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This paper aims to generate a better understanding of how challenges and opportunities for sustainable change during digitalization relate to the organizing work of change agents mandated to facilitate technology adoption from within local work organizations.

This study examines the work of welfare technology coordinators, health-care professionals who are mandated to facilitate the use of technologies in home-based services in a Norwegian city. Data comprise ethnographic observations of meetings and work practices, interviews and documents collected over one year. A practice-based approach was applied to analyze how the welfare technology coordinators go about integrating technologies with the work practices, and the forms of negotiations this work implies in their work community.

The analysis identified four sets of practices in the coordinators’ work: exploring and integrating new technologies into work practices, legitimizing aims and values, formalizing routines and responsibilities and critically considering existing and envisioned service practices. Through these practices, emerging problems and disconnections in the service organization were attended to in a continuous manner.

The study contributes to the literature by examining the work of internal change agents mandated to facilitate multiple and simultaneous technology adoption and demonstrates the importance of recognizing the continuous efforts and negotiations of these agents as significant to sustainable organizing.

In this article, we use the film Bridge of Spies – which depicts the case of U-2 spy pilot Francis Gary Powers – and relevant primary sources, particularly Powers' letters from prison, to provide teachers with a case that can engage students with the complexity of the Cold War. Understanding USA–Russia relations is as important today as ever as we watch the tragedy unfold in Ukraine. Using primary sources to reflect on the Cold War can help secondary students understand the historical context of the war in Ukraine as well as how to evaluate and critique sources of information about the war.

The film and personal letters provide insights often not available or obvious when we focus on the political or military history of an event or time period. The Cold War is frequently defined by the rhetoric of the USA and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) governments – but everyday people and citizens had a wider range of views and experiences. The film and letters bring out the humanity of the Cold War.

This article supports secondary teachers in incorporating film and primary sources as teaching tools to study the Cold War while more broadly thinking about these sources as ways to understand the past. The letters used, including those from U-2 spy pilot Francis Gary Powers, help us understand his time in a Soviet prison as well as the behind-the-scenes work to free him as part of a prisoner exchange.

The U-2 Incident and other events of the Cold War provide important context for understanding the Cold War-like tensions between the USA and Russia today. The distrust between these countries has a long history. However, documents like the film and letters discussed here show that there is much more to the bluster of political leaders and the military chess game. There is an important human element to these events and an impact on individuals who are much more than pawns in international diplomacy.

Energy poverty is a global phenomenon, but its prevalence is enormous in most African countries, with a potential impact on quality of life. This study aims to investigate the impact of energy poverty on the shadow economy.

The study uses panel data from 45 countries in Africa over a period of 1996–2018. Using panel cointegrating regression and panel vector auto-regression model in the generalized method of moments technique.

This study provides that energy poverty deepens the size of the shadow economy in Africa. It also documents that there is a bidirectional causality between shadow economy and energy poverty. Therefore, the two variables can predict each other.

The study suggests that lack of access to clean and modern energy services contributes to the depth of the shadow economy in Africa. African authorities are advised to strengthen rural and urban electrification initiatives by providing adequate energy infrastructure so as to reduce the level of energy poverty in the region. To ensure energy sustainability delivery, the study proposes that the creation of national and local capacities would be the most effective manner to guarantee energy accessibility and affordability. Also, priorities should be given to the local capital mobilization and energy subsidies for the energy poor. Energy literacy may also contribute to the sustainability and the usage of modern energy sources in Africa.

Previous studies reveal that income inequality contributes to the large size of shadow economy in developing economies. However, none of these studies analyzed the role of energy poverty and its implications for underground economic operations. Inadequate access to modern energy sources is likely to deepen the prevalence of informality in developing nations. Based on this, this study provides fresh evidence on the implications of energy deprivation on the shadow economy in Africa using a heterogeneous panel econometric framework. The study contributes to the literature by advocating that the provision of affordable modern energy sources for rural and urban settlements, and the creation of good energy infrastructure for the firms in the formal economy would not only improve the quality of life but also important to discourage underground economic operations in developing economies.

Despite the growing concern about security breaches and risks emerging from Shadow IT usage, a type of information security violation committed by organizational insiders, this phenomenon has received little scholarly attention. By integrating the dual-factor theory, unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) and social control theory, this research aims to examine facilitating and deterring factors of Shadow IT usage intention.

An online survey was performed to obtain data. As this study aims at investigating the behavior of organizational insiders, LinkedIn, an employment-oriented network site, was chosen as the main site to reach the potential respondents.

The results show that while performance expectancy, effort expectancy and subjective norms considerably impact intention to use Shadow IT, personal norms and sanctions-related factors exert no influence. Besides, an organizational factor of ethical work climate is found to significantly increase individual perceptions of informal controls and formal controls.

This work is the first attempt to extend the generalizability of the dual-factor theory and UTAUT model, which primarily has been utilized in the context of system usage, to the new context of information security. This study is also one of few studies that simultaneously take both organizational and individual factors into consideration and identify its impacts on user's behaviors in the information security context.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the gendered ideas and ideals attached to an imagined ideal Entrepreneur in a post-industrial rural community in Sweden. While research has not yet clearly explained how the ideal entrepreneur is constructed, the result, i.e. the gendered representations of entrepreneurs, is well-researched. Previous results indicate a prevalent portrayal of entrepreneurship as a predominantly masculine construct characterised by qualities such as self-made success, confidence and assertiveness.

Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in a community that is attempting to re-brand itself through garden tourism. Through inductive reasoning, this study analyses the gendered ideas and ideals regarding the community’s imagined ideal Entrepreneur who is to help the community solve its problems.

This study finds that the community forges the Entrepreneur into an imagined masculine ideal as holy, a saviour and a god and is replacing its historical masculine ironmaster with a masculine Entrepreneur. This study develops forging as a metaphor for the construction of the masculine ideal Entrepreneur, giving the community, rather than the entrepreneur himself, a voice as constructors. From social constructionism, this study emphasises how gendered ideas and ideals are shaped not only by the individual realities but more so in the reciprocal process by the realities of others.

The metaphor of forging adds an innovative theoretical dimension to the feminist constructionist approach and suggests focusing on how the “maleness” of entrepreneurship is produced and reproduced in the local. Previously, light has been shed on how male entrepreneurs perform their identities collectively; the focus of this study is on the social construction of this envisioned Entrepreneur within a rural community. The development of forging thus contributes as a way of analysing entrepreneurship in place. The choice of an ethnographic study allowed the authors to be a part of the real-life world of community members, providing rich data to explore entrepreneurship and gender.

This paper argues that Bruno Latour’s work on translation provides an alternative to dominant anthropocentric, individualistic and managerial approaches in career studies by considering careers as precarious effects of networks instead of the implicit assumption of individual strategic career actors in extant career research paradigms.

The article first compares the three main current approaches to studying careers – structural functionalist, interpretivist and critical – illustrated by three exemplary empirical studies. Subsequently, three concepts from the sociology of translation that are relevant for the study of careers are introduced: career making as translating interests, careers as effects of networks and career action as dislocated and overtaken. Taken together, these three concepts allow us to conceive of careers as practices performed by human and nonhuman actors. Finally, an example from an ethnographic case study in the field of contemporary art illustrates how a Latourian approach can be used.

Latour’s work on translation provides conceptual and methodological tools to investigate career processes and practices in an era of unpredictability.

The paper introduces Bruno Latour’s work on translation to the study of careers.

Intelligent prediction of node localization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a major concern for researchers. The huge amount of data generated by modern sensor array systems required computationally efficient calibration techniques. This paper aims to improve localization accuracy by identifying obstacles in the optimization process and network scenarios.

The proposed method is used to incorporate distance estimation between nodes and packet transmission hop counts. This estimation is used in the proposed support vector machine (SVM) to find the network path using a time difference of arrival (TDoA)-based SVM. However, if the data set is noisy, SVM is prone to poor optimization, which leads to overlapping of target classes and the pathways through TDoA. The enhanced gray wolf optimization (EGWO) technique is introduced to eliminate overlapping target classes in the SVM.

The performance and efficacy of the model using existing TDoA methodologies are analyzed. The simulation results show that the proposed TDoA-EGWO achieves a higher rate of detection efficiency of 98% and control overhead of 97.8% and a better packet delivery ratio than other traditional methods.

The proposed method is successful in detecting the unknown position of the sensor node with a detection rate greater than that of other methods.

This study builds on the extant research of the authors on illegal rural enterprise (IRE). However, instead of taking a single or micro case approach within specific sections of the farming and food industries we examine the concept holistically from a macro case perspective. Many IRE crimes simply could not be committed without insider knowledge and complicity, making it essential to appreciate this when researching or investigating such crimes.

Using data from published studies, we introduce the theoretical concept of “Shadow infrastructure” to analyse and explain the prevalence and endurance of such criminal enterprises. Using a multiple case approach, we examine data across the cases to provide an analysis of several industry wide crimes—the illicit halal meat trade; the theft of sheep; the theft of tractors and plant; and the supply of illicit veterinary medicines.

We examine IRE crimes across various sectors to identify commonalities in practice and in relation to business models drawing from a multidisciplinary literature spanning business and criminology. Such enterprises can be are inter-linked. We also provide suggestions on investigating such structures.

We identify academic and practical implications in relation to the investigation of IRE crime and from an academic perspective in relation to researching the phenomenon.

This study combines data from numerous individual studies from a macro perspective to provide practical solutions to a multifaceted problem.

Cloud computing, a dominant technology, significantly impacts organizations, necessitating talent management strategies for sustained growth. This study aims to explore the impact of cloud adoption on large French organizations through a “learning organization” perspective.

Interviews were conducted with business and IT stakeholders from 35 multinational organizations in France.

Cloud services have a high impact on large organizations, leading to a demand for cloud-related skills, a power shift from IT to business departments and increased shadow IT activities. Effective utilization requires organizational learning and a change management project, transforming organizations into productive and innovative learning organizations.

This paper contributes to cloud computing, organizational learning and talent management literature, offering managers a novel approach to handling cloud services.

This paper aims to determine the impact of mentorship on the development of self-directedness among beginner teachers in their initial years of teaching.

The researcher adopted a positivist paradigm to explore the situation of concern. Quantitative research was conducted, involving the collection and analysis of numerical data. Two closed-ended structured questionnaires were utilised, derived from the 40-item self-directed learning readiness scale (SDLRS) developed by Fisher and King, and a pre-determined questionnaire by Glazerman focused on the first-year teaching experience, induction and mentoring of beginner teachers.

Beginner teachers merely relying on the knowledge obtained from their studies is insufficient to achieve a satisfactory level of self-directedness when starting a teaching career. Most beginner teachers faced significant challenges in their early years of teaching due to the absence of mentoring support. In addition, most indicated that they resume their teaching duties and rely on their district for general support, guidance and orientation. Finally, the results have shown that mentoring positively impacts beginner teachers’ self-directedness.

The first limitation was that this study was narrowed to one South Africa University part-time B.Ed honours students working as beginner teachers in different provinces at primary and secondary schools. As a result, the findings of this research might be interpreted by some critics as one-sided and not representative of the views of most beginner teachers in South Africa who are working. The second limitation of this study is the sample size. In this study, 222 responses were received. As a result, the findings of this research might be considered not representative of the target sample size.

The presence and effective implementation of mentoring programmes in schools can positively impact beginner teachers' professional development and retention during their first years of teaching.

We contend that our research holds significance for international readership as it aims to garner attention towards potential research endeavours in diverse settings concerning mentorship programs for beginner teachers, specifically promoting self-directed learning. Our research offers opportunities to compare our findings with studies conducted in more comprehensive, comparative contexts and foster research possibilities in broader, contrasting contexts.

Based on the findings of this research, the availability and effective use of mentoring programmes would significantly affect beginner teachers' self-directedness, improve their retention rate and alleviate their teaching challenges. This study was the first research on the perceptions of the influence of mentoring on the self-directedness of beginner teachers.