Search results

With practical entrepreneurship capabilities becoming ever more important for all university graduates, whether they are starting their own business or adding value to an organisation by innovating, improving, and problem-solving, what role do business incubators (BIs) play in helping to develop these capabilities for students? This chapter aims to better understand the role of BIs as extra-curricular entrepreneurship activity in universities through a narrative account of business incubation practice in three institutions – two in England and one in Australia. Utilising a practice-led methodology, the study is underpinned by social capital theory and a critical realist ontological perspective on incubation’s mechanisms, processes, and structures. Across these examples, there are common underpinning principles of entrepreneurial learning and socio-economic development. However, there are differences in implementation regarding space for incubation. Where the BI is on campus and closely integrated with extra-curricular entrepreneurship activity, this results in a cohesive graduate startup community and ongoing peer support. With no BI present, the opposite is observed. The chapter argues that without the infrastructure to build and maintain a community of nascent entrepreneurs to benefit from sustained peer learning, there can be negative impacts on the entrepreneurs and a visible gap affecting the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The chapter concludes with a practice note providing practical considerations for university BIs in communicating the significance of the incubator peer group to prospective entrepreneurs to improve realistic expectations and potentially improve their reach to entrepreneurs who may be experiencing isolation during their startup journey.

We articulate cycles of creative storying and data analysis and the wonder that motivated the project by detailing our reading, thinking and writing processes to contribute to the conceptual and practical literature on collaborative writing as method.

This paper documents a process of collaborative writing as method that produced a co-written fictional narrative that evokes questions about schooling.

Our process began with world-building for our fictional future, creating characters to serve as a lens for analysis. From our discussions of the data, we crafted a plotline to present our themes in coherent story. As we explored and shared our readings, interdisciplinarity shaped our project in unique ways.

Throughout, our collaboration and fiction-writing opened spaces for wonder, interdisciplinarity and joy that may inspire other researchers to engage in collaborative and/or creative writing processes.

Adding to the rich literature of arts-based research methods, we contribute our reflections on the pragmatics of incorporating reading, writing and thinking for collaboration and creative writing as qualitative research methods for document analysis.

Bailey et al. (2001) queried accounting researchers concerning admitted fraudulent research practices, their beliefs about the prevalence of such practices among their peers, and their perceptions of the causal factors. They used a randomized response technique that assures anonymity, and it remains the only published study to ask these questions explicitly. Over the past two decades, publication pressures have increased, and accounting academia has experienced a shocking instance of fraud. The current study replicates Bailey et al. (2001) and extends the study by asking new questions about the adequacy of participants’ graduate training, the perceived attitudes and practices of mentors and coauthors, and whether their awareness and concern have evolved. Participants’ comments provide insights about the accounting research environment. Importantly, they indicate a lack of consensus about the legitimacy of research practices.

In this article, we highlight ways in which disability critical race theory (DisCrit) (Annamma et al., 2013), inclusive education and community-based participatory research (CBPR) can be used within professional development schools (PDS) to provide students with disabilities with more access to inclusive classrooms. At a grade 4–6 elementary school, we developed a model of a critical PDS to promote inclusive education and facilitate the transition of students of color with disabilities from self-contained to inclusive classrooms. We conducted semi-structured interviews and used action plan meetings with school administrators, teachers, professionals and students with disabilities and their parents to assess the impact of our critical PDS model. Findings suggest this model had a positive impact on administrators’ and teachers’ critical consciousness, ideological and instructional practices, students of color with disabilities’ social, academic and personal outcomes, as well as a schoolwide culture of inclusion and social justice. This study can inform tailored professional development efforts to improve educators’ inclusive practices.

We conducted semi-structured interviews and used action plan meetings with school administrators, teachers, professionals and students with disabilities and their parents to assess the impact of our critical PDS model.

The findings of this study suggest this model had a positive impact on administrators’ and teachers’ critical consciousness, ideological and instructional practices, students of color with disabilities’ social, academic and personal outcomes, as well as a schoolwide culture of inclusion and social justice.

This study can inform tailored professional development efforts aiming to improve educators’ inclusive practices.

We developed a model of a critical PDS to promote inclusive education and facilitate the transition of students of color with disabilities from self-contained to inclusive classrooms.

This study aims to investigate how art events can enrich novice visitors by transforming their practices.

This research uses an interpretive case study of the art exhibition “1/1/1/1/1” in the Oppenheim gallery in Wroclaw. It draws on multiple sources of evidence, namely, novice visitors’ interviews, observation including photo studies and content analysis of art-makers’ mediation sources. This study is an example of contextual theorizing from case studies and participatory action research with researchers as change agents.

The evidence highlights that aesthetic values and experiences are contextual to practices and are transformable into other values. The findings illustrate the role of practice theory in studying how art-makers inspire the transformation of practices, including values driving the latter.

The findings provide implications for transformations of co-creating contextual values in contemporary visual art consumption and customer experience management.

Practical implications to arts organizations are also provided regarding cultural mediation conducted by art-makers. Exhibition makers should explain the meanings of the particularly visible artefacts to allow visitors to develop a congruent understanding of the meanings. The explanations should not provide ready answers or solutions to the problem art-makers suggest to rethink.

The social implication of our findings is that stakeholders in artistic ventures may undertake adequate, qualified and convergent actions to maintain or transform the defined interactive practices between them in co-creating contextual aesthetic values.

The study provides new insights into co-creating values in practices in the domain of contemporary art exhibitions by bringing the practice theory together with an audience enrichment category, thus illustrating how novice visitors get enriched by transforming their practices led by contextual values of “liking” and “understanding”.

This study aims to respond to the latest research calls to precisely revisit the nexus between corporate green innovation (CGI) and financial decisions through deeply investigating the mediating effect of corporate environmental performance measured by the effectiveness of emission reduction.

This study analyzes nonfinancial-listed firms on the Australian Securities Exchange from 2002 to 2019 using multiple regression analysis on a panel data set. Initially, different static panel data approaches were used. To account for the potential endogeneity issue and generate robust outcomes, the authors apply the one-step system generalized method of moment, two-stage least squares and lagged model approaches.

The results provide a clear indication that the practices of green innovation can favorably contribute to the level of environmental performance, which in turn affect the firm’s ability in opening the new financial doors and shape solid capital structure. In this context, the effective environmental performance fully mediates the nexus between CGI and capital structure of a firm. More importantly, the outcomes are robust and coherent across different estimation techniques.

The originality of this study lies in its utilization of mediation analysis to explore the relationship between CGI and a firm's financial structure. This approach distinguishes it from previous research by offering a thorough and nuanced understanding of how green innovation practices influence the financing decisions of a firm.

This study aims to examine the perceptions of male and female Emirati students regarding the competency of male and female faculty members in general introductory courses at a higher education institution in Dubai, which follows a policy of segregating undergraduates by sex.

Using a purposive research design, the study employs focus-group data to investigate the viewpoints of two groups of first-year undergraduates in Dubai (n = 2,43) on the role of gender in shaping their perceptions of faculty competency. Additionally, the researchers utilized open and axial coding schemes to analyze gender perceptions, revealing distinct patterns and thematic outcomes.

The findings highlight the presence of hidden gender stereotypes that can potentially impact the development of pedagogical relationships in higher education. Based on these findings, the study recommends ways in which students, educators, and administrators may mitigate gender-related bias in faculty evaluations.

Furthermore, these insights were designed to contribute to fostering a more equitable educational environment in higher education institutions.

Despite the growing interest regarding companies' sustainability, its social dimension has mostly been neglected by academics and practitioners. Consequently, this study aims to address this issue by investigating if the adoption of human resource (HR) analytics can positively influence the impact of social sustainable operations practices (SSOP) on employees' motivation and engagement and the effect of these lasts on organizational retention.

Data were collected through online questionnaires addressed to 281 HR managers of heterogeneous companies from Europe and analyzed through a structural equation modeling (SEM) technique.

The findings confirmed the positive effect of SSOP on employees’ motivation and engagement, and of these last on employees’ retention. Furthermore, they confirmed that the usage of HR analytics positively moderates the relationship between SSOP and employees’ motivation and engagement.

This study contributes to both sustainable operations management and HR management literature streams. First, it adopts a multidisciplinary perspective which also considers evidence from HR management literature, allowing the authors to concentrate on the social dimension of sustainability. Second, it provided further insight regarding the adoption of a data-driven approach in relation to social sustainable operations management. Finally, it contributes to HR analytics-related literature by demonstrating its impact also on organizational aspects that are not directly controlled by the HR department.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore the potential of regenerative tourism practices and their influence on destinations and their stakeholders from a community development approach focusing on Nordic lifestyle entrepreneurs. We focus on small and micro-sized enterprises (SMiEs) that conform to the realities of tourism systems in Nordic regions.

We explore how community development can be used as an approach for regenerative tourism and vice versa. Our conceptual paper builds from recent work of the Nordic Regenerative Tourism project, which aims to develop place-based practices for SMiEs that contribute to the regeneration of natural and cultural resources.

Regenerative tourism research should focus on developing tools that aid in capacity sharing and equitable partnerships through a community development approach. However, there is a lack of understanding of the processes of how to implement this in real world practice. More research is needed in developing tools to mobilize Nordic communities, particularly within the countryside to help transform tourism towards a regenerative model. It was found that much of these efforts comes from MSMEs. Therefore, more case studies are needed to understand how and why lifestyle entrepreneurs play in community revitalization efforts and the potential linkages with regenerative tourism management and marketing.

This conceptual paper contributes to the discussion of regenerative tourism and focus on smaller countryside communities within the Nordics. We argue that community development is linked with the concept of regenerative tourism through lifestyle entrepreneurs.

In the past few years, researchers across the world have been attracted to corporate governance (CG) and sustainability studies in the banking space. However, inconsistencies remain, which have created a lack of alignment in existing research. To address this problem, this paper aims to re-examines the CG–bank sustainability relationship using a qualitative design, which has been underused in the field, to generate in-depth, useful and novel analysis and insights that may hide behind the numbers.

A qualitative inquiry was conducted using key informants in Ghana’s banking industry. This study made use of purposive and snowball sampling techniques, an interview guide and the thematic approach to qualitative data analysis.

Firstly, this research finds that while larger boards do not promote bank sustainability, those who are independent and have diversified expertise and experiences do. Secondly, CEO duality can boost bank sustainability only if the CEO is actively engaged and performing. Thirdly, this study finds that foreign-owned and managed banks make more profits only if they have good knowledge of the local market.

This research makes the call that upcoming researchers should replicate this research in other banking settings worldwide to validate the results.

Practical lessons for local and foreign-owned banks and their shareholders are discussed to advance the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 8.

This research shares novel insights that offer clarity to the literature and move the CG and sustainability fields forward.