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Book review by Lori Wagner. Henry, Colette, ed. Entrepreneurship in the Creative Industries: An International Perspective. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007. ISBN 9781845426101

Book review by Lori Wagner Snyder. Steyaert, Chris and Daniel Hjorth, eds. Entrepreneurship as Social Change. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006. ISBN 9781847206275

This study sought to explore first-year college student perceptions related to when they first became aware of leadership and perceived influences on leadership. The study was rooted in the Leadership Identity Development Model (Komives, Owen, Longerbeam, Mainella, & Osteen, 2005). Five purposively selected individuals completing the first semester of a formal leadership program for first-year students participated in this study. Content analysis of qualitative interviews revealed two themes related to leadership awareness: pre-college and positional versus non-positional roles; four themes related to perceived leadership influences: external role models, internal beliefs, previous experience, and types of leadership/leadership philosophy. This research supports the importance of both internal and external factors in developing an understanding of what leadership is by first-year college students.

American sociology has long been concerned with the social conditioning of American character, particularly with regard to caring for others. This interest can be traced to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1899[1838]) in which he reflected on how democratic participation in government and voluntary associations in the 1830s shaped the American character. Tocqueville believed that participation in social institutions, and especially voluntary societies, balanced the potentially excessive individualism he observed in the United States. David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd: A Study of Changing American Character (1950) picked up similar themes in an exploration of the isolation of the individual within modern society. These concerns reached a broad audience more recently in Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton's Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985) in which the authors argued that the scale had swung in favor of individualism at the expense of commitment to the social good. Robert Wuthnow (1991) addressed these issues again in Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves, in which he explored how in volunteer work, Americans attempted to reconcile compassion with individualism. These studies, primarily focusing on white, middle‐class Americans, have laid the groundwork for an exploration of the social nature of the American character within the context of caring for others.

First-year college students in a leadership-themed living-learning community (N= 60) at Texas A&M University were surveyed to examine if participation in the learning community influenced their leadership mindset using hierarchical and systemic thinking preferences. Utilizing a pre-test and post-test methodology, significant differences for hierarchical thinking were not found; however, significant differences for systemic thinking were found. At the end of the program year, students had larger systemic scores than when they started the program, but their hierarchical thinking scores remain fairly steady. Findings indicated that participation in a leadership-themed living-learning community influenced students’ leadership mindsets.

This study aims to investigate the key elements that influence knowledge sharing practice, primarily the relationship between knowledge sharing practice and organizational performance within the oil and gas (OG) industry.

A sample of 203 responses was collected from the OG industry using an online questionnaire. Data were analyzed using applied structural equation modeling to validate the model and test the hypotheses.

The results indicate that significant relationships exist among the model constructs. These findings provide a better understanding of the factors that influence knowledge sharing practices within the OG industry. These findings prove that knowledge sharing practices positively impact organizational performance through cost reduction, organization growth and intangible benefits.

This study demonstrates that organizations in the OG industry may increase performance by adopting knowledge sharing practices. This study also provides practitioners with important information to enhance knowledge sharing practice within their organizations. For instance, managers should focus on Web 2.0 and other knowledge sharing systems to facilitate both tacit and explicit knowledge sharing. The findings provide empirical evidence that knowledge sharing practices allow organizations to transfer expert knowledge to younger generations of employees. As a result, organizations will be able to capture knowledge and alleviate the negative impact of high staff turnover within the OG industry.

The lack of knowledge sharing practices and the eminent loss of technical knowledge within the (OG) industry, because of retirements and turnover, create a difficult challenge for practitioners. Research on knowledge sharing within the OG industry is limited. Therefore, this study provides an in-depth analysis regarding the critical knowledge sharing practices and valuable information to researcher and practitioners’ knowledge sharing practices within the OG industry.

Recent research has shown that student affairs practitioners are characterized as leadership educators by experts in their field, but leadership education traditionally is not part of a student affairs preparatory program, nor is leadership education a commonly discussed professional competency. Using two simultaneous Delphi panels, Group A: Student Affairs Practitioners/Managers (n=17) and Group B: Student Affairs Preparatory Program Faculty/Directors (n=20), this study sought to ascertain the competencies required of entry-level student affairs leadership educators. Between the two panels, 128 unique competencies were identified. Four recommendations are provided to strengthen the professional development of student affairs leadership educators.

Identity has emerged as a compelling force in understanding leadership. Situated within the identity approach to leadership, this study explored identity within the context of leadership for both assigned (i.e., positional) and emergent (i.e., nonpositional) student leaders. Findings from this study suggest that a distinct set of a leader’s identities is active in college student leadership and that personal identities are most salient to leaders. By making connections between identity and leadership, educators and practitioners may strengthen their understanding of how their curriculum and workshops may serve as identity workspaces for leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the relationships between the drivers of economic growth in emerging markets to include entrepreneurial orientation (EO), human capital (HC), relational capital (RC), and international performance (IP).

Data were collected from 199 small- to medium-sized Indian professional service entrepreneurs that employ less than 500 employees and engage in international business. Given the multidimensional nature of IP, structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the measurement and substantive models.

SEM and mediation tests confirmed significant relationships among the constructs in the model and indicated that HC can be leveraged for international growth using RC to deliver new professional services across borders. EO, the strongest predictor, along with HC and RC, directly influenced IP. The effect of HC is mediated by an EO and RC.

By design, only successful professional service firms in India were studied, which limited generalizability.

Entrepreneurs can enhance the likelihood of international expansion success by utilizing highly skilled HC and developing strong network relationships. Entrepreneurial managers should leverage their professional service resources through judicious investments in personnel and relationship-building skills to develop RC.

This study examined entrepreneurial professional HC and RC as related to international entrepreneurship emerging market research. Data collection in India contributes to empirical research on internationalization from emerging markets.

With the growth of unstructured data, opportunities to generate insights into supply chain risks in low cost countries (LCCs) are emerging. Sourcing risk has primarily focused on short-term mitigation. This paper aims to offer an approach that uses newsfeed data to assess regional supply base risk in LCC’s for the apparel sector, which managers can use to plan for future risk on a long-term planning horizon.

This paper demonstrates that the bulk of supplier risk assessments focus on short-term responses to disruptions in developed countries, revealing a gap in assessments of long-term risks for supply base expansion in LCCs. This paper develops an approach for predicting and planning for long-term supply base risk in LCC’s to address this shortfall. A machine-based learning algorithm is developed that uses the analysis of competing hypotheses heuristic to convert data from multiple news feeds into numerical risk scores and visual maps of supply chain risk. This paper demonstrates the approach by converting large amounts of unstructured data into two measures, risk impact and risk probability, leading to visualization of country-level supply base risks for a global apparel company.

This paper produced probability and impact scores for 23 distinct supply base risks across 10 countries in the apparel sector. The results suggest that the most significant long-term risks of supply disruption for apparel in LCC’s are human resource regulatory risks, workplace issues, inflation costs, safety violations and social welfare violations. The results suggest that apparel brands seeking suppliers in the regions of Cambodia, India, Bangladesh, Brazil and Vietnam should be aware of the significant risks in these regions that may require mitigative action.

This approach establishes a novel approach for objectively projecting future global sourcing risk, and yields visually mapped outcomes that can be applied in forecasting and planning for future risks when considering sourcing locations in LCC’s.