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The paper investigates the closure mechanisms and strategies of exclusion concerning the establishment and subsequent functioning of the Collegio dei Rasonati, the professional body of accountants that was established in Venice in 1581 and operated until the end of the 18th century.

The research design offers a critical longitudinal explanation of the emergence of the Collegio dei Rasonati as a professional body in the context of Venetian society by relying on the social closure theory elaborated by Collins (1975); Parkin (1979) and Murphy (1988).

The Collegio dei Rasonati was established to overcome the prerogatives of a social class in accessing the accounting profession. However, the pre-existing professional elites enacted a set of social closure strategies able to transform this professional body into a stronghold of their privileges.

As virtually all of the evidence concerning the admission examinations has been lost over time, the investigation is restricted to the study of the few examples that have survived. The main implication of the study concerns the understanding of some dynamics leading to neutralize attempts to replace class privileges with a meritocratic system.

The research investigates the structure of the rules of social closure revealing the possibility of an antagonistic relationship between different co-existing forms of exclusion within the same structure. Moreover, it highlights that a form of exclusion can be made of different hierarchical levels.

The paper intends to explore the lived experiences of medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on their lifestyles and mental wellbeing.

Fourteen medical students from the College of Medicine and Medical Sciences, Arabian Gulf University, Bahrain, were enrolled, and their narratives were obtained. Data were analyzed and conducted using Colaizzi’s phenomenological descriptive method of enquiry.

The analysis identified two themes, along with nine subthemes, that were generated. The first theme focused on mental and social experiences, while the second focused on lifestyle changes. During the pandemic, students had time to reflect on themselves and started to think positively about their lives, although they felt fearful, uncertain, stressed and anxious due to preventive control measures that were mandated, including social distancing and lockdowns. Participants’ lifestyles changed generally negatively, as they adapted to the preventive measures, rendering them physically inactive and exposing them to unhealthy food and disturbed sleep.

The findings provide an insight into the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lifestyle and mental wellbeing of medical students. Educational institutes need to offer their students both short as well as long-term health, social and mental support to overcome the impact of the pandemic on their lives.

Social norms about the timing of retirement and stereotypes about qualities of younger and older workers are pervasive, but it is unclear how they relate to employers’ ageist preferences. The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of employers’ retirement age norms and age-related stereotypes on their preferences for younger or older workers in three types of employment practices: hiring a new employee; offering training; and offering a permanent contract.

Survey data from 960 Dutch employers from 2017 are analysed to study employers’ preferences for younger or older workers. Effects of organisations’ and managers’ characteristics, retirement age norms and stereotypes are estimated with multinomial logistic regression analyses.

Many employers have a strong preference for younger workers, especially when hiring a new employee, while preferences for older workers are highly uncommon. Higher retirement age norms of employers are related to a lower preference for younger workers in all employment decisions. When employers are more positive about older workers’ soft qualities (such as reliability and social skills), but not about their hard qualities (such as their physical capacity and willingness to learn), they rate older workers relatively more favourable for hiring and offering training, but not for providing a permanent contract.

This is one of the first studies to estimate the effects of retirement age norms and age-related stereotypes on ageist preferences for a diverse set of employment practices.

This paper aims to show which factors influence the perception of human resources professionals about managers over 50 years old and which factors guide the age management practices adopted in the surveyed companies.

To this end, a survey was conducted with 140 companies accessed from a database of a human resources association. Through the answers obtained through the online questionnaire, an exploratory factor analysis was made with the aid of Software R.

Thus, it was possible to identify four factors that explain the work posture of professionals 50 years of age and older (company expectations, performance, morality and knowledge and professionalism) and three factors that guide the adoption of age management practices in organizations (recruitment & selection and integration, retention and continuity in the company, adaptation to the needs).

The results suggest that, even considering the high performance of older managers, perceived by HR professionals, the adoption of age management practices is still insufficient, making it difficult for these professionals to enter and remain in organizations. Moreover, it can be inferred that such posture indicates biases of discrimination and age stereotypes.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the causal mechanisms that explain the relationship between the long-term buyer–supplier relationship and buyer performance. Building on the growing body of research on social capital in supply chain management (SCM), the authors examine how a buyer achieves superior performance in forming the enduring partnership with a supplier through two different forms of supplier embeddedness: buyer–supplier dyadic embeddedness and supplier external embeddedness.

The bootstrapping method is utilized in data analysis to examine the mediating effects of the two different forms of supplier embeddedness simultaneously on the linkage between the duration of buyer–supplier relationships and buyer performance outcomes.

The authors find that the two forms of supplier embeddedness serve as distinct conduits for the buyer to translate the long-term buyer–supplier relationship into performance effectiveness. Notably, dyadic embeddedness only mediates the linkage between the duration of buyer–supplier relationships and buyer economic performance, while supplier external embeddedness solely mediates the linkage between the duration of buyer–supplier relationships and buyer innovation performance.

This study empirically demonstrates that different forms of supplier embeddedness may benefit a buyer differentially when directed at distinct performance goals. If a buyer can leverage both buyer–supplier dyadic embeddedness and supplier external embeddedness, the buyer will overcome value creation limitations of social capital from a single source, obtaining more comprehensive performance benefits sought by developing long-term buyer–supplier relationships.

This study aims to contribute to the early but fervent debate on blockchain and supply networks by proposing a novel theoretical perspective on blockchain adoption grounded on social capital theory. In particular, it seeks to answer the following question: what is the role of social capital in shaping the decision to adopt blockchain in supply networks?

Multiple case-studies, based on interviews performed with managers of eight firms, were used.

The social capital theory emerged as an additional but necessary lens to investigate blockchain implementation in supply networks. The intuitions proposed highlighted the importance of managers’ sensemaking for investigating technology adoption. Relational capital emerged as a necessary but not sufficient condition to adopt blockchain in supply networks. In addition, it is argued a relationship between competitive opportunities at the firm level and the idea to adopt the blockchain. The opportunity to act as “Tertius Gaudens” or as “Tertius Iungens” information brokers in supply networks should severely affect firms’ proneness toward the adoption of blockchain solutions.

This is one of the first studies in the literature investigating blockchain adoption in supply networks from a social capital perspective. It introduces new issues to the debate related to the role of blockchain in the supply chain by discussing the role of goal misalignment and competitive advantage, which emerged as crucial for shaping the decision to adopt blockchain in supply networks.