Search results

Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are living up to their claims as consumers choose them more frequently. The increasing demand for sustainable vehicles translates into the global need for specific components, materials, and infrastructures and drives the regulatory frameworks in each country. While BEVs offer environmental benefits and global business opportunities, the technology has not yet gained mainstream acceptance. Thus, this work aims to investigate the characteristics of BEV users and their role in the diffusion of products to larger segments, as this may vary from country to country. For this purpose, a survey based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT-2) (Venkatesh et al., 2012) framework and structural equation modeling (SmartPLS) was adopted. The results indicated that, except for the constructs of effort expectancy (EE) and social influence (SI), the predictors in the model performed well in this context. Current users are satisfied with their vehicles and are supportive of BEVs in the future. The analysis also revealed that in addition to the availability of financial resources, early adopters are attracted by new technologies in a way that leads them to make decisions outside of the traditional influence of the other members of society. It is suggested to leverage the perceived benefits of status, differentiation, or uniqueness motives, to appeal to those seeking to appear trendy and tech-savvy in society. Companies and policymakers should acknowledge the peculiarities of early customers in their communication strategies to reach a wider audience around the globe and encourage the adoption of BEV technology.

In the 21st century, placing higher education institutions in the global world has become the norm. Therefore, many higher education institutions in Ghana and across the globe have set out to internationalise or become world-class universities as part of their strategic ambitions. Thus, finding ways to become visible on a global scale and transcend beyond the countries in which they operate has become of major interest to most universities. The authors of this chapter were curious to determine how universities adopt imported organisational templates as a strategic ambition. One should not assume that the semblance of such imported concepts is mere institutional isomorphism stemming from internationalisation and globalisation. The study employed semi-structured interviews and institutional documents as data collection tools among ten (10) university actors in a flagship university in Ghana. The study used postcolonial theory to critically examine the drivers and current practices embedded in dominant hegemonic global discourses, such as internationalisation. The findings revealed that the drivers and reforms underpinning university internationalisation ambition are framed within economic rationalities, producing human capital, self-marketisation to promote visibility, and a quest for global competition couched within global neoliberal ideology. The study recommends the need for university actors to (re)focus and (re)evaluate university internationalisation discourse to ensure a balance between local relevance and global forces.

This chapter investigates whether, and if so, how particular firms in a transition economy are involved in bribery. Built on pressure theories, we explain how the direct effects of firm characteristics and contextual characteristics determine firm bribery behavior. Entrepreneurs make choices based on perceptions of a specific pressure due to organizational characteristics (internal pressures) or due to context (external pressures). The relationship between firm characteristics, context, and bribery was estimated using unique data from a survey of 606 Vietnamese entrepreneurs. We controlled for various entrepreneurial, organizational, and industrial characteristics. The exploratory findings support firm attributes hypotheses, which is a negative relationship between firm size and bribery and a nonmonotonic U-shaped relationship between firm age and bribery. Besides, the effects of context on bribery are also found. Specifically, the result supports a positive relationship between competition and bribery and a negative relationship between the quality of the government and bribery.

The amount of current assets and the structure of their financing within working capital management define the level of risk, liquidity and profitability of any company. This chapter identifies the type of working capital investment and financing policies and reveals their influence on the financial performance of Czech firms.

The type of investment policy was defined, based on the structure of current assets and the working capital-to-sales ratio, followed by the share of different liabilities in assets, used to determine the financing policy. The Orbis database provided the chapter with indexes of manufacturing, agricultural, construction and trade companies for the period of 2012–2021.

The results obtained revealed the liquidity and financial independence of all selected industries. Flexible investment and conservative financing policies in agriculture were accompanied by low profitability. The decrease of the working capital-to-sales ratio and the attraction of the current debts for assets financing provided a higher return on assets in the manufacturing, agricultural and trade sectors.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the immigrant women entrepreneurship phenomenon in Italy by focusing on the Polish experience. Stemming from the most current data on immigration in Italy and on immigrant women entrepreneurs and women-led firms, by analysing the regions in which these firms are grounded and the economic sectors in which they are mostly involved, this chapter presents the research programme the two authors of this book have been involved in over the last year and the first preliminary results. Specifically, the two authors engaged to compare the experiences, difficulties and opportunities of immigrant women entrepreneurs of different ethnicities/communities located in Italy. The final goal is to analyse if and how the socio-cultural background of these women counts, if and how it affects their way of doing business and what is the influence of the socio-cultural Italian context. The first group of immigrant women entrepreneurs that the authors decided to analyse are the Polish. Accordingly, this chapter presents data on Polish women entrepreneurs based in Italy and the results of an interview with an expert on this community.

Over the years, at the international level, the social construction assumption according to which women would be less innovative than men and, consequently, also less prone to be involved in innovative fields, since their educational path decisions to career path decisions, has long prevailed. This has resulted in a widespread lack of representation of women in more innovative sectors, in comparison to their male counterparts. In recent years then, if the pandemic has had an impact, at least for some specific socio-economic contexts, especially on those that can be typically considered as ‘necessity entrepreneurs’, it has to be said that it has been able also to generate some virtuous dynamics crosswise related to innovative issues. In particular, this chapter aims to go in depth into these issues from the perspective of innovative women entrepreneurs in the attempt to answer to the following questions: how does the socio-economic environment affect innovative women entrepreneurs? And, what are the unique experiences, achievements and contributions of innovative women entrepreneurs in Italy? In order to answer to these specific research questions, an analysis based on direct interviews with a sample of Italian innovative women entrepreneurs has been conducted.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) own and control technological resources and capabilities that make them critical actors in accelerating the transition toward net zero. Even beyond the energy sector, stakeholders are putting increasing pressure on MNEs to reduce the carbon intensity of their operations, that is, to improve their carbon performance. While there is unambiguous evidence that national climate policy is a critical catalyst for long-term carbon performance improvements, there is limited research on how MNEs’ carbon strategies react to climate policies. This chapter reviews the concepts, drivers, and strategies connected to carbon performance in the broader sustainability and management literature to clarify potential complementarities to international business (IB). The authors then highlight how MNEs will face increasing institutional complexity along two dimensions: (1) the structural diversity of institutional environments and (2) institutional dynamism, primarily reflected by public policy. The proposed conceptual framework maps these two dimensions to national and subnational levels, and the authors present two data sources that allow the quantitative analysis of country differences in the diversity and dynamism of national climate policy. The authors conclude that there are ample opportunities for IB researchers to explore MNEs’ strategic reactions to climate policy and to inform policymakers about the consequences of national climate policy in the global economy.

In Morocco, as in many developing countries, environmental responsibility is not well integrated into corporate management at the operational, tactical, and strategic levels. While the management literature offers a rich body of knowledge on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategies and practices, less attention has been paid to exploring the complexity of environmental responsibility through the lens of corporate culture. This research aims to address this gap by examining the influence of cultural factors on the deployment of environmental responsibility using Johnson's (2000) model of corporate culture. This model identifies seven components of corporate culture: stories or myths, symbols, power structures, organizational structures, control systems, rituals and routines, and paradigms. Through a Moroccan industrial group case study, this chapter presents the successful deployment of environmental responsibility and describes how managing cultural factors facilitated this transition. This chapter also identifies the unique aspects of the group's culture that allowed redesigning the company's management systems. These insights offer valuable implications for managers and policymakers seeking to improve the environmental performance of large enterprises in developing countries.