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The COVID-19 pandemic has created a crisis for healthcare systems worldwide. There have been significant challenges to managing public and private health care and related services systems’ capacity to cope with testing, treatment and containment of the virus. Drawing on the foundational research by Frow et al. (2019), the paper explores how adopting a service ecosystem perspective provides insight into the complexity of healthcare systems during times of extreme stress and uncertainty.

A healthcare framework based on a review of the service ecosystem literature is developed, and the COVID-19 crisis in Australia provides an illustrative case.

The study demonstrates how the service ecosystem perspective provides new insight into the dynamics and multilayered nature of a healthcare system during a pandemic. Three propositions are developed that offer directions for future research and managerial applications.

The research provides an understanding of the relevance of managerial flexibility, innovation, learning and knowledge sharing, which offers opportunities leading to greater resilience in the healthcare system. In particular, the research addresses how service providers in the service ecosystem learn from this pandemic to inform future practices.

The service ecosystem perspective for health care offers fresh thinking and an understanding of how a shared worldview, institutional practices and supportive and disruptive factors influence the systems’ overall well-being during a crisis such as COVID-19.

The paper aims to develop a strategic conceptualization and measurement scale of organizational resilience to support researchers examining how small firms prepare and respond deliberately to general disruptions in the operating environment over more extended time frames.

The paper uses a four-step process to develop, present and test (for predictive validity) a scale of strategic organizational resilience for frequent events or those needing long-term responses.

The resulting seven-factor measurement scale of organizational resilience consists of readiness, slack, problem-solving, flexibility, connectedness, adaptiveness and proactiveness.

The literature on organizational resilience explains how organizations recover from rare but catastrophic events by focusing on adaptation principles and short-term survival. The broader conceptualization presented here enables the study of organizational resilience in small-medium size enterprises (SMEs) across more frequent and pervasive events, such as financial crises, industry downturns and other forms of structural change and technological disruption. This is operationalized in a measure that includes new strategic factors associated with forward-planning and more traditional operationally focused elements.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how universities attempt to balance meeting their traditional mission of education, research and community engagement while remaining economically sustainable.

A survey was conducted in 2014 of university executives and found that universities in Australia are rapidly transitioning from public supported institutions to an organizational form much more like social enterprise, with all of the organizational, marketing and ethical ramifications.

Australian universities were found to be focused on maintaining financial viability and that the most significant source of future revenue for Australian universities is perceived to be from international students.

The findings have tremendous public policy and ethical implications – suggesting a shift in the classification of university education from what was generally considered a public good to what is increasingly perceived as a private good in the contemporary market place, with the increasing importance of international students.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise and validate a scale to capture entrepreneurship behaviour at the human resource management (HRM) functional level.

Drawing from the HRM and entrepreneurship literature, this paper first conceptualises and operationalises entrepreneurial behaviour at the human resource (HR) functional level. Second, it uses a multi-phase, systematic scale development procedure to design a two-dimensional scale of entrepreneurial HRM. Finally, the scale is validated by testing its relationship with HRM innovation.

The findings suggest that entrepreneurial behaviour at the HRM functional level is characterised by innovativeness, pro-activeness, risk-taking and consensus-building behaviour. The scale shed new light on the roles of HR professionals.

This paper highlights the need for HR professionals to demonstrate entrepreneurial behaviour in HRM value addition. The scale development process, while providing a detailed understanding of the entrepreneurial behaviour at the HR functional level, will facilitate future research.

This scale provides HR professionals with the means to measure and improve entrepreneurial HRM, leading to higher levels of HRM-based value addition.

This is the first known attempt to capture entrepreneurial behaviour at the HRM functional level.

Unequal workplace gender outcomes continue to motivate research. Using the prism of work-life-(im)balance, the purpose of this paper is to show how identity salience and motivation contribute to a subject position that for many reproduces socially gendered practices of workplaces.

After initial inductive computer-assisted text analysis, the authors innovatively move to deductively analyse data from focus group and semi-structured interviews of 18 female and 19 male Australian managers in the financial and government sectors.

The authors find that a gendered sense of reflexivity is virtually non-existent among the female Australian managers and professionals interviewed in this research. The inductive stage of critical discourse analysis revealed a substantial difference between men and women in two concepts, responsibility, and choice. These form the axes of the typological model to better explain how non-reflexive gendered workplace practices are “performed”.

This empirical research provides a foundation for understanding the role of choice and responsibility in work-home patterns for women.

The absence of a reflexive gender-based understanding of women’s work-home choice is explained in Bourdieusian terms.

By not specifically using a gender lens, the authors have avoided the stereotypical understanding of gendered workplaces.

This paper aims to examine the integration of entrepreneurship and strategy to develop a conceptual framework of strategic entrepreneurship. The framework is developed through an analysis of theory and refined through an examination of practice.

This framework is considered in the context of potentially entrepreneurial and strategic activity undertaken by 12 of the 17 state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) operating in New Zealand in 2006‐2007. Based on a review of documents, observation, and interviews with SOE executives, cases of 12 SOE activities were analysed to compare and contrast strategic entrepreneurship in practice.

The findings reveal distinct elements within the four activities classified as strategic entrepreneurship, activities, such as leveraging from core skills and resources from a strategic perspective, and innovation from an entrepreneurial perspective.

This study is one of the first to examine the nature of strategic entrepreneurship in practice and the associated financial returns.

The purpose of this paper is to develop contemporary entrepreneurial configurations of small firms and relates them to performance. Adding a process dimension, the authors extend the more commonly used resource and growth taxonomies in this field of research.

A review of current literature on small firm configurations is followed by a discussion of its dimensions, namely, context (external and internal environment), content (entrepreneurial orientation (EO)) and process (strategy making). These are related to perceived performance, using cluster analysis and ANOVA for a sample of 320 small New Zealand firms.

The results isolate young corporates, young simple and mature consolidator clusters. Young corporates outperform their counterparts in dynamic environments in how they use formal structures, and their high EO and generative strategy-making (GSM).

This study uses self-reporting measures and a cross-sectional design.

The findings show how young, small firms can enhance their performance practically by aligning the key dimensions of an entrepreneurial configuration. These firms could benefit from early formalization of systems and structures, a high EO, and by using a GSM approach.

The contribution is threefold. First, the authors empirically verify the existence of three clusters of small firms and then link these to perceived performance. Second, by basing the small-firm configurations on a content, context, process framework, the authors highlight the importance of aligning these dimensions to performance. Third, the authors find evidence of the role of early formalization to accompany GSM and EO if small firms want to improve performance outcomes.

In today's competitive environment firms can seldom rely on their current products and services to secure their future success (Miller, 1983; Zahra, 1993; Lumpkin & Dess, 1996). Neither can they ignore their position in the market vis-à-vis their current and potential competitors (Barney, 2002). To win in the competitive global market, firms also have to continuously improve their internal processes in order to ensure that operations are efficiently performed (Carpinetti & Martins, 2001; Tompkins, 2001). These challenges may seem overwhelming and even threatening, but by generating more opportunities firms can increase the possibility of obtaining successful outcomes. This is based on the assumption that the discovery of new opportunities helps leverage a firm's value creation and ensures that the firm remains vital (Stevenson, 1983).

The purpose of this paper is to consider the role of government in fostering entrepreneurial activity and economic development, thereby balancing social and economic objectives.

Case studies on state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) in New Zealand, one of which is examined in detail, are analysed and compared. Triangulated data from interviews, texts, and personal observation were collected and analysed in two separate phases, examining effective pathways for social enterprise in the public sector and related themes.

Findings suggest the role of government is not limited to policy‐making. Examination of activity which aims to balance social and economic objectives identifies several factors which have contributed to successful and entrepreneurial operations within SOEs.

Although limited to a single case, this paper reveals the nature and importance of entrepreneurial activity within government organisations.

Deregulation as an alternative to privatisation is examined and evaluated.

Evidence is provided to support entrepreneurship within the public sector as a strong foundation for balancing both social and economic objectives.