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Decision-making is of utmost importance for entrepreneurs. One of the most important entrepreneurial decisions is the decision to persist, which under certain circumstances such as a high level of adversity may seal the fate of entrepreneurs’ businesses. Nevertheless, the main antecedents of the decision to persist among entrepreneurs have remained understudied. This dearth of research is more obvious with respect to women entrepreneurs, especially in developing countries. To address this gap, this paper aims to explore the main antecedents of the decision to persist among women entrepreneurs.

By adopting a narrative approach, data were collected through a combination of semi-structured and in-depth questions with a sample of Iranian women entrepreneurs founding and running small businesses offering services in a variety of sectors and analysed by narrative data analysis.

According to the findings, the pandemic-emanated uncertainty, personal attachment to one’s venture as well as the reluctance of being blamed by one’s family, and the fear of the unknown future were the main drivers of the decision to persist among the entrepreneurs.

This paper offers two novel contributions to the extant literature. This paper is a pioneer not only in exploring entrepreneurs’ decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic but also in studying the decision to persist in the context of the developing nations.

This manuscript explores the value of mission statement emotional content in the relationship between money raised by a nonprofit organization through fundraising efforts and the money spent. It proposes the emotional content of a mission statement moderates money spent and earned to ultimately to impact how much revenue a nonprofit makes through fundraising.

The manuscript evaluates the qualitative turned quantitative data (via text mining [TM]) in mission statements from 200 nonprofits serving the homeless sector via a moderation analysis. After segmenting the sampled nonprofits by gross revenue, the authors analyze the impact of the positive and negative emotional tone in each group to determine how the content of a mission statement impacts organizational revenue.

The paper provides empirical insights about how the emotional polarity of a mission statement influences money earned through fundraising. However, the positive and negative tone of a mission statement impacts organizations differently based on size. For nonprofits that report an annual revenue of less than $1 million, a positive tone in the mission statement results in higher revenue. Conversely, nonprofits that report over $1 million earn less revenue with a positive tone in their mission statement.

Owing to the specialized group sampled, the findings possibly only apply to the sampled group. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the relationships found in other areas of nonprofits. However, the implications of mission statement polarity influencing financial performance in any population should be of keen interest to practitioners when crafting mission statements.

The finding that mission statement emotional tone influences the financial performance of a nonprofit has direct implications for the effective delivery of services in the nonprofit realm. Leaders of nonprofits can use the study’s findings to position their organizations to capture potential needed revenue in the crafting of their mission statements.

This paper uniquely exposes the moderating impact of the emotional tone in mission statements in relationship with financial performance.

Escalation of commitment is one of the most influential decision-making biases in entrepreneurs which may incur substantial losses and result in failure by making entrepreneurs allocate an increasing amount of resources to failing plans. Not only is escalation one of the less-researched biases in entrepreneurship but also most of the existing studies have been either limited to specific contexts or exclusively limited to men entrepreneurs. The purpose of this study is to explore the antecedents of escalation of commitment among a sample of Iranian women and men entrepreneurs to address these gaps.

By conducting a narrative inquiry, data were collected through semi-structured and in-depth interviews with nine women and 10 men Iranian entrepreneurs who were founder/owners of a small business and had introduced at least one product to the market.

According to the findings of this study, the fear of losing autonomy and fear of being blamed by one’s family were the main drivers of escalation of commitment among the women entrepreneurs, while overconfidence, sense of responsibility and hoping to gain more profits were the main antecedents of escalation among men entrepreneurs.

This study is a pioneer in studying the antecedents of the escalation of commitment among women and men entrepreneurs comparatively in the context of a developing country.

Food safety management systems (FSMSs) are implemented in food supply chains primarily to adhere to regulations as well as meet customer requirements. The literature contains examples of successful and failed implementation of FSMSs, including the influencing factors. This paper aims to explore the literature on the effectiveness factors of FSMSs to identify the literature findings, the emerging themes and suggestions for future research.

A systematic literature review (SLR) is used to synthesise research on the factors influencing the effectiveness of FSMSs. The methodology consists of formulating the research questions, identifying, selecting and evaluating relevant studies, analysing, synthesising and presenting findings.

The effectiveness factors of FSMSs identified from the literature are clustered into five categories, namely (1) FSMS culture; (2) FSMS inspection, verification and audit; (3) FSMS knowledge; (4) Legal regulations; and (5) Prerequisite programmes. Moreover, it was determined that the effectiveness factors featured in a variety of contexts.

SLR is an objective, rigorous and reliable approach to exploring the effectiveness factors of FSMSs. However, the results are contingent on research studies selected for review, which depends on the research criteria used, available and accessible research studies and the criteria for inclusion and exclusion of studies. This dependency introduces bias, an intrinsic limitation of the SLR approach.

In this study, the effectiveness factors of FSMSs are identified utilising an SLR approach, integrating findings from previously reported research. The factors and resulting emerging themes identified in this study are beneficial, including in improving food safety management practices.