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Business model (BM) canvases have been used in educational institutions and business incubators for over a decade to assist students and start-up entrepreneurs in developing their business projects. Given the urgency of tackling sustainability challenges, several tools have emerged to stimulate sustainable business modeling (SBM). However, these tools are often too complex for nonexperts in business modeling or sustainability, and thus insufficiently user-friendly for educational contexts. This study aims to address this pedagogical gap by describing the design process of the responsible business model canvas (RBMC).

The authors relied on a design science research methodology involving the active participation of end users, entrepreneurship educators, business coaches and external partners. The authors proposed four criteria and ten subcriteria to analyze existing SBM canvases based on their user-friendliness and to design the initial prototype of the RBMC. The RBMC was subsequently tested in various settings, including classroom assignments and business incubation programs, with over 1,000 university students. The tool was refined and assessed throughout the development process, incorporating feedback from focus groups with start-up entrepreneurs.

Through the development process, the authors created a user-friendly tool to help novice student and start-up entrepreneurs integrate sustainability into their BMs: the RBMC. The canvas consists of 14 building blocks grouped into four areas: consistency (mission, vision, values), desirability (value propositions, customer segments, users and beneficiaries, customer relationships and channels), feasibility (key activities, key resources, key partners and stakeholders and governance) and viability (cost structure, revenues streams, negative impacts and positive impacts).

The research methods and user-friendliness criteria in this study can be applied in other contexts to design tools to support sustainable entrepreneurship education. While the RBMC is currently being used in several educational institutions throughout the world, its impacts in different pedagogical and cultural settings require further validation.

The RBMC is a user-friendly tool to introduce students and start-up entrepreneurs to SBM. It helps raise users’ awareness about sustainability concerns, challenging them to consider issues they might have otherwise overlooked. Some participants even shifted their outlook and were motivated to develop a long-term vision integrating compensatory, mitigative or corrective actions into their BMs.

The RBMC is the outcome of a balanced approach that combines both pragmatic (i.e. user-friendliness) and normative (i.e. sustainability) perspectives. It provides users with a systematic approach for integrating and applying sustainability issues in their business projects.

High-quality employee motivation can contribute to an organization’s long-term success by supporting employees’ well-being and performance. Nevertheless, there is a paucity of research concerning how organizations motivate workers in non-traditional work contexts. In the algocratic context of the gig-economy, the purpose of this paper is to understand the role that technology can play in motivating workers.

Drawing on the self-determination theory, job-characteristic theory and enterprise social media research, this conceptual paper explores how the architecture of the digital labor platforms underlying the gig-economy (and the characteristics of jobs mediated through these IT artifacts) can impact key antecedents of self-motivation.

Combining theory and empirical evidence, this paper develops a mid-range theory demonstrating how organizations can support the self-motivation of gig-workers through the thoughtful design of their digital labor platforms and the integration of two social media tools (namely, social networking and social badging).

This paper answers calls for psychologically-based research exploring the consequences of gig-work as well as research studying the impacts of advanced technologies in interaction with work contexts on motivation. In theorizing around a large set of social-contextual variables operating at different levels of analysis, this paper demonstrates that individual-level motivation can be influenced by both task-based and organizational-level factors, in addition to individual-level factors.

The proposed theory provides novel insight into how gig-organizations can leverage widely accessible social media technology to motivate platform workers in the absence of human supervision and support. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine multi-stakeholder cooperatives (MSCs), a relatively new and understudied type of cooperative, by focusing on the impact of a new member status: the “supporting member.” Supporting members are included in the ownership structure, participate in the decision-making process and contribute to the share capital without being formally defined as users of the cooperative’s services, an important disruption to the traditional cooperative venture.

This paper is based on a qualitative study using in-depth interviews with 30 members (i.e. founders, managers, board members and employees) of 14 MSCs located in the Canadian province of Québec.

This study suggests that including supporting members in the cooperative venture impacts the three core features of cooperatives, which are traditionally user-owned, user-controlled and user-benefiting. Despite supporting members’ positive contributions to an MSC’s development and success, the inclusion of such members generates management challenges and organizational paradoxes.

The inclusion of supporting members allows MSCs to become an experiment in “stakeholder democracy” and a space of negotiation between organizations, citizens and institutions, as MSCs represent and embody some of the community’s needs and desires.

This study constitutes an original contribution to paradox literature, as it describes the specific upward and downward spirals related to the inclusion of supporting members, highlights innovative responses to these paradoxes and extends understandings of cooperatives as hybrid organizations entangled in bundles of paradoxes.

Entrepreneurship education scholarship has been recently challenged to look at what goes on inside the entrepreneurship classroom to assess what students are really learning. Relying on the construction and analysis of a 3-h long set of learning activities on responsible entrepreneurship, this paper focuses on the activities conducted and what students have learned, based on Bloom's revised taxonomy of educational objectives.

This paper builds on a pre-/post-intervention assessment around a set of learning activities with 151 undergraduate students. Before and after the class, students were asked to produce a definition of responsible entrepreneurship. They were also asked to reflect on what had changed from the beginning.

Analysis of students' pre/post definitions shows a standardization of their conceptions of responsible entrepreneurship. This result confirms that the learning objective of this class was met. Nevertheless, applying Bloom's revised taxonomy to students' reflections allows for more nuanced interpretation. The analysis indeed revealed that some students manifest relatively superficial learning while other shows a deeper ability to reflect on the concept.

First, this paper contributes to the entrepreneurship education literature by showing the relevance of using Bloom's revised taxonomy for both teaching and research purposes. Second, it presents a set of innovative learning activities on responsible entrepreneurship that could be easily reproduced in other educational contexts. Third, it shows the importance of asking students what they learned and what has changed for them through class activities.

This study analyzes which worldviews on the interrelatedness of the economic, environmental and social systems are adopted in the literature on responsible management education (RME) and explores how this affects the way business schools educate future responsible managers.

The sustainability-focused relational worldviews of Kurucz et al. (2014) were used to perform a content analysis on 100 articles from the field of RME to understand which worldviews are adopted and to distill potential implications of the prevalence of such worldviews in the RME field.

In the sample, the most adopted view was the intertwined view that imagines a balance between the economic, environmental, and social system (61% of the articles). The subsuming worldview (highlighting the business case for sustainability) accounted for 8% of articles in the sample. The embedded worldview (a new paradigm that respects the limitations of the environmental and social systems) accounted for 31% of the articles in the sample. The disparate view (representing classic economic views of discrete systems) was not adopted, indicating a rather uniform belief that RME is about moving management education away from this view. Examining the evolution of views over the last 20 years, it can be observed that the embedded view is growing in popularity. The continuing prevalence of the ambiguous and malleable intertwined view in the RME literature could explain why so many RME initiatives have been taken in the last two decades, while simultaneously critics remain vocal that business schools are not preparing future managers to engage with ethics, responsibility, and sustainability (ERS).

While sustainability-focused relational worldviews have been introduced in the RME literature, this study provides empirical evidence of the prevalence of such worldviews in the literature, allowing an exploration of the implications for the field. The presence of multiple — and at times competing — worldviews adds tension to the field of RME. Seen on the trajectory of increasingly progressive worldviews, the intertwined view is not limited by economic rationalism (like the subsuming view) but also stops short of requiring a full paradigm shift (like the embedded view).

Despite the popularity of gig employment amid the changing business landscape, gig scholarship is somewhat limited and the untold reality about gig is yet to be fully revealed. This study aims to critically address the nature of gig employment, its ambiguities, evolution, theoretical premises and the appropriate future road ahead.

This paper adopts a dual analytical approach – bibliometric and thematic analyses. After incorporating the exclusion–inclusion criteria, the authors identified 2,135 articles for the bibliometric analyses by using VOSviewer. Additionally, for the deep-delving synthesis, the authors conducted thematic analyses following Braun and Clarke (2006), based on 351 papers.

The findings revealed that gig work, in its different forms, is emerging as an alternative work arrangement with respect to the future of work. This study also identified multilevel perspectives of gig employment along with its holistic nomological network. Finally, this study offers some critical research directions that should help enhance the theoretical and practical strengths of this nascent scholarship in future.

The review findings are limited in nature owing to the paucity of quality research papers published in the said domain.

The paper brings more clarity to what gig is and isn’t, along with its critical perspectives from multilevel lenses.

This paper identifies critical perspectives related to gig work and suggests appropriate directions for future gig work related scholarship.