Search results

Access to finance and corruption are two major institutional obstacles hindering firm innovation in Africa whose implication on the fit between managerial characteristics and firm innovation has not been examined. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether firms may want to hire managers with a good fit when faced with institutional constraints and the authors suggest managerial level of education and experience within an industry could play a vital role in helping such firms innovate.

Secondary data was obtained from the World Bank Enterprise Survey on 17 African countries and a series of hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to achieve the aim of the research.

The findings show that while managers with primary and secondary education had a negative relationship with firm innovation (product and process), managers with a university degree had a positive relationship. This relationship was also confirmed when the authors’ split the full sample into two sub-samples (the firms that are institutionally constrained by access to finance and corruption) and therefore confirm the institutional implications of managers fit for firm’s innovation.

While research on the effect of management characteristics on firm innovation has focused more on large firms and mostly from developed economies testing both direct and mediation effects, little research exists as to whether the institutional obstacles faced by small firms could influence the type of managers required to drive their innovation.

Africa is becoming the fastest-growing continent despite significant challenges to accessing finance and the use of technology. This paper aims to examine the direct effect of mobile money adoption on firm performance and its moderation effect by examining how it moderates the effect of access to finance on firm performance.

Quantitative data were obtained from the World Bank Enterprise Survey for Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe. A series of hierarchical regression analyses were done to test the hypotheses.

The main findings show a negative significant relationship between mobile money adoption and firm performance, while access to finance had a positive relationship. The moderation effect though positive was not significant. Research examining the effect of mobile money adoption in Africa on firm performance is limited, and existing studies have focused on the determinants of mobile money usage. By examining the direct and contingency effect on other determinants of firm performance, this research makes both theoretical and practical contributions. Theoretically, this research shows that not all strategic resources are valuable in improving firm performance. Practically, this research provides insights into how technology could be embedded into business processes for firms to benefit from such technology.

This research has complemented by the extant literature by assessing the role of mobile money adoption in moderating the influence of access to finance on firm performance.

Historically, counter-terrorism's attitude towards women has been complicated, partly because both counter-terrorism and terrorism were for many years considered almost exclusively a male business. This approach has also been reflected in the media's sensationalised representation of women involved in political violence. This chapter explores how women's participation in non-state political violence is still largely explained through traditional conservative notions of sexual difference that characterise women as irrational and highly influenceable, eliminating the possibility of any informed discussion. Focusing on the British case, the chapter shows how the actions of female militants are still bound to gendered narratives and limited to specific frames that generally portray violent women as highly sexualised and pathologised. Depictions of female terrorists and ‘radicalised’ women are based on stereotypes that reinforce the image of women as weak, easily influenced, naïve, driven by romantic emotions, deceitful and in constant need of protection and supervision. From an intersectional perspective, the chapter also explores the orientalist imaginaries of Muslim women who are seen as victims and as individuals lacking empowerment and agency. The discussion highlights ultimately that explanations of women's violence must go beyond myths that explain women's involvement in political violence via a wide range of personal and emotional factors, to examine political motivations and consideration of the complexity of their decisions, and the wider context.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine knowledge management (KM) practices as a moderator in the relationship between organizational culture and performance. The effect of four types of organizational culture on organizational performance was studied. In addition to direct effects, most importantly, KM practices as a moderator in strengthening the culture-performance relationship were empirically examined.

A carefully crafted survey instrument was distributed and data was collected from 1,255 respondents from 10 information technology companies in India. After checking the psychometric properties of the instrument, this paper performs hierarchical regression to test hypotheses.

The results reveal that: cooperative culture, innovative culture, consistent culture and effectiveness culture were all positively and significantly related to organizational performance; KM practices were positively and significantly related to organizational performance, KM practices moderate the relationship between various dimensions of organizational culture and organizational performance.

As with any survey-based research, the present study suffers from the problems associated with self-report measures. These are common method bias and social desirability bias. However, this study attempts to minimize these limitations by following appropriate statistical techniques.

This study contributes to both practicing managers and the literature on KM and organizational culture. The study suggests that managers use KM practices, which are all-pervasive and very important for improving organizational performance. The results highlight the importance of implementing KM practices in organizations.

This study provides new insights into the importance of KM practices in achieving sustained competitive advantage by achieving organizational effectiveness. To the knowledge, the importance of KM practices is underemphasized in organizational culture research.

The research aims to provide a nuanced understanding of the complex social, psychological and organizational factors that serve as the foundation driving academics' knowledge-sharing behavior (KSB) within an academic enclave.

A cross-sectional research design using the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach was employed to examine the determinants of personality traits among tertiary academics in Malaysia in relation to their KSB. To this end, a self-administered survey was distributed to a sample group of 526 respondents.

It is evident that conscientiousness and agreeableness are the personality traits that play a significant role in promoting KSB among academics in higher learning institutions (HLIs). These personality traits are positively linked with academics' willingness to transfer and receive knowledge. In contrast, the personality trait of openness to experience does not significantly influence KSB.

This study has employed a four-item measurement for evaluating the three distinct personality traits. Despite employing a brief measurement tool, the study has demonstrated significant reliability and validity, particularly in terms of convergent and discriminant validity.

The present study has revealed that conscientiousness in academics is intimately linked with their KSB, which is of paramount importance in the output-based education system. Notably, agreeableness among academics also conveys a positive effect on knowledge sharing (KS) in HLIs, as it cultivates trust and helpfulness among individuals and facilitates the exchange of valuable tacit knowledge.

This research explores the relationship between personality traits and KSB among Malaysian academics in HLIs. The study adopts the theories of planned behavior (TPB) and social capital theory (SCT) as theoretical ground, providing a nuanced understanding of the underlying motivations and mechanisms driving academics' knowledge-sharing behavior within the unique socio-cultural context of Southeast Asia.

Murder is overwhelmingly a male affair (UNODC Global Study on Homicide, 2019). So, when women kill, their crimes gain a lot of attention and even more hysteria in both courts and media. This chapter will analyse the cases of Sally Challen, Belinda van Krevel and Maxine Carr to show that portrayals of women who are involved in killing exist on a continuum, from abused victims to those simply ‘born evil’ to the incomprehension of those whose crimes render them outside society altogether; or in simple terms, from sad, to bad, to mad. In all cases, the agency of the women is presented as incomplete or impossible, indicating our inability in heteropatriarchy to acknowledge that women are as capable as men of exhibiting the full spectrum of human behaviour. Denying agency, particularly to violent women, allows Western societies to avoid having to face and thus, attempt to understand, the female capacity for aggression.

This paper revolves around the central question: is it possible to do “proper ethnography” without complete participant observation? The authors draw upon a student's experiences of negotiating National Health Service (NHS) ethical approval requirements and access into the student's research field, a British NHS hospital and having to adapt data collection methods for the student's doctoral research. The authors examine some of the positional (insider/outsider, native gone academic), methodological (long-term/interrupted, overt/covert) and contextual challenges that threatened the student's ethnographic study.

The paper draws on reflexive vignettes written during the student's doctorate, capturing significant moments and issues within the student's research.

The authors highlight the temporal, practical, ethical and emotional challenges faced in attempting an ethnography of nursing culture within a highly regulated research environment. Having revealed the student's experience of researching this specific culture and finding ways to overcome these challenges, the authors conclude that the contemporary ethnographer needs to be increasingly flexible, opportunistic and somewhat covert.

The authors argue that it is possible to do “proper” and “good” ethnography without complete participant observation – it is not the method, the observation, that is the essence of ethnography, but whether the researcher achieves real understanding through thick descriptions of the culture that explain “what is really going on here”.

The authors hope to assist doctoral students engage in “good” ethnographic research within (potentially) risk-averse host organisations, such as the NHS, whilst being located in neo-liberal performative academic organisations (Foster, 2017; McCann et al., 2020). The authors wish to contribute to the journal to ensure good ethnography is accessible and achievable to (particularly) doctoral researchers who have to navigate complex challenges exacerbated by pressures in both the host and home cultures. The authors wish to see doctoral researchers survive and thrive in producing good organisational ethnographies to ensure such research is published (Watson 2012), cognisant of the pressures and targets to publish in top-ranked journals (Jones et al. 2020).

Having identified key challenges, the authors demonstrate how these can be addressed to ensure ethnography remains accessible to and achievable for, doctoral researchers, particularly in healthcare organisations. The authors conclude that understanding can be attained in what they propose as a hybrid form of “propportune” ethnography that blends the aim of the essence of “proper” anthropological approaches with the “opportunism” of contemporary data collection solutions.