Search results

Building trust and living interpersonal trust are crucial corporate executive virtues that are needed today. Once you have developed and solidified a high level of genuine interpersonal trust with all your stakeholders, especially customers, suppliers, and employees, then you are on the right path of managing and transforming your company. A high level of interpersonal trust between all stakeholders and corporates in a business situation will break down communication barriers, foster serious conversation and sharing of ideas, and will eliminate corporate transactional anxieties of fear, mistrust, guilt, rigidity, blame, and resentment. When stakeholders trust you and you trust them, then you speak freely, they speak freely, and your mutual sustained transparency is a gateway to survival, revival, and sustained corporate recovery and transformation, and steady growth and prosperity. Conversely, when there is low trust, high mistrust, and high distrust among stakeholders in a business situation, communications and conversations are stressed and fragmented, teamwork and team spirit are very low, and the company is heading toward its ruin and extermination. Such is the crucial role of interpersonal trust in business. This chapter explores the crucial phenomenon of corporate interpersonal trust. We review various cases, models, concepts, definitions, and theories of trust from the management literature in general, and from the marketing field in particular, to derive psychological, behavioral, ethical, and moral principles of corporate trust, trusting relations, and trusting strategies.

This paper aims to investigate the process by which performative technologies (PTs), in this case accreditation work in a business school, take form and how humans engage in making up such practices. It studies how academics come to accept and even identify with the quantitative representations of themselves in a translation process.

The research involved a longitudinal, self-ethnographic case study that followed the accreditation process of one Nordic business school from 2015 to 2021.

The findings show how the PT pushed for different engagements in various phases of the translation process. Early in the translation process, the PT promoted engagement because of self-realization and the ability for academics to proactively influence the prospective competitive milieu. However, as academic qualities became fabricated into numbers, the PT was able to request compliance, but also to induce self-reflection and self-discipline by forcing academics to compare themselves to set qualities and measures.

The paper advances the field by linking five phases of the translation process, problematization, fabrication, materialization, commensuration and stabilization, to a discussion of why academics come to accept and identify with the quantitative representations of themselves. The results highlight that the materialization phase appears to be the critical point at which calculative practices become persuasive and start influencing academics’ thoughts and actions.

An understanding of the motivation of individual employees to adopt lean practices is fundamental to successful lean implementation. This study aims to investigate the adoption of lean practices and provides an analysis of the individual-level factors necessary for lean implementation. This study presents a method for assessing the impact of individual-level factors in a company deploying lean within a biopharmaceutical manufacturing subsidiary.

The case study explores the attitudes of individuals within a functionally structured organisation undergoing a lean implementation initiative. A quantitative data collection approach was used to capture data from employees in a medical device manufacturing organisation.

The study found that personality and affective organisational commitment positively affects an individual’s intention to adopt lean practices. Employees with greater levels of affective commitment are more likely to partake in lean-related practices. Individuals in functions that directly support the production process, as opposed to those in functions that indirectly support production, are more likely to participate in lean practices. Finally, individuals in supervisory roles are more likely to adopt lean practices than those in non-supervisory roles, and management should involve top performers in lean.

There is a paucity of case study research in the area of individual-level factors for lean practice adoption. The findings of this study offer practical guidance on individual-level factors for lean practice adoption and illuminate new avenues for future research. This analysis also makes a practical contribution to the literature. From a managerial perspective, understanding why certain employees are more willing to adopt lean practices contributes to an overall lean organisational readiness and implementation framework. This insight enables the development of carefully tailored communication and training programs for managing employee motivation for and receptivity to lean.

The aim of this paper is to examine how managerial ability affects corporate tax aggressiveness.

The study follows the work of Demerjian, Lev, and McVay (2012) and quantifies managerial ability by calculating how efficiently managers generate revenues from given economic resources using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach. The study uses a wide range of measures of tax aggressiveness. Firm fixed-effects regressions and a difference-in-differences approach using information regarding CEO turnover to control for endogeneity are used.

The study finds a negative relationship between managerial ability and corporate tax aggressiveness. Further tests show that this negative relationship is more pronounced for firms with higher investment opportunities or firms with more reputational concerns.

Given the significant costs associated with tax aggressiveness and the negative effect it can have on managerial reputation if discovered, the results suggest that more able managers invest less effort in aggressive tax avoidance activities. This study furthers the understanding of how managerial personal traits affect corporate decision-making.

Information literacy is defined as discrete abilities that a person requires to have in order to find, assess, use and share information. As information literacy skills play a prominent role in the students' academic achievement, students and in particular international students coming to continue their postgraduate studies in other countries may face problems in finding and using library services. The purpose of this paper is to explore and investigate the information literacy skills, challenges and needs of international and domestic students at the Finnish universities.

This paper uses a mixed-methods design. Quantitative data were collected through an online survey (82 respondents) and qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 10 international and 10 domestic students.

Academic library services are used but in different ways. The findings indicate that international students have a relatively low level of information literacy skills compared to domestic students and faces various challenges, especially in the beginning of their studies.

The study was exploratory, and data were collected from limited number of Finnish universities and may not be representative of the underlying population.

Academic libraries should provide effective courses on research methods and library services to the international students while keeping in mind the international students language and cultural barriers.

This is one of the first attempts in information literacy research that focusses on international and domestic students' information literacy skills at the higher education environment. As such, the results provided in this paper can help librarians and decision-makers at the higher education environments to plan better and become more efficient in delivering information services meeting students' information needs and expectations.

World trade has been increasing rapidly and much faster than world output. This study analyzes the trade structures of major dynamic East Asian countries as well as regional subgroups such as ASEAN members and Northeast Asian countries. Emphasis will be on the complementarities that would enhance integration among them through international trade. In addition, potential trade levels for each combination of East Asian countries are estimated by applying the gravity model of trade to the trade flows of21 APEC members, as a reference group. It is estimated to have significant potentiality by regional subgroup, ASEAN or Northeast Asia, and not between the two regional subgroups. However, the potential integration between East Asian countries in different regional subgroups is more significant by considering complementarities in trade compared with the results from the basic gravity model. To enhance economic cooperation between East Asian countries, expanding relationships such as inter-industry trade in natural resources trade and industrial goods between the regional subgroups needs to occur. They should also utilize complementary relationships from intra-industry trade in industrial goods such as electric and electronic equipment, related parts and accessories. And they should focus on the implementation of trade facilitation measures based on global standards.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether managers of bankrupt firms are more or less conditionally conservative in their financial reporting relative to non-bankrupt firms. The study further examines the cross-sectional differences in conditional conservatism among bankrupt and non-bankrupt firms.

The study employs a sample of US firms to investigate conditional conservatism in firms that experience financial distress and go bankrupt relative to non-stressed non-bankrupt firms. The study also uses switching regression models to identify the drivers of the cross-sectional difference in conditional conservatism among bankrupt and non-bankrupt firms.

Empirical results show that bankrupt firms are timelier in recognizing bad news than good news when compared to non-bankrupt firms. The higher level of conditional conservatism in bankrupt firms is mainly driven by their higher levels of leverage and tax-reduction incentives. The cross-sectional analyses show that these results largely hold for more leveraged firms and firms with higher tax costs. Taken together, these results suggest that the conservative tendency of managers of bankrupt firms can stem from the agency problem between lenders and managers and from tax-decreasing motivations.

The novelty of the authors’ research stands in studying the drivers of the cross-sectional differences in conditional conservatism between bankrupt and non-bankrupt firms and specifically, the demonstration that taxation also induces conditional conservatism in the setting of ex post bankrupt firms.

This study aims to analyze the impact of different exit alternatives, investor presence and founders’ human capital on the exit value of European venture capital (VC)-backed high technology startups.

The empirical analysis is based on a sample of 107 European firms that obtained an exit through Merger&Acquisition (M&A) or an initial public offering (IPO) between 2010 and 2017, backed by VC investors.

This study provides empirical evidence on how different exit alternatives, investor heterogeneity and founders’ human capital may affect the exit value of European VC-backed startups. Exiting through an IPO and retaining a larger equity stake are positively correlated with the exit value. The presence of business angels and non-governmental VC firms is associated with larger valuations. Founders’ previous education was positively correlated with the exit value.

Exit strategies in technology startups are essential to capitalize investors’ efforts and reinvest cash into new ventures, supporting the development of entrepreneurial ecosystems and countries’ competitiveness. The results of this study provide interesting hints for policymakers and contribute to an in-depth understanding of the drivers of exit valuation for startups.

This study aims to analyse whether theories and views of classical Islamic scholars are widely adopted as references in Islamic accounting and finance (IAF), Islamic economics (IE) and Islamic business management (IBM) research studies as part of their contribution to solving current economic and financial problems.

The research adopts a qualitative meta-analysis methodology using NVivo 12 with selected data from 474 international journal articles published between 1981 and 2021. The study considers 172 IAF articles, 111 IE articles and 191 IBM articles.

The results of the study show that the use of theories and views of classical Islamic scholars is not widespread among the examined research papers. The findings show that 90% of researchers tend to acquire modern economics, management, psychological and sociological theories instead of classical theories. Both modern and classical theories have been discussed in the studied articles namely agency theory, stakeholders' theory, ḥisbah (accountability), maqāṣid al-Sharīʿah (objectives of Islamic law) and waʿd (unilateral promise). The gaps prevail not only in the taxonomy of terms but also in the choice of paradigm references. It is found that 66% of the 474 journal articles adopt a positivist paradigm, followed by interpretivism (19%), post-structuralism (9%) and critical orientation (6%).

This paper considers only ABS ranking journal articles. Future research may consider other journal articles from different ranking groups such as Scopus or Thomson & Reuters.

The paper sheds light on how Islamic educational institutions can develop strategies for the Integration of Knowledge (IOK) in their curriculum.

This paper helps to shape the Muslims' way of thinking within an Islamic worldview which will lead to an Islamic way of expressing knowledge, skill and behaviour.

This paper contributes to the model of IOK that has been deliberated among Islamic universities, especially those that develop IAF, IE and IBM studies.