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Digital platforms increase their function and scope by leveraging boundary resources and complementary add-on products from third-party developers to interact with external entities and producers. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are essential boundary resources developers use to connect applications, systems and platforms. This notwithstanding, previous API studies tend to focus more on the technical dimensions, with little on the social and cultural contexts underpinning API innovations. This study relies on the new (neo) institutional theory (focusing on regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive pillars) as an analytical lens to understand the institutional forces that affect API integration among digital firms.

The study adopts a qualitative case study methodology and relies on phone calls and a semi-structured in-depth interview approach of a Ghanaian digital music platform to uncover the institutional forces affecting API integration.

The findings reveal that regulative institutions such as excessive tax regimes mostly constrained API development and integration initiatives. However, other regulative institutions like the government digitalization agenda enabled API integration. Normative institutions, such as the growing use of e-payment options, enabled API integration in digital music platforms. Cultural-cognitive institutions like employee ego constrained the API integration process in music digital platforms.

This study primarily contributes to deepening understanding of the relevant literature by exploring the institutional forces that affect API integration among digital firms in a developing economy. The study also uncovered a new form of an institution known as motivational institution as an enabler for API development and integration in digital music platforms.

This chapter investigates whether, and if so, how particular firms in a transition economy are involved in bribery. Built on pressure theories, we explain how the direct effects of firm characteristics and contextual characteristics determine firm bribery behavior. Entrepreneurs make choices based on perceptions of a specific pressure due to organizational characteristics (internal pressures) or due to context (external pressures). The relationship between firm characteristics, context, and bribery was estimated using unique data from a survey of 606 Vietnamese entrepreneurs. We controlled for various entrepreneurial, organizational, and industrial characteristics. The exploratory findings support firm attributes hypotheses, which is a negative relationship between firm size and bribery and a nonmonotonic U-shaped relationship between firm age and bribery. Besides, the effects of context on bribery are also found. Specifically, the result supports a positive relationship between competition and bribery and a negative relationship between the quality of the government and bribery.

It's hard to envision a system more global and more integrated than research. Many stakeholders affect and are affected by changes in the research ecosystem; the ecosystem differs in significant ways across the globe and between researchers, institutions and fields of study; and there are many questions that exclusive action can't address. There are also broad ecosystem-level questions that need answering. For these reasons alone, global approaches to reform are needed.

The first step in this exploration isn't to start looking for “solutions”, but to develop a better understanding of how our needs and interests overlap. By identifying the broad contours of common ground in this conversation, we can build the guardrails and mileposts for our collaborative efforts and then allow the finer-grained details of community-developed plans more flexibility and guidance to evolve over time.

What are these overlapping interests? First, the people in this community share a common motive – idealism – to make research better able to serve the public good. We also share a common desire to unleash the power of open to improve research and accelerate discovery; we are all willing to fix issues now instead of waiting for market forces or government intervention to do this for us; and we want to ensure that everyone everywhere has equitable access to knowledge.

There is also very broad agreement in this community about which specific problems in scholarly communication need to be fixed and why, and well as many overlapping beliefs in this community. OSI participants have concluded that four such beliefs best define our common ground: (1) research and society will benefit from open done right; (2) successful solutions will require broad collaboration; (3) connected issues need to be addressed, and (4) open isn't a single outcome, but a spectrum.

OSI has been observing and debating the activity in scholarly communication since late 2014 with regard to understanding possible global approaches and solutions for improving the future of open research. While the COVID-19 pandemic has made the importance of open science abundantly clear, the struggle to achieve this goal (not just for science but for all research) has been mired in a lack of clarity and urgency for over 20 years now, mostly stalling on the tension between wanting more openness but lacking realistic solutions for making this happen on a large scale with so many different stakeholders, needs and perspectives involved.

Underlying this tension is a fundamental difference in philosophy: whether the entire scholarly communication marketplace, driven by the needs and desires of researchers, should determine what kind of open it wants and needs; or whether this marketplace should be compelled to adopt open reform measures developed primarily by the scholarly communication system's main billpayers-funders and libraries. There is no widespread difference of opinion in the community whether open is worth pursuing. The debate is mostly over what specific open solutions are best, and at what pace open reforms should occur.

OSI has proposed a plan of action for working together to rebuild the future of scholarly communication on strong, common ground foundation. This plan – which we're referring to as Plan A – calls for joint action on studies, scholarly communication infrastructure improvement, and open outreach/education. Plan A also calls for working together with UNESCO to develop a unified global roadmap for the future of open, and for striving to ensure the community's work in this space is researcher-focused, collaborative, connected (addressing connected issues like peer review), diverse and flexible (no one-size-fits-all solutions), and beneficial to research. UNESCO's goal is to finish its roadmap proposal by early 2022.

For a full discussion of OSI's common ground recommendations, please see the Plan A website at http://plan-a.world.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the internationalisation decision-making process using causation and effectuation.

The proposed hypotheses are tested with a survey data set of 148 Kenyan small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to assess the pre-internationalisation decision-making of the firm. Multinomial logistic regression has been used to predict the categories from total effectuation to total causation.

The results of this study show that firm resources and capability provide a solid basis for firms' internationalisation. The entrepreneur becomes more effectual commence as they assess the firm's resource and capability. Entrepreneurs with a high entrepreneurial self-efficacy use both causation and effectuation with a bias towards effectuation. Increasing environmental predictability led the firms to use less effectuation, and increasing psychic distance entails high effectuation relative to high causation in the Kenyan context.

The sample choice of the category is Kenyan SMEs which may raise some questions. This study assumed that SMEs sampled had the same level of internationalisation experience regardless of the number of years in business.

This study theoretically advances the field of international business by combining the Uppsala internationalisation model with effectuation; this study defines four antecedents of decision-making to form its conceptual framework to study internationalisation decision-making approach for SMEs using the effectuation logic and adds to the stream of literature that has reviewed the factors that influence the internationalisation decision-making process for SMEs in developing countries.