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1 – 10 of over 1000Colleen E. Mills and Faith Jeremiah
This study presents an original empirically based conceptual framework representing mobile microbusiness founders' experiences when converting to a franchise business model that…
Abstract
Purpose
This study presents an original empirically based conceptual framework representing mobile microbusiness founders' experiences when converting to a franchise business model that links individual-level variables to a sociomaterial process.
Design/methodology/approach
An exploratory interpretive research design produced this framework using data from the enterprise development narratives of mobile franchisors who had recently converted their mobile microbusinesses to a franchise business model.
Findings
The emergent framework proposes that franchisor’s conversion experience involves substantial identity work prompted by an identity dilemma originating in a conflict between role expectations and franchising operational demands. This dilemma materializes during franchise document creation and requires some degree of “identity undoing” to ensure business continuity. By acting as boundary-objects-in-use in the conversion process, the franchise documents provide a sociomaterial foundation for the business transition and the development of a viable franchisor identity.
Research limitations/implications
There is scant literature addressing the startup experiences of mobile microbusiness franchisors. The study was therefore exploratory, producing a substantive conceptual framework that will require further confirmatory studies.
Practical implications
By proposing that conversion to a franchise business model is experienced as an identity transformation coupled to a sociomaterial process centred on system documentation, this original empirically based conceptual framework not only addresses a gap in the individual-level literature on franchise development but also provides a framework to direct new research and discussions between intending franchisors and their professional advisors about person–enterprise fit.
Originality/value
The conceptual framework is the first to address franchisors' experience of transitioning any type of microbusiness to a franchise business model.
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Dorothy Ai-wan Yen, Benedetta Cappellini, Jane Denise Hendy and Ming-Yao Jen
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe challenges to ethnic minorities in the UK. While the experiences of migrants are both complex and varied depending on individuals' social…
Abstract
Purpose
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe challenges to ethnic minorities in the UK. While the experiences of migrants are both complex and varied depending on individuals' social class, race, cultural proximity to the host country and acculturation levels, more in-depth studies are necessary to fully understand how COVID-19 affects specific migrant groups and their health. Taiwanese migrants were selected because they are an understudied group. Also, there were widespread differences in pandemic management between the UK and Taiwan, making this group an ideal case for understanding how their acculturation journey can be disrupted by a crisis.
Design/methodology/approach
Qualitative data were collected at two different time points, at the start of the UK pandemic (March/April 2020) and six months on (October/November 2020), to explore migrant coping experiences over time. Theoretically, the authors apply acculturation theory through the lens of coping, while discussing health-consumption practices, as empirical evidence.
Findings
Before the outbreak of the pandemic, participants worked hard to achieve high levels of integration in the UK. The pandemic changed this; participants faced unexpected changes in the UK’s sociocultural structures. They were forced to exercise the layered and complex “coping with coping” in a hostile host environment that signalled their new marginalised status. They faced impossible choices, from catching a life-threatening disease to being seen as overly cautious. Such experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society.
Research limitations/implications
It is important to note that the Taiwanese sample recruited through Facebook community groups is biased and has a high level of homogeneity. These participants were well-integrated, middle-class migrants who were highly educated, relatively resourceful and active on social media. More studies are needed to fully understand the impact on well-being and acculturation of migrants from different cultural, contextual and social backgrounds. This being the case, the authors can speculate that migrants with less resource are likely to have found the pandemic experience even more challenging. More studies are needed to fully understand migrant experience from different backgrounds.
Practical implications
Public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. In particular, this paper has shown how separation, especially if embraced temporarily, is not necessarily a negative outcome to be corrected with specific policies. It can be strategically adopted by migrants as a way of defending their health and well-being from an increasingly hostile environment. Migrants' home country experience provides vicarious learning opportunities to acquire good practices. Their voices should be encouraged rather than in favour of a surprising orthodox and rather singular approach in the discussion of public health management.
Social implications
The paper has clear public health policy implications. Firstly, public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. Acknowledging migrants' voice is a critical first step to contribute to the development of a fair and inclusive society. Secondly, to retain skilful migrants and avoid a future brain-drain, policymakers are advised to advance existing infrastructure to provide more incentives to support and retain migrant talents in the post-pandemic recovery phase.
Originality/value
This paper reveals how a group of previously well-integrated migrants had to exercise “coping with coping” during the COVID crisis. This experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society. It contributes to the understanding of acculturation by showing how a such crisis can significantly disrupt migrants' acculturation journey, challenging them to re-acculturate and reconsider their identity stance. It shows how separation was indeed a good option for migrants for protecting their well-being from a newly hostile host environment.
Sally Helen Stone and Laura Sanderson
This paper considers the exhibition: UnDoing. This research-through-curation project examined interactions within existing spaces and situations. This established links between…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper considers the exhibition: UnDoing. This research-through-curation project examined interactions within existing spaces and situations. This established links between the selected exhibits, the gallery, the city and with the continuum of the previous exhibition.
Design/methodology/approach
Carefully selected architects, designers and artists were invited to contribute—those who pursued a contextual approach; whose practice explored the way buildings, places and artefacts are reused, reinterpreted and remembered.
Findings
Through the act of curation, this research uncovered a series of different approaches to constructed sites and existing buildings, from layered juxtaposition, the refusal to undo, to interventions of new elements within architectural works.
Research limitations/implications
Curation offered the opportunity to consider works of architecture and of art through the same lens, for direct comparisons to be made and the influence of one upon the other to be comprehended.
Practical implications
The examination processes the architect employs is similar to that of the artist; the development of an understanding of place, and from this synthesis, creative interpretation. However, despite the similarities in the starting position, the elucidation developed by the artist can be vastly different to that of the architect.
Social implications
The juxtaposition and new classifications created by the exhibition encouraged visitors to look at art, architecture and the city in a different way; to grasp the direct link between the different subjects; and the possibilities created.
Originality/value
The two driving factors for UnDoing were places of previous occupation and the city of Manchester. The qualities of surrounding constructed environment combined were combined with attitudes towards existing structures and places.
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Samina M. Saifuddin, Lorraine Dyke and Md. Sajjad Hossain
This study aims to identify women professionals' strategies to persist in the male-dominated technology industry situated in the Bangladeshi socio-cultural context.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to identify women professionals' strategies to persist in the male-dominated technology industry situated in the Bangladeshi socio-cultural context.
Design/methodology/approach
In-depth interviews with women tech professionals were conducted to identify and explore the strategies. Thematic coding was used for data analysis.
Findings
The findings suggest that the complex interplay of macro-, meso- and micro-factors pushes women to defy societal and gender norms in their choice and persistence, yet they simultaneously conform to these norms. By simultaneous expressions of doing and undoing gender, these women dealt with hierarchies and inequalities, navigated masculinized industry and empowered themselves within a patriarchal culture. The strategies effectively allowed them to demonstrate agency and persist in tech occupations.
Research limitations/implications
The study participants were women and recruited using snowball sampling. Future research could benefit from recruiting a larger, more varied sample using random sampling.
Practical implications
The study can inform teaching and policy initiatives to increase women's representation in tech sectors through awareness campaigns, policy interventions and counseling.
Originality/value
The research extends the doing and undoing framework by integrating the relational perspective to explain women's agency and resilience situated in a patriarchal context. The paper focuses on women's micro-individual strategies to navigate macro- and meso-level forces. Moreover, Bangladesh is an under-researched context, and findings from the study can help design potential intervention strategies to increase women's participation.
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The purpose of this paper is to explore opportunities for delivering sustainable leadership education through critical reflection embedded in the framework of higher and degree…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore opportunities for delivering sustainable leadership education through critical reflection embedded in the framework of higher and degree apprenticeships.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper contributes to leadership development research that focusses on “leader becoming” as an ongoing process of situated learning (in the classroom and everyday work life). The approach to leadership development adopted in this paper proposes that sustainable leadership practices and decision making are developed when leadership learning is firmly embedded in work-based practices and critical self-reflection.
Findings
The discussion of critical reflection methods focusses on utilising the learning portfolio as a core aspect of all leadership and management apprenticeships to embed sustainable and reflective practice and facilitate situated leadership learning. The paper explores the role of training providers in actively connecting higher and degree apprenticeships to embed this model of leadership development and seeing leadership as a lifelong apprenticeship. It also highlights the potential for resistance by managers and senior leaders in seeing themselves as apprentices rather than accomplished leaders. By paying attention to issues of language and identity in this discussion, it will surface practical implications for the delivery of sustainable leadership education through the framework of apprenticeships.
Originality/value
This paper adds to the theoretical and practical understanding of sustainable leadership education by exploring opportunities for re-framing leadership development as a lifelong apprenticeship focussed on personal and professional development. Recognising the resistance that often exists to reflective practice within leadership development contexts, this paper further explores ways of dealing with such resistance.
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This paper aims to understand the dialectical relationship between place-making and identity formation of factory women in a free trade zone (FTZ) in the Global South.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to understand the dialectical relationship between place-making and identity formation of factory women in a free trade zone (FTZ) in the Global South.
Design/methodology/approach
Inspired by Judith Butler’s notions of performative acts and performativity, the paper uses poststructuralist discourse analysis to analyze data – oral and written texts – generated through a fieldwork study conducted in an FTZ in Sri Lanka.
Findings
Performative acts and the performativity of the occupants in the FTZ demarcate the boundary of the zone and articulate the identities of its occupants. Furthermore, the study shows that, in this process, such performativity and performative acts function as a form of “glue” to amalgamate the places of the zone space as kalape, a complex socio-geographical landscape in flux.
Research limitations/implications
This study provides a new insight into the relationships between discursive-performative acts, place-making and identity formation of (factory) women in the neoliberalized (zone) space(s) of the Global South.
Originality/value
By articulating the FTZ as a (neoliberalized) space in a perpetual present, the study provides new insight into the relationships between performative acts, place-making and identity formation (of factory women) in the zone space.
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Sara Bonesso, Fabrizio Gerli, Anna Comacchio and Laura Cortellazzo
Research has extensively underlined the positive impact of emotional, social and cognitive competencies on leadership effectiveness. Despite the fact that literature acknowledges…
Abstract
Research has extensively underlined the positive impact of emotional, social and cognitive competencies on leadership effectiveness. Despite the fact that literature acknowledges that these competencies can be learned from different experiences over a person’s lifetime, research has mainly focused on leadership development in adulthood. Through the case study of the Ca’ Foscari Competency Centre, this chapter advances the understanding on how higher education can favour leadership development at the early stage, in terms of identity formation and self-regulation, through the implementation of the intentional change theory, considering that this learning process varies according to different developmental trajectories.
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