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In this chapter we investigate the role of family-specific factors in facilitating or constraining business exit in family firms. Family business literature seems to have an implicit bias toward continuity and persistence in the founder's business. This is explained by heavy emotional involvement and development of path-dependent core competences over generations. However, several long-lived family firms were able to successfully exit the founder's business. Exit allowed them to free significant strategic resources, which were later reinvested in exploiting novel entrepreneurial opportunities. Our aim is to investigate the process of exit from the founder's business in family firms, to explain both triggers and obstacles to decommitment and de-escalation. We address this issue through the study of the Italian Falck Group's exit from the steel industry in the 1990s, followed by successful startup of a renewable energy business. By carefully triangulating different data sources and different voices within and outside the controlling family, we develop a framework describing family-specific facilitators and inhibitors of business exit, and subsequent startup of a new business. Three types of family-specific factors emerge as relevant in shaping a family firm's likelihood and speed of exit from a failing business: family-related psychological triggers and obstacles to business exit; family-specific components of the structural de-escalation context; family responses to ensuing de-escalation and exit needs. The emerging framework offers a more nuanced interpretation of decommitment activities in family firms, pointing to the differential role family-specific factors may play as facilitators or inhibitors of business exit. We also suggest how these family-specific results may contribute to a deeper understanding of exit in nonfamily firms. Our results also have practical implications for family business entrepreneurial management. Actively managing the different determinants of exit choices that emerged from our study will set the stage for de-escalation from a failing course of action – a dynamic capability all family firms should learn and practice if they intend to transfer their entrepreneurial orientation to next generations.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the magnitude of employee turnover (E-turnover) in Nigerian small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with particular focus on the manufacturing and service firms adjudged as central to the growth and development of Nigerian economy.

Data from 602 employees and 94 owner/managers of SMEs located in three Southwestern Nigerian states were collected through survey questionnaire and analysed quantitatively.

Employees’ and management’s responses indicated that E-turnover still pervades the Nigerian SMEs surveyed with most employees leaving their jobs in less than a year of employment. Multiple exits also occurred; additionally, employees were more prone to exiting if they were male, older, had a smaller family size and/or worked in the manufacturing rather than service SMEs.

More needs to be done to comprehend owner-managers’ apparent deliberate disguise of employee over-casualisation in the SMEs studied, an act that appeared to limit the interpretation of status-related turnover extent among employees.

Twenty-first century businesses need to stimulate sustainable cost-effective employment relationship capable of thwarting the threat accompanying high E-turnover in businesses.

Through this research, extant global E-turnover literature (largely on western businesses) is enriched by dedicated empirical data on Nigerian SMEs that this study offers.

Despite the growing importance of young, entrepreneurial ventures in modern economic systems, many such ventures fail quite early in their lifecycles. While both evolutionary theory and organizational learning theory yield important insights for the literature on young venture survival, questions remain as to why ventures facing similar environments experience differential rates of survival. In response, I propose a theory of entrepreneurial agency – defined as the emergence and/or transformation of firms, markets, industries governed by the evolving interaction of temporally situated, intentional strategic action with a malleable external environment – to complement prevailing viewpoints on the causes of young venture survival. My central thesis in this chapter is that to develop more comprehensive explanations of differential survival rates, a theory of entrepreneurial agency – illuminating the transformative potential of entrepreneurial action – is necessary to complement evolutionary perspectives in the literature on firm survival. With this objective in mind, I construct a theoretical model linking diverse perspectives on the duality of human agency and theories of environmental selection, and offer several theoretical and empirical suggestions to guide future research.

Although studies of “core competence” appear frequently, the concept lacks a clear definition that allows one to operationalize it and use it to develop falsifiable predictions. We propose a definition based on the phenomenon that core competence is typically applied to – adaptations to different external context. Sourcing insight form the paradigm of organizational ecology, we develop arguments rooted in theories of structural inertia and environmental imprinting. Empirical analyses of failure rates of entrants in the Italian automobile industry confirm our propositions that core competence is a source of competitive advantage when industry entry is based on relevant capabilities and a source of inertia and obsolescence when core competences need to be substantially altered. We conclude that whether core competence materializes as a dynamic capability or exposes the firm to liability to selection and obsolescence is a random process. Its outcome hinges on environmental variation and the resulting firm-environment (mis)alignment and is thus largely beyond managerial control.

As competition grows in the robot field and as more sophisticated applications emerge, it has become necessary to accurately predict robot cycle time. Especially in the area of robot assembly applications, it is necessary to estimate times to balance multi‐arm systems and to economically compare robot assembly systems to alternate methods. Using the Unimate 6000 robot system as a model and manual time methods as a guide, a robot time and motion method is developed. Three time estimating methods are discussed starting with a simple, approximate one and finishing with a detailed, accurate one. All three methods can be adapted for use with applications other than assembly and will be further evaluated in the future with other robot systems.

The purpose of this paper is to present some of the findings from an empirical, mixed methods research project that reveal underreporting and active concealment of abuse in private sector care homes.

Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 36 care home personnel. An anonymously completed questionnaire was also used concurrently among newly appointed staff in newly opened care homes, to elicit additional quantitative and qualitative data.

A significant number of respondents reported awareness of acts of abuse that had not been reported within the care home or externally to the authorities. Some respondents were aware that where occurrences of abuse had been reported, no subsequent action was taken, and external authorities were not always involved in responses to abuse. A significant number of respondents were aware of deliberate strategies used to deter reports of abuse to external agencies.

Though the research draws upon the experiences of only 36 care home personnel through interviews, and 94 questionnaire respondents who had witnessed occurrences of abuse, data suggest that a significant proportion of abuse in care homes remains unreported.

The research has revealed staffs’ experiences of underreporting of abuse in private sector care homes. Findings indicate that changes are required to current methods of scrutiny of occurrences of abuse in care homes and the strengthening of incentives to report it.

The purpose of this paper is to present findings from face-to-face interviews with three former care staff who were proven to have abused some of the older people living in the care and nursing homes in which they had once worked. The research sought to explore the intra-personal dynamics, personal characteristics and work experiences that led these staff to perpetrate abuse.

Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with three former care and nursing home staff who had committed abusive acts and the data secured subjected to thematic narrative analysis.

None of the three people interviewed had intended to become care staff and reported that the interview and induction processes they experienced did little to establish their suitability for the work they would be undertaking or to prepare them for its demands. Participants expressed their generally negative perceptions of older people, particularly those living with dementia, and told of how they also felt that they were under pressure to conform with the often abusive care home regimes that they had entered. They also recounted some specific abusive practices developed to allow them to manage the constant tension between the time available to complete all of the tasks required when “caring” for older people, and revealed their perceptions of external scrutiny of care home conduct and the behaviours developed to deflect the effectiveness of this oversight. Two interview participants also revealed their unfavourable attitudes to some of the people they were employed to care for that were based upon perceptions of ethnic differences, and of how this had contributed to the abuse they perpetrated.

Though the research draws upon the experiences of only three former care staff, the data reveal some of the intra-personal dimensions of individual staff who have engaged in abusive acts, and illuminates how the care home environment with which they interact can engender conditions under which abuse is more likely to occur.

Unusually, the paper explores the characteristics, perceptions and experiences of care staff who have actually committed abusive acts against those entrusted to their care.

The purpose of this paper is to present findings from face-to-face interviews undertaken with 16 care and nursing home managers employed in homes situated in two English local authorities. The research sought to explore managers’ perceptions of the role of contract monitoring in the prevention of abuse.

Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 16 care and nursing home managers.

Though personnel employed by the local authority who conducted contract monitoring were generally thought of positively by care home managers on a personal level, their effectiveness was perceived to be limited as a result of their lack of experience and knowledge of providing care, and the methods that they were required to use.

Though the research draws upon the experiences of only 16 care and nursing home managers in two local authorities, data suggest that current contract monitoring activity is of limited utility in determining the true nature of care and the presence of abuse.

Unusually, the paper explores care and nursing home managers’ perceptions of contract monitoring processes in terms of how they perceive their effectiveness in preventing abuse.

Empirical evidence suggests that labour-managed firms (LMFs) are relatively rare in market economies not because they are unable to survive as long as their capitalist firm (CF) counterparts, but rather because they are created much less frequently. In this chapter we use event count models applied to panel data on UK manufacturing to provide a direct comparison of the entry process of CFs and LMFs. Our main finding is that risk and capital requirements constitute greater entry barriers for LMFs than for CFs.

The purpose of this paper is to present some of the findings from an empirical, mixed methods research project that reveal the importance of the personal value frameworks held by individual staff in the prevention of abuse of older people in private sector care homes.

Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with a sample of 36 care home personnel, including proprietors, care managers and care staff.

A significant number of respondents identified the importance of personal value frameworks among staff providing care as a potential contributory factor in the prevention of abuse of older people.

Though the research draws upon the experiences of only 36 care home personnel through interviews, data suggest that the personal evaluations of staff towards those in their care is a significant contributory factor to the occurrence of abuse.

The research has identified individual staff value frameworks as a causal factor in the occurrence of abuse. The research also confirms that the perceptions of “values” among respondents directly involved in the provision of care are at odds with common understanding of “values” often cited elsewhere in connection with staff recruitment and training as a means of preventing the occurrence of abuse.