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This paper aims to critically reflect on how societal governance can drive environmental responsibility instead of being used as a support mechanism for other domains in sustainable development and corporate social responsibility.

There is little discussion in the literature about the individual and social-specific issues and challenges of human and social competition within environmental responsibility. The primary objective of this literature review is to examine how societal governance may decrease environmental responsibility in cross-sector partnerships, especially within the confines of human and social competition.

Society is competing at differing levels and strategies, thereby creating changing social and environmental contexts for firms that can limit firm competitive advantage and environmental responsibility.

Critically reviewing societal governance apart from economic and environmental domains permits reasonably sound inferences about unmeasured social conditions or situations; thus, permitting greater understanding of not only what is happening and where it is happening but also why it is happening.

Society is an underplayed actor than currently portrayed in the literature to drive environmental responsibility within human and social competition in cross-sector partnerships.

This review bridges individual and social aspects of governance and competition within and outside of the firm because society is competing in different contexts that can impact private and public sector environmental responsibility performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the quality of social relationships of older Filipino church members by determining their perceptions of support and non-support in their social network.

A qualitative research approach with semi-structured interviews was utilized. A purposive sample of six Filipino older adults (ages 60-89) were invited and agreed to participate in the study.

The themes found in the study confirmed the types of support outlined in social convoy theory. Several unique nuances in the types of support and non-support between the interactions of older adult Filipinos with people very close to them, somewhat close to them, and merely acquainted with them were identified. The themes of support include instrumental support, emotional care, social connectedness, and companionship during engagement in activities. Themes characterising lack of support include disrespect and lack of understanding, constraining one’s actions, helplessness in responding to the other’s needs, non-dependability and non-reliability, difficulty in maintaining social connections, making it difficult to play a desired or expected role.

The study’s limitations are the small sample size, the quality of support explored only through nominating two members of each level of closeness in the older adults’ social convoy, sample size adequacy to reach data saturation, and the lack of data on support reciprocity that may influence the respondents’ perceptions of support and non-support.

The findings of the paper point to possible interventions to improve social support for the older population. The road map for those interested in developing interventions should also put some emphasis on older adults’ needs in their continued societal engagement. Interventions may involve facilitating role transitions and providing social support systems attuned to the needs of the elderly.

The authors speculate that this lack of support experienced by the older adults relates to the loss of societal roles, especially as this relates to their identity, meaning, and changes in social interactions within their communities. It is therefore important that interventions be planned to provide structures for older adults’ transitions in their re-engagement in society and into the work-force, thereby reducing this sense of role ambiguity and providing them with more positive identities in their communities.

The results suggest another form of support distinct from the emotional and instrumental support elaborated in previous work. This support is identified as companionship from within the social network that allows older adults to sustain engagement in meaningful activities. The study’s results further suggest a lack of clarity in societal roles, i.e. a sense of role ambiguity, which older adults may experience in the transitioning from adulthood to later adulthood.

This study aims to examine how entrepreneurship education influences intentions for starting a technology venture among science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students with particular attention to gender differences. This study builds on the model of entrepreneurial event and social role theory to assess the impact of entrepreneurship education on feasibility, desirability and intentions for technology entrepreneurship.

The hypotheses are tested with a sample of 879 Bulgarian science and engineering students from 15 universities. To test the models, this study uses ordinary least squares and logistic regressions with robust standard errors and Hayes mediation analysis with bootstrap bias-corrected confidence interval estimations for indirect effects. Two-stage Heckman regressions to control for sample selection bias and other robustness checks including propensity score matching were used.

Results show that entrepreneurship education, measured as participation in an entrepreneurship course, has a stronger impact on feasibility, desirability and intentions for technology entrepreneurship for female STEM students compared to their male counterparts. As such, this study supports the notion that entrepreneurship education could be part of a solution to counteract societal norms that position technology entrepreneurship as a less desirable and/or less feasible choice for women in STEM. However, attention should be paid to the operationalization of entrepreneurship education, as other measures of entrepreneurship education (role models, entrepreneurship education support) did not have a moderation effect with gender.

The authors assume a positive correlation between entrepreneurial intentions and entrepreneurial behavior. Future studies should include actual entrepreneurial behavior to paint a more complete picture of the effect of entrepreneurship education.

Little is known about the role of entrepreneurship education in the field of technology entrepreneurship, and even less about the potential gender differences in entrepreneurship education among STEM students. The study contributes to the literature by examining factors that could help close the persistent gender gap in technology entrepreneurship.

Utilizing boundary theory as a guiding framework, this study aims to explore facets of work–life balance (WLB) that women entrepreneurs experience in the context of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It sheds light on strategies women entrepreneurs use to manage and shape boundaries between their personal and professional lives.

In this qualitative study, we conducted in-depth interviews with 50 women entrepreneurs to gain a deeper understanding of their WLB challenges.

Integration is a boundary management approach used by most women in our sample, facilitated by the thin work–life boundary inferable from their entrepreneurial careers. Integration has all the hallmarks of being imposed on women entrepreneurs because of family role challenges and societal expectations, on top of their entrepreneurial obligations. Women are reactors; they shoulder societal, family and entrepreneurial roles while having little control over events and circumstances.

Boundary theory suggests two roles must be interconnected to coexist successfully. Women entrepreneurs can benefit from the synergy between their personal and professional lives. As their roles tend to be more complex, it is essential to consider the consolidation of both spheres as an ongoing process to maximize their benefits.

Today’s independent forms of working are contingent on flexible work arrangements, work intensification and wireless communication. Understanding how women entrepreneurs find balance amid boundarylessness adds to our limited knowledge of people in comparable environments.

The purpose of this paper is to gain insights into the gap between management accounting professional’s role and the societal expectations of the management accounting professionals in Sri Lanka.

A quantitative research approach was adopted to identify the statistical gap of the management accountant’s role and society’s expectations. Four business sectors were selected from Colombo Stock Exchange as of 31 December 2018. Sample consisted of 160 entities; 480 questionnaires were distributed among three stakeholders (financial accountant/manager, management accountant and human resource manager). Out of the 228 responses received, only 171 responses were usable. Exhibiting an overall response rate of 35.6 per cent.

The role expectation of management accountants varies significantly across the selected business sectors in Sri Lanka. There is an increasing demand for contemporary management accounting skills in Sri Lanka.

The insights of this study would be of use to policy makers and policy implementers to examine and develop remedial measures to enhance the creditability and transparency of the management accounting profession in Sri Lanka. Academic and professional educational providers can identify future trends and necessary skills of management accounting to improve management accounting curriculum.

The evidence from this study contributes to the literature of societal importance of management accounting from a Sri Lankan perspective.

There is progress in entrepreneurship research. Important works in entrepreneurship increasingly appear in highly respected, mainstream journals (see Busenitz et al., 2003; Davidsson, Low & Wright, 2001). There is conceptual development that attracts attention (e.g. Shane & Venkataraman, 2000) and handbooks are compiled, providing the field with more of a common body of knowledge (Acs & Audretsch, 2003a; Shane, 2000a; Westhead & Wright, 2000). Further, there is evidence of methodological improvements (Chandler & Lyon, 2001) and accumulation of meaningful findings on various levels of analysis (Davidsson & Wiklund, 2001). Moreover, due to time lags in publication the reported improvements are likely to be underestimated. This author’s experience as organizer, reviewer and participant in core entrepreneurship conferences on both sides of the Atlantic (e.g. Babson; RENT) suggests that much of the lower end of the quality distribution has either disappeared from the submissions or is screened out in the review process. Much more than used to be the case a few years back we find among the presented papers research that is truly theory-driven; research on the earliest stages of business development, and research that employs methods suitable for causal inference, i.e. experiments and longitudinal designs.

Civil society organisations (CSOs) contribute essentially to welfare states and society. In Europe they play a key role in the provision of social services, but also fulfil a large variety of other functions, such as giving voice to unaddressed issues, offering alternative ways of occupational socialisation or facilitating social inclusion (cf. Kramer, 1981; Rose-Ackerman & James, 1986; Kendall, 2003). Current research suggests that the third sectors’ societal roles considerably vary between countries, depending on the welfare state they are embedded in: Starting with a revision of Esping-Andersen's welfare regime typology (1990) and also based on the earlier work of Moore (1966), Salamon and his colleagues developed a typology of four different ‘non-profit regimes’ (Salamon & Anheier, 1998; Salamon, Hems, & Chinnock, 2000a). As key dimensions for this classification, they applied the extent of governmental welfare spending and the size of the third sector (cf. Johnson, 1999). According to this typology of nonprofit regimes, in countries with a large third-sector CSOs mainly fulfil the service function. Countries with a relatively small third sector, so the implicit conclusion, would tend to engage in ‘the expression of political, social, or even recreational interests’ (Salamon & Anheier, 1998, p. 229).

Ascription theory together with human capital theory both predict that, over time, the scarcity of knowledge and skills in increasingly complex working contexts will “crowd out” the influence of arbitrary characteristics such as gender. The purpose of this paper is to test the extent to which job performance determinants of research productivity differ by gender in their contributions to research productivity, in the developing country (South Africa) context, in which gender and other forms of historical discrimination were previously endemic.

Research output was measured as published journal articles indexed by Thomson Reuters Institute for Scientific Information, ProQuest’s International Bibliography of the Social Sciences and the South African Department of Higher Education and Training, as well as conference proceedings publications, conference papers presented and published books and book chapters. Structural equation modelling, with critical ratio and χ² tests of path moderation were used to test theory predicting gender (sex) differences moderate the potential influence of certain intrinsic determinants of job performance on research productivity, as a form of academic job performance.

Gender is found to moderate the relationship between experience and research productivity, with this relationship stronger for men, who are also found to have higher research output. This is considered a paradox of sorts, as English and African home languages, which proxy racial differences in societal and economic disadvantages and unequal opportunities, are not significantly associated with research output differences. Findings further suggest none of the tested intrinsic effects are moderated by gender, contesting theory from general work contexts.

This research applied a cross-sectional design, and did not apply causal methods, instrumental variables or controls for endogeneity. Nevertheless, these are limitations shared with most research in the human resources field, which is constrained by the type of data available in organisational contexts. Further research might do well to investigate non-intrinsic influences on research productivity which may be vulnerable to differences in societal gender roles.

This research offers a novel perspective of research productivity and gender inequality in a developing country context of increasing diversity, which might offer useful insights into other contexts facing increasing diversity in higher education. The problem of gender-based inequality in research productivity is empirically identified, and little evidence is found to support the notion that intrinsic effects, including core self-evaluations, are at the heart of this problem. Arguably, these findings reduce the problem space around gender inequality in research productivity, in a context in which other forms of disadvantage might no longer manifest in research productivity inequality.

Achieving sustainable development in heart-wrenching milestone in the face of the current pandemic (COVID-19) situation is becoming a key factor for competitiveness of organizations. Human Resource Development professionals are deemed to be in an ideal position to facilitate the organizational sustainable development by bringing about contextual changes in the workplace and by changing the behavioral patterns of employees. The COVID-19 pandemic has engendered the disruption across societies, raising challenges for the organizations besides other institutions to play their imperative role for a sustainable development pathway. One such way of striving by organizations would be to embark among employees a spark of bringing a change among its employees from being self-centered to societal-oriented by instilling among them the kindle of DSIW (Desire to have Significant Impact through Work). It is the desire of making substantial impact toward society and others' lives, which is evoked under ethical leadership and perceived ethical Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Thus, we have identified the underpinning values of being an ethical leader in wake of contributing toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) toward bringing a societal perspective among employees by infusing the altruistic desire, that is, DSIW among employees. This chapter is broadly divided into two main sections. The first section highlights the contextual settings and the underlying mechanisms that lead to DSIW. The second section draws the attention toward the implication of DSIW for employees in bringing about social change with respect to sustainability, social well-being, as well for the sustainable development of organizations and for positive socioeconomic consequences.