Search results

Construction is one of Australia’s largest employers of young people and the industry is facing a major labor shortage, with young people expected to account for much of the shortfall. Surprisingly however, there been little research into the pathways for young people into construction employment. The aim of this paper is to address this gap in research by exploring whether project-based intermediaries can support the development of disadvantaged young people’s trust in the often-problematic systems which are meant to help transition them into employment in construction.

Employing an in-depth case study approach, this research mobilizes theories of personalized and generalized trust to report the results of interviews with 15 sectoral leaders; focus groups with 12 young people working in construction; and interviews with 11 young people being transitioned into construction employment through a unique project-based intermediary developed by a major Australian construction company as part of its social procurement requirements.

Findings show that project-based intermediaries can play an important trust-building role in transitioning disadvantaged young people into work in construction. They do this by bridging a young person’s strong social ties (family and friendship) and weak social ties (with government and construction industry organizations), both of which can be problematic when used in isolation to seek employment in construction. By performing a crucial bridging role between a young person’s individual self-interest in acting alone to find work and their collective interest in being part of a collaborative group, the project-based intermediary creates a new form of linking social capital, enabling social procurement policies which target young people to work while also addressing wider systemic problems in Australia’s employment systems.

This research addresses the lack of employment research into young people in construction and the paucity of theory in social procurement research more broadly. It takes an original approach in aligning theories related to a duality of personalized trust and generalized trust seen against the duality of individual intentionality and agency (self-focused) and shared intentionality and agency (group-focused). By doing so it provides new conceptual and practical insights into the important role that construction project-based intermediaries like the one studied here can play in providing innovative cross-sector and collaborative solutions to the world’s growing youth unemployment crisis.

This chapter addresses one of the most crucial areas for critical thinking: the morality of turbulent markets around the world. All of us are overwhelmed by such turbulent markets. Following Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2004, 2010), we distinguish between nonscalable industries (ordinary professions where income grows linearly, piecemeal or by marginal jumps) and scalable industries (extraordinary risk-prone professions where income grows in a nonlinear fashion, and by exponential jumps and fractures). Nonscalable industries generate tame and predictable markets of goods and services, while scalable industries regularly explode into behemoth virulent markets where rewards are disproportionately large compared to effort, and they are the major causes of turbulent financial markets that rock our world causing ever-widening inequities and inequalities. Part I describes both scalable and nonscalable markets in sufficient detail, including propensity of scalable industries to randomness, and the turbulent markets they create. Part II seeks understanding of moral responsibility of turbulent markets and discusses who should appropriate moral responsibility for turbulent markets and under what conditions. Part III synthesizes various theories of necessary and sufficient conditions for accepting or assigning moral responsibility. We also analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions for attribution of moral responsibility such as rationality, intentionality, autonomy or freedom, causality, accountability, and avoidability of various actors as moral agents or as moral persons. By grouping these conditions, we then derive some useful models for assigning moral responsibility to various entities such as individual executives, corporations, or joint bodies. We discuss the challenges and limitations of such models.

This study aims to analyze the university environment’s role in the intention–action gap (IAG)of highly successful startup founders in an emerging market.

Using multiple regression analysis, this study analyzed data collected from 314 founders representing 99 successful startups (289 valid observations), renowned for their high funding and value operating in an emerging market, Brazil.

The results demonstrate that extracurricular activities and exchange programs lead to a reduced IAG while living in a significant economic center extends it. Computer science and industrial engineering students show reduced IAGs. Studying together with future co-founders also leads to reduced gaps.

The study contributes to the microfoundations theory by presenting new interactions between students and the university environment that influence entrepreneurial action. Limitations are related to the sample, limited to Brazilian founders and selected only through venture capital firms’ filters.

This study also provides practical insights to the universities’ leaders on how they can create programs that improve the rate of startup creation, potentially leading to successful companies.

This study investigates the association between the university role and the entrepreneur’s IAG in emerging markets. The entrepreneur’s IAG is still a relatively new phenomenon explored in entrepreneurship. Even less understanding and limited empirical data exist on successful startups from emerging markets. This study drew on the microfoundations literature to answer how universities in emerging markets could address specific resources and entrepreneurship programs to reduce the IAG among students and alumni.

This study examines how potentially irresponsible banking operations affect organisational reputation. A moderated mediation model is applied to explain how major aspects of social irresponsibility affect the relationship between consumer awareness of allegedly irresponsible operations, blame and bank reputation. The empirical context is the Swiss franc mortgage crisis that affected the banking industry in most Central and Eastern European countries.

The research study uses data collected from a large survey (N = 1,000) conducted among Polish bank consumers, including those with mortgage loans in Swiss francs. To test the proposed model, the authors use Hayes' process macro.

The findings show that blame fully mediates the effects of corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) awareness on organisational reputation. Three facets of social irresponsibility moderate this relationship. Specifically, the perceived harm and intentionality of corporate culprits cause people to be more likely to blame a bank for the difficulties posed by indebted consumers. At the same time, the perceived complicity of consumers in misselling a mortgage reduces the level of blame and its subsequent adverse effects on bank reputation.

Although a strong reputation is crucial in the financial industry, few studies have attempted to address reputational risk from a consumer perspective. This study helps to understand how potentially irresponsible selling of a financial product can adversely affect a bank's reputation.

This study aims to analyse the differences between professional interaction mediated by video conferencing and direct professional interaction. The research identifies diverging interests of office workers for the purpose of addressing work ethical and business ethical issues of professional collaboration, competition, and power in future hybrid work models.

Based on 28 qualitative interviews conducted between November 2020 and June 2021, and through the theoretical lens of phenomenology, the study develops explanatory hypotheses conceptualising four basic intentions of professional interaction and their corresponding preferences for video conferences and working on site.

The four intentions developed on the basis of the interviews are: the need for physical proximity; the challenge of collective creativity; the will to influence; and control of communication. This conceptual framework qualifies a moral ambivalence of professional interaction. The authors identify a connectivity paradox of professional interaction where the personal dimension remains unarticulated for the purpose of maintaining professionality. This tacit human connectivity is intertwined with latent power relations. This plasticity of both connectivity and power in direct interaction can be diminished by transferring the interaction to video conferencing.

The application of phenomenology to a collection of qualitative interviews has enabled the identification of underlying intention structures and the system in which they affect each other. This research identifies conflicts of interests between workers relative to their different self-perceived abilities to persevere in competitive professional interaction. It is therefore able to address consequences of future hybrid work models at an existential and societal level.

This article aims to explore the potential of feminist phenomenology as a conceptual framework for advancing women’s entrepreneurship research and the suitability of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to the proposed framework.

The article critically examines the current state of women’s entrepreneurship research regarding the institutional context and highlights the benefits of a shift towards feminist phenomenology.

The prevailing disembodied and gender-neutral portrayal of entrepreneurship has resulted in an equivocal understanding of women’s entrepreneurship and perpetuated a male-biased discourse within research and practice. By adopting a feminist phenomenological approach, this article argues for the importance of considering the ontological dimensions of lived experiences of situatedness, intersubjectivity, intentionality and temporality in analysing women entrepreneurs’ agency within gendered institutional contexts. It also demonstrates that feminist phenomenology could broaden the current scope of IPA regarding the embodied dimension of language.

The adoption of feminist phenomenology and IPA presents new avenues for research that go beyond the traditional cognitive approach in entrepreneurship, contributing to theory and practice. The proposed conceptual framework also has some limitations that provide opportunities for future research, such as a phenomenological intersectional approach and arts-based methods.

The article contributes to a new research agenda in women’s entrepreneurship research by offering a feminist phenomenological framework that focuses on the embodied dimension of entrepreneurship through the integration of IPA and conceptual metaphor theory (CMT).

Using real-time support systems may help operators in road construction to improve paving and compaction operations. Nowadays, these systems transform from descriptive to prescriptive systems. Prescriptive or operator guidance systems propose operators actionable compaction strategies and guidance, based on the data collected. It is investigated how these systems mediate the perceptions and actions of operators in road pavement practice.

A case study is conducted on the specific application of an operator guidance system in a road pavement project. In this case study, comprehensive information is presented regarding the process of converting input in the form of data from cameras and sensors into useful output. The ways in which the operator guidance systems translate data into actionable guidance for operators are analyzed from the technological mediation perspective.

Operator guidance systems mediate actions of operators physically, cognitively and contextually. These different types of action mediation are related to preconditions for successful implementation and use of these systems. Coercive interventions only succeed if there is widespread agreement among the operators. Persuasive interventions are most effective when collective and individual interests align. Contextual influence relates to designs of the operator guidance systems that determine human-technology interactions when using them.

This is the first study that analyzes the functioning of an operator guidance system using the technological mediation approach. It adds a new perspective on the interaction between this system and its users in road pavement practice.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of cyberbullying and corresponding strategies being used under the New United Arab Emirates (UAE) Cybercrimes Law.

The analysis begins with a review of the nature of cyberbullying, focusing primarily on key concepts, underlying risk factors, forms of cyberbullying and adverse effects. Background information about the nature of cyberbullying will then lay the foundation for the subsequent sections of the analysis, which will focus on preventive strategies and legislative measures. The second section of the analysis will entail a review of the legislative framework for cyberbullying in the UAE. The goal here is to examine how the UAE is responding to the emerging threat of cyberbullying in its jurisdiction. The next section will then shift gears to interventions and strategies being implemented at the global level. A global perspective is central to comparing practices in the UAE to international standards and regulations.

Findings from the analysis have shown that the UAE has the most robust and comprehensive cyberbullying laws internationally. Nonetheless, the New Cybercrimes Law is ambiguous, and it is not expressively specific to cyberbullying. The law does not have a clear definition of cyberbullying, as well as the scope of its application to specific cases involving students. A comparative analysis across jurisdictions has revealed that most countries neither have specific cyberbullying laws nor explicitly define the phenomenon in existing laws. Thus, cyberbullying is a gray area in the UAE national law, requiring a clear definition and scope of application. The courts will establish case law that will finally address the current definitional challenges and extend of applying the New Cybercrimes Law.

The analysis concludes with the application of international best standards and practices to the UAE context, focusing specifically on how to strengthen laws and procedures in the UAE.

This study aims to investigate the social and affective impacts of inviting residents of a socially divided, post-war city to “play tourist” for a day, exploring their own backyards with a new intentionality and perspective.

This qualitative research within a transformative worldview uses a creative, place-based approach of role-playing based upon principles of participatory action research.

While each tour was unique, participants’ insights reflected three common themes: shifts in observations and perceptions of place arising from the intentionality of the “tourist” lens, a sense of freedom created by the touristic research opportunity, and the varying abilities of tourism experiences to help build empathy or awareness in a post-conflict setting.

The inventive research approach allows for a unique examination of local tourism-styled explorations, a subject of growing interest that has largely been overlooked in literature, while paying special attention to ways in which a history of conflict may manifest in contemporary urban tourism experiences.

Using resource-based theory and social cognitive theory, this study aimed to investigate crucial resources that new US fashion ventures need to survive the initial stage of business development. It also intended to discover the role and characteristics of founders that contribute to the success of a fashion business, as well as challenges and struggles that fashion entrepreneurs face.

For the study, a qualitative research method with in-depth personal interviews was conducted. Participants were recruited through purposeful sampling methods. Using a grounded theory approach, we analyzed the approximately 308 pages of primary source data, transcribed from the records of the interviews.

Findings were categorized into three major themes. First, financial resources and literacy, marketing, merchandising, as well as legal resources were identified as critical resources at the firm level. Second, at the individual level, four important human agency factors, including intentionality, forethought, reactiveness and reflectiveness were revealed as essential for the success of fashion entrepreneurs. Lastly, relationships and networks were highlighted at both firm and individual levels.

This study contributes to the understanding of fashion entrepreneurship, an understudied area. The study identified critical resources for the success of fashion startups, especially during the initial business development process. The findings also emphasized the importance of human agency factors and networks at both firm and individual levels.