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The purpose of this paper is to determine if and how role models presented in entrepreneurship education can influence students’ entrepreneurial activity given that the lack of financial and material means render most role models unattainable.

Data were collected in three stages from an entrepreneurship workshop programme held in Lagos, Nigeria. Nigerian and European undergraduate and graduate business students worked together to develop sustainable business ideas for the European and African market. In this exploratory paper, the emphasis for analysis is on the Nigerian students.

Based on the research results, the authors identified four types of role models and gained insight into how and why they could inspire students at different stages of entrepreneurship education.

This research is highly contextual with an emphasis on Europe and Africa. Given the relatively small sample of the European students in this study, this paper only presents findings from the Nigerian students. In view of time and sample size constraints, it would be useful to do a longitudinal international study to compare the approaches taken by European and African higher education institutions to develop an understanding of role models in entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial activity. Further study is needed to explore whether role models are the way forward to address the processes of student entrepreneurial learning in the context of entrepreneurship education in Nigeria. Further work could also uncover deeper convictions, the attitudes of students with regard to race and gender, and consider implications for practice between university and industry.

The paper contributes to the development of entrepreneurship education in the context of Nigeria’s emerging economy and makes suggestions on how to stimulate entrepreneurial activity through the targeted use of role models.

In view of financial, material or societal constraints to attain role models, the result of this study can be applied in other African contexts or emerging economies to develop the understanding of the relationship between role models in the industry, higher education practices and government policy. The findings of this study show that the highest impact gained is from “real-life” exchanges between students and entrepreneurs.

Traditional entrepreneurship education fails because the learner’s process of integrating and applying behaviours of entrepreneurial examples and programmes is opaque. Research on role models suggests that where they have a positive impact is where they are perceived as self-relevant and attainable. This idea is explored in the particular context of entrepreneurship education in Nigeria in West Africa, which is characterised by highly limited and fluctuating resources despite Nigeria’s relative wealth. The authors conclude with suggestions for the use of role models in entrepreneurship education, especially in the Nigerian higher education context. This paper, therefore, contributes to research on entrepreneurship role model education in emerging economies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how rural entrepreneurship engages with place and space. It explores the concept of “rural” as a socio-spatial concept in rural entrepreneurship and illustrates the importance of distinguishing between ideal types of rural entrepreneurship.

The paper uses concepts from human geography to develop two ideal types of entrepreneurship in rural areas. Ideal types constitute powerful heuristics for research and are used here to review and link existing literature on rural entrepreneurship and rural development as well as to develop new research avenues.

Two ideal types are developed: first, entrepreneurship in the rural and second, rural entrepreneurship. The former represents entrepreneurial activities with limited embeddedness enacting a profit-oriented and mobile logic of space. The latter represents entrepreneurial activities that leverage local resources to re-connect place to space. While both types contribute to local development, the latter holds the potential for an optimized use of the resources in the rural area, and these ventures are unlikely to relocate even if economic rationality would suggest it.

The conceptual distinction allows for engaging more deeply with the diversity of entrepreneurial activities in rural areas. It increases our understanding of localized entrepreneurial processes and their impact on local economic development.

This study contributes to the understanding of the localized processes of entrepreneurship and how these processes are enabled and constrained by the immediate context or “place”. The paper weaves space and place in order to show the importance of context for entrepreneurship, which responds to the recent calls for contextualizing entrepreneurship research and theories. In addition ideal types can be a useful device for further research and serve as a platform for developing rural policies.

This article aims to examine whether specific job tasks measured at the individual level or personality traits are associated with wages and whether the relationship between personality traits and wages differs depending on the job tasks that individuals perform.

This study analyzes the association between job tasks and personality traits, and their interaction, with regard to wages using German employee data from 2017/2018.

Results suggest that nonroutine manual, interactive or analytic tasks are associated with significantly higher wages compared to routine manual tasks, and while extraversion and emotional stability are related to higher wages, agreeableness and openness tend to be associated with lower wages also within occupations. Moreover, the association between personality traits and wages varies depending on the job task requirements at the workplace. A high degree of extraversion in particular is associated with higher wages when the employee performs nonroutine manual, interactive or analytic tasks.

To date, especially the interaction between individual job tasks and personality traits on wages has not been extensively studied because data on both job tasks and personality at the employee level are scarce. This study contributes to the understanding of wage differences among employees.

This editorial is an introduction to the special issue on CSR communication related to the 4th CSR Communication Conference, held in Vienna (Austria) in September 2017. The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect on the state-of-the-art in academic research on CSR communication concepts, strategies and future scenarios.

The editorial critically evaluates existing academic research dealing with CSR communication in the digital age. More precisely, it analyses established theories and concepts of CSR communication in terms of their fit to meet future challenges.

It can be noted that CSR communication practice is heading for new shores. Economic pressure, legal and political requirements, reputation risks in a digital media ecology and a new civic-minded and well-being-oriented generation of employees require a reorientation of CSR communication from information to impact orientation. Thus, the authors complement the approach of communication about CSR with the concept of communicative responsibility as a normative framework for corporate communication in the future.

The analyzed literature as well as the papers of the CSR Communication Conference indicate that the authors are heading toward a future of impact- instead of information-oriented communication. Here, communicative responsibility comes in as a fourth dimension of corporate responsibility, offering a normative framework for strategic, impact-oriented sustainability communication, integrated reporting and internal CSR.