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In early 2004, Southern HR’s team began examining the links between its business and workforce strategies. Here, HR strategy director Howard Winkler explains how a set of KPIs was developed to monitor success and focus both HR and management on high‐priority issues.

This essay considers the relationship between global sociology and sociological theory through an examination of the critique of Northern Theory developed by Raewyn Connell. The author accepts many of Connell’s criticisms of the formation of the Northern Theory canon, and of the false universalism of contemporary Northern Theory, but disputes the degree to which Connell has succeeded in finding a replacement for the “ethnosociology of the metropole” provided by current sociological theory. In particular, the author suggests that, in Southern Theory, Connell pursues an intellectual history of world philosophies instead of the development of theoretical concepts that could provide a more adequate global sociology from a Southern perspective. Connell leaves the reader with a reconstructed canon of classics, but without a new repertoire of middle-range explanatory and interpretive concepts with which to reconstruct our understanding of history itself. The former may be the necessary first step toward the latter, however, rendering Southern Theory an important moment in the global turn in sociological theory.

In this paper, the authors suggest that Central Americans can use entrepreneurship to solve economic uncertainty in their home country and that entrepreneurship can contribute to reducing the number of undocumented migrants to the USA.

The authors first illustrate the context of Central American illegal migration to the USA from a transitional entrepreneurship perspective, the authors address the economic drivers of illegal migration from Central America, which results in marginalization in the USA. Second, the authors build a theoretical model that suggests that Central Americans can improve their entrepreneurial abilities through the entrepreneurial cognitive adjustment mechanism.

Central Americans at risk of illegally migrating to the USA have high entrepreneurial aptitudes. Entrepreneurship can help them avoid the economic uncertainty that drives Central Americans to illegally migrate to the USA and become part of a marginalized community of undocumented immigrants. This conceptual paper introduces an entrepreneurial cognitive adjustment mechanism as a tool for Central Americans to reshape their personalities and increase their entrepreneurial abilities in their home countries. In particular, entrepreneurial intentions reshape the personality characteristics of individuals (in terms of high agreeableness and openness to experiences, as well as low neuroticism) through the entrepreneurial cognitive adjustment mechanism, which consists of reflective action in sensemaking, cognitive frameworks in pattern recognition and coping in positive affect.

This paper studies Central Americans at risk of illegal migration using the lens of transitional entrepreneurship, which advances the understanding of the antecedents to marginalized immigrant communities in the USA and suggests a possible solution for this phenomenon. Besides, the authors build a cognitive mechanism to facilitate the transitional process starting from entrepreneurial intention to reshaping individuals' personality, which further opens individuals' minds to entrepreneurial opportunities. Since entrepreneurial intention applies the same way to all entrepreneurs, the authors' aim of constructing the entrepreneurial intention unfolding process will go beyond transitional entrepreneurship and contribute to intention-action knowledge generation (Donaldson et al., 2021). Moreover, the conceptual study contributes to public policy such that international and local agencies can better utilize resources and implement long-term solutions to the drivers of illegal migration from Central America to the USA.

This paper uses former Black girl students' experiential knowledge as a lens to examine Black students' experiences with formal and informal curriculum; it looks to the 1970s during Waco Independent School District's desegregation implementation process.

Guided by critical race theory, I used historical and oral history methods to address the question: In newly desegregated schools, what does Black females' experiential knowledge of the academic and social curriculum reveal about Black students' experiences within school desegregation implementation process? Specifically, I drew on oral history interviews with former Black girl students, local newspapers, school board minutes, legal correspondence, memoranda, yearbooks, and brochures.

Black girls' holistic perspectives, which characterized Black students' experiences more generally, indicate Waco Independent School District's implementation of school desegregation promoted a tacit curriculum of Black intellectual ineptitude.

My main contribution is the concept of tacit curriculum, which I identified through the lens of former Black girl students, whose experiences spoke to Black students' experiences more widely. It also offers Black females' firsthand perspectives of the school desegregation implementation process in Texas, a perspective, a process, and a place heretofore underexamined in history of education scholarship.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of social capital on the adoption of best crop management practices and testified the mediatory role of learning in the relationship between social capital and the adoption of best crop management practices. Then the authors examined the role of education as the moderator of the interrelations between social capital, learning and the adoption of crop management practices.

Based on a survey of 317 small farmers from three districts of Southern Punjab, the authors used structural equation modeling and bootstrapping to test these relationships.

The study confirms that bonding social capital and bridging social capital are positively related to the adoption of best crop management practices. Moreover, the authors empirically demonstrate that exploitative and explorative learning act as the parallel mediators between social capital and the adoption of best crop management practices.

By focusing on building social capital and maintaining meaningful interactions with the social networks, the small farmers can improve their existing methods and practices of managing the existing varieties of crops.

The extant literature has highlighted, but usually not explored, the imperative interrelations between social capital, learning and the adoption of best crop management practices. The authors provide empirical evidence about these relationships.

The study aims to explore motivators and barriers in business venture creation among potential Latina entrepreneurs.

Focus group interviews collected data using Latinas between the ages of 20-30 who expressed interest in starting their own businesses in the near future. Interview participants were primarily first-generation college students.

Findings revealed major themes based around four dimensions of cultural heritage, motivators, barriers and preferred resources. Cultural heritage and gender are both enablers and obstacles for Latinas. Frequently mentioned motivators were parental business ownership, autonomy, flexible income and self-fulfillment. The barriers include fear, lack of financial management knowledge, business location selection and discrimination. The preferred resources were informal education, a checklist, a toolkit, free online resources and networking with business owners and mentors.

The findings of this study highlight pull factors (i.e. family business background and self-fulfillment) increasing entrepreneurial motivations among Latinas. The present study illustrates the nuanced but substantive interactions of gender and ethnicity in Latinas’ perceptions and attitudes toward new business formation.

The present study contributes to the literature by exploring the motivators and barriers that affect business formation among emerging Latina entrepreneurs. Moreover, past research has not explored both motivators and barriers perceived by nascent Latina entrepreneurs. Findings from this study will assist future researchers in developing materials and programs to aid female and ethnic entrepreneurship.

This article is about the construction of masculinity in the German rap scene. After giving a short overview over the history, structure, main narratives and economic relevance of German rap, the construction of rap masculinity will be mainly discussed in the context of a transformation of the (global) gender order. For example, what impact does the rise and success of female rappers have on the gendered power relations within the German rap scene? Does the inclusion of feminine-coded moves and sounds, aesthetics or topics indicate a shift towards more alternative forms of masculinity? And what does it mean, when male rap artists currently rap about the meaning of masculinity, as if it was something that has to be (re-?) defined all at once?

The field study works with different data material from the rap scene, lyrics, interviews, but also multimodal signs as album covers, photos, video material, etc. Through discourse analysis, major discursive lines and threads are pointed out to draw a picture of gender order in this distinctive social and artistic setting.

The purpose of this study is to further our understanding of the effects of service employees’ accents on service outcomes and to investigate the boundary conditions of service type, service criticality and accent-service congruence.

This study reports on three scenario-based experiments with between-subject designs to assess customer reactions to service employees with nonstandard accents.

The findings revealed that the three service-related extraneous factors investigated in this study influence the direction and strength of accent’s impact. Service employees’ nonstandard accents generally negatively influence customers’ satisfaction with a service provider and purchase intentions. This effect is stronger for credence services than for experience services. While customer satisfaction with the service encounter tends to stay the same regardless of service criticality, they have less purchase intention in high service criticality situations when they deal with service employee with a nonstandard accent. Accent-service congruence enhances both satisfaction and purchase intention.

This study makes contributions to the accent in service interaction literature by enabling the authors to have a more complete understanding of how accent effects drive customer satisfaction and purchase intention. Future studies can take customer-related factors such as customer-service employee relationships, customers’ ethnic affiliation and ethnocentrism into consideration when examining the effects of accent in service interactions.

Service managers need to be aware when nonstandard accents’ negative effects will elevate – credence service and service with higher criticality are better provided by service employee with a standard accent. A nonstandard accent that matches the service improves customer satisfaction and purchase intention and could be used to its advantage.

This study contributes to the service literature about service employees’ interaction with customers and is particularly relevant in multicultural societies with increasingly diverse workforces.