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1 – 10 of 375Gazi Mahabubul Alam, Morsheda Parvin and Samsilah Roslan
Universally, university is considered as the apex body which is ethically obliged to present a substantial society. In doing so, universities often innovate dynamic business…
Abstract
Purpose
Universally, university is considered as the apex body which is ethically obliged to present a substantial society. In doing so, universities often innovate dynamic business models and theories. Ideally, the countries whose universities contribute for better and sustainable business growth are the advanced one. However, universities themselves should be the business organisation – an argument is yet to receive attention. Although literature lacks in the area of education business especially university provision, the sector behaves as business entity after the inception of private sector. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the paradigm transformation of university sector and its impact on the society.
Design/methodology/approach
Given the differentiated nature of research questions, multiple techniques are used to collect the data. However, this research adopts the norms of qualitative methods. Both secondary and primary data are used. While secondary data are collected by University Grants Commission (UGC), primary data are collected through interviews.
Findings
Findings show that the development of university sector started following monopoly model. More than half a century, the same model was continued. Thereafter, duopoly model was introduced which carried until the inception of private sector. The growth of private sector followed oligopoly model which was further extended to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). These days, society compares university with “diploma mill”, as production of knowledge and civic society is longer than the part of the core business of university. Consequently, compromising with research is to be judged as a threat to overall development that includes business and social development.
Originality/value
A few studies have been published in the area of private university. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, none covers the oligopoly-ism and SME-ism behaviour of university and its impact on the concept of university and on the society. Therefore, this project aims to understand the norms of university business and its substantial contribution on the social change.
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Paul C. Hong, Joseph Chacko Chennattuserry, Xiyue Deng and Margaret M. Hopkins
This paper aims to examine the relationships between organizational purpose, leadership practices and sustainable outcomes for universities in emerging economies. We propose that…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine the relationships between organizational purpose, leadership practices and sustainable outcomes for universities in emerging economies. We propose that a strong sense of purpose is a fundamental and defining feature in the leadership practices of these institutions, which ultimately contributes to their success.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors present a research model that defines the relationships between a sense of purpose, leadership practices, student success outcomes, alumni involvement outcomes and societal reputation outcomes. Over 200 higher education administrators in India participated in the study.
Findings
The institutions' sense of purpose directly relates to their leadership engagement practices and their student success outcomes. Student success outcomes are a crucial linkage between leadership engagement practices and alumni involvement outcomes to achieve their societal reputation.
Practical implications
As competitiveness intensifies, educational institutions under resource constraints must differentiate their organizational practices. This paper demonstrates how their core purpose and leadership actions result in achieving effective outcomes and overall sustainable societal reputation.
Originality/value
There is a significant difference between having an organizational purpose and enacting that purpose through their leadership practices. These results highlight the cascading effect from the institution's fundamental sense of purpose to their leadership practices and the positive outcomes of student success, alumni involvement and societal reputation.
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Gerald Reisinger and Martina Gaisch
The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual frame for scholars who draws on the conflicting logics of the postpandemic university.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual frame for scholars who draws on the conflicting logics of the postpandemic university.
Design/methodology/approach
This feature paper is based on a systematic review of research and studies conducted in the field of higher education. It illustrates broader trends with respect to how the various elements of contemporary and conflicting challenges present themselves within higher education institutions (HEIs).
Findings
A combination of literature review and fieldwork across a broad range of scientific fields presents a potentially powerful means of reducing the gap between research and practice. For this reason, this paper sets out to provide conceptual perspectives as to contemporary and conflicting challenges in higher education.
Research limitations/implications
This paper presents many descriptive results from HEIs in the western world which do not allow for making global inferences toward the entire higher education sector.
Practical implications
The results have a number of implications for the postpandemic university. Among them are that HEIs should not only be more open toward contemporary changes but also embrace previously excluded student populations with their purpose-driven and sustainable orientation toward life.
Originality/value
This paper presents a conceptual contribution to contemporary challenges in higher education as a way of refraining from one-size-fits-all approaches. It demonstrates how institutional positioning and profiling depend on conflicting logics. Consequently, each institution of higher learning needs to address these challenges in line with their strategic, economic and political settings.
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The purpose of this paper is to outline a path for entrepreneurial universities to embrace their purpose as custodians of society and to hardwire it institutionally.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to outline a path for entrepreneurial universities to embrace their purpose as custodians of society and to hardwire it institutionally.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is conceptual in its approach, drawing on practical and theoretical insights in the fields of responsible leadership, business sustainability and transformational change. The resulting Circle Model offers a developmental perspective connecting individual and organizational development in service of society.
Findings
A key finding lies in expanding the current understanding of an entrepreneurial university beyond its organizational effectiveness to become a true custodian of society in the way it educate, researches and lives this intended purpose. The model offers a next conceptual step for the 50+20 vision (Muff et al., 2013) which had outlined a radical new role for business schools.
Research limitations/implications
More research is required to understand how not only the educational and research strategies but also the organizational structure can be transformed to serve a given purpose.
Practical implications
Concrete insights and examples of the developmental perspective of the model illustrate the opportunities for educating responsible leaders, for consulting business organizations to serve the common good, and for walking the talk by hardwiring a purpose-driven organization.
Originality/value
The originality of the paper lies in the introduction of the idea of a common space of sustainability and responsibility as a foundation to reorient education and research of an entrepreneurial business school and hardwire its organizational structure truly around purpose.
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Fernando Antonio Ribeiro Serra, Marcos Rogério Mazieri, Isabel Cristina Scafuto, June Alisson Westarb Cruz and Fabio Pinoti
Mission statements are usually related to strategic management and elements related to the organization's identity. Catholic higher education organizations (CHEOs) identity is…
Abstract
Purpose
Mission statements are usually related to strategic management and elements related to the organization's identity. Catholic higher education organizations (CHEOs) identity is based on the Charisma of the founder of the Catholic order or congregation. If in contradiction, it puts their organizational legitimacy at risk. If organizations deviate from their identity, it means a mission drift. Even more severe is when mission statements are misaligned with the identity. In this study, the authors seek better understand the mission drift by the misalignment between the mission statement and the organizational identity of the CHEOs.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors examine the mission statements of 112 Catholic CHEOs in Brazil. They used lexical analysis based on descending hierarchical classification and post-factorial analysis. They analyzed the vocabularies of each class extracted from the descending hierarchical classification and determine the presence or absence of the Charisma.
Findings
The results indicate that aspects of Catholic identity through the Charisma are manifested in the organizational mission but are not predominant. There is a variation of the mission statements relative to the Charisma of the orders and congregations. A significant part manifests generically. They respond in a similar and isomorphic way or to internal institutional pressures of CHEOs.
Originality/value
The authors empirically identified a mission drift, considering the mismatch between the mission statement and the Charisma. The authors emphasize that for organizational identity to manifest, it should consider the identity that emerges from the founder's Charisma. This influence must appear in central elements of the organizational identity, such as the mission statements.
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José Carlos Vázquez-Parra, Juan Alberto Amézquita-Zamora and María Soledad Ramírez-Montoya
The objective of the study was to analyze the perception of knowledge and experience development in social entrepreneurship in students of a university certified by Ashoka as a…
Abstract
Purpose
The objective of the study was to analyze the perception of knowledge and experience development in social entrepreneurship in students of a university certified by Ashoka as a Changemaker campus and to identify data that argue for equitable training among all students regardless of gender and discipline studied.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors evaluated the perception of knowledge about social entrepreneurship of a group of students from a university certified as Ashoka Changemaker Campus to check if there are differences by gender and disciplinary area. The population was 140 students, to whom a validated instrument was applied.
Findings
The results shed light on the few differences among students in the business, engineering and health sciences disciplines compared to those enrolled in the humanities and social sciences concerning knowledge and experience in social entrepreneurship. The findings also indicate gender equality in the perception of knowledge and experience of innovation and social entrepreneurship.
Research limitations/implications
The sample size in the different disciplinary areas is a limitation of this research. However, the findings are valuable in terms of gender and the study being conducted in the first university certified as a Changemaker Campus in Latin America.
Practical implications
Underlying the statistics and the hypotheses is important in improving students' experience and expanding their equitable opportunities to learn about and implement innovative proposals for social entrepreneurship projects.
Social implications
Training in equality and inclusion contributes to an equitable and socially just society, especially when this training aims to bring new possibilities to society. This study links with those that have been conducted in other institutions, where conscious efforts have been made to reduce the gender gap or differences by disciplinary area when undertaking social entrepreneurship projects that connect sectors for social benefit. This research also argues for the need to identify the impact of other cultural elements, in addition to the knowledge provided by universities, that reduce the gap among their students.
Originality/value
This study is original because of its hypotheses about university students' social entrepreneurship projects, being conducted in a special environment (Ashoka Changemaker campus) in Latin America. The data were analyzed under hypothesis testing, contrasting the empirical evidence with the theoretical assumptions.
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The paper seeks to illuminate the intersection between doing greater good in the world and the self-disciplining that comes along with it. The paper raises a discussion on how…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper seeks to illuminate the intersection between doing greater good in the world and the self-disciplining that comes along with it. The paper raises a discussion on how purpose-driven organizations with a sustainability focus should be concerned about internal social sustainability in order to maintain consistency between external purpose and internal well-being of employees.
Design/methodology/approach
This article investigates the interrelations between purpose-driven organizations' quest for social sustainability and internal work conditions exemplified through experiences with work intensification. A governmentality studies approach is applied to investigate how employees' perceptions of doing greater good in the world also become a productive self-disciplining strategy that potentially increases work intensification and simultaneously result in an instrumentalization of working for greater sustainability.
Findings
Working with an organizational sustainability purpose can, in some situations, create dilemmas that may decrease employee well-being as it demands continuous negotiation of boundaries between paid work and free time, meaningfulness and work devotion, self-management and work intensification.
Originality/value
The paper raises a discussion on how purpose-driven organizations with a sustainability focus should be concerned about internal (social) sustainability in order to maintain consistency between external purpose and internal well-being of employees.
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Alexis Bajalia Fitzsimmons, Yufan Sunny Qin and Eve R. Heffron
Purpose statements persuade stakeholders of companies' reasons for being. The goal of this study was to analyze how purpose-driven companies craft their purpose, mission and…
Abstract
Purpose
Purpose statements persuade stakeholders of companies' reasons for being. The goal of this study was to analyze how purpose-driven companies craft their purpose, mission and vision statements and whether and how purpose statements differ from mission and vision statements.
Design/methodology/approach
This quantitative content analysis explored the brand personality traits, mission statement components and corporate ethos appeals that purpose-driven companies included in their purpose, mission and vision statements.
Findings
Results provide implications for corporate leaders and communicators who write these statements as well as theoretical implications related to brand personality, rhetorical theory and corporate ethos.
Practical implications
This research provides practical implications for corporate leaders and communication professionals about how to craft these statements, what components they might include and the potential benefits and downfalls of not clearly differentiating among purpose, mission and vision statements.
Originality/value
While several studies have compared differences between mission and vision statements, there is a lack of academic literature on how companies craft purpose statements. This study added to this body of knowledge on corporate communication.
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Silvia Ferraz Nogueira De Tommaso and Vanessa Pinsky
This study aims to investigate how Suzano implemented shared value (SV) strategies to reconcile profitability and social welfare by joining innovation and sustainability.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate how Suzano implemented shared value (SV) strategies to reconcile profitability and social welfare by joining innovation and sustainability.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use an exploratory, descriptive qualitative approach using the interactive qualitative analysis (IQA) method. IQA procedures and protocols were operationalized to get to Suzano's SV system. Primary data were collected through in-depth interviews. Content analyses were conducted with the support of Atlas.ti software.
Findings
The most relevant findings of this research are (1) Suzano developed a unique strategy to spread collaborative and innovation mindset throughout the organization called “innovability”; (2) Suzano's effort to understand local community's demands and a collaborative work raised the companies' profitability and enabled prosperity for the community; (3) the IQA procedures and protocols enabled the development of a Suzano's SV system, composed of nine elements and their relationships. They are purpose-driven leadership, materiality matrix, social welfare, profitability, ecosystem, business results, social results, impact and sustainable economic development, (4) purpose-driven leadership is the system's driver.
Research limitations/implications
This study was limited to studying the implementation of the SV as a strategy to reconcile profitability and welfare. Despite the findings about the company's conflicts with local communities and the strategy with small family producers, other studies could evaluate the strategy of different stakeholders, such as the supply chain since Suzano is one of the leading companies of paper sales in Brazil.
Practical implications
By using IQA protocols and the nine elements of this study, other researchers may replicate it to investigate the adoption of SV strategies in other organizations. The SV system developed in this study may be used by business leaders to disseminate the SV policies and practices in their organization.
Social implications
The company adopts the three forms of SV -reconceiving products and markets, redefining productivity in the value chain and developing clusters with the local community-as strategies for sustainable and collaborative management. Suzano was led to get involved with the problems and conflicts' root causes. By doing so, the company unlocked innovation as a driver to achieve sustainable and responsible management. For them, innovation is in service of sustainability, creating innovability. Both concepts are part of the whole organization culture and practice. Innovability is Suzano's essence, and SV strategies are the means to scale it.
Originality/value
The originality of the paper relies on the method and techniques used to gather and analyze primary data, in which the unit of analysis (Suzano's SV strategy) was considered a system. Major findings were validated with research participants. By using IQA protocols and the nine elements of this study, other researchers may replicate it to investigate the adoption of SV strategies in other organizations.
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The purpose of this paper is to examine the origins of and current practices in corporations seeking to define themselves as “purpose-driven”. The literature suggests that…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the origins of and current practices in corporations seeking to define themselves as “purpose-driven”. The literature suggests that consumers, in particular Millennials, are attracted to companies that define themselves in this way both in terms of their buying behaviors and as places they would wish to work. The author also wanted to examine whether this trend represented a significant departure from previous activities in corporate citizenship, corporate social responsibility, sustainability or the triple bottom line.
Design/methodology/approach
This viewpoint reviewed the history of corporate philanthropy and social commitments from the 1880s to today to identify trend waves in this category. The author then examined some current examples of “purpose-driven” behavior to identify best practices.
Findings
The author found that there is considerable confusion in the marketplace about what constitutes best practices in corporate citizenship. The author also found that the outputs from preceding waves of corporate citizenship have created atomized pockets of similar activities in individual companies that either overlapped or were at odds with each other. This analysis suggested that there were four key requirements for companies trying to maintain a purpose-driven corporate brand: long-term commitment, authenticity, that they be employee-driven and be based on collaboration.
Research limitations/implications
The viewpoint was based on secondary source material and did not involve any primary research.
Practical implications
By identifying some core principles for purpose-driven activity, the viewpoint will help companies create and effectively maintain a master narrative.
Social implications
This review of corporate social responsibility will also create framework for thinking about the appropriate balance between the social and profit-driven motives of today’s corporations.
Originality/value
The author believes that this viewpoint is the first to examine the entire spectrum of corporate social commitment from both a historical and contemporary perspective.
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