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Although an increasing number of PhD holders will continue their careers outside academia, we know little about their further career prospects. To develop a better understanding of how this group constructs and justifies a successful career outside academia, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 47 PhD graduates from different disciplines (humanities, social and beta sciences) who have obtained elaborate experience working outside academia.

Drawing on a multi-career perspective, we explored the motivations of the PhD holders when making such career transitions. The findings from the interviews demonstrated how PhD holders’ main motivations were associated with their perceived organizational, community and cognitive careers. Our data analysis revealed that these motivations related to PhD holders and can be grouped along four key tensions:

• distanced from real life (academia) versus appreciating the practical impact of their research (currently);

• competition and performance orientation (academia) versus enjoying their current multidisciplinary collaboration towards a common goal (current);

• Individualism and loneliness were typically experienced in academia versus autonomy and intellectual stimulation in their current work; and

• lack of stable career perspectives in academia versus current options for competence-based development and personal growth.

distanced from real life (academia) versus appreciating the practical impact of their research (currently);

competition and performance orientation (academia) versus enjoying their current multidisciplinary collaboration towards a common goal (current);

Individualism and loneliness were typically experienced in academia versus autonomy and intellectual stimulation in their current work; and

lack of stable career perspectives in academia versus current options for competence-based development and personal growth.

Thus, while discontinuation of an academic career may easily hold a pejorative connotation, the analysis of the PhD holders’ motivations revealed important and rewarding opportunities in pursuing a career in other sectors. Overall, from our study, we can conclude that while a major gap may exist between careers in academia and ‘the corporate world’, shifting careers between these worlds is not as ‘unthinkable’ as commonly believed.

Talent management in higher education institutes is an underexplored topic. Only a small portion of talent management publications is focussed on describing talent management in higher education institutes. In this chapter, we give an overview of the most important topics in the talent management literature in general and link it to what is known about these issues in higher education. It discusses the definition of talent and talent management, the talent management process and the multilevel outcomes of talent management, the fairness and justice issues related to talent management and the importance of embedding the analysis of talent management in its broader organizational and institutional context. In the final part of this introduction chapter, we will explain how the talent management topics are discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.

Mainland Tanzania has seen two decades of significant social policy reforms and transformations in its social and economic structures, whilst the country continues to grapple with persisting gender inequalities. This article examines Tanzania's social policy developments from a gender perspective. The authors analyse the level, reach and quality of social policy delivery to working-age women across the areas of health policy, social protection and employment policy during 2000–2021.

The article draws on qualitative research deploying the scoping review method. The data consist of diverse secondary materials, including academic publications, government policy documents, relevant statistics and other types of “grey” literature.

Tanzania has made significant advancements in the legal frameworks around welfare provision and has instituted increasingly gender-responsive government policy plans. The health and social protection sectors, in particular, have witnessed the introduction of large-scale measures expanding social policy implementation. However, social policy delivery remains two-tiered, with differences in provisions for women in the formal and informal sectors.

Social policy delivery and implementation have increased and diversified in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) during the new millennium, with a growing integration of gender-specific policy objectives. However, limited social policy scholarship has focused on the gendered effects of broader social policy models in SSA. The article remedies the concomitant knowledge gaps by examining various social policies and their impacts on working-age women in Mainland Tanzania. The authors also engage with the theoretical welfare regime literature and present an analytical framework for gender-sensitive assessment of emerging social policy models in the Global South.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the influence of budgeting process elements (budget participation, preparation, implementation and evaluation) on budget performance of government.

A cross-sectional survey was administered among budget officers from government agencies, departments, and units in Malaysia. Descriptive and regression analyses were used to examine the relationship between the budgeting process and budget performance.

The findings revealed the significant influence of the two predictors: (1) budget participation and (2) budget implementation and evaluation, on budget performance. Both have positive and significant impacts on budget performance. However, budget preparation appeared to have no significant relationship with budget performance, although there is positive effect.

This study provides empirical evidence on the budgeting process factors that influence budget performance. The findings hopefully are of interest to government officials, especially frontline bureaucrats, who seek to ensure that budget performance meets expectations in Malaysia and other countries.

In this article, the authors analyse a complex social process affecting historic public paths in rural areas in southern Spain. Despite the fact that urban populations are demanding the enhancement of this type of natural heritage for tourism, sports and recreational use, some parts of the network have been abandoned or usurped.

The study is multidisciplinary, comprising three interlinked studies. The cartographic study comprises an inventory of public paths in rural areas based on administrative sources. The legal study analyses local, regional and national regulations governing agricultural, environmental, heritage, sports and tourism uses of the infrastructure. The sociological study analyses social discourses on the uses of public paths, and identifies conflicts between farmers, landowners, environmentalists, sportspeople and tourists.

The preliminary results identified an important public paths network in Andalusia, approximately 160,000 km. The legal study found that there are laws regulating use, although local authorities do not monitor compliance or provide solutions to enhance management. The sociological study determined the attribution of environmental, cultural and economic value to public paths, but also the existence of conflicts between rural and urban populations.

Given that this is ongoing research, only state of the art and some preliminary albeit sufficiently consistent results are presented.

The results could help to guide public policy and governance of public paths.

Public paths promote rural development and a green/sustainable economy.

The research results and conclusions are original.

A debate on whether new ventures should be supported with public funding is taking place. Adopting a position on this discussion requires rigorous assessments of implemented programs. However, the few existing efforts have mostly focused on regional cases in developed countries. To fill this gap, this paper aims to measure the effects of a regional acceleration program in a developing country (Medellin, Colombia).

The economic notion of capabilities is used to frame the analysis of firm characteristics and productivity, which are hypothesized to be heterogeneous within the program. To test these relationships, propensity score matching is used in a sample of 60 treatment and 16,994 control firms.

This paper finds that treated firms had higher revenue than propensity score-matched controls on average, confirming a positive impact on growth measures. However, such financial growth is mostly observed in service firms rather than other economic sectors.

Further evaluations, with a longer period and using more outcome variables, are suggested in the context of similar publicly funded programs in developing countries.

These findings tip the balance in favor of the literature suggesting supportive programs for high-growth firms as opposed to everyday entrepreneurship. This is an insight, especially under the context of an emerging economy, which has scarce funding to support entrepreneurship.

This article aims to investigate how institutional characteristics affect the level of financial development of economies collectively and compare between developed and undeveloped economies.

A dynamic panel with 131 countries, including developed and developing ones, was utilized; the estimators of the generalized method of moments system (GMM system) model were selected because they have econometric characteristics more suitable for analysis, providing superior statistical precision compared to traditional linear estimation methods.

The results from the full panel suggest that concrete and well-defined institutions are important for financial development, confirming previous research, with a more limited scope than the present work.

Limitations of this research include the availability of data for all countries worldwide, which would make the research broader and more complete.

A panel of countries was used, divided into developed and developing countries, to analyze the impact of institutional variables on the financial development of these countries, which is one of the differentiators of this work. Another differentiator of this research is the presentation of estimates in six different configurations, with emphasis on the GMM system model in one and two steps, allowing for comparison between results.

Previous literature has identified human resources as a key source of competitive advantage in organizations of all sizes. However, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) face difficulty in comprehensively implementing all recommended Human Resource Management (HRM) functions. In this study, we shed light on the field of HRM in SMEs by focusing on the context of Greek Small and Medium-sized Hotels (SMHs), which represent a dominant private sector employer across the country.

Using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and 34 in-depth interviews with SMHs' owners/managers, we explore the HRM conditions leading to high levels of performance, while taking into consideration the influence of internal key determinants.

We uncover three alternative successful HRM strategies that maximize business performance, namely the Compensation-based performers, the HRM developers and the HRM investors. Each strategy fits discreet organizational characteristics related to company size, ownership type and organizational structure.

To the best of the authors' knowledge this is among the first empirical studies that examine different and equifinal performance-enhancing configurations of HRM practices in SMHs.

Despite the unparalleled importance of value within healthcare, value-based models remain underutilised in the procurement of medical devices. Research is needed to understand what factors incentivise standard, low-priced device purchasing as opposed to value-adding devices with potentially higher overall health outcomes. Framed in agency theory, we examine the conditions under which different actors involved in purchasing decisions select premium-priced, value-adding medical devices over low-priced, standard medical devices.

We conducted 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects scenario-based vignette experiments on three UK-based online samples of managers (n = 599), medical professionals (n = 279) and purchasing managers (n = 449) with subjects randomly assigned to three treatments: (1) cost-saving incentives, (2) risk-sharing contracts and (3) stronger (versus weaker) clinical evidence.

Our analysis demonstrates the harmful effects of intra-organisational cost-saving incentives on value-based purchasing (VBP) adoption; the positive impact of inter-organisational risk-sharing contracts, especially when medical professionals are involved in decision-making; and the challenge of leveraging clinical evidence to support value claims.

Our results demonstrate the need to align incentives in a context with multiple intra- and inter-organisational agency relationships at play, as well as the difficulty of reducing information asymmetry when information is not easily interpretable to all decision-makers. Overall, the intra-organisational agency factors strongly influenced the choices for the inter-organisational agency relationship.

We contribute to VBP in healthcare by examining the role of intra- and inter-organisational agency relationships and incentives concerning VBP (non-) adoption. We also examine how the impact of such mechanisms differs between medical and purchasing (management) professionals.

High turnover rates, delay and dissatisfaction among PhD students about the high efforts and low rewards are common problems in doctoral education. Research shows that many different factors are associated with the mental health crisis in graduate education, but these diverse aspects have not often been studied in relation to talent management and human resource management (HRM) strategies. Based on questionnaires and in-depth interviews, this chapter critically assesses the factors that influence doctoral students’ well-being, using as theoretical framework the self-determination theory, concerned with the social and other conditions that facilitate or hinder human well-being and flourishing, and the job demands–resources model, an occupational stress model that suggests strain is a response to imbalance between demands on the individual and the resources he or she has to deal with those demands. These theoretical frameworks help to explore the perceived job demands and resources, and motivations of a sample of 25 PhD students in the Netherlands, in order to recommend adequate talent management strategies to improve PhD work conditions at universities and reduce the increasing levels of ill-being. The study proposes a collegial model, focussing on the enjoyment of work, instead of the current managerial model, which focusses on strengthening knowledge and skills, and stimulating performance-oriented behaviour. A differentiated approach is needed, offering customized talent development for each PhD student in order to respond to his or her specific qualities, improving general well-being. This radical shift in talent management is needed to counter the mental health crisis in doctoral studies.