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The purpose of this research was to empirically examine the career transitions of mid-career African American women leaving traditional careers for entrepreneurship. The authors illustrate how transition theory and effectuation principles ameliorate an African American woman's transition to entrepreneurship.

The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with nine African American woman entrepreneurs. The data collected were evaluated through the lens of transition theory and effectuation theory.

The study results show that despite being the chief officer, many African American women still face inequalities when negotiating business deals, interacting with partners and when seeking capital for their business. Effectuation theory partially supports an African American woman's career transition to entrepreneurship, but the theory does not fully address the unique experiences of this demographic.

The results of this study reveal that effectuation principles do not fully explain the entrepreneurial career transition experiences of African American women. Theory development and extensions of existing theories should consider the potential discriminatory practices that limit financial resources and strategic partnerships for African American women entrepreneurs. The authors also advocate for consideration of identities, particularly related to gender and race, as factors that contribute to entrepreneurial experiences.

The study findings support the notion that each woman's situation will be different and unique, requiring aspiring African American woman entrepreneurs to assess their individual situation. Consistent access to minority-specific programs can help aspiring African American women entrepreneurs visualize her new identity and provide the support needed to enhance her career transition. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, so each woman will need to craft her own individualized plan.

Findings from this study solidify the role of African American women entrepreneurs as business leaders with influence and direct impact on the US economy. Their success enables African American women to contribute to more inclusive societies through their service to diverse members of society. In addition, their attainment of success serves as a testimony to aspiring African American women that entrepreneurial success is achievable, encouraging more diversity in entrepreneurship.

Few entrepreneurial studies exist on both women and racial minorities, resulting in a paucity of strategies to support African American women throughout their entrepreneurial journey. The results of this study revealed barriers which require specific strategies to address discriminatory lending practices and acceptance when forging new business relationships.

Personal influence is one of the most powerful strategies to influence publics’ behaviours. Yet, there is scant attention on how personal influence is leveraged for different public relations purposes in different cultural contexts. This study empirically investigates the presence and use of personal influence among Italian public relations professionals.

A survey was conducted through a self-administrated, web-based questionnaire and was developed from earlier studies investigating personal influence in public relations literature. Survey participants included public relations professionals across public, non-profit and private sectors.

The findings empirically show the presence and regular use of personal influence by professionals from all sectors to cultivate interpersonal relationships. Personal influence is considered a personal resource and used to leverage own influencing power. The findings also document four major manifestations of personal influence, which were named: relational closeness strategy, engagement strategy, expertise strategy and added value strategy.

This study enhances our understanding of personal influence in a specific cultural context and offers strategic insights for international professionals seeking to leverage influence in the socio-political environment of Italy. It also offers elements to improve public relations education and training.

The study offers some preliminary understandings of how Italian professionals leverage their personal influence in their daily public relations activities contributing with empirical evidence to the body of knowledge in public relations.

As Australians experience more fierce and frequent natural disasters, there are urgent calls for businesses to meaningfully respond to climate change. Australian financial and professional services employees occupy an ambiguous space as climate mitigation measures have different economic implications for their clients. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how Australian professionals experience climate change and respond to the issue within their workplace.

This mixed methods study applies a systems thinking framework to investigate: how do professionals’ experiences of the issue of climate change and the workplace influence their cognitions, emotions and behaviour? And in particular, what psychosocial antecedents precede voicing climate concern?

Firstly, a survey of professionals (N = 206) found social norms, perceived behavioural control and biospheric values, but not attitudes, significantly predicted prohibitive green voice. Middle managers were significantly likely to voice climate concern, whereas senior managers were significantly likely to express climate scepticism. Ten professionals were then interviewed to gain a contextualised understanding of these trends. Interpretive phenomenological analysis identified five interrelated themes: (1) active identity management, (2) understanding climate change is escalating, (3) workplace shapes climate change response, (4) frustration and alienation and (5) belief that corporations prioritise profit.

Findings are discussed in relation to how employees may both embody and adapt their organisations. These results have implications for understandings of workplace meaningfulness and organisational risk governance.

The Australian Government has long used its international scholarship programs as an instrument of soft power in international diplomacy. The paper examines an international scholarship program and its role in Australia’s soft power efforts during a period in recent history.

The Australia in the Asian Century White Paper of 2012 is used as a lens to reveal how the Australian Government viewed the role of international scholarship programs in international diplomacy at a specific point in the recent past, and compares it with research revealing what was contemporaneously happening with one key government-funded scholarship program.

This paper is based on a comprehensive case study of the Australian Government’s Endeavour Scholarships and Fellowships program (2004–2019). Endeavour was an ambitious and expensive merit-based program with 6,600 recipients in numerous and diffuse sub-categories. The program was complex and cumbersome and lacked clear priorities, particularly in its lack of geographic focus. It missed opportunities to connect with the political zeitgeist, largely due to opaque priorities and inadequate evaluation regimes which focused entirely on outcomes for individual recipients rather than on relationships for Australia.

This research draws on the first academic study of the Endeavour program. Other scholarship programs (for example Australia Awards and the New Colombo Plan) have attracted considerable scholarly interest. The Endeavour research provides an additional counterpoint for studies of Australian scholarship programs and their contribution to international diplomacy. It is timely to consider this in 2024 when Australia is putting a new focus on its investment in international scholarships.

Applying the concept of “entrepreneur managers” from dynamic capabilities theory to the question of how some Japanese managers develop and use their relationships with foreign investors, this article explores organizational contexts in which Japanese managers use foreign shareholders as resources to enhance firm capabilities in the global marketplace, deploy assets effectively and implement changes to traditional organizational customs. The article asks why and how some top managers implemented institutional changes and adopted customs that are common in the shareholder-based system while others did not.

We conducted qualitative interviews with 11 inverstor relations (IR) managers of large, listed Japanese firms in Kyoto and Tokyo.

First, by inviting a hedge fund partner and using their human capital and social capital, a Japanese CEO committed to strengthening his firm’s competencies in the global market and introduced changes that are common in the shareholder-based system. Second, a CEO with an MBA degree and exceptional communication skills in English and Japanese dedicated himself to executing much of the strategic advice suggested to him by foreign shareholders and altered some of his firm’s traditional Japanese management practices. Third, even though many Japanese firms welcomed and used foreign shareholders as advisors to help them streamline and/or acquire firm assets, their top leaders’ implementation of organizational changes was limited. Fourth, the top leaders of family-owned firms were reluctant to initiate dialogue with foreign investors.

This article adds some useful organizational context to existing scholarship on institutional theory by examining Japanese leaders’ strategic management in their relations with foreign investors. Using the concept of dynamic capabilities, it addresses the role of innovative strategic managers in firms’ institutional changes.

This study aims to develop a self-reflection scale useful for teachers to improve their skills and to clarify the Japanese teachers’ characteristics during mathematics lesson observation (MLO). In MLO, it is important to understand the lesson plan in advance to clarify observation points, and we aim to develop a scale including these points.

Based on the pre-questionnaire survey, nine perspectives and two situations for MLO were extracted. From these, a questionnaire for MLO was created. The results obtained from 161 teachers were examined, and exploratory factor analysis was conducted. ANOVA was conducted to analyze the effect of differences across the duration of teaching experience on the identified factors.

We developed a self-reflection scale consisting of 14 items with three factors: [B1] focus on instructional techniques and evaluation, [B2] focus on proactive problem-solving lesson development and [B3] focus on the mathematical background of the learning content. While duration of teaching experience showed no effect, three factors of the self-reflection scale for MLO showed a significant effect. Further multiple comparisons revealed the degree of focus was [B2]>[B1]>[B3].

Teachers who use this developed scale may grasp the strengths and weaknesses of their own MLO, which leads to self-improvement. The perspectives emphasized in lesson observation are the same when creating lesson plans and implementing lessons, leading to lesson improvement. Furthermore, based on the characteristics of teachers revealed, new training programs regarding MLO can lead to higher-quality lesson studies.

This article aims to investigate whether there is a relationship between education for the labor market in the post-pandemic stage and the educational quality of universities, taking as a sample a group of Latin American countries and their main trading partners. Reference is made to the Global Competitiveness Report 2020 of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) index, which evaluates the quality of universities.

Correlations, clusters and T-tests were generated to test for significant differences, resulting in two blocks of countries being identified with statistically significant differences in educational efforts to prepare their citizens for the labor market and the quality of their universities.

It is concluded that there are examples of Latin American countries that, although they are emerging economies, are updating their educational systems at an accelerated pace to meet the needs demanded by the labor market, such as Chile and Argentina. In addition, there are some particular cases of Latin American QS universities that although they are not at a high level in their overall educational quality as a university, compared to North American and Asian universities, their graduates do show a high employability index. This means that in the graduate profile, these universities are also accelerating efforts to position them at a high level of preparedness to respond to the jobs and markets of tomorrow, just as the universities in developed economies do.

Although the sample size is a limitation of this work, since it is based on secondary information reported by the WEF (2020) and the QS World University Rankings (2021), it contributes value by analyzing specific cases. Despite its limitations, the study yields meaningful results that put the challenges of post-pandemic employment and the role that universities play in a comprehensible framework.

These results put special attention on the work of universities as a crucial entity to prepare citizens to develop the competencies needed for the post-pandemic labor market, especially in terms of critical thinking and digital skills. Human capital formation will drive the post-pandemic recovery process of leading countries and universities.

The purpose of this inductive, exploratory study is to provide foundational insights into the role of management control in dealing with dysfunctional behaviour within accounting schools in changing environment of Australian universities.

Evidence is drawn from semi-structured interviews with 28 current or previous heads of school, research deans, deans of teaching and learning, school managers and human resource managers from 16 Australian universities and interpreted from the theoretical perspective of rational choice theory.

The findings suggest the incidence of a range of dysfunctional behaviours occurring in accounting schools. Even when such behaviours are limited in frequency, their consequences are nevertheless found to have far-ranging and potentially destructive change impacts for both individuals and the university. Formal management control systems designed to address such behaviours are perceived to be largely ineffective in identifying, managing, eliminating or even mitigating the consequences of such dysfunctionality. Instead, it is informal control processes that are preferred in dealing with dysfunctionality.

This study enhances our understanding of the role of management control in dealing with dysfunctional behaviour within university accounting schools, and points not only to the difference between the design and use of management controls but also to the implications of this disconnect between the underlying intent of control design and their actual use in the context of environments that are subject to significant change.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

A study of Indian working professionals showed GenY and GenZ cohorts differed significantly in their approaches to core self-evaluations (CSE), team cohesion and organisational culture, but no significant difference was found in team performance. Meanwhile, the study also showed that CSE, team cohesion and organisational culture had a positive effect on team performance

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