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Drawing on the social presence theory, this study aims to explore how supplier–customer social media interactions influence supplier observers’ trust in the customers and what mechanisms contribute to variation in trust experience.

A total of 36 semi-structured interviews were conducted with Chinese suppliers using WeChat for business-to-business interactions. Data were analyzed in three steps: open coding, axial coding and selective coding.

Findings reveal that varied trust is based not only on the categories of social presence of interaction – whether social presence is embedded in informative interactions – but also on the perceived selectivity in social presence. Observer suppliers who experience selectivity during social and affective interactions create a perception of hidden information and an unhealthy relationship atmosphere, and report a sense of emotional vulnerability, thus eroding cognitive and affective trust.

The findings contribute new understandings to social presence theory by exploring the social presence of interactions in a supplier–supplier–customer triad and offer valuable insights into business-to-business social media literature by adopting a suppliers’ viewpoint to unpack the mechanisms of how social presence of interaction positively and negatively influences suppliers’ trust and behavioral responses.

Adopting an institutional view of entrepreneurship, this study aims to explore the potential mediating role of entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) in the relationship between subjective norms and the entrepreneurial intentions of Malaysian students. Additionally, social role theory (SRT) was used to examine whether gender acts as a boundary condition in the proposed relationship.

Empirical evidence was based on responses from 220 final-year students registered from a final-year entrepreneurship module at a private university in Malaysia. The hypothesised relationships were tested using Model 7 of the PROCESS macro.

The findings indicated that subjective norms had a weak but positive effect on the entrepreneurial intentions of Malaysian students. Moreover, ESE was found to mediate the relationship between subjective norms and entrepreneurial intentions. However, contrary to theoretical expectations, gender did not act as a boundary condition in the proposed mediation relationship.

By incorporating SRT with institutional theory, this study sought to address a knowledge gap in the existing literature by investigating and empirically exploring the moderating influence of gender on the mediating effect of ESE in the relationship between subjective norms and entrepreneurial intentions.

What kinds of support do interstate rivals provide to domestic actors in ongoing civil wars? And how do domestic actors utilize the support they receive? This chapter answers these questions by comparing Iranian and Saudi military and non-military (mediation, foreign aid and religious soft-power promotion) support to the Houthis and to the Government of Yemen (GoY) during the Saada wars (2004–2010) and the internationalized civil war (2015–2018). It also focuses on the processes through which the GoY and the Houthis have utilized this support for their own strategic purposes. This chapter applies a structured, focused comparison methodology and relies on data from a review of both primary and secondary sources complemented by 14 interviews. This chapter finds that there were less external interventions in the conflict in Saada than in the internationalized civil war. During the latter, a broader set of intervention strategies enabled further instrumentalization by domestic actors, which in turn contributed to the protracted nature of the conflict. This chapter contributes to the literature on interstate rivalry and third-party intervention. The framework of analysis is applicable to civil wars that experience intervention by rivals, such as Syria or Libya.

The current study aimed to examine the moderating role of perceived supervisor support in the nexus between employee empowerment and organizational commitment in the Ghanaian hospitality industry.

A quantitative research design was adopted, and data were collected from 274 frontline workers from 4-star and 5-star hotels at two different waves within a 7-month interval. The data received were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics with the aid of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS V. 23.0) and SmartPLS (V.4.0), respectively.

As hypothesized in the study, employee empowerment was significantly related to organizational commitment. Furthermore, the results revealed that perceived supervisor support moderated the nexus between employee empowerment and affective and continuance commitment but did not moderate the nexus between employee empowerment and normative commitment.

Arguably, support from supervisors has been theoretically identified as a key construct in enhancing subordinates' commitment to an organization. However, less is known in the literature about the moderating role of perceived supervisory support in the nexus between employee empowerment and organizational commitment, especially in the Ghanaian hospitality industry.

This study reports on changes made within the study, plan, teach and reflect steps of lesson study with pre-service teachers who were learning to teach within a disciplinary literacy course.

Using methods associated with formative experiments and design-based research, this study gathered data over four iterations of the disciplinary literacy course. Data included the course materials, pre-service teachers’ written work, observational notes from research lessons, transcripts of post-lesson discussions and teacher-educators’ analysis sessions and pre-service teachers’ post-program interviews. Data were analyzed within and across iterations.

Initial adjustments to the lesson study process focused on the reflect step, as we learned to better scaffold pre-service teachers sharing of observational data from research lessons. Later adjustments occurred in the study and plan steps, as we refined the design of four-day lesson sequences that better supported pre-service teachers’ attention to disciplinary literacy while providing room for their instructional mentors to provide specific team-based feedback. Adjustments to the teach step included reteaching and more explicit attention to literacy objectives.

This paper contributes to the literature by explicitly applying formative experiment and design-based research methods to the implementation of lesson study with pre-service teachers. Furthermore, it contributes examples of lesson study within a disciplinary literacy context, expanding the examples of lesson study’s applicability across content areas.

Business Model Innovation is increasingly created by an ecosystem of related companies. This paper aims to investigate the transition of a manufacturing ecosystem toward electric vehicles from a business model perspective.

The authors investigate an automotive manufacturing ecosystem that is in transition toward electric and electrified vehicles, conducting semi-structured interviews with 46 informants from 27 ecosystem members.

The results reveal that the actions of several ecosystem members are driven by regulations relating to emissions. Novel requirements regarding components and complementary offers necessitate the entry of actors from other industries and the formation of new ecosystem members. While the newly emerged ecosystem has roots in an established ecosystem, it relies on new value offers. Further, the findings highlight the importance of ecosystem governance, while the necessary degree of change in the members' business models depends on their roles and positions in the ecosystem. Therefore, upstream suppliers of components must perform business model adaptation, whereas downstream providers must perform more complex business model innovation.

The paper is among the first to investigate an entire manufacturing ecosystem and analyze its transition toward electric vehicles and the implications for business model innovation.

Demonstrate proof-of-concept for conducting NFL Draft trades on a blockchain network using smart contracts.

Using Ethereum smart contracts, the authors model several types of draft trades between teams. An example scenario is used to demonstrate contract interaction and draft results.

The authors show the feasibility of conducting draft-day trades using smart contracts. The entire negotiation process, including side deals, can be conducted digitally.

Further work is required to incorporate the full-scale depth required to integrate the draft trading process into a decentralized user platform and experience.

Cutting time for the trade negotiation process buys decision time for team decision-makers. Gains are also made with accuracy and cost.

Full-scale adoption may find resistance due to the level of fan involvement; the draft has evolved into an interactive experience for both fans and teams.

This research demonstrates the new application of smart contracts in the inter-section of sports management and blockchain technology.

First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.

Pre-construction of a project comprises stages that are pivotal for the procurement performance. It is defined as the duration from the project's initiation to construction. However, Private Public Partnerships (PPPs) have been subjected to a long pre-construction, thereby leading to an inefficient development process. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to pay attention to the influencing factors elongating the pre-construction duration.

Based on data of 5,677 PPP projects between 2009 and 2021 in China, the authors adopt the Accelerated Failure Time (AFT) model in duration analysis to empirically analyze the following underlying dynamics determining the duration of PPP pre-construction stages: (1) policy uncertainty; (2) corruption; and (3) procurement method selection. To observe the influencing paths more specifically, the authors divided the pre-construction duration into the pre-tendering period and tendering period and regressed them separately.

The results indicate that the pre-construction duration is significantly prolonged with increased policy uncertainty and corruption degree as well as the use of tendering methods. Meanwhile, the above factors have a greater impact on the pre-tendering period than the tendering period.

The contribution of this study is twofold: (1) theoretically, this paper provides new evidence on the impact of PPP policy uncertainty, corruption and procurement method selection on the pre-construction duration. It complements empirical studies on the factors elongating the time efficiency of PPPs projects. (2) In practice, it provides a specific path for the government to improve the time efficiency of PPPs.

This paper aims to investigate the association between negative tone in annual report narratives and future performance in the UK context. Under the principle-based approach in the UK, managers tend to bias the tone of narrative reports upward, as the reporting regime is more flexible than the rule-based approach in the USA. Consequently, any negative disclosure not mandated by regulators conveys credible information about a firm’s prospects.

This paper uses a sample of UK FTSE all-share non-financial companies from 2010 to 2019. The authors use the textual-analysis approach based on Loughran and McDonald (2011)’s wordlist (LM) to measure the negative tone in UK annual reports.

The results show a significant negative association between negative tone and future performance. Moreover, our further analyses suggest that only the negativity in the executive section of the annual disclosures correlates significantly with future performance. In summary, this study suggests that negativity does matter under the principle-based approach and can be used as an indicator of future performance.

In contrast to the literature arguing that only positivity has the power to affect a firm’s outcomes under the principle-based approach, the authors provide new empirical evidence suggesting that negativity also matters within the UK context and can be used as an indicator for future performance. Also, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to identify which section of the annual report is more informative about a firm’s future performance.