Search results

Most years, several AIB members are elected as AIB Fellows on account of their excellent international business scholarship, and/or past service as AIB President or Executive Secretary. The Fellows are in charge of electing Eminent Scholars as well as the International Executive and International Educator (formerly, Dean) of the Year, who often provide the focus for Plenary Sessions at AIB Conferences. Their history since 1975 covers over half of the span of the AIB and reflects many issues that dominated that period in terms of research themes, progresses and problems, the internationalization of business education and the role of international business in society and around the globe. Like other organizations, the Fellows Group had their ups and downs, successes and failures – and some fun too!

Policy entrepreneurs often experience thorny dilemmas, finding themselves between the “rock and a hard place” or, as the Italian equivalent idiom would have it, between the “hammer and the anvil.” Crisis and the associated problems that arise often bring changes in politics and policy in its wake, and this begs the question of what are the resources and assets required to operate successfully as a place-based public policy entrepreneur. The role of policy entrepreneurs has been studied over many years with one of the most influential theories being the multiple streams approach (MSA) originally devised in the 1980s which sought to counter perceptions of the random or “garbage can” nature of policymaking and implementation. MSA describes a more rational process where policy entrepreneurs shape “windows” of opportunity where streams of problem, policy, and politics are brought together to create innovative responses to situations in society. The authors explore these ideas through the lens of a longitudinal case study of Labor Market policy interventions (including the role of a personal budget system for education and training called “Dote”) in the Lombardy Region, Italy, using MSA as an analytical framework. This case suggests that the pressing need to move away from short-term structural responses to complex social issues is potentially addressed by an emerging approach for the parallel deployment of sociotechnical platform infrastructure resources and superstructure. Adoption of the approaches outlined here afford streaming opportunities on which policy entrepreneurs can dynamically bring the multiple streams of problem–policy–politics together across political cycles in a more persistent and sustainable way.

Although the literature addressing entrepreneurial networking is reaching a fairly high degree of sophistication and scope, there are certain critical areas where important questions remain unanswered. Specifically, research into the processes of entrepreneurial networking has been hindered by a paucity of longitudinal studies. Thus, the consideration of change over time is de facto limited. Moreover, accounts of how individuals actually use networks to learn about entrepreneurship, its practices and processes remain sparse. Yet, we know that learning is a social process, so the research gap lies in relating networks, as social contexts to the entrepreneurial learning process. Furthermore, since social relations are fundamental to everyone's life, and emerge, develop and change throughout their life course, people are embedded in social situations that put them in touch with others (Kim & Aldrich, 2005). Consequently, learning is often “located in the relations among actors” (Uzzi & Lancaster, 2003, p. 398). As well as direct learning through network contacts, network transitivity also facilitates learning by one embedded network member, through the knowledge held by a second member, about a third, as shown in Uzzi and Gillespie's (2002) study. Accordingly, in many ways how entrepreneurs go about using their networks and with whom they network may be critical for entrepreneurship and thus warrants investigation. It is to this end that we now consider the shape, content and process of entrepreneurial networking.

The 2019 ‘Sanremo’ Music Festival has stimulated a heated debate on immigration and Italy's so-called liberal pro-immigrant elites, as the winner, Alessandro Mahmoud, a 26-year-old rapper born in Milan, is the son of an Italian mother and an Egyptian immigrant, to whom he ‘dedicated’ his winning song, ‘Soldi’ (Money) that speaks about irresponsible fathers. A rapper with an Arabic name winning Italy's most famous festival has shocked many Italians who were used to seeing in Sanremo a reassuring representation of the old traditional canzone italiana. His victory was unexpected in a country, in which anti-immigrant attitudes are becoming mainstream, and the League's movement is deliberately whipping up this nationalist wind. However, Mahmoud represents only the tip of the iceberg as since 2005 a number of so called ‘second generation rappers’ has been growing in Italy, who are using their lyrics to talk about personal and collective discrimination’ experiences. Through a text analysis of the most prominent second generation rap writers, this chapter aims at detecting the claims for belonging they attach to this musicalized social and political forum, shedding light on the question of Italian citizenship that is still denied to second generation young people.