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I suggest that the search for Adam Smith’s theodicy is likely to be in vain. The paper begins with a brief history of approaches to evil, emphasizing the context in which they arose, and the questions authors were addressing. Approaches most relevant to Adam Smith include those of Augustine and Calvin, and the early modern theodicies of Leibniz, Samuel Clarke and William King, as well as the attacks on them by Bayle and Voltaire. Scottish Enlightenment writers were not terribly interested in theodicy, though Hutcheson and Kames did devote space to their versions of problems of evil. David Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion are often taken to be classic statement of the problem of theodicy and argument against religious belief, but his concern was to demolish rationalistic theodicies rather than religious belief or practice. The paper then turns to Smith’s writings, considering similarities and differences to these approaches to evil. Smith emphasizes the wisdom and beneficence of God, and that evils we observe are part of a larger providential plan. He makes no attempt to justify the God in the face of evil, and in this respect Smith shares more with Augustine and Calvin than he does with the early modern theodicists. Smith’s approach to evil is simple and ameliorative. Smith’s approach contrasts with early nineteenth century English political economists, from Malthus onwards, for whom theodicy was important. Whatever view we take of the theodicists project of justifying an all-powerful and good God in the face of evil may, we still struggle to make sense of economic suffering and evil.

This paper aims at measuring the factors affecting early-stage entrepreneurial activity by opportunity vs necessity motives in India using theory of planned behaviour.

The study is based on the Adult Population Survey (APS) of Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), covering 4,165 respondents in 2018. The data has been analysed using descriptive statistics, chi-square test, analysis of variance and logistics regression. The theory of planned behaviour has been used to identify the determinants of early-stage entrepreneurial activity by opportunity vs necessity motives.

About 13.1% of the respondents reported early-stage entrepreneurial activity, of which opportunity motives were reported by 6.5% respondents, necessity motives by 5.4% respondents and the remaining 1.2% respondents reported other motives. Further, the mean difference in early-stage entrepreneurial activities by motives shows the domination of opportunity-driven entrepreneurial activities. Finally, marginal effects of all determining variables and three components of the theory of planned behaviour, i.e. attitude towards entrepreneurship (ATE), perceived subjective norm (PSN) and perceived behavioural control (PBC), have been estimated on opportunity vs necessity motives of early-stage entrepreneurial activities.

This paper contributes theoretically and practically to the existing body of knowledge by predicting the factors affecting opportunity vs necessity motives of early-stage entrepreneurial activities by applying the theory of planned behaviour. Considering the current focus of the government on promoting entrepreneurship, this piece of research can be valuable in adopting a motive-based approach in implementing entrepreneurial initiatives.

This paper provides unique insights into developing a policy framework for promoting new ventures based on the perceived motives of the entrepreneurs.

This study explores the relationship between economic freedom and gender ideologies on the allocation of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries. Opportunity entrepreneurship is typically understood as one’s best option for work, whereas necessity entrepreneurship describes the choice as driven by no better option for work. Specifically, we examine how economic freedom (i.e. each country’s policies that facilitate voluntary exchange) and gender ideologies (i.e. each country’s propensity for gendered separate spheres) affect the distribution of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries.

We construct our sample by matching data from the following country-level sources: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s Adult Population Survey (APS), the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index (EFI), the European/World Value Survey’s Integrated Values Survey (IVS) gender equality index, and other covariates from the IVS, Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) World Bank (WB) databases. Our final sample consists of 729 observations from 109 countries between 2006 and 2018. Entrepreneurial activity motivations are measured by the ratio of the percentage of women’s opportunity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship to the percentage of female necessity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship at the country level. Due to a first-order autoregressive process and heteroskedastic cross-sectional dependence in our panel, we estimate a fixed-effect regression with robust standard errors clustered by country.

After controlling for multiple macro-level factors, we find two interesting findings. First, economic freedom positively affects the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship. We find that the size of government, sound money, and business and credit regulations play the most important role in shaping the distribution of contextual motivations over time and between countries. However, this effect appears to benefit efficiency and innovation economies more than factor economies in our sub-sample analysis. Second, gender ideologies of political equality positively affect the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship, and this effect is most pronounced for efficiency economies.

This study offers one critical contribution to the entrepreneurship literature by demonstrating how economic freedom and gender ideologies shape the distribution of contextual motivation for women’s entrepreneurship cross-culturally. We answer calls to better understand the variation within women’s entrepreneurship instead of comparing women’s and men’s entrepreneurial activity. As a result, our study sheds light on how structural aspects of societies shape the allocation of women’s entrepreneurial motivations through their institutional arrangements.

This study aims to investigate the moderating role of psychological capital (PC) and the mediating role of safety climate (SC) in the relationship between the perception of psychological well-being (PWB) and ethical climate perception (ECP) of yacht crews in commercial yachts.

This study follows a quantitative approach. Data were obtained from a total of 339 yacht crews in Türkiye. The data were analyzed using SPSS 22 and AMOS 22 statistics package software.

This study uncovers the role of SC and PC in the causal relationship between the PWB and ECP of yacht crews who are, as tourism and maritime industry employees, expected to exhibit positive organizational attitudes and behaviors. The PWB of yacht crews in the work environment is affected by their SC and PC levels.

Although the holistic model of this study is a strong one, there are some limitations. The sample includes only Turkish yacht crews in yacht organizations in Türkiye. Yacht crews work periodically under harsh conditions. We acquired the research data from the yacht crews who had experienced the challenging environment; hence, the findings are specific to the crews. Ethical perceptions and standards may differ across cultures; for this reason, future research on employees in different organizations may conclude with different results. The significance of this research lies in the fact that it tests a comprehensive model.

This study can guide managers in finding ways to affect the PWB of crews. Ethical and safety climate should be taken into account by yacht organizations to improve the perceptions of yacht crews. The findings show that ECP and SC have a positive effect on the PWB of yacht crews. From this perspective, this study suggests that yacht organizations should involve their crews in their ethical decisions to foster an ECP. Yacht businesses should act consistently in all areas and adopt clear safety and ethical rules and procedures for yacht crews to follow to create a perception of ethical and safety climate.

This study contends that yacht crews, who face lengthy shifts and professional duties, are a component of the tourism and maritime industries. The findings indicated the necessity for more study on different perspectives related to the factors that impact PWB in the light of the employees. There are relatively scarce data on yacht crews and the relationship between their PWB, SC, ECP and personality constructs such as PC. This research shows that the PWB of yacht crews in stressful and demanding working environments depends on positive ECP and high PC through SC.

This study is the first to assess the role of SC and PC in the relationship between the ECP and PWB of yacht crews. It further aims to fill the research gaps and build on the tourism and maritime literature on yacht crews and PWB, and climate within the tourism and maritime context.

This research aims to identify the intentions behind becoming an entrepreneur and the perception of entrepreneurial failure among different groups of students. There has been significant research discussing the motivations behind becoming an entrepreneur. However, such a research study is often focused on individuals who are already in the entrepreneurial process. Therefore, this research focuses on the understanding of the entrepreneurial process specified on the intentions of becoming an entrepreneur and the associated risk, in the context of a learning process.

The perspectives of students towards becoming an entrepreneur and their perception of associated risk are identified. A comparative exploratory case study method is used. Three cases developed in the light of empirical evidence consist of Business, Law and Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students.

Major results show that the law and STEM students were on the same line in terms of motivational factors, such as being career driven. In contrary, the business students were more driven by personal factors such as leaving something behind and building something meaningful.

Whilst studies have attempted to understand entrepreneurial intentions, little work has considered students and their views on becoming entrepreneurs. Even with studies that looked at this subject matter, the focus was mainly business students. The authors build on previous work and construct the authors' views based on multi-disciplinary student base to know more about their intentions to become an entrepreneur. The science and law students were more influenced by external factors, whereas business students were focused more on their personal goals. Such classification of the diverse intentions based on student discipline opens a new and promising research avenue to better develop entrepreneurial education not only for business students but across all disciplines in higher education.

Given the complexity of building information modeling (BIM) adoption decisions in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, understanding BIM adoption decision-making through the net effect of a single factor on BIM adoption decisions alone is limited. Therefore, this paper analyzed the co-movement effect of managers' psychological factors on the BIM adoption decisions from the perspective of managers' perceptions. The purpose is to let managers have a deep understanding of their BIM adoption decisions, and put forward targeted suggestions for the AEC industry to promote the adoption of BIM by SMEs.

Data from 192 managers in SMEs collected by the questionnaire were used in a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). Due to the limitations of fsQCA in making the best use of the data used, as a complement to fsQCA, necessary conditions analysis (NCA) was used to analyze the extent to which necessary conditions influenced the outcome.

(1) NCA analysis shows that high perceived resource availability (PRA) and high performance expectancy (PE) are necessary conditions for high BIM adoption intention (AI). (2) fsQCA analysis shows that high PE is the single core condition for high AI. fsQCA analysis identifies three configurations of managers' psychological factors, reflecting three types of managers' decision preferences, namely benefit preference, loss aversion and risk avoidance, respectively. Different decision preferences may lead to different BIM adoption strategies, such as full in-house use, partial in-house/outsourcing and full outsourcing of BIM processes. (3) High perceived risk (PR) and low perceived business value of BIM (PBV) are the core conditions for low AI.

This paper expands on the application of fsQCA to context of BIM adoption decisions. Based on the results of fsQCA analysis, this paper also establishes the relationship between managers' decision-making psychology and BIM adoption strategy choice and analyzes the impact of different decision biases on BIM adoption strategy choice. It concludes with suggestions for encouraging managers to adopt BIM and for avoiding decision-making bias.

The study aimed at identifying job insecurity during COVID-19 as a determinant of green entrepreneurial intentions under the mediating role of entrepreneurial passion. Further, moderated mediation model of environmental consciousness and environmental knowledge on the relationship between job insecurity during COVID-19 and green entrepreneurial intentions through entrepreneurial passion as a mediator is also measured.

The study employed Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and analysis of a moment structure (AMOS) to calculate the measurement and structure model. Data was collected from the twin cities of Pakistan (Islamabad and Rawalpindi). A total of 389 usable responses were included in the analyses.

Considering entrepreneurship as a process, the result shows a significant relationship between the study variables. Also, it is realized that entrepreneurial passion serves as an important mediator between job insecurity during COVID-19 and green entrepreneurial intention. Both entrepreneurial knowledge and environmental consciousness have an indirect conditional effect on the relationship between job insecurity during COVID-19 and green entrepreneurial intention with entrepreneurial passion as a mediator. The study tested a novel relationship between job insecurity during COVID-19 and entrepreneurial passion under the lens of contingency theory and entrepreneurial event theory.

The extreme necessity to choose an alternative to full-time jobs is entrepreneurial endeavors that can be explored by entrepreneurs. Policymakers can capitalize on this scenario by proposing entrepreneurial opportunities which are green as well. The term Green represents an environmental friendly business, which one can start in the context of COVID-19 when everyone is oriented to cleanliness, personal hygiene and environment friendly.

The study tested a novel relationship between job insecurity during COVID-19 and entrepreneurial passion under the lens of contingency theory and entrepreneurial event theory. It contributes to the present stock of knowledge and understanding of the subject by contextualizing the concept of green entrepreneurial intention.

Trust is the glue that holds cooperative relationships together and often exists in an asymmetric manner. The purpose of this study is to explore how to mitigate the issue of losses or increased transaction costs caused by opportunistic behavior in a soft environment where trust asymmetry is quite common and difficult to avoid.

This study focuses on examining asymmetric trust between the government and the private sector in public-private partnership (PPP) projects. Drawing upon both project realities and relevant literature, the primary conditional variables influencing asymmetric trust are identified. These variables encompass power perception asymmetry, information asymmetry, interaction behavior, risk perception differences and government-side control. Subsequently, through the use of a survey questionnaire, binary-matched data from both the government and the private sector are collected. The study employs fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to conduct a configurational analysis, aiming to investigate the causal pathways that trigger asymmetric trust.

No single conditional variable is a necessary condition for the emergence of trust asymmetry. The pathways leading to a high degree of trust asymmetry can be categorized into two types: those dominated by power perception and those involving a combination of multiple factors. Differences in power perception play a crucial role in the occurrence of high trust asymmetry, yet the influence of other conditional variables in triggering trust asymmetry should not be overlooked.

The findings can contribute to advancing the study of trust relationships in the field of Chinese PPP projects. Furthermore, they hold practical value in facilitating the enhancement of trust relationships between the government and the private sector.

The climate crisis presents a global threat. Research shows the necessity of joint communication efforts across different arenas—media, politics, business, academia and protest—to address this threat. However, communication about social change in response to the climate crisis comes with challenges. These challenges manifest, among others, in public accusations of inconsistency in terms of hypocrisy and incapability against self-declared change agents in different arenas. This increasingly turns public climate communication into a “blame game”.

Strategic communication scholarship has started to engage in this debate, thereby acknowledging climate communication as an arena-spanning, necessarily contested issue. Still, a systematic overview of specific inconsistency accusations in different public arenas is lacking. This conceptual article provides an overview based on a macro-focused public arena approach and decoupling scholarship.

Drawing on a systematic literature review of climate-related strategic communication scholarship and key debates from climate communication research in neighboring domains, the authors develop a framework mapping how inconsistency accusations of hypocrisy and incapacity, that is, policy–practice and means–ends decoupling, manifest in different climate communication arenas.

This framework creates awareness for the shared challenge of decoupling accusations across different climate communication arenas, underscoring the necessity of an arena-spanning strategic communication agenda. This agenda requires a communicative shift from downplaying to embracing decoupling accusations, from mutual blaming to approval of accountable ways of working through accusations and from confrontation to cooperation of agents across arenas.

Women entrepreneurs are often categorized and assessed for various outcomes based on their start-up motivations. It is generally assumed that entrepreneurs with opportunity motivation have better performance when compared to necessity entrepreneurs. This study aims to test these suppositions through the lens of the entrepreneur’s motivation to learn (MTL) and level of female entrepreneurial competencies (FECs), namely, business and management, entrepreneurial, human relations (HR) and personal.

Data collected from 344 respondents through a survey questionnaire was analyzed using the structural equation modelling – partial least squares method using SmartPLS 4.

The findings highlight the need of recognizing the differentials between necessity and opportunity entrepreneurs as they were found to influence performance and learning outcomes. Opportunity entrepreneurship was found to significantly impact both MTL and the FECs. The authors also observed that business and management skills along with HR competencies played a greater role in the firm performance.

The findings demonstrate a case for specialized, tailor-made policy approaches rather than the “one size fits all” approach as evident in many government programs. As necessity entrepreneurs form a vital part of the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem, apart from mentoring, need-based competency development programs may be looked at. Opportunity entrepreneurs may need support and encouragement through advanced skilling and uncomplicated funding options.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, empirical studies related to women-owned micro, small and medium enterprises in India establishing the relationship between start-up motivation and business performance are scarce. Even in the global context, this is one of the initial studies to examine the relationship through the lens of MTL and competencies.