with parental rights, whereas the Norwegians were more accepting of compulsory decisions to protect children.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the historical influences and chronological development of foreign investors on Malaysian Bumiputera (indigenous) new technology-based small firms (NTBSFs).

Weick’s (1989) conceptual theory building approach is used to conduct a critical historical documentary analysis of the international, local, academic and government inward foreign investments literature from prior Malaysia’s independence (1957) through to 2016.

Increased foreign investment between 1957 and 2016 proved to be effective for Malaysia to transform its economy from a reliance on primary production to a focus on innovation and value-added industries such as the biotechnology and the information and communication and technology sectors.

Local and international literature addressing inward foreign investments towards host countries yielded four key research implications: employment effects, strategic alliances, technology transfer and knowledge transfer. Creation of firm-specific resources in addition to government assistance, particularly through grants and advisory services, significantly contribute to the sustainability of Bumiputera NTBSFs.

Inward foreign investment through subsidiary multi-national companies (MNCs) leads to the formation of strategic alliances between MNCs and Bumiputera NTBSFs, generating employment opportunities, contributing to Malaysia’s development aims.

Charting the chronological development and historical influence of foreign investment from a Malay-Bumiputera perspective provides an in-depth understanding of the evolution of what is now a multi-cultural Malaysian society.

This study provides a chronological development and discussion of the historical influences and implications of foreign investment towards the evolution and sustainability of Malaysian Bumiputera NTBSFs.

The relationship between gender, family and employment is often depicted as the outcome of rational allocation between time in paid work and time spent on family-related tasks, such as household chores and care for children and other dependent persons (Becker, 1991). This balancing process may be framed in purely economic terms as a question of which spouse should be most active in the labour market when the goal is that of maximizing the total family income. It may also be conceived as deliberations over gender role norms (e.g. Petersen, 2002). If spouses have similar earning capacity, or if they accord relatively little importance to variation in pecuniary income, they may instead decide the employment pattern on the basis of norms of fairness or gender equality. In both cases the couple making the decision is portrayed as context-free actors maximizing a simple set of values: family income or gender equity.

The current paper aims at contributing to the understanding of interorganizational knowledge integration by highlighting the role of individuals' understandings of the task and how they shape knowledge integrating behaviours.

The paper presents a framework of knowledge integration as heedful interrelating. Knowledge integration is conceptualized as help seeking, help giving and reflective reframing, and the paper discusses how these knowledge integrating behaviors are shaped by actors' representations of the situation and their role in it. The framework is illustrated and refined in relation to a qualitative case study of an IT outsourcing project.

Narrow and separating representations of actors' roles, partly based on institutionalized ideas of the proper behaviors of “buyers” and “suppliers”, impede knowledge integration. Such representations render the knowledge integrating behaviors help seeking, help giving and reflective reframing illegitimate.

Results call for attention to actors' representations of the situation and their role in it in order to understand knowledge integration. The interorganizational setting, with its institutionalized roles, provides unique challenges that need to be investigated further. As findings are based on a single case study, further research needs to extend the findings to other kinds of interorganizational collaboration.

The paper adds to the understanding of interorganizational knowledge integration by drawing attention to the importance of individual actors' representations and behaviors. Hereby, the dominant organizational and network levels of analysis in the literature on interorganizational knowledge integration are complemented by an individual level of analysis.

Over the past decade, there has been an increase in the number of transgender adolescents that receive gender-affirming hormones. While the long-term repercussions of taking hormones are understudied, it is possible that one of the impacts is infertility. Although infertility is not definite, healthcare professionals are still responsible for discussing fertility preservation with transgender adolescent patients, which encourages a population of young people to determine whether or not they want to biologically have children in the future. Drawing on in-depth interviews with healthcare professionals, parents, and transgender adolescents, this study explores the thoughts and perceptions pertaining to fertility and how these three groups work with one another throughout transition. My findings show that (1) adult participants (parents and healthcare professionals) have mental barriers, which include fear of regret and grief over the loss of anticipated biological motherhood, (2) there is a delay in the conversation happening between the healthcare professionals, parents, and trans adolescents, and (3) trans adolescents reject fertility, but are open to building a family. I argue that cisnormative and transnormative ideologies overshadow these conversations, which could result in limiting the potential for queer biological parenthood. The chapter ends with suggestions for how to make conversations pertaining to fertility preservation more expansive to dismantle transnormativity.

The purpose of this paper is to explore what motivates patients to participate in service development and how participation may influence their well-being. Health-care providers are increasingly adopting practices of customer participation in such activities to improve their services.

This paper builds on an analysis of data from a service development project in which lung cancer patients contributed by sharing their ideas and experiences through diaries. Out of the 86 lung cancer patients who were invited to participate, 20 agreed to participate and 14 fully completed the task. The study builds on participants’ contributions, in-depth interviews with six participants and the reasons patients gave for not participating.

This paper identifies a number of motives: non-interest in participating, restitution after poor treatment, desire for contact with others, volunteerism, desire to make a contribution and the enjoyment of having a task to complete. A self-determination theory perspective was adopted to show how the need to satisfy basic human needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness determines if and how patients participate. Participation may have important benefits for patients, especially an improved sense of relatedness.

Service providers must be prepared to meet different patient needs in service development, ranging from the need to express strong distress to expressing creativity. By understanding the dynamics of motivation and well-being, organizers may achieve better results in terms of improved services and in patient well-being.

This study makes a significant contribution to the study of customer participation in service development, especially in relation to health care, by offering a self-determination-based typology for describing different styles of patient participation.

The paper aims to empirically examine the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows and digitalization on employment opportunities in selected 70 developing economies across the world over the period of 2001–2019. The same empirical investigations are also carried out on two groups of these developing countries created on the basis of the levels of FDI inflows and digitalization.

The study uses various panel unit root tests followed by the estimations of the generalized method of moments in the dynamic panel framework, using secondary data collected from the World Bank (2020), International Labour Organization (2020) and International Telecommunication Union (2020).

Empirical findings reveal that both FDI inflows and digitalization have positive effects on employment; however, the extent of the impact of digitalization is greater than that of FDI inflows in developing economies, mostly in countries with relatively low FDI inflows and low digitalization.

Conventionally, FDI inflows accelerate economic growth and thus improve the labour market in host countries. However, FDI inflows into developing countries with low-skilled labours may limit job creation, particularly during the process of digitalization. This study shows that despite a much moderate impact of FDI inflows, digital transformation supports a higher employment in developing economies with low level of FDI inflows and digitalization.

Although previous research has examined the role of franchising for the economic development of countries, no empirical study to date has investigated the importance of franchising for social, infrastructural, and institutional development. The authors address this research gap by applying research results from the field of sustainable entrepreneurship and highlight that franchising has a positive impact on economic, social, institutional and infrastructural development.

This study uses a fixed-effects model on a panel dataset for 2006–2015 from 49 countries to test the hypothesis that franchising positively influences various dimensions of country development such as economic social institutional and infrastructural development.

The findings highlight that franchising has a positive impact on the economic, social, infrastructural, and institutional development of a country. Specifically, the results show that the earlier and the more franchising systems enter a country, the stronger the positive impact of franchising on the country's economic, social, institutional, and infrastructural development.

This study has several limitations that provide directions for further research. First, the empirical investigation is limited by the characteristics of the data, which are composed of information from 49 countries (covering a period of 10 years). Because franchising is not recognized as a form of entrepreneurial governance in many emerging and developing countries, the available information is mainly provided by the franchise associations in the various countries. Hence, there is a need to collect additional data in each country and to include additional countries. Second, although the authors included developed and developing countries in the analysis, the authors could not differentiate between developed and developing countries when testing the hypotheses, because the database was not sufficiently complete. Third, future studies should analyze the causality issue between franchising and development more closely. The role of franchising in development may be changing depending on different unobserved country factors, economic sector characteristics, or development stages.

What are the practical implications of this study for the role of franchising in the development of emerging and developing economies? Because public policy in emerging and developing countries suffers from a lack of financial resources to improve the social, infrastructural and institutional environment, entrepreneurs, such as franchisors who expand into these countries, play an important role for these countries' development. In addition to their entrepreneurial role of exploring and exploiting profit opportunities, they are social, institutional, and political entrepreneurs who may positively influence country development (Schaltegger and Wagner, 2011; Shepard and Patzelt, 2011). Specifically, the findings highlight that countries with an older franchise sector (more years of franchise experience) may realize first-mover advantages and hence larger positive spillover effects on their economic, social, institutional and infrastructural development than countries with a younger franchise sector. Hence, governments of emerging and developing countries have the opportunity and responsibility to reduce potential market entry barriers and provide additional incentives for franchise systems in order to trigger these positive spillover effects. The authors expect that the spillover effects from the franchise sector on the economic, institutional, social and infrastructural development of a country are stronger in emerging and developing countries than in developed countries.

Previous research has focused on the impact of franchising on the economic development of a country, such as its growth of gross domestic product (GDP), employment, business skills, innovation and technology transfer. This study extends the existing literature by going beyond the impact of franchising on economic development: the results show that franchising as an entrepreneurial activity offers opportunities for economic, social, institutional, and infrastructural development, all of which are particularly important for emerging and developing economies. The findings of this study contribute to the international franchise and development economics literature by offering a better understanding of the impact of franchising on country development.