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In this chapter, the authors review the concept of sustainable entrepreneurship and how it has evolved with increasing concerns about the environmental and social impact of business firms. The authors offer a background to the emergence of sustainability issues in the field of entrepreneurship research, and review a number of influential approaches to entrepreneurship that in various combinations address the relationships between the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of business. The authors further suggest three levels at which entrepreneurs can understand and assess their approach to sustainable entrepreneurship, highlight how the issue of sustainable entrepreneurship applies equally to startups and already established corporations, and in the conclusions point toward the emergence of humane entrepreneurship as a critical posture for entrepreneurship in the 21st century.

Social commerce (s-commerce) has gained widespread popularity as a social platform where customers engage in resource-sharing activities such as information exchange, advice-seeking and expressing their opinions on mutual interests. However, existing studies have not fully comprehended the drivers of electronic customer-to-customer interaction (eCCI) and how such behavior contributes to the customer “stick” on s-commerce sites. This study develops the Motivation–Opportunity–Ability (MOA) theory and investigates the impact of MOA factors on eCCI, which in turn affects customer stickiness.

A survey was used to acquire data from 455 valid respondents, and the research employed a combination of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and structural equation modeling.

The results revealed associations between perceived self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, tie strength with other customers, eCCI and customer stickiness.

Considering the limited availability of complete eCCI frameworks in existing scholarly works, the authors present valuable perspectives on the role of consumer characteristics as both antecedents and consequences of eCCI. Additionally, this study proposes a research agenda for the field of eCCI on s-commerce sites.

The growth of mental disorders and their costs represents a public health challenge. This study aims to explore how a social club can help mitigate its impact through arts and sports workshops.

Using the social return on investment (SROI) methodology, the impact of the social club is evaluated by identifying stakeholders and quantifying their contributions. In addition, the relationship between patients’ attendance and the reduction of relapses and medication consumption is explored.

The SROI showed a positive return on investment, €12.12 per euro invested. This ratio indicates that the social club generates social value well above its initial costs. On the other hand, two stakeholders were identified as higher impact generators, and it was confirmed that sports activities generate more social and economic impact than art activities – however, the positive effects of art activities last longer over time. The study revealed a positive relationship between social club attendance and relapse reduction. Almost 90% of the participating users reported no relapses or emergency hospitalizations during the past year of attendance. In addition, a substantial decrease in medication dosage was observed. These results suggest that social clubs help stabilize mental health and reduce the burden on health-care systems.

The case study highlights the vital role of social clubs in supporting people facing mental health issues. Policymakers and health-care providers can use this knowledge to invest in more effective and sustainable mental health support activities.

The adoption of social procurement, the emerging practice of using a firm's spending power to generate social value, requires buying firms to navigate conflicts of institutional logics. Adopting an institutional work perspective, this study aims to investigate how buying firms change their existing procurement institutions to adopt and advance social procurement.

The authors conducted an in-depth case study of a social procurement initiative in the UK. This case study comprised of 16 buying firms that were actively participating in the social procurement initiative at the time of data collection (2020–2021). The data were largely captured through a set of 41 semi-structured interviews.

Four types of institutional work were observed: reducing institutional conflicts, crossing institutional boundaries, legitimising institutional change and spreading the new institutional logic. These different types of institutional work appeared in a sequential way.

This study contributes to various strands of literature investigating the role of procurement in generating value and benefits within societies, adopting an institutional lens to investigate the buying firms' purposeful actions to change procurement institutions. Secondly, this study complements the existing literature investigating the conflicts of institutional logics by illustrating the ways firms address such institutional conflicts when adopting and advancing social procurement. Finally, this work contributes to the recently emerging research on institutional work that examines the creation and establishment of new institutions by considering the existing procurement institutions in the examination of institutional work.

This paper describes a model of “Learning to care” derived from a study exploring how care workers in care homes learn to care for people living with dementia. The “Learning to care” model is primarily informal in nature in which influences such as formalised training and organisational culture impact care outcomes indirectly rather than directly.

This study used a focused, critical ethnographic approach in two care homes in England resulting in 63 h of observation of care of people living with advanced dementia, 15 semi-structured interviews and 90 in-situ ethnographic interviews with care staff.

The findings reveal a three-level model of learning to care. At the level of day-to-day interactions is a mechanism for learning that is wholly informal and follows the maxim “What Works is What Matters”. Workers draw on resources and information within this process derived from their personal experiences, resident influences and care home cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge is created through a worker’s interactions with colleagues and the training they receive, meaning that these organisational level influences affect care practice only indirectly via the “What Works is What Matters” mechanism.

This study makes an original contribution by explaining the nature of day-to-day informal learning processes as experienced by care workers and those living with dementia in care homes. In particular, it illuminates the specific mechanisms by which organisational culture has an effect on care practice and the limitations of formal training in influencing such practice.

This paper aims to examine how managers make non-generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) exclusion decisions depending on the regulatory guidance provided and their motivations. Guidance detail is a double-edged sword: resolving uncertainty but risking rule-based compliance over principled judgment.

This paper uses the context of non-GAAP measures in reporting, given the history of Securities and Exchange Commission changes in guidance detail. Drawing on theories of epistemic motivation and process accountability, this paper manipulates the goal of management (informativeness vs. opportunism) and guidance detail to examine effects on management decisions to exclude an ambiguous charge.

The 2×2 between participants experiment with 132 managers reveals that more detailed guidance increases likelihood of exclusion of an ambiguous charge. This paper further finds that this exclusion is more likely when management is given an informativeness goal, a result of a mediating effect of epistemic motivation. However, these findings only hold at low levels of process accountability.

The findings regarding the psychological concepts recognize the influence of perceived decision uncertainty by suggesting how managers respond to the level of regulatory guidance detail, offering regulators and auditors a basis for understanding and anticipating managerial reporting choices. Also, awareness of heightened epistemic motivation under the informativeness goal provides a nuanced practical understanding of non-GAAP decision drivers. Finally, the finding that effects are more pronounced for managers with lower process accountability highlights the significance of organizational accountability structures in guiding managerial choices, which can inform board-level governance and control decisions.

Pragmatically, this paper finds that detailed guidance leads to more appropriate exclusion decisions under a goal of informativeness but finds no such evidence where the goal is opportunism. No prior study has examined how the level of detail in guidance affects managers’ disclosure choices.

This paper draws on the thinking of the nineteenth-century Italian philosopher and poet Giacomo Leopardi and scholars who studied his thoughts on the relationship between nature and humans. Leopardi's philosophy of nature recognizes the alienness of nature in relation to humankind, thus challenging human governance of the planet. The poet’s thoughts align with the dilemma identified in the Anthropocene literature: who speaks for nature? This dilemma has accounting implications in terms of the frameworks and disclosures to be adopted. Therefore, Leopardi’s thoughts can become the basis for a more articulated and complex understanding of some key concepts and issues at the roots of SEA.

The paper utilizes content analysis to examine four essays by Giacomo Leopardi, which serve as the source of our data.

Leopardi recognizes the alienness of nature with respect to humanity and the voicelessness of nature as a generative of conflict. He also warned of the consequences of human governance that does not take nature’s needs into account. These findings open a discussion on the complex accounting implications of the distance between humanity and nature. They can inspire SEA scholars to change the status quo by developing new accounting frameworks from the perspective of nature and adopting forms of governance of nature that recognize the need to protect it as a voiceless stakeholder.

Through Leopardi’s humanistic and poetic philosophy, the perspective of nature can be infused into SEA studies, thereby promoting the need for a multidisciplinary and complex approach to the discipline.

This study analyses how different forms of online accountability – hierarchical/individualising, hierarchical/calculative and socialising accountability – influence online financing success of non-profit organisations (NPOs).

The study is based on 797 NPOs’ projects listed on three international crowdfunding platforms providing space for NPOs to present, account for and fund social projects.

Results show that accountability forms developed online play significantly different roles in NPOs’ financing. While online hierarchical/individualising and socialising accountability enhance NPO funding, hierarchical/calculative accountability reduces financing success.

The empirical analysis is limited to the specific research context. However, the research provides theoretical and practical insights for the accounting literature.

The paper recommends that NPOs invest more in explaining their past and future activities rather than reporting on pure financial performances, as this may lead to stakeholders’ perception of mission drift and reduce financing success.

This research enhances the understanding of online accountability and its significance in securing financial resources for NPOs by highlighting the necessity of examining various accountability forms individually, as they may serve distinct functions in the financial sustenance of NPOs.