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Microenterprises (MEs) are vital to the growth and prosperity of economies around the world. All levels of society, from universities to national governments, have collaborated to improve the chances of survival and future growth of these businesses. The threat to life is serious, and unless concerted action is taken, the situation will spiral out of control. Policymakers and business leaders must work together to address the sustainability crisis. The study, therefore, set out to determine how various entrepreneurial skills (such as creativity, collaboration, networking, and risk-taking) affect the long-term viability of MEs. The overall objective of the study was to determine the importance of innovative problem-solving, collaboration, networking, and willingness to take calculated risks of microentrepreneurs for the long-term success of their businesses. A total of 274 microentrepreneurs in rural areas of the Ancash region of Peru were surveyed in the grocery, hardware, clothing, and food service sectors. The survival of the MEs was tested on four dimensions: innovation, leadership, networking, and risk-taking. According to the results, MEs managers can increase their longevity by cultivating creative skills, strengthening leadership as a key to business sustainability and survival, maximizing the use of networks to gain a market advantage and expand their customer base, and employing calculated risk-taking.

An important issue for medium-sized enterprises (MEs) in strategic management research is the ability to be resilient, recover and bounce back, after a disturbing and extenuating external event, such as the recent financial and economic crisis. Researchers have made efforts to understand the antecedents to resilience. Some studies propose capabilities and resources that strengthen experimentation while other researchers emphasize factors that support reliability. This study seeks to reconcile these views relying on upper echelons theory as the top management of MEs’ shape organizational attitudes and behaviors. The authors propose two antecedents in MEs related to management capabilities, ambidexterity and consistency, and the characteristics of family ownership that allow building of experimentation and reliability. We test our hypotheses on a dataset of 3,006 MEs and show how manager ambidexterity and family ownership play important roles in ME resilience.

Based on a news media review, this chapter explores how micro enterprises (MEs) and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) within the Norwegian tourism sectors were impacted by COVID-19 in early 2020. It examines central stakeholders' and tourism SMEs and MEs first responses to the pandemic. Similar to previous crises and disasters, the case of COVID-19 demonstrates the reliance on top-down management approaches, notably governmental compensation schemes and subsidies. Given the magnitude of the impacts related to travel bans and border closures, response mechanisms remained largely insufficient. The media reviews reveals that in the first months after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, Norwegian tourism SMEs and MEs have responded in five ways that are to some extent time-displaced yet continue simultaneous: (1) early response to business survival, (2) smaller operational changes, (3) employee layoff and bankruptcies, (4) innovation and alternative income sources and (5) gradual reopening. The Norwegian tourism recovery will strongly rely on domestic tourism which requires a reorientation of communication strategies and Norwegianization (Fornorsking) of product development and innovation. Some Norwegian destinations have already demonstrated that high dependability on international tourists and often disintegrated tourism development may threaten sustainability and prosperity of local communities, and post-COVID-19 recovery strategies will be needed that mitigate the dependence on international markets, mono-seasons or tourism as a mono-industry.

This chapter investigates the presence of a difference in the systemic risk level between Islamic and conventional banks in Bangladesh. The authors compare systemic resilience of three types of banks: fully fledged Islamic banks, purely conventional banks (CB), and CB with Islamic windows. The authors use the market-based systemic risk measures of marginal expected shortfall and systemic risk to identify which type is more vulnerable to a systemic event. The authors also use ΔCoVaR to identify which type contributes more to a systemic event. Using a sample of observations on 27 publicly traded banks operating over the 2005–2014 period, the authors find that CB is the least resilient sector to a systemic event, and is the one that has the highest contribution to systemic risk during crisis times.

We employ three systemic risk measures of banks, including the systemic risk index (SRISK) and marginal expected shortfall (MES) of Brownlees and Engle (2017) and the conditional Value-at-Risk (ΔCoVaR) of Adrian and Brunnermeier (2016), to analyze bank's exposure and contribution to systemic risk in the banking system when a financial crisis occurs. We find evidence that time-varying systemic risk exists, and systemic risk exposures escalate with the interconnectedness of banks. We also find revenue diversification is another significant factor that reduces a bank's exposure to systemic risk but not for banks in Taiwan and Singapore.

This chapter sought to overcome the current theoretical lack of understanding of the memorable tourism experiences (MTEs) phenomena and provide a conceptual framework for guiding destination managers who seek to design and deliver memorable experiences appropriate to their particular destination.

This chapter employed literature-based research methods. More specifically, it sought to (1) summarize the understanding of MTEs gained from a review of others’ work, and conduct a retrospective examination of my own empirical research on the topic; and (2) convey the insights I have formulated regarding the implications for destination managers of this understanding for designing, delivering, and evaluating programs, which may increase the probability a visitor will return home with truly memorable experiences.

The literature review and the content analysis and synthesis identified seven conceptual and theoretical components of MTEs, such as hedonism, refreshment, novelty, local culture, meaningfulness, knowledge, and adverse feelings.

The current study suggested what characteristics of tourism experiences lead to strong memorability and how to measure each component of MTEs. Thus, the findings provide important implications for destination managers to develop tourism programs that last long in visitors’ memories.

Previous researchers suggested some practical strategies to prepare environments and design experiences. However, a comprehensive, theoretically sound understanding of the fundamental factors of MTEs was left out. This study investigated tourism experiential factors that enable and facilitate MTEs. It also tried to demonstrate the managerial importance of these theoretical components to the design of “on the ground” destination programs, which initially create excitement and anticipation among potential visitors (within the context of a highly competitive marketplace), to the point where a given destination is selected over a multitude of others and where it subsequently delivers the kind of high-quality “truly memorable” experiences that fully meet the inflated expectations initially “promised” by the destination brand.

I use data from employers and longitudinal data from former/current recipients covering the period 1997 to early 2004 to analyze the relationship between job skills, job changes, and the evolution of wages. I analyze the effects of job skill requirements on starting wages, on-the-job training opportunities, wage growth prospects, and job turnover. The results show that jobs of different skill requirements differ in their prospects for earnings growth, independent of the workers who fill these jobs. Furthermore, these differences in wage growth opportunities across jobs are important determinants of workers’ quit propensities (explicitly controlling for unobserved worker heterogeneity). The determinants and consequences of job dynamics are investigated. The results using a multiplicity of methods, including the estimation of a multinomial endogenous switching model of wage growth, show that job changes, continuity of work involvement, and the use of cognitive skills are all critical components of the content of work experience that leads to upward mobility. The results underscore the sensitivity of recipients’ job transition patterns to changes in labor market demand conditions.

Being a parent supposes an important number of language interactions with children and other social actors, in order to realize “parental functions”, such as everyday communication with children, transmission of knowledge, expression of emotions, communication with school and others. As for parents with migrant backgrounds, some realize their parenting functions while using only the language of the country of origin, whilst others use only the language of the host country, and some parents use both of these languages. The aim of this paper is to discuss which of these language practices enables parents to more fully realize their parental functions. The paper is based on a thematic analysis of non-directive narrative interviews of parents and children with migrant backgrounds in Strasbourg (France) and Frankfurt-am-Main (Germany). We come to the conclusion that “fuller” or “more partial” realization of parenting functions depends on parents’ subjective perceptions. For instance, in similar language use situations, some parents believed their language practices had allowed them to realize their parenting functions “more fully” while others considered that they had only been able to “partially” do so. This paper opens up a new avenue of reflexion while analysing the concept of “partial parenting” regarding the use of languages by migrant parents. We hope that it will be be of interest to migrant and also non-migrant parents and their children, as well as to researchers and professionals working with immigrant families and that it will contribute to raising awareness about the role of languages in parenting.

This chapter is about education in four Central Asian states which were part of the former USSR until 1991. These countries have common legacy, yet, have been evolving with their own trajectories. The chapter provides the demographic information, politics, economy, social system, religion and worldview, followed by the presentation of education system of each country. The chapter presents both accomplishments and setbacks of the four counties in the education sector, highlighting key trends and strategic growth areas.