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The purpose of this research is to outline and investigate a set of five experience elements from neuroscience research labeled SCARF that could impact the quality of perception, evaluation and engagement of executives, managers and employees in business-to-business (B2B) companies during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed experience elements are perceived status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. The authors demonstrate that all five elements are influential factors in B2B employees’ workplace environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors outline several specific managerial implications and describe how companies can make better decisions related to several important market crisis decisions via a growth mindset built on the five experience elements. The authors also pay attention to implications to several B2B areas of research focus, including salesforce management and buying/supplier relationships.

The authors first examine existing B2B research to gauge if the five elements have been examined in B2B business contexts. They then analyze a combination of quantitative and qualitative survey data from 335 employees of different B2B companies to see if the five experience elements surface in discussion on how the pandemic has impacted their work experience and careers.

The authors find that several B2B research studies have looked at each of the individual components of the SCARF model, but none of them have yet included all five elements together in research or looked at them in the context of COVID-19. The results of analysis of surveys from employees in 335 B2B companies provide strong evidence that all five elements are influential factors in B2B employees workplace environment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study contributes to prior research focusing on how B2B companies can thrive during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The research offers valuable practical insights and detailed examples of how to apply a set of five elements/experiences that industrial and business-to-business organization leaders should adopt in their conscious decision-making evaluation and in their communications with employees, suppliers and customers during and after the pandemic.

COVID-19 has dramatically changed how people live, socialise and think about their future. The disruptive shock that hit societies all over the world had a significantly negative impact on businesses, creating not only economic discontinuity but also uncertainty and disorientation. This special issue on COVID-19 aims to phrase the pandemic crisis and its impact on how to do business.

The authors follow MacInnis’s (2011) suggestion that a conceptual article sees what others have identified in a new or revised way.

The authors develop the crisis management framework. The authors acknowledge that disruptive events may be repeated, and their consequences will have long-term and permanent impacts. These aspects highlight the need for a systemic approach in which the focus is not limited to an analysis of the cause of the crisis and ways of solving it but includes the paths through which the business, economic and social systems evolve because of the crisis.

Managerial policies, business models and practices that have been effective up to now will probably no longer work. Beyond this backdrop, the articles compiled in this special issue aim to help set the agenda for post-COVID business research

The authors identify four primary themes captured by these articles: strategies, capabilities, organisational transformations and value processes. In their entirety, they represent pieces of a conceptual puzzle that do not provide knowledge of “hard facts” but rather a “soft interpretation of how to approach the “new normal”, i.e. a new social and business context.

Alvin Hansen and John Williams’ Fiscal Policy Seminar at Harvard University is widely regarded as a key mechanism for the spread of Keynesianism in the United States. An original and regular participant, Richard A. Musgrave was invited to prepare remarks for the fiftieth anniversary of the seminar in 1988. These were never published, though a copy was filed with Musgrave’s papers at Princeton University. Their reproduction here is important for several reasons. First, it is one of the last reminiscences of the original participants. Second, the remarks make an important contribution to our understanding of the Harvard School of macro-fiscal policy. Third, the remarks provide interesting insights into Musgrave’s views on national economic policymaking as well as the intersection between theory and practice. The reminiscence demonstrates the importance of the seminar in shifting Musgrave’s research focus and moving him to a more pragmatic approach to public finance.

In this project, we propose and test a new device – wearable sociometric badges containing small microphones – as a low-cost and relatively unobtrusive tool for measuring stress response to group processes. Specifically, we investigate whether voice pitch, measured using the microphone of the sociometric badge, is associated with physiological stress response to group processes.

We collect data in a laboratory setting using participants engaged in two types of small-group interactions: a social interaction and a problem-solving task. We examine the association between voice pitch (measured by fundamental frequency of the participant’s speech) and physiological stress response (measured using salivary cortisol) in these two types of small-group interactions.

We find that in the social task, participants who exhibit a stress response have a statistically significant greater deviation in voice pitch (from their overall average voice pitch) than those who do not exhibit a stress response. In the problem-solving task, participants who exhibit a stress response also have a greater deviation in voice pitch than those who do not exhibit a stress response, however, in this case, the results are only marginally significant. In both tasks, among participants who exhibited a stress response, we find a statistically significant correlation between physiological stress response and deviation in voice pitch.

We conclude that wearable microphones have the potential to serve as cheap and unobtrusive tools for measuring stress response to group processes.

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) plays an important role in explaining firm performance. In this study, we investigate the relation between EO and performance at the strategic business unit (SBU) level and examine the influence of decision-making mode and social capital of the focal business unit manager. Adopting the attention-based view (ABV) as our main theoretical perspective, we examine the impact of decision-making mode (i.e., participative vs. autocratic) on the EO–performance relation. In addition, we investigate the extent to which strong network ties with actors at lower, similar, and higher hierarchical positions, respectively, enable SBU managers to effectively engage in participative decision-making processes when leveraging EO. Our findings based on 119 SBUs of one large international company provide nuanced insights into how local conditions interact to shape EO’s influence on performance.

In considering the lager beer industry of Denmark it may not seem out of place to recall the main facts regarding the researches of E. C. Hansen. It is due to Hansen, a Dane, that the brewing industry throughout the world was placed on a scientific basis so far as the employment of pure yeast cultures is concerned. The brewing of lager beer had been for long successfully practised in certain European countries, notably in Germany. In a word what may be termed the mechanical technik was well understood, but a knowledge of the underlying biological principles so far as they related to the nature and action of the yeast employed had not advanced so far. The study of micro‐organisms in general had but just commenced. Their very existence in many cases was not even suspected. The employment of yeast in brewing practice was largely of the “hit and miss” kind, and continued to be so until fifty years ago. It is true, of course, that excellent beer was being made in this country and on the continent, both top and bottom fermentation kinds, as it had been for centuries past, but the power to control the nature of the beer by using a pure culture of a selected variety of yeast was not possible until Hansen had made his investigations and published the results in 1883.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) involving cities and municipalities have received little research attention. This is unfortunate because cities are fundamentally important in the global economy and their influence is likely to grow further. This chapter takes stock of extant research and offers an agenda for studying city M&A. The authors outline the dominant strategic perspective, and complement it with human and institutional perspectives that help explore these complex phenomena. Finally, the authors consider what the M&A literature at large can learn from studying cities.

Despite the vulnerability of rapidly developing and emerging market economies, researchers have paid less attention to the determination of the size of money laundering (ML) in these economies, including the United Arab Emirates (the UAE). Therefore, this paper aims to estimate the magnitude of ML in the UAE between 1975 and 2020 based on the currency demand approach (CDA).

The study uses the Gregory–Hansen cointegration technique alongside the autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing procedure to estimate the CDA model.

The results illustrate that an amount equivalent to about 19.034% of the GDP is laundered in the UAE between 1975 and 2020, on average, with the value lying between 15.129% and 23.121%. In addition, the results demonstrate the importance of the real estate market, gold trade, remittance channels and the size of the underground economy in facilitating the laundering of illicit funds in the country.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is the pioneering attempt at estimating the amount of illicit funds laundered in the UAE. Besides, the adoption of a novel, yet robust, approach based on the modification of the CDA technique also sets the study apart as it ensures a correct, clear, unambiguous and indisputable estimate of the magnitude of ML is obtained. In addition, it is expected that the outcome of the study will expand the frontiers of knowledge among policy makers and relevant agencies and ensure the adoption of the most efficient and effective measures to curb the ML menace in the country.

This article gives a centenary appreciation of the contributions to economic thought of Joseph A. Schumpeter, with special focus on his work, The Theory of Economic Development (TED). It proceeds, first, by providing an overview of Schumpeter's life and works; secondly, by giving an interpretative exposition of the main themes of TED, and, thirdly, Schumpeter's broader “economic sociology” in terms of the place of these ideas in the history of economic thought; fourthly, by examining the reception to TED and the impact of it and Schumpeter's dynamic methodology on the discipline.