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Ireland’s ageing population has resulted in an increasing number of older adults living with frailty. Despite growing attention towards older adults’ and health professionals’ perspectives of frailty, occupational therapy research is limited. This study aims to explore occupational therapists’ perceptions of frailty and how their perceptions impact their approach to the assessment and management of frailty.

Using qualitative descriptive design, 19 occupational therapists working with older adults participated in online focus groups. Data were analysed using thematic analysis.

Perceptions of occupational therapists were constructed into three main themes: conceptualising frailty; management of frailty; and advancing frailty practice. Findings indicate that occupational therapists perceived frailty as a multidimensional concept but highlight a reluctance to use frailty terminology with patients. Findings also suggest that although occupational therapists are involved in provision of care for older adults living with frailty, the profession’s scope is not optimised in the assessment and management of frailty.

Findings provide insight into occupational therapists’ perceptions of frailty. Development of a shared understanding of frailty between clinicians and patients and enhancement of undergraduate frailty education are recommended to progress occupational therapy’s role in frailty management.

In the multilayered capability framework the authors integrate two layers, namely functional level production capabilities and shop floor-level production routines (PRs). The authors examine how these two layers are interlinked, and additionally, they explore how these layers contribute to firm performance.

The authors tested the hypotheses using structural equation modeling (SEM) on a sample of manufacturing firms.

Regarding the capability layers, the authors found that at the functional level, production dynamic capabilities (PDCs) drive the renewal of production ordinary capabilities (POCs), and that at the shop floor level, deployment of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is influenced by lean production. Regarding the direct links between capability layers, the authors showed that PDCs and POCs have different roles in shaping shop floor PRs: PDCs is linked to I4.0, and lean methods is impacted by POCs. Concerning performance implications, only PDC and POC have significant impact on firm performance (the latter is negative), while PRs do not.

Although, contextual factors (e.g. technology intensity, size) do not influence our findings, the potential country-effect and the dominance of medium-sized firms offer future research directions.

If production managers want to contribute to business performance, they should be more susceptible to resource renewal (PDCs) than to their general (POCs) or specific (PRs) exploitation efforts. As they exploit current resource stocks, they face a trade-off: they must consider that beyond their positive impacts on operational performance, their implications on business performance will be controversial.

Scholars usually examine one layer of capabilities, either capabilities or routines, and associate that with one dimension of performance, either financial and market measures or operational indicators. The authors propose a multilayered capability framework with a complex view on performance implications.

To interrogate the grand narrative of “entrepreneurship for development” that dominates international development circles, by applying a feminist critical discourse analysis that prioritizes women's situated experiences as local stories.

Two existing frameworks for analysing women's entrepreneurship, namely the 5M (Brush et al., 2009) and the 8M (Abuhussein and Koburtay, 2021) frameworks, are used to examine the local stories of women in rural Ethiopia to provide a counter-narrative to the grand narrative of “entrepreneurship for development”. The local stories are derived from 16 focus group discussions and 32 interviews.

The findings provide a counter-narrative to the grand narrative of “entrepreneurship for development”, evident in Ethiopia and in international development generally, while demonstrating larger structural issues at play. They challenge entrepreneurship's solely positive effects. While women recognize the benefits of having a business, particularly in terms of financial gains, empowerment and social recognition, they also highlight negative consequences, including uncertainty, concerns for their own personal safety, criticism, stress, limited social life and fear of indebtedness and poverty.

Policymakers, scholars and development professionals are urged to reflect on the limitations of “entrepreneurship for development” and to consider the negative effects that promoting an acritical grand narrative of entrepreneurship could have on women's lives.

The article advances an innovative partnership between feminist analysis and established women's entrepreneurship frameworks to contest dominant assumptions in the fields of entrepreneurship and international development studies. It adds to the limited empirical evidence on women's entrepreneurial activity in Ethiopia, tests the adequacy of the 5M and 8M frameworks in the rural low-income context of Ethiopia, and proposes a 7+M framework as an alternative to study rural women's entrepreneurship in low and middle income countries.