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Competitiveness is often confused with productivity. Productivity refers to the internal capability of an organization, while competitiveness refers to the relative position of an organization against its competitors. These two important concepts are often confused and interchangeably used. For example, in his famous book, The Competitive Advantage of Nations. Porter (1990, p. 6) says that the only meaningful concept of competitiveness at the national level is national productivity. Competitiveness may also have a distinctly different meaning at different levels of analysis — product, firm, industry, and nation. Porter (1990, p. 33) says that the basic unit of analysis for understanding competition is the “industry,” while the title of his book refers to “nations.” He also says that firms, not nations, compete in international markets.

Describes the experiences of an organization which made the decision to establish a new production facility and empower its workforce using self‐managed work teams. Elaborates on some of the selection issues surrounding this site and includes the reasoning used to select employees for this facility. Finally, relates recommendations for making selection decisions in this type of situation. Fully expects that SMWT and other flexible/adaptive structures will become more and more popular in the future, and that managers need to know how to select employees to maximize the effectiveness of this structure.

Forces of international competition and innovations within organizations have led to the development of employee involvement programmes, including self‐managing work teams. The widespread use of such programmes poses special problems for human resource management. Outlines how the human resource management process and the role of the HRM professional can be changed to increase the effectiveness of self‐managing work teams.

National Park Service (NPS) units generate a significant economic impact for states and local gateway communities across the USA. Utah is home to 13 NPS units with visitation accounting for 18% of the state's US$9.75bn tourism economy in 2018. Twelve NPS units, including five national parks, are located in Southern Utah, driving an economy that is heavily dependent on tourism. This paper examines the challenges and opportunities for visits to national parks post-COVID-19, generally and in the specific context of Southern Utah. Although the assumption is that visits to national parks will recover quickly, this paper will critically examine how visitation may change and what adaptive measures and alternative forms of unit management may be necessary.

By adopting a holistic-inductive paradigm, this paper utilizes a descriptive case study approach. Data were collected across a variety of mediums focusing on interviews with key stakeholders in and around Southern Utah.

The results from this study highlight the various challenges faced in parks and gateway communities vis-à-vis changing patterns of visitation, adaptive measures and alternative forms of unit management necessary due to COVID-19 and their impact on the future management and marketing of national parks for touristic purposes.

This paper examines the impacts of COVID-19 on an often-neglected yet significant area within tourism, yielding implications for industry, visitors and destination communities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore supportive and shared leadership structures at schools as a function of school culture policies and procedures.

A qualitative study was conducted at three secondary schools in the Midwestern USA. Administrators and teachers were interviewed, professional learning communities observed and artifacts collected to explore school culture policies, procedures and leadership in the implementation of professional learning community practice.

This study concludes that school leaders must provide supportive and shared leadership structures for teachers in order to ensure a positive school culture and effective professional learning communities that impact school improvement. Leaders in schools must work directly with teachers to create policies and procedures that provide teachers the leadership structure to directly impact school improvement through professional learning community collaborative efforts.

This study builds on the school culture and professional learning communities literature by exploring existent policies and practices in schools as unique cases. Much of the literature calls for specific case studies to identify issues in the implementation of effective practice. This study is important to the community as specific cases that may inform educational leaders on mechanisms that may be leveraged to ensure successful implementation of policies and procedures outline in school culture and professional learning community literature.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the changing pattern and characteristics of international financial flows in the emerging entrepreneurial ecosystems of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), provide a novel taxonomy to classify and analyze them, and discuss how such investments contribute to competence building and sustainable development.

In an exploratory study, the authors analyze the characteristics of international venture capital investors and the start-ups receiving funding in Kenya and map their interaction. The authors proceed by developing a novel taxonomy, classifying investors according to their main rationales (for-profit-for-impact), and start-ups according to the locus of needs and markets addressed by the start-up (local-global) and the locus of the start-ups capacity and knowledge (local-global).

The authors observe a new type of mainly western investors who support innovative ideas in SSA by identifying and investing in domestically developed technical innovations with the potential to address global market needs. The authors find such innovations to be mainly developed at the intersect of global and local knowledge.

The authors shed light on the – up to now – under-researched emerging phenomenon of international high-tech investments in SSA, and develop a novel taxonomy of technology investments in low-income countries, guiding further research on the conditions, impact, practical, and policy implications of this new form of finance flows.