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The dropout rates of open e-learning platforms are often cited as high as 97%, with many users discontinuing their use after initial acceptance. This study aims to explore this anomaly through the lens of affordances theory, revealing design–reality gaps between users' diverse goals and the possibilities for action provided by an open IT artefact.

A six-month case study was undertaken to investigate the design implications of user-perceived affordances in an EU sustainability project which developed an open e-learning platform for citizens to improve their household energy efficiency. Thematic analysis was used to reveal the challenges of user continuance behaviour based on how an open IT artefact supports users in achieving individual goals (e.g. reducing energy consumption in the home) and collective goals (lessening the carbon footprint of society).

Based on the findings, the authors inductively reveal seven affordances related to open e-learning platforms: informing, assessment, synthesis, emphasis, clarity, learning pathway and goal-planning. The findings centre on users' perception of these affordances, and the extent to which the open IT artefact catered to the goals and constraints of diverse user groups. Open IT platform development is further discussed from an iterative and collaborative perspective in order to explore different possibilities for action.

The study contributes towards research on open IT artefact design by presenting key learnings on how the designers of e-learning platforms can bridge design–reality gaps through exploring affordance personalisation for diverse user groups. This can inform the design of open IT artefacts to help ensure that system features match the expectations and contextual constraints of users through clear action-oriented possibilities.

This case is suitable for courses in entrepreneurship and growing enterprises and management communication. It follows the step by step process of growing a business built on a strong culture that fosters high employee engagement and loyalty. The result for Leaders was low employee turnover, long-term relationships based on communication and trust, and being a finalist on the Wall Street Journal's 2008 Top Small Workplaces list.

Anatomy of a Murder, a beloved, highly influential, seemingly liberal 1959 classic law-film seems to appropriate some of the fading western genre’s features and social functions, intertwining the professional-plot western formula with a hero-lawyer variation on the classic western hero character, America’s 19th century archetypal True Man. In so doing, Anatomy revives the western genre’s honor code, embracing it into the hero-lawyer law-film. Concurrently, it accommodates the development of cinematic imagery of the emerging, professional elite groups, offering the public the notion of the professional super-lawyer, integrating legal professionalism with natural justice. In the course of establishing its Herculean lawyer, the film constitutes its female protagonist as a potential threat, subjecting her to a cinematic judgment of her sexual character and reinforcing the honor-based notion of woman’s sexual-guilt.

Racial code-switching is an impression management behavior for people to blend into social and professional situations by adhering to norms outside their own. Drawing on the identity threat perspective, this study aims to examine the harmful effects of racial code-switching on employee psychological depression and hospitality industry turnover intentions.

The current study used a two-wave time-lagged survey of 286 restaurant frontline employees. Participants were asked to rate their racial code-switching, identity threat and shame in the first survey. Participants reported their depression and industry turnover intention in the second survey one week later.

The results showed that employees that engaged in racial code-switching had higher intentions to leave the hospitality industry via the sequential mediating roles of identity threat, shame and depression.

The findings provide practical implications on how hospitality practitioners can foster employee authenticity and tenure by evaluating impression management strategies. This paper provides a discussion, suggestions and future research directions on how to take sustainable actions toward diversity, equity, inclusion, justice and belonging.

Although racial code-switching is a common behavioral strategy for whites and people of color, research on racial code-switching in the hospitality industry is limited. This study is among the first to examine racial code-switching’s health and career consequences.

Xyberspace Consulting, Inc. is reconsidering the allocation of the costs associated with its Training and Educational Services Group (TESG), a shared-services or support department to its user departments. Currently, the company uses a single departmental rate to allocate actual training costs to the user groups, using the user groups' actual usage of TESG resources. The company is exploring whether it should allocate TESG fixed and variable costs separately, whether it should use budgeted or actual allocation rates and whether it should allocate costs based on budgeted or actual usage. This case is intended to give students exposure to allocating shared-services or support-department costs, understanding the implications of different allocation strategies, and evaluating whether and how allocation systems can facilitate strategy implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to carry out a literature review to determine which variables have the greatest impact on the survival capacity of mutual funds, and if these variables also have an influence on the various ways in which mutual funds disappear.

The authors carry out a systematic review of the literature on mutual funds and identify the main features that affect their capacity for survival.

The results show that most of the articles are based on data from the US market and that the two most studied variables are the return and the size of the fund. Furthermore, the relationship between the behaviour of variables and the disappearance of funds has mainly been analysed by comparing surviving and non-surviving funds, but without specifying the way in which they disappeared. Finally, the results show that there is no single methodology for examining the survival of funds.

In the financial literature, no previous literature review has focused on the factors that influence the survival capacity of mutual funds. The authors consider that this review will provide a broader and more realistic vision of the level of academic interest in this field and identify any gaps that exist in the literature available.

The corporate disclosure decision is one of the most difficult decisions any corporation, its management and counsel will face. If a corporation learns that it or one of its employees has engaged in a fraud or crime, the corporation, through its officers and directors, must decide whether it should disclose the fraud or crime to the government and, if the decision to disclose is made, what the scope of the disclosure should be. These decisions are fraught with dangers which threaten to expose the corporation and its employees to civil and criminal liability.

Within the two-tier bargaining system, the role of complementary collective bargaining is somewhat controversial. In this paper, the authors analyse collective agreements from a triple perspective: scanning the contents of firm-level complementary collective agreements (CCAs); identifying the factors that determine the probability of signing a CCA and analysing the relationship between the latter and firm performance with a focus on the role of different negotiated topics.

The empirical procedure is based on 2 main linked sources: longitudinal balance sheet data and a cross-sectional dataset of a representative sample of Italian firms with at least 15 employees, including some retrospective information. The innovative dataset derives from integrating multiple sources. The main empirical approaches include Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimations, multivariate regressions, as well as instrumental variable (IV) estimations to overcome simultaneity issues.

With respect to the probability of signing a CCA, on the firms' side, the authors find a positive role of the degree of firm capitalisation and affiliation with an employers' association and a negative role of family firms compared to non-family firms; on the workers' side, a positive role of the workers' unionisation rate and a positive but differentiated weight of workers' union representations and industrial conflicts. With regard to firm performance, the authors' estimates suggest that signing a CCA is associated with an average increase of 3% in total factor productivity (TFP) and 7.8% in labour productivity. By investigating the contents of the complementarity agreements, the authors show that bargaining a wider range of topics implies advantages that are not homogenous, benefitting more efficient firms. Moreover, the authors find a specific positive and significant role for three main interacting issues: economic incentives, organisation and employment.

The cross-sectional structure of the data on bargaining practices prevents detecting causal relationships due to either potential common driver(s) of both the target variables (firm performance) and bargaining practices (simultaneity bias) and unobservable time-invariant firm-level characteristics (heterogeneity bias).

According to the authors' results, policymakers should operate along four fiscal channels to spur the efficiency of firms, via CCA. First, tax incentives stimulate higher firm capitalisation, as this seems to be a CCA-favouring factor. Second, deduction in taxable income for union members, which should led to higher membership rates, hence raising the likelihood of obtaining a CCA. Third, incentives aimed at directly promoting the greater diffusion of CCAs as a source of improved performance. Fourth, fiscal tools aimed at favouring the negotiation of either specific contents or “bundles” of contents, which the authors' estimates show as an additional performance-enhancing tool of CCA practices.

The conceptualisation of the contents of CCA as organisational investments and the whole probability function of signing a CCA are quite innovative. Moreover, the econometric strategy takes account of several potential sources of bias when estimating the relevant coefficients at each stage, which is currently not fully considered in the literature. Finally, this is the first study to shed light on both the diverse outcomes associated with different negotiated topics (in terms of quantity and quality) and the distinction between short and medium-long term effects.

The accounting scandals and the war on terrorism have produced special challenges for this year's crop of strategists.

The paper aims to analyse a specific configuration of coworking space that emphasises the production of social value in the territory (resilient/welfare-oriented coworking). This kind of space represents the current evolution of coworking that recovers the original meaning of coworking space to promote social changes, questions the role of the physical space and brings to the fore its connections between the internal (space) and the external (territory).

The paper presents an action research on a rising network of coworking spaces. The action research was based on qualitative interviews of the founders and main stakeholders of the network and monthly meetings discussions with the steering committee of the coworking spaces.

The paper provides some key elements that highlight different meanings related to the value produced by the coworking spaces and related interpretations of the material and immaterial characteristics of the spaces. The results also highlight different managerial challenges connected with these interpretations.

The main results of the study shed light on the fact that it is not enough to focus on material aspects of the coworking space, such as the design and the dispositions of furniture and the curatorship of the relationships among coworkers, if the desired outcome is a reinterpretation of work against the consolidated individualistic paradigm. Rather, the boundary work is the condition that permits to sustain and maintain the evolutionary trajectory of coworking in the most innovative direction. Inside a network of different stakeholders, aimed at integrating individual and collective needs, the constant crossing of boundaries between people, relationships and contexts is the process that permits to generate new meanings and possibilities of action (affordance), holding a transformative potential.