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This study aims to examine the role of technological capabilities in the competitive advantage of supply chains for the “countryside” hub of São Paulo state.

An interdisciplinary approach was adopted by combining the strategic orientation of supply chain management as a link between market and operational activities, with technological capabilities as an essential factor for competitive advantage. This exploratory, mixed-method study was conducted in the Campinas technology hub, which has become important for its available skilled workforce, and broad and structured supply chain. The study sample included ten companies and dealt with the techniques of content analysis and non-parametric statistics – the Mann–Whitney U technique.

The results revealed that strategic supply chain management has an impact on technological capabilities and competitive advantage.

They also showed that technological capabilities have a partial mediating effect on competitive advantage.

A major paradigm shift focusing on the dark side of leadership has generated lots of concern for organizations as leadership has cascading effects on employees’ behaviour. This study aims to understand negative behaviours in the organization as a system of interrelated interaction initiated from the top which trickles down to employees.

Drawing on the theories of social exchange and norms of reciprocity, social learning and displaced aggression, this study models how and when abusive supervision relates to employees’ task performance. The model is empirically tested and extended to cover mediation and moderation processes. Drawing data from 218 bank supervisors and employees, this study uses the structural equation modelling to analyse a trickle-down model of abusive supervision.

Results from multi-waved, multi-sourced data indicated a mediating effect on the abusive supervision–performance relationships and provided support for employees’ guilt proneness and emotional dissonance as moderators. Overall, the results provided support for a moderated mediation relationship in the trickle-down model.

This study provides new knowledge into the potential boundary conditions of employees’ guilt proneness and emotional dissonance in affecting the relationship between abusive supervision, counterproductive work behaviour and task performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and understand the perceptions of residents of Southeastern Nigeria about glocalizing tourism in the region to help improve their support for the sustainability of the industry. Emphasis is laid on their expectations and strategies to maximize the positive impacts while minimizing the negative aspects in a bid to address their specific local needs.

This paper adopts an ethnographic approach to explore the perspectives of key stakeholders in Southeastern Nigeria's tourism industry. These include traditional rulers, men, women and youth representatives, chief priests and local security agents. Decision-making theory is adopted to frame the study.

The findings identified residents' expectations from glocalizing tourism. They see tourism as an avenue for initiating community projects, creating jobs, patronizing farm produces, reviving cultural practices and addressing religious crises.

This research focused only on selected communities within Southeastern Nigeria. The implication is that the findings do not represent what obtains in other communities within the region. Future research should extend to these areas to have a deeper understanding of how residents perceive the glocalization of tourism.

As the government and developers continue to invest in the tourism industry in the study area, glocalization could be a good way to address specific local needs and gain residents' support in the future.

This paper represents a new research approach for understanding the perceptions of residents about the Nigerian tourism industry.

This study empirically tests a conceptual framework that shows how integration practices are significantly associated with supply chain (SC) performance. This study also intends to achieve the following purposes: first, how the performance is influenced by the integration practices, i.e. internal and external; second, to measure the mediating effect of organizational antecedents (market orientation, learning orientation) between integration practices and firm’s SC performance.

In a noncontrived study environment, a cross-sectional study design was used with a questionnaire. The study used a stratified proportionate random sample of 205 managers from manufacturing firms in China. Six hypothesized relationships were examined using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique in AMOS software, and five were shown to be valid. The proposed model was validated through various techniques.

Results of this study indicate that both external and internal integration influence SC performance and confirms the mediating role of organizational antecedents between integration practices and SC performance. According to the findings, five out of the six hypotheses are accepted. Findings of this research also offer very expedient insights for the companies’ management which can help them to ensure optimal output by giving due importance to external as well as internal integration.

The data for the study were only obtained from one province, which was Henan Province, and one industry, which was manufacturing; this constrained the generalizability of the study. The findings may be further validated in the future by expanding the scope of the studies to include various cultural contexts and types of businesses. Second, this study used data from a cross-sectional analysis; however, future research may potentially make use of a longitudinal design in order to more thoroughly confirm the findings.

Findings of this study offer substantial managerial insights suggesting various ways to develop better internal as well as external integration to get better results. Management of the company should focus and give more importance to job rotation, trainings and management commitment as part of internal integration. Moreover, management should strive for improving the capabilities of integration in internal functions prior to external integration as internal collaboration, teamwork and interaction within the company are considered as a precondition to maintain integration with external stakeholders. It is also a social process which needs to be built up over a longer period of time.

The authors contribute to the literature by experimentally evaluating the effects of integration practices on SC performance using a conceptual model drawn from current theories. The study also offer additional empirical evidence for Han et al. (2007), who found that SCI enhances firm performance through quality management in their analyses of the relationships between SCI, quality management practices and firm performance.

Humour and, in particular, jokes have received little serious academic scrutiny in the entrepreneurship literature to date. To address this, the purpose of this paper is to examine publicly available jokes about entrepreneurs to establish what such jokes tell us about how humour, particularly entrepreneur jokes shapes public perceptions of entrepreneurial identity. This is important because humour may be an integral part of an individual's entrepreneurial identity. The authors thus contribute to understandings of the complex nature of entrepreneurial identity and how public perceptions of humour influence such by encapsulating negative public perception of entrepreneurs which may act as a de-legitimisation mechanism.

From a representative sample of entrepreneur jokes located on the web using netnographic techniques, the authors apply a multi-disciplinary framework to analyse the material and its messages to establish how such jokes shape public perceptions.

The findings suggest that jokes convey a pejorative message about how entrepreneurs are perceived by the public with the content and message of the jokes being negative and derogatory. Common themes contained in the punchlines include – criminality, greed, dishonesty, hubris, stupidity, misfortune, ridicule and deviousness – all of which may de-legitimise generic entrepreneurial identity. In the process, the authors uncovered liminal aspects of joke telling and consumption in that the perception of jokes about entrepreneurs relate to the time and context in which the joke is told given that situational cleverness is a key facet of such jokes. In addition, the authors discuss variations across jokes.

The authors discuss learning outcomes for future research and potential future studies into humour in an entrepreneurial context.

This study places humour and joking on the research stage, making an incremental contribution. The authors add to the literature on the use of entrepreneurial humour and in particular in relation to how jokes influence public perception of entrepreneurs. From the data collected, the authors develop some fresh insights into the variation and range of entrepreneurship related jokes accessible online.