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The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the perspective of youth employees about owner manager businesses. The owner-manager business (a one-man business) is the most common in Lagos. Hence, an inquiry into their management style and how it impacts youth employees within the context of decent work is important to explore.

The study used the convenience sample technique to obtain data from 382 owner-managers and youth employees who work in owner-managed businesses across various sectors. They were administered a questionnaire with carefully structured questions, with an 81% return rate. The exploratory factor analysis (EFA) technique was used to identify the prominent parameters, and the hypothesis tested and validated accordingly.

The study identified three prominent factors that youth consider when working for an owner-manager business, i.e. the workplace factor, geographical factors and employee benefit. Consequently, issues regarding sustainable employment, conducive working conditions, job security and pension are paramount in the youths' view. Many owner-managers do not respect labour laws, and job security is low in owner-managed businesses; hence, they experience high turnover as most youth work in one-man businesses to gain experience.

The owner-manager business is the most predominant in the country and yet is under-researched. Furthermore, the perception of youth employees regarding owner-manager businesses provides a better understanding of performance and expected satisfactory outcome required from youth employees and how they can be met through proper channelling of their energies to the right tasks.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the factors related to the adoption of social media by women entrepreneurial small businesses (ESBs).

Using a structured survey instrument, this study gathered data from 101 women entrepreneurs in Yemen. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data.

The results confirm that social media has been widely applied by women ESBs in Yemen and has made a significant contribution to different business strategies and processes, mainly marketing, promotion and communication. Social media adoption is linked mainly with nontechnical obstacles and challenges, in specific, those “soft” factors such as management attitude, as well as “hard” technical obstacles and challenges involving cost and other practical aspects regarding social media nature.

This study contributes to the increase in awareness of the impact of social media among female ESB owners. A greater understanding of the impact of social media will eventually lead to better use of the tool to increase performance.

This study highlights the perceived benefits and challenges that give Yemeni female business owners strong decision-making power in their businesses. This study provides insight into the numerous drivers that affect owners/managers’ decisions to adopt and continuously use social media in the future.

Uncertainty management (UM) in projects has been a point of attention for researchers for many years. Research on UM has mainly been aimed at uncertainty analyses in the front-end and managing uncertainty in the construction phase. In contrast, UM components in the design phase have received less attention. This research aims to improve knowledge about the key components of UM in the design phase of large road projects.

This study adopted a literature review and case study. The literature review was used to identify relevant criteria for UM. These criteria helped to design the interview guide. Multiple case study research was conducted, and data were collected through document study and interviews with project stakeholders in two road projects. Each case's owners, contractors and consultants were interviewed individually.

The data analysis obtained helpful information on the involved parties, process and exploit tools and techniques during the design phase. Johansen's (2015) framework [(a) human and organisation, (b) process and (c) tools and techniques)] was completed and developed by identifying relevant criteria (such as risk averse or risk-taker, culture and documentation level) for each component. These criteria help to measure UM performance. The authors found that owners and contractors are major formal UM actors, not consultants. Empirical data showed the effectiveness of Web-based tools in UM.

The studied cases were Norwegian, and this study focussed on uncertainties in the project's design phase. Relevant criteria did not cover all the criteria for evaluating the performance of UM. Qualitative evaluation of criteria allows further quantitative analysis in the future.

This paper gave project owners and managers a better understanding of relevant criteria for measuring UM in the owners and managers' projects. The paper provides policy-makers with a deeper understanding of creating rigorous project criteria for UM during the design phase. This paper also provides a guideline for UM in road projects.

This research gives a holistic evaluation of UM by noticing relevant criteria and criteria's interconnection in the design phase.

While the value of human capital for technological innovation is well acknowledged, literature on the role of vocational training in corporate innovation is notably scarce. The purpose of this study is to assess the effect of government support for small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) competencies on Korean firms’ innovation. The author investigates SMEs’ patent applications (supported by the government to varying degrees) while accounting for firms’ market position, ownership and management structure, as well as prior changes in firms’ technologies, products, processes and other characteristics. Alternative hypotheses about management motivation – the “lazy manager”, “career concerns” and “special East Asian institutional constraints” hypotheses – are also evaluated.

Censored and count data analysis methods are used on a panel of 595 Korean firms covering 2005–2015 from the Korean Human Capital Corporate Survey, Intellectual Property Office and National Investment Commission. A regression discontinuity estimator accounts for potential endogeneity because of support for vocational training at firms.

Firms receiving training support are more innovative than firms without support, but latent effects may play a role. The regression-discontinuity model suggests that firms that succeeded only marginally in obtaining support had higher innovative output than non-recipients near the eligibility threshold.

The findings of this study establish that government support had the intended effect on SMEs’ technological capacity. This cannot be discounted as a simple crowding-out effect. The author also establishes that management–ownership separation within firms was conducive to innovation, that product competition had an inverse U-shaped effect and that management–ownership separation had a substitutable relationship with competition in overcoming managers’ effort avoidance. The findings support the “lazy manager” hypothesis over the “career concerns” and the “special East Asian institutional constraints” hypotheses.

This article aims to increase the understanding of the role of individual actors and arenas in dealing with multiple institutional logics in family firms.

This study follows a case-study approach of two family-owned newspaper companies. Based on interviews and secondary sources, the empirical material was analysed focussing on three institutional logics, that is, family logic, management logic and journalistic logic.

First, the authors show how and in which arenas competing logics are balanced in family-owned newspaper companies. Second, the authors highlight that family owners are central actors in the process of balancing different institutional logics. Further, they analyse how family members can become hybrid owner-managers, meaning that they have access to all institutional logics and become central actors in the balancing process.

The authors reveal how multiple institutional logics are balanced in family firms by including formal actors and arenas as additional lenses. Therefore, owning family members, especially hybrid owner-managers, are the best-suited individual actors to balance competing logics. Hybrid owner-managers are members of the owner families who are also skilled in one or several professions.

Building on social identity theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine how European managers construct their multiple identities after being acquired by a Chinese firm and to determine the key factors contributing to the changing dynamics of multiple organizational identities.

The paper presents a qualitative, single case study of a Chinese acquisition of a European manufacturing firm at two points in time.

We find that multiple identities initially trigger ambivalence toward the acquisition, but over time, the ambivalence diminishes. The reduction of ambivalence results from concurrent integration and separation: a newly constructed boundary spanning the organization separates positive identities from negative ones, and integration interventions foster the development of a new, shared identity.

The findings reveal that organizational identity change is facilitated by the aligning of a post-merger identity with the acquired organization's historical identity and by creating an ambivalent boundary spanning identity.

In this study, the impact of owner-operator and non-owner operator rice mills on productive efficiency is investigated.

Primary data collected from a survey of 111 rice mills in the Mwea region of Kenya are used. A metafrontier approach is employed to measure overall technical efficiency which is decomposed into managerial and organisational efficiency.

The results reveal no significant difference in overall technical and managerial efficiency between owner and non-owner operated mills. However, a significant difference exists in organisational efficiency of mills: non-owner operated mills were found to be performing significantly better than owner-operated.

The authors provide supporting evidence to the study and discuss some of the significant policy implications stemming from the study.

It is recognised that for owners to take the risk of divesting control to a hired manager rather than manage the firm themselves can have major strategic, financial and often emotional consequences. However, there is little empirical evidence on how production efficiency will develop as a result of hiring a manager with the underlying economic theory providing ambiguous guidance. Standard economic theory assumes that firms behave as profit maximisers, which can be achieved by operating efficiently. However, this may not always be the case and as the literature indicates, this may especially be so for small businesses in low- and middle-income countries.

In this article, the authors draw-upon an extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) and propose a research model involving performance expectancy (PE), effort expectancy (EE), facilitating conditions (FC) and competitive pressure (CP) as potential salient factors explaining the adoption of digitalization in European SMEs. The authors also postulate that there may be cross-cultural differences, thereby leading us to include the country as a moderator in the model.

The authors validate this model with a cross-cultural sample involving 188 owner-managers from the Czech Republic and Slovakia and through the partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) techniques as well as multi-group analysis.

The results using the study’s global dataset indicate that PE, FC and CP significantly affect owner-managers intentions toward digitalization in SMEs. The authors’ application of the multi-group analysis also suggests that although the two countries differ in digitalization adoption intention, the differences are statistically insignificant. In the conclusion, the authors highlight several implications these findings have for theory and practice.

The authors recommend that the providers of emerging digital technologies should improve on the performance features of those technologies and ensure they are relevant to the SMEs. By doing so, the adoption of digitalization will grow, because owner-managers of SMEs will have the confidence that adopting such technologies will improve their operations. Second, SMEs are required to provide adequate organizational and technical infrastructure to support digitalization adoption.

Aside from being among the few attempts to extend the explanatory power of UTAUT with PE, EE, FC and CP in investigating digitalization adoption in SMEs context, this study also validates its model with rigorous methodological approach as well as three datasets (global, Czech Republic and Slovakia) thereby strengthening the validity of the results.

This chapter demonstrates that social business models do not meaningfully prioritize or impose accountability to “social good” over other purposes in ways that (a) best protect against owners changing their minds or entry of new owners with different priorities and (b) enable reliable accountability over time and across circumstances. This chapter further suggests a model – a “social primacy company” – that actually prioritizes “social good” and meaningful accountability to it. This chapter thus clarifies circumstances under which existing models might be most useful and are not particularly useful, especially as investors, entrepreneurs, employees, regulators, and others pursue shared, common understandings about purposes, priorities, and accountability.

This study analyzes small-sized asset owners’ optimal choice problems in selecting an outsourced chief investment officer (OCIO). While large-sized asset owners can select OCIOs through procurement auctions, it is difficult for small-sized asset owners to use this method. Instead, they access OCIO services by participating in an investment pool or utilizing OCIO funds. In this study, the authors compare the two OCIO selection methods. The authors construct an agent-based model for OCIO selection to reflect the heterogeneity in production efficiency and preferences. The results of this study imply that when the market has enough investment pools, the utility of all small-sized asset owners increases. To enhance the growth in the OCIO market, the investment pool should represent the preferences of small-sized asset owners and enable individual owners to find an appropriate OCIO.