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Research on high growth firms is booming yet a strong conceptual understanding of how these firms obtain (and sustain) rapid growth remains (at best) partial. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the role founders play in enabling episodes of rapid growth and how they help navigate this process.

This paper reports the findings from a qualitative study involving in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs enlisted onto a publicly funded high growth business accelerator programme in Wales. These interviews explored the causes of the firms rapid growth, their key growth trigger points and the organisational consequences of rapid growth.

The research reveals that periods of high growth are intrinsically and inextricably inter-linked with the entrepreneurial traits and capabilities of their founders coupled with their ability to “sense” and “seize” pivotal growth opportunities. It also demonstrates founder-level dynamic capabilities enable firms to capitalise on pivotal “trigger points” thereby enabling their progression to a new “dynamic state” in a firm’s temporal evolution.

The novel approach towards theory building deployed herein is the use of theoretical elaboration as means of extending important existing theoretical constructs such as growth “trigger points” and founder dynamic capabilities. To capitalise on these trigger points, founders have to undergo a process of “temporal transitioning” to effectively manage and execute the growth process in firms. The work also has important policy implications, underlining the need for more relational forms of support for entrepreneurial founders.

Introduces a special issue on globalization and the welfare state. Asserts that economic globalization constrains national economic and social policy far more now than ever before, although the level of international trade has not increased that much compared to levels at the beginning of this century. Talks about the political consequences of economic globalization, particularly welfare state retrenchment in the advanced capitalist world. Outlines the papers included in this issue – comparing welfare system changes in Sweden, the UK and the USA; urban bias in state policy‐making in Mexico; and the developing of the Israeli welfare state. Concludes that economic globalization has a limited effect in shaping social welfare policy in advanced capitalist countries; nevertheless, recommends further research into which aspects of economic globalization shape social welfare policy.

Training, particularly in the form of comprehensive professional development, continues to be a need for paraeducators (also known as teacher assistants). Training needs begin with an initial set of knowledge and skills and is built based upon the paraeducator’s role with individual students and the educational settings. Standards or guidance documents are available from a few individual states within the United States, higher education systems, and professional organizations that serve individuals with exceptional needs and agencies. An international professional organization, Council for Exceptional Children [CEC] (2011), identified a common skill set that reinforces standards for defining curricula when providing training to paraeducators. Key to their ongoing professional development is the on-the-job coaching by the education professional (teacher), to support the application of skills into the inclusive setting. Various forms of professional development are available including online trainings in addition to face-to-face.

In the era of the digital economy, organizations are under much pressure to justify their information technology (IT) spending on digital transformation. Some organizations have thus implemented IT chargeback, an IT governance (ITG) mechanism, to clarify and allocate IT costs among various business units. While practitioners have stressed the importance of IT chargeback, there has been little theoretical effort that investigates its strategic effects and boundary conditions.

Synthesizing the ITG literature and the resource-based view (RBV), the authors develop a research model to examine if IT chargeback affects IT–business strategic alignment and, in turn, organizational performance and how human IT resources strengthen the impacts of IT chargeback. The authors designed a survey to collect data from 103 firms and tested the model using partial least squares (PLS).

The authors found that IT chargeback promoted strategic alignment and then organizational performance only for firms with business-competent chief information officers (CIOs), rather than IT-competent business executives.

This study enriches the ITG literature by exploring the strategic value of an IT cost governance mechanism (i.e. IT chargeback). This study further proposes and validates a measure of IT chargeback. Drawing on the RBV, this study quantitatively investigates the strategic impacts and boundary contingencies of IT chargeback. This study also advances the CIO literature by identifying the strategic leading role, instead of the traditional supporting role, of CIOs in modern organizations.

This study explores the nature of the spot foreign exchange risk premium. Employing Ross's Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) as a vehicle, it tests the hypothesis that cross‐sectional differences in pure currency returns depend on measures of systematic (covariance) risk. These tests have greater power, in the sense of an enhanced ability to reject the hypothesis, since they explicitly allow for the possibility that idiosyncratic risk is priced. A battery of tests is unable to reject the hypothesis that expected exchange returns can be explained by a single‐factor APT. One implication of these results is that official intervention in exchange markets is unnecessary and undesirable.

The underlying principle of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is that there is a linear relationship between systematic risk, as measured by beta, and expected share returns. The CAPM attempts to describe this relationship by using beta to explain the differences between the expected returns on various shares and share portfolios. The CAPM has been the subject of considerable theoretical investigation and empirical research. The aim of this article is to establish the current knowledge of the usefulness of the CAPM, i.e. whether it provides a reasonable description of reality and whether it is a useful tool for investment decision‐making. The main conclusion drawn from the study is that the CAPM is useful and that it does describe and explain the risk/return relationship. However, other risk factors (i.e. other than beta) may also be useful for explaining share returns. Investors should therefore be cautious when using the model to evaluate investment performance.

As a means of contributing to the literature surrounding the evolution and growth of firms, this paper seeks to outline the explanatory concept of growth trigger points. It aims to examine the forces that propel firms towards different stages of growth and argues that high‐growth firms (HGFs) often encounter important “trigger points” that can affect their growth capabilities. The paper's main aim is to define, conceptualise and illustrate the role of trigger points in promoting rapid growth within businesses.

The primary methodological approach used was intensive case study research of HGFs in Scotland. The case studies, 40 firms in total, were compiled using a mixed method research approach that included, inter alia, background desk research, firm interviews and interviews with business advisers.

The research discovered that growth trigger points are extremely diverse and play a major role in shaping the growth trajectory of firms, and highlights three main types of trigger points. While trigger points can fundamentally reconfigure organisations, providing a catalyst for a business to undertake a period of rapid, transformative growth, these events can conversely cause severe organisational turbulence or even decline. Often the critical period determining the ultimate success of the growth opportunity presented is the post‐trigger transition period identified by the authors.

The paper aims to inform public policy on how to support high‐growth entrepreneurship. From a policy perspective, understanding these trigger points is essential for helping policymakers to prioritise and optimise their interventions to help promote rapid firm growth.

The paper's unique contribution to the literature is to help conceptualise how firms move along a growth trajectory, by introducing the novel concept of growth “trigger points”. The paper also seeks to inform public policy, so that interventions can be better attuned to the requirements of dynamic growth businesses.

The purpose of this empirical paper is to identify the role of social networking information (SNI) on job candidates' pre-employment background checking (PBC) process. SNI was further divided into three elements: perceived availability of information (PAI), perceived accuracy of information (PACI) and perceived reliability of information (PRI). In addition, the authors employed two mediating variables: perceived benefit (PB) and organizational branding (OB) to study the influence of each element of SNI on PBC.

The authors used primary data collected from a valid sample of 465 using a structured questionnaire survey selected through purposive sampling. For descriptive analysis, SPSS 24 and for testing the hypothesized relationships, structural equation modeling technique (with AMOS 24) were utilized.

The results indicated that only PAI had strong positive influence on PBC. The other two independent variables: PACI and PRI had insignificant positive influence on PBC. In case of mediators, OB was found to partially mediate the relationship between PAI and PBC while it did not mediate two other direct relationships. Further, PB did not mediate any relationship at all.

The paper is expected to be useful for the academicians involved in investigating the role of SNI on PBC as a lucrative research topic.

The hiring professionals can utilize the findings of this primary research as the guidelines for formulating effective social media background checking policies.

Using SNI for different HRM practices is comparatively new but a growing practice. However, the empirical investigation covering this area is almost absent in academia. This paper as one of the very initial attempts to reveal the role of SNI on PBC can fill that severe gap to some extent and guide future research attempts. Furthermore, the HR professionals are expected to be benefitted from the empirical results in formulating and implementing an effective media policy that will help them in utilizing the SNI in an efficient and rightful manner.

This paper presents a new research design to test the efficacy of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory of Ross [1976], similar to that applied by Christofi, Christofi and Philippatos [1993]. In particular, we use a combination of factor analysis and canonical correlation to test the underlying relationships between APT factors developed using factor analysis and unanticipated changes in five macro‐economic variables that have been shown to be related to stock returns. The results of this paper indicate that the first factor of industry returns is strongly related to the S&P 500 while the remaining four factors are highly correlated with the term structure of interest rates, the rate of inflation, the default premium, and the industrial production, respectively.