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Organisational slack has been widely considered in strategic management, but there is a gap in understanding the process of accumulation and application of slack resources. From a dynamic perspective and over an extended period of time, this paper analyses the management of slack resources and evaluates whether the different behaviours, in relation to the accumulation and consumption of slack resources, have any effect on performance.

The resource-based view and the dynamic extension of this theory, i.e. resource management and resource orchestration, were analysed in order to evaluate how slack resources can be managed and generate value. Assuming a configurational approach, the analysis was structured into two stages to answer the proposed hypothesis. The first stage studied whether there were different patterns of management of slack resources over time using the DistatisR package. The second stage evaluated which behaviours had the greatest impact in terms of profitability by using a dynamic panel data regression.

Three different types of slack resource management were found in companies: efficient, effective and erratic. Different types do not have the same impact on performance.

The dynamic management of slack resources has scarcely been considered, even during periods of crisis and economic expansion. This research advances the understanding of how firms transform slack resources into performance from a dynamic perspective.

Recent debates in urban studies and urban anthropology have revolved around the growth of neoliberal economies and their impact on postcolonial cities such as Bengaluru and invoke the phenomenon of the death of the commons. Rather than focusing on a dialectical existence of infrastructures, which suggests a life and death binary, in 2020, I turned my attention to the possibility of a life between and beyond these two binaries through the game of football and its place in Bengaluru. This essay is based on a study of two different types of football fields in Koramangala, Bengaluru, and through this exercise, it intends to examine a potential move towards the viewing of commons as sites of knowledge production for sport, culture, and the city. One of the key ideas around which urban commons are looked at in this essay is through an examination of Bengaluru as a postcolonial city, one which was supposed to uphold a Nehruvian vision, and its transformation into the Information Technology hub of India through a neoliberal turn in urban development. A major concern raised here with neoliberal models of urban development is how people who do not have the monetary capacity to access sports infrastructure end up playing in the postcolonial, neoliberal city.

The purpose of this paper is to identify entrepreneur mentor benefits and challenges as a result of entrepreneurship mentoring in higher education (HE).

An entrepreneurship mentoring scheme was developed at a UK university to support prospective student entrepreneurs, with mentors being entrepreneurs drawn from the local business community. A mentor-outcomes framework was developed and applied to guide semi-structured interviews.

Results supported the broader applicability of our framework, with a revised framework developed to better represent the entrepreneur mentor context. Alongside psychosocial and personal developmental outcomes, mentors benefitted from entrepreneurial learning, renewed commitment to their own ventures and the development of additional skills sets. Enhanced business performance also manifested itself for some mentors. A range of challenges are presented, some generic to the entrepreneur setting and others more specific to the higher education (HE) setting.

The framework offered serves as a starting point for further researchers to explore and refine the outcomes of entrepreneur mentoring.

The findings serve to support those considering developing a mentor programme or including mentoring as part of a formal entrepreneurship education offer, specifically in a university setting but also beyond.

The vast majority of entrepreneurship mentoring studies focus on the benefits to the mentee. By focusing on benefits and challenges for the entrepreneur mentor, this study extends our knowledge of the benefit of entrepreneurship mentoring. It offers an empirically derived entrepreneur mentor outcomes framework, as well as offering insights into challenges for the entrepreneur mentor within an HE setting.

The aim of this study is to investigate how the demographics and appearance cues of potential social engineers influence the likelihood that targets will trust them and accept security risk.

Data were collected through an online survey of 635 participants, including 322 participants from Arab countries and 313 participants from the UK. The survey presented scenarios with 16 personas who offered participants the use of their mobile internet hotspot. These personas were characterized by combinations of age (young vs aged), gender (male vs female), ethnicity (Arab vs UK) and look formality (casual vs formal). The study measured both participants’ offer acceptance and trust in the persona.

Results indicated a higher likelihood of offer acceptance from female and aged personas, as well as a greater trust in these groups. Arab participants showed a preference for personas with Arabian ethnic features. In both samples, trust and acceptance were influenced by the persona’s appearance, which was found to be gender-dependent; with female personas in casual attire and male personas in formal attire being trusted more in comparison to female with formal attire and male with informal, respectively.

Findings highlight the importance of incorporating awareness of appearance-based biases in cybersecurity training, suggesting the need for culturally sensitive training programs to enhance defense against social engineering.

This study distinguishes itself by elucidating the influence of social engineers’ demographic and appearance cues on the likelihood of individuals to take security risks, thus addressing a significant gap in the literature which has traditionally emphasized the profiles of targets.

Entrepreneurial exit research has overlooked the unique context of exits at retirement age when an exit marks the end of an entrepreneurial career (i.e. retirement). To better understand retirement exit decisions and transitions, this study introduces the concept of work ability (i.e. an individual’s ability to meet work demands) into the entrepreneurial exit literature and, based on role theory, hypothesises its effect and interaction with general life satisfaction in explaining the entrepreneurial exits to retirement. The study clarifies the dynamics between the voluntary and non-voluntary aspects behind exit to retirement.

The authors use mixed-effects ordinal logistic regression with four-wave panel data on 198 Finnish small business entrepreneurs who intend to retire to test hypotheses on the relationship between work ability, general life satisfaction and entrepreneurial exit to retirement.

The study provides partial support for the hypothesis that work ability negatively impacts entrepreneurial exit to retirement and strong support for the idea that this effect is affected by general life satisfaction. Entrepreneurs who experience higher life satisfaction are likely to retire on their own terms, whereas those less satisfied continue working until declining work ability forces them to retire.

The study contributes to the entrepreneurial exit literature by showing how the exit dynamics unfold in the unique context of entrepreneurial exit to retirement. The theoretical discussion opens up the potential psychological mechanisms behind such dynamics.

This chapter presents three Chinese teachers' narrative accounts about how they live in dilemmatic spaces due to excessive entitlement. Still, the teachers move forward with transformative agency. The thick description of the three teacher participants has been reported elsewhere as the narratives of Lee – a math teacher, Ping – a Chinese language teacher and Wang – a school principal. In this chapter, however, ‘excessive teacher entitlement’ is used as a new lens to assist me in revisiting their stories of living in dilemmatic spaces. Narrative inquiry as a method unpacks the three teachers' life experiences. Although Lee, Ping and Wang encounter different entitlements and various dilemmas, their transformative agency in transitioning from a survival mode to thriving human beings brings out the similarities in their experiences. Using Vygotskian philosophy and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), this chapter focuses on the teachers' transformative agency as breaking away from given boundaries in their professional lives and taking up initiatives that confront the tacit excessive entitlement in and around them. Furthermore, transformative agency is promising in that it helps develop new practices in teacher education. Finally, the new understanding emanating by viewing the three subjects' experiences from the angle of excessive entitlement has the potential to inspire teachers in other contexts to become conscious of manifestations of excessive entitlement not only in themselves or others they interact with but also in the macro context we live in. This consciousness also increases the likelihood of the urge to find ways to ameliorate excessive entitlement and to move closer to one's cherished professional values.

Since public and private spaces are generally considered to be the fundamental building blocks for residential settings, this study draws attention to the need to consider and detail threshold spaces as one of the key aspects for accomplishing sociocultural needs, restoration and well-being in the residential environment. Understanding the function and uses of these spaces allows us to appreciate their benefits which are often neglected. This research particularly focuses on the social dimension of one fundamental threshold pattern; the Cairene balcony.

A qualitative anthropological approach was adopted in this research where in-depth interviews with female residents (n = 46) were conducted in three local contexts in Cairo, Egypt in parallel with non-participatory observation. The present piece focuses on the results elicited from the female residents’ interviews.

Irrespective of the income group, sociocultural background and context, dominating factors influencing women’s perception of the role of the Cairene balcony were commonly present. These included issues of; well-being and restoration, the phenomenon of personalization and identity, functional and communicative purposes, safety and security and privacy and control. Overall, the majority of interviewees stressed the significance of the balcony as a prominent source of prospect and an impermissible part of the residential environment.

The fact that little research has been conducted to examine the everyday use of the balcony and the role it plays in Cairene homes makes this “dedicated” research piece a valuable addition.

This study aims to examine the underlying process through which learning organization culture positively influences knowledge sharing. It specifically explored the mediating role of social capital, underscoring its critical impact on enhancing both knowledge sharing and fostering learning organization culture.

To test the proposed hypotheses, structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis was conducted with a sample of 231 employees from a manufacturing firm in South Korea.

The results of this study indicate significant direct effects of learning organization culture on social capital. Also, social capital indicates a positive effect on knowledge sharing. Although learning organization culture had no direct effect on knowledge sharing, it indirectly affected learning organization culture and knowledge sharing by mediating social capital.

This study proposes that a learning organization culture will be interconnected with social capital and knowledge sharing. Organizations that can effectively harness the wealth of knowledge unlocked by social capital, and subsequently integrate this knowledge into their activities, are poised for competitive advantage.

First, this study places a special emphasis on the mediating role of social capital between learning organization culture and knowledge sharing. Despite extensive research exploring diverse knowledge-sharing factors (Wang and Noe, 2010), it is plausible that examining social capital as a mediator could offer insights for facilitating knowledge sharing through its structural, relational and cognitive dimensions. Second, while a plethora of literature examines knowledge sharing, this study also seeks to unravel the multifaceted pathways through which the learning organization culture influences knowledge sharing and how these processes could be optimized in organizations.

Some sports organizations have a strategic objective of promoting human and social development through sports. However, it can be challenging to ensure that these objectives, conveyed by the board, are fully internalized by the athletes. From the perspective of inter-organizational networks, this dissemination can occur through strategic alignment and diffusion of social capital. Therefore, the authors wanted to analyze if organizational policies from sports organizations are related to athletes' perception of social capital and strategic alignment.

The authors conducted a sequential mixed-method research. Firstly, a pilot study was conducted with two exploratory interviews with key informants from a sports organization, supported by documentary data from this organization. A thematic content analysis was carried out to identify relevant categories and subcategories to prepare a quantitative research instrument. In the second phase, a questionnaire was applied to 159 student-athletes from this organization. The collected data were analyzed by multiple linear regression.

From the pilot study, a set of five elements of strategic alignment, and three elements of social capital in the sports organization context were provided. In the quantitative phase, the authors identified that social capital is related to athletes' perception of shared values internalization in a sports organization, but strategic systems were not.

Sports managers could better promote internal policies if there is social capital among athletes rather than implementing top-down deployed communications.

Policymakers could better predict the effectiveness of a foment request by sports organizations considering not only strategic systems communication deployment but also the existence of social capital in a sports organization. It is a broader mechanism to understand the capacity of a sports organization in disseminating good values among their members.

Different from traditional companies, in sports organizations, only social capital is related to the internalization of organizational policy by athletes rather than strategic alignment initiatives.

This study aims to examine how women entrepreneurs in Kazakhstan's male-dominated sectors utilize the concept of positionality to navigate and redefine gender norms, focusing on their engagement with entrepreneurial masculinities and femininities. It explores the transformative potential of their strategic actions on gender dynamics within the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Employing qualitative research through 27 in-depth interviews, this study adopts constructivist grounded theory to delve into how women entrepreneurs interact with gender norms within their entrepreneurial context. This approach highlights the dynamic interplay between gender norms and the strategies employed by women entrepreneurs to navigate these challenges.

The findings reveal that women entrepreneurs actively employ and navigate entrepreneurial masculinities and femininities as strategies to challenge traditional gender roles. Their approaches vary from conforming to, challenging and creatively redefining the gendered expectations encountered in their entrepreneurial journey. This demonstrates their agency in reshaping gender norms and contributing to the diversity of gender performances within the domain of entrepreneurship.

While focused on Kazakhstan, the study's findings suggest broader implications for understanding gender dynamics in entrepreneurship across different cultural contexts. Future research could extend this inquiry to varied sociocultural settings, employing post-structuralist and ethnographic methodologies to further explore the performance of gender roles and the negotiation of belonging in entrepreneurial contexts.

By foregrounding the concept of positionality, this study enriches the dialogue on gender dynamics within entrepreneurship, offering fresh perspectives on the agency of women entrepreneurs in male-dominated sectors. It illustrates how gender identities and performances are not fixed but are actively constructed and negotiated, contributing to the evolving landscape of entrepreneurial masculinities and femininities.