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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how competence trust (i.e. trust regarding the ability of the counterpart) and goodwill trust (i.e. trust regarding the benevolence and integrity of the counterpart) affect the probability that the auditor or the client stand up to the respective negotiation partner’s position in situations of disagreement in the auditing relationship.

Two experiments were conducted, one with 149 auditors and one with 116 chief financial officers (CFOs). Both auditors and CFOs had to indicate the likelihood that they stand up to the other party’s preferred position in a disagreement on the materiality of unrecorded liabilities. The data derived from these experiments were analyzed using hierarchical OLS.

The results indicate that both auditors and CFOs who take their respective negotiation partner in the audit for highly competent are less likely to stand up to them in situations of disagreement. Interestingly, goodwill trust appears to be irrelevant for the negotiation outcome.

The findings are highly relevant for regulators, because they inform about the crucial importance of competence trust for the auditing negotiation outcome and thus put the so-called “trust-threat” into perspective.

The study adds to the literature on the role of the context for auditor-client negotiations by exploring the role of two distinct forms of trust on the outcome of these negotiations.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an understanding as to whether trust‐based coordination is feasible in the context of small and medium‐sized enterprises (SME) internationalization processes, and if so, what impact these cooperative arrangements can have on corporate success.

To answer the research hypotheses, multiple regression analyses based on a postal questionnaire survey (n = 58 SMEs from Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovenia) were computed.

It is found that self‐commitment facilitates the establishment and maintenance of heterarchic cross‐border cooperation relationships of SMEs that cannot evolve based on market or hierarchical coordination. It is also found that the establishment of trust‐based cooperation relationships with foreign partners positively affects the success of the participating companies.

Only Slovenian and Czech enterprises and their internationalization have been investigated and compared to Austrian enterprises. Only SMEs have been investigated, no large companies. It is not clear that the presented empirical findings also hold true for larger enterprises.

Active measures such as building more knowledge (getting to know) and openly approaching other enterprises should be encouraged in internationalization processes. Thus, protectionist labor market politics on the macro level are highly counterproductive. At the micro level, parties involved should acquire specific knowledge (e.g. languages or social codes) as well as that they replace prejudices and skepticism by profound knowledge on and openness towards the other, e.g. through exchange programs for employees.

The paper is the first to analyze the role of trust‐based cooperation relationships on the internationalization processes of SMEs in the context of Austrian and Central and Eastern Country (CEEC) enterprises. The results of this research can become important for SMEs which want to pursue an internationalization strategy in the context of the CEEC.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how age and job identification affect entrepreneurial intention.

The researchers draw on a representative sample of the Austrian adult workforce and apply binary logistic regression on entrepreneurial intention.

The findings reveal that as employees age they are less inclined to act entrepreneurially, and that their entrepreneurial intention is lower the more they identify with their job. Whereas gender, education, and previous entrepreneurial experience matter, leadership and having entrepreneurial parents seem to have no impact on the entrepreneurial intention of employees.

Implications relate to a contingency perspective on entrepreneurial intention where the impact of age is exacerbated by stronger identification with the job.

Practical implications include the need to account for different motivational backgrounds when addressing entrepreneurial employees of different ages. Societal implications include the need to adopt an age perspective to foster entrepreneurial intentions within established organizations.

While the study corroborates and extends findings from entrepreneurial intention research, it contributes new empirical insights to the age and job-dependent contingency perspective on entrepreneurial intention.

The purpose of this paper is to answer whether or not entrepreneurial teams and management teams are a common phenomenon in small firms and to identify differences in the reasons for the formation of these different kinds of joint management. Additionally the impact of joint management on the performance of small businesses is tested.

To answer the research question a questionnaire survey (n = 119, response rate = 48 per cent) of small firms (20‐49 employees) in Eastern Finland was supplemented by a secondary data collection on financial issues.

The results show that in nearly four‐fifths of the firms a team was involved in the management. The logistic regression model revealed statistically significant differences between firms with entrepreneurial teams and such with management teams regarding the formation motives turnover, liability distribution and efficiency. Even though secondary data suggested that the firms managed by management teams were bigger, more profitable and faster growing, the differences were not statistically significant.

This study suggests that teams are common in the management of small firms, and that the future research in this field should focus more on the small firm context.

The importance of teams in the management of small firms has to be realized by entrepreneurs, their employees, the consultants as well as by those who create the legal and institutional condition for the creation and development of businesses.

Although the impact of management teams and entrepreneurial teams has been widely studied in large‐firm settings, the studies in the field of small business are rare. With its multi‐perspective approach and its focus on small firms this study breaks new ground in this research field.

The purpose of this article is to develop a contextualized definition of the phenomenon of rapidly internationalizing ventures (RIVs) ‐ such as born globals or international new ventures ‐ building upon the commonly noted dimensions of internationalization: speed, degree and scope.

The study builds on a theory informed review of 62 empirical studies on RIVs from the USA and the European Union and an empirical survey among 103 academics in the field of international entrepreneurship.

After specifying the core characteristics of RIVs (speed, degree, and scope of internationalization), it is shown that the discrepancies in definitions result in a dysfunctional fragmentation of empirical results. Thus, research on the phenomenon of RIVs urgently needs contextualized definitions because the three core characteristics are context‐sensitive, and will therefore manifest themselves differently across contexts.

The paper contributes to international entrepreneurship research by introducing a feasible strategy for defining RIVs which ensures the identification of the very same phenomenon across different contexts, thus bridging the gap between different research contexts and enabling a common body of knowledge to evolve.

This insight is particularly important for identifying, analyzing and understanding how managers in RIVs recognize and exploit opportunities in a global sphere and what drives their behaviour and development paths with regard to international activities.

Based upon the theoretically‐driven identification of the core characteristics of RIVs, the paper formulates the concept of contextualized definitions which enable researchers to identify the phenomenon within any specific context. These relative definitions are suitable for identifying the very same phenomenon in diverse contexts.

This chapter critically discusses the many positive aspects that are ascribed to gazelle firms by exploring the external effects and dark sides of high firm growth. On the background of the more general debate on purpose versus profit as a firm’s mission, the chapter theoretically elaborates on the dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative growth of gazelles. This is followed by a case-based illustration and exploration as to how quantitative and qualitative growth interrelates in gazelles and what are impediments for high growth that is purpose driven. The chapter closes with a discussion of the Janus-faced nature of gazelles and how their corporate citizenship can be enhanced.

To advance the learning of professional practices in teacher education and medical education, this conceptual paper aims to introduce the idea of representational scaffolding for digital simulations in higher education.

This study outlines the ideas of core practices in two important fields of higher education, namely, teacher and medical education. To facilitate future professionals’ learning of relevant practices, using digital simulations for the approximation of practice offers multiple options for selecting and adjusting representations of practice situations. Adjusting the demands of the learning task in simulations by selecting and modifying representations of practice to match relevant learner characteristics can be characterized as representational scaffolding. Building on research on problem-solving and scientific reasoning, this article identifies leverage points for employing representational scaffolding.

The four suggested sets of representational scaffolds that target relevant features of practice situations in simulations are: informational complexity, typicality, required agency and situation dynamics. Representational scaffolds might be implemented in a strategy for approximating practice that involves the media design, sequencing and adaptation of representational scaffolding.

The outlined conceptualization of representational scaffolding can systematize the design and adaptation of digital simulations in higher education and might contribute to the advancement of future professionals’ learning to further engage in professional practices. This conceptual paper offers a necessary foundation and terminology for approaching related future research.

This study aims to investigate how transformative learning has been conceptualised and operationalised in education for sustainable development (ESD) and sustainability learning and to collect evidence on how to support transformative learning in formal and non-formal environments.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review to provide a structured and replicable search and analysis of the relevant literature to produce a bibliometric overview that combines a quantitative description of the body of literature and qualitative analysis of the learning processes, outcomes and conditions.

The convergence between transformative learning and sustainability has become an emerging field of inquiry, despite the superficial use of transformative learning theory in many studies. By examining the learning process, outcomes and conditions in the core sample of studies, this study demonstrates that transformative learning theory – if carefully studied – can contribute to the design and implementation of educational interventions and assessments of learning towards sustainability. Furthermore, the sustainability context provides an empirical grounding that highlights the fact that social learning, the role of experience and the development of sustainability competencies are inherently part of transformative learning.

To date, few attempts have been made to better understand how transformative learning theory has been used in sustainability learning and ESD research. This systematic review allows for a better comprehension of how concepts and mechanisms elucidated in transformative learning theory are operationalised in sustainability learning and ESD research and serves as a source of inspiration for those researchers and practitioners who aims to make sustainability education, teaching and learning more transformative.

The purpose of this paper is to review the state-of-the-art in adaptive user interface systems by studying their historical development over the past 20 years. Moreover, this paper contributes with a specific model combining three main entities (users, context and devices) that have been demonstrated to be always represented in these environments. Novel concepts that should be taken into account in these systems are also presented.

The authors first provide a review and a comparison of current user interface adaptive systems. Next, the authors detail the most significant models and the set of techniques used to, finally, propose a novel model based on the studied literature.

Literature solutions for adaptive user interface systems tend to be very domain dependant. This situation restricts the possibility of sharing and exporting the information between such systems. Furthermore, the studied approaches barely highlight the dynamism of these models.

The paper is a review of adaptive user interface systems and models. Although there are several reviews in this area, there is a lack of research for modelling users, context and devices simultaneously in this domain. The paper also presents several significant concepts that should be taken into account to bring an adaptive and dynamic perspective to the studied models.