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The purpose of this paper is to explore individual career management by family members in the context of their family firms.

The interpretative interview study of family members active in family businesses explores how this context affects the choice, planning, goals and development of family members' careers in their family business.

The authors find that career management in the family business setting focuses on fulfilling the family business goals rather than the personal goals of family members. Career management is rather reactive and less self-directed than current literature on career development recommends. Based on the results, the authors develop a process model for individual career management in the family business context.

Little is known about individual career management of family members in a family business context, as research on careers in family firms has so far focused mainly on transgenerational succession. The authors explore how in family firms, the trend towards self-directed, individual career planning is in tension with a commitment to the family business and its legacy.

This study aims to empirically investigate the role of contracts in tacit knowledge acquisition in research and development (R&D) alliances. By combining the perspectives of sensemaking and transaction cost economics (TCE), this study proposes a model about the mechanisms through which shared goals and contract completeness jointly affect tacit knowledge acquisition.

This study adopted a quantitative design and used the questionnaire survey method to collect data. The authors finally collected data on 196 R&D alliance samples in China. Multiple regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses.

There is strong empirical support that contract completeness has a positive effect on shared goals and that shared goals have a positive effect on tacit knowledge acquisition. Meanwhile, contract completeness weakens the positive effect of shared goals on tacit knowledge acquisition. Therefore, this study reveals that contract completeness has an inverted U-shaped effect on tacit knowledge acquisition.

The findings suggest that managers should consider both the psychological and rational effects of contract governance simultaneously, thus recognizing the importance of a moderate level of contract completeness for tacit knowledge acquisition in R&D alliances.

This study enhances the current understanding of contract governance by integrating the sensemaking and TCE perspectives. The findings provide a possible explanation of how contracts affect tacit knowledge acquisition in R&D alliances. The authors expand the research on contract governance and alliance knowledge acquisition by revealing the inverted U-shaped relationship between contract governance and tacit knowledge acquisition.

The purpose of this paper is to give a more appropriate picture of the new trend of career shifts in a late career.

The paper uses literature studies.

The paper gives a more apposite picture of experiential learning and career shift for mature people.

The paper gives no exact guidance in how to assess experiential learning.

Appreciating mature people's experiential learning gives employers a broader and richer hiring base, which is especially important in a period of shortage of employees.

For many societies the age distribution is unfavorable with too many mature people in pension age. The good thing is that many mature people are interested in staying active in the labor market.

The paper argues that a combination of academic and experiential learning probably will qualify individuals best for career shifts as it leads them to a higher order of competence. Career shifts will blow new air into a person's career and enrich them and the organization, which they serve.

All sorts of distinctions can be made concerning prestige goods: for instance, between the most durable like precious stones passed down from generation to generation and the ephemeral ones, or between those which seem to exert a universal fascination, like gold and others valued only in some places. The question of borrowings and possible syncretism is also most appealing for the comparatist and countless illustrations could be given here. In many cases, prestigious goods must be studied by taking both their symbolic and practical value into consideration. What I mean is that a ‘Veblenesque’ approach only paying attention to them as status symbols tends to underestimate their functional dimension. For example, limousines or jets must certainly be analyzed in terms of attributes of power and status enhancement. However, one cannot deny that they also have concrete functions of ‘comfortableness’ and rapidity for ubiquitous elites bound to do extensive traveling. Normally, in modern democracies, top political actors inherit or acquire all kinds of prestigious public assets, but these must be returned at the end of their mandate. Even presents officially given to them are supposed to be surrendered to a public museum. The famous affair of Emperor Bokassa's diamonds offered to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing no doubt discredited the French President and contributed to his defeat in the 1981 elections.

The delivery of assistance to SMEs, provided by enterprise councils at the local level, can vary between those bodies which are innovative and those which are pedestrian in their approach. Although it is generally accepted that most small firms in the UK sell to local markets, SMEs based within the Aberdeen area of Scotland play an important role in exporting and employment. The potential for birth and growth of firms exists in a number of targeted key sectors which aid the economic development of the Aberdeen area. However, assistance is required to bring people together in order to encourage networking, and this paper seeks to explore the process of facilitating an enterprise culture by examining the collaboration and partnership roles played by a LEC and a university in initiatives which foster enterprise. The relationship of the researchers and practitioners is similar to the model outlined by Oakey and Mukhtar where research and practice are used to inform each other, over time, to identify policy needs. The initiatives examined in this paper are the Entrepreneurs’ Club where established entrepreneurs mix with others at the new venture stage, and the Chrysalis Elite programme which links graduates with existing owner managers, creating a work‐based project involving groups of students. These links extend to the wider business community and organisations, including local entrepreneurs (who provide prizes and guidance), 3i and the Local Investors Network Company (LINC), who offer advice and opportunities. The main outcomes for policy in this paper are that collaboration between a LEC and a university can be very effective in assisting individuals or groups to meet the challenge of building entrepreneurial networks and that effective support can be provided for students to gain experience from the business community.

The convergence of industries exposes the involved firms to various challenges. In such a setting, a firm's response time becomes key to its future success. Hence, different approaches to anticipating convergence have been developed in the recent past. So far, especially IPC co-classification patent analyses have been successfully applied in different industry settings to anticipate convergence on a broader industry/technology level. Here, the aim is to develop a concept to anticipate convergence even in small samples, simultaneously providing more detailed information on its origin and direction.

The authors assigned 326 US-patents on phytosterols to four different technological fields and measured the semantic similarity of the patents from the different technological fields. Finally, they compared these results to those of an IPC co-classification analysis of the same patent sample.

An increasing semantic similarity of food and pharmaceutical patents and personal care and pharmaceutical patents over time could be regarded as an indicator of convergence. The IPC co-classification analyses proved to be unsuitable for finding evidence for convergence here.

Semantic analyses provide the opportunity to analyze convergence processes in greater detail, even if only limited data are available. However, IPC co-classification analyses are still relevant in analyzing large amounts of data. The appropriateness of the semantic similarity approach requires verification, e.g. by applying it to other convergence settings.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore small business e‐commerce development and usage of the emerging ICT‐infrastructure for e‐commerce in Sweden. For more than a decade firms in countries with appropriate infrastructures in place have generally been able to exploit internet technologies for business purposes.

The paper presents the results from a telephone survey on Swedish small businesses. The 160 firms surveyed were independent manufacturing firms in Sweden with a number of employees ranging from ten to 50 and a turnover not surpassing €10 million. Data analysis was conducted using SPSS.

The paper presents empirical data on e‐commerce development among small businesses in Sweden. The study shows that a significant share of the studied firms have adopted internet technologies, but also that more than 70 per cent of the small businesses in the study have more than five years of experience of e‐commerce. The study finds that small businesses in Sweden show remarkably high levels of e‐commerce adoption. The study shows strong penetration of web site and e‐mail use among small businesses in Sweden, but also that advanced applications are still not broadly applied.

Statistics presented by the OECD have recurrently shown that the Scandinavian countries are in the lead as regards building an ICT infrastructure. Sweden's leading position in ICT has been confirmed by several studies. Because of scarce resources and lack of knowledge, small businesses are generally known to be lagging in terms of ICT use. This study empirically explores small business e‐commerce development in Sweden and contributes to the stream of research aiming at benchmarking e‐commerce development.

Do female CEOs face a compensation gap? The purpose of this paper is to examine whether gender affects the total compensation of today’s CEOs, and whether it moderates ten factors influencing their total compensation.

Taking the 54 female CEOs cited in the US 2014 Fortune’s 1000 report, a matched sample of male CEOs was selected, matched according to the crosstab of age by education and by the sizes of the companies directed by these female CEOs.

Using four years’ worth of Fortune reports, between 2013 and 2016, this matched sample indicates that female CEOs are not discriminated against in terms of total compensation. However, eight factors do show a significant effect on total compensation. Using moderation analysis, the present study reveals how gender interacts with company size, sector, membership of outside boards and nature of previous experience.

This paper addresses an important and under-researched gap, with contradictory findings in the existing literature, by compiling and testing the characteristics of male and female CEOs which are not cited in Fortune 1000 reports.

Arguably, this is therefore one of the first papers to study gender differences in total compensation among Fortune 1000 CEOs using a matched sample technique, based on a larger number of female CEOs and a larger number of years than any previous research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possible associations between health-relevant personality traits and adherence; and if these traits predict adherence to a web-based occupational health intervention.

In total, 563 participants were analyzed using the Health-relevant Personality Inventory. Adherence measures were: logins, utilization of self-help exercises and time spent logged in.

Higher levels of antagonism (a facet of agreeableness) and impulsivity (a facet of conscientiousness) correlated to fewer logins, and higher levels of negative affectivity (a facet of neuroticism) and impulsivity correlated to a higher utilization of self-help exercises. Alexithymia (a facet of openness) negatively predicted self-help exercise utilization and antagonism was a positive predictor. Negative affectivity was a positive predictor of time spent logged in to the intervention. There were sex-related differences in outcomes.

This is the first study to investigate health-relevant personality traits in relation to adherence to a web-based occupational health intervention. The practical implications are that intervention developers could benefit from taking personality into consideration to better understand and improve adherence.

The primary purpose of this bibliography is to provide a compilation of trust‐related articles from the disparate fields in which trust has been explored (from psychology to sociology and information systems to marketing. Years in its compilation and (still incomplete), it provides a listing that is not easily obtained even with the search capability of the internet and electronic library catalogues. Its secondary purpose is to highlight which articles are used most by marketing‐related trust researchers both in general and within the submissions to the special issue.

The bibliography was compiled via search and analysis of databases, reference lists, bibliographies, internet searches, library catalogues, university web pages, researchers' curricula vitae (inter alia) for conference papers, journal articles, and books that use trust as a key concept within the work.

The paper finds that there is a plethora of material on trust, but spread across several thousand sources. No single comprehensive collection exists and the need for such a compilation is of value to researchers.

The paper is an invaluable source of references on trust from across a wide range of academic disciplines.

The main contribution of the paper is the cross‐disciplinary nature of the compilation of reference materials.