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First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.

This study examines how assurors make sense of sustainability assurance (SA) work and how interactions with assurance team members and clients shape assurors’ sensemaking and their actual SA work.

To obtain detailed accounts of how SA work occurs on the ground, this study explores three SA engagements by interviewing the main actors involved, both at the client firms and at their Big Four assurance providers.

Individual assurors’ (i.e. partners and other team members) sensemaking of SA work results in the crafting of their logics of action (LoAs), that is, their meanings about the objectives of SA work and how to conduct it. Without organizational socialization, team members may not arrive at shared meanings and deviate from the team-wide assurance approach. To fulfill their objectives for SA work, assurors may engage in socialization with clients or assume a temporary role. Yet, the role negotiations taking place in the shadows of the scope negotiations determine their default role during the engagement.

Two options are available to help SA statement users gauge the relevance of SA work: either displaying the SA work performed or making it more uniform.

This study theoretically grounds how assurors make sense of SA work and documents how (the lack of) professional socialization, organizational socialization and socialization of frequent interaction partners at the client shape actual SA work. Thereby, it unravels the SA work concealed behind SA statements.

This study investigates how attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in entrepreneurs functions through coping schema to affect entrepreneurship-related cognitions. It is proposed that the resource-induced coping heuristic (RICH) bridges the conceptual gap between pathological cognitive executive control/reward attributes and cognitive resources, specifically entrepreneurial alertness, cognitive adaptability and entrepreneurial intent.

With data from 581 entrepreneurs, this study utilizes partial least squares structural equation modeling for analysis. Additionally, a two-stage hierarchical component modeling approach was used to estimate latent variable scores for higher-order constructs.

Findings indicate the RICH mediates the relationships ADHD has with alertness, cognitive adaptability and entrepreneurial intent.

The RICH is introduced as a mechanism to explain how ADHD indirectly influences entrepreneurial alertness, cognitive adaptability and entrepreneurial intent.

Small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in e-commerce often invest in information technology (IT) to stay competitive. However, whether and how IT capability (ITC) translates into financial performance requires further research. This paper examines the role of ITC in enabling value proposition innovation (VPI) as an important mechanism that improves financial performance for Chinese e-commerce SMEs during the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that ITC is critical for enabling innovation because it elevates SMEs’ understanding of changing customer needs, especially when SMEs operate on multiple e-commerce platforms (multihome).

We used partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and tested the hypotheses that ITC mediated by VPI and moderated by multihoming increases the financial performance of e-commerce SMEs through a survey among 206 Chinese SMEs operating on Taobao.

We find that not only higher levels of ITC lead to better financial performance, but also that the effect is fully mediated by VPI. Moreover, the effect of ITC on innovation is enhanced when vendors operate on multiple platforms.

The study identifies VPI as an important mechanism through which SMEs can leverage their ITC to adapt, innovate and thrive in competition. Our work suggests that using technology to develop innovative ideas and identify opportunities (which are reflected in VPI) is key to success and that doing so is more likely when vendors multihome. Thus, this study contributes to the innovation literature by explicating a concrete link between ITC, multihoming, VPI and increased financial performance. Different e-commerce stakeholders, including SME owners, IT and service providers and e-commerce platforms, can benefit from the findings of this work.

Based on the trait activation theory, the current study systematically integrates how autonomy interacts with proactivity to influence the relationship between ethical leadership style and employee creativity.

Using simple random sampling and questionnaires, a sample of 475 engineering employees of 3 leading telecommunication companies in Ghana were obtained. The analysis was done using structured equation modeling (SEM), using SmartPLS.

The results showed that ethical leadership style provides employees with job autonomy which facilitates individual creativity. Employee proactivity also moderates a positive relationship between autonomy and creativity such that high-proactive employees are well placed to produce more creative outcomes when given autonomy. At the individual level, personal characteristics determine the degree of creativity.

The current study implies that telecommunication companies should put in more efforts to train and encourage leaders to be ethical in leaders' dealings with employees and employees must be rewarded for taking initiative.

With a focus on the integrative approach from a developing economy, this work is novel in exploring how contextual and personal features impact creativity.

The purpose of this study is to examine how lenders alter their behavior when faced with real earnings management.

This study uses the incremental R-square approach as in Kim and Kross (2005) to examine how much lenders rely on income statement and balance sheet ratios as the degree of real earnings management increases.

As real earnings management affects mostly the income statement, the authors find that lenders rely less on income statement ratios in making credit decisions in the presence of real earnings management. The authors also find that lenders do not alter their reliance on balance sheet ratios when faced with real earnings management.

This paper is the first to study how lenders alter their reliance on financial statements in making credit decisions in the presence of real earnings management. The findings of this paper could help the regulators set standards to improve the usefulness of financial statements. The findings of this paper could also help practitioners (borrowers and lenders) understand how real earnings management affects credit decisions.

Natural disasters profoundly influence agricultural trade sustainability. This study investigates the effects of natural disasters on agricultural production imports in China within 2002 and 2018. This exploration estimates the mediating role of transportation infrastructure and agriculture value-added and the moderating role of government effectiveness and diplomatic relations.

This investigation uses Probit, Logit, Cloglog and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) models.

The results confirm the mediating role of transportation infrastructure and agriculture value-added and the moderating role of government effectiveness and diplomatic relations in China. According to the findings, natural disasters in trading partners heighten the risk to the agricultural imports. This risk raises, if disasters damage overall agricultural yield or transportation infrastructure. Moreover, governments’ effective response or diplomatic ties with China mitigate the risk. Finally, the effect of disasters varies by the developmental status of the country involved, with events in developed nations posing a greater risk to China’s imports than those in developing nations.

China should devise an early warning system to protect its agricultural imports by using advanced technologies such as data analytics, remote sensing and artificial intelligence. In addition, it can leverage this system by improving its collaboration with trading partners, involvement in international forums and agreement for mutual support in crisis.

In Denmark, there has been, over decades, an intensified political focus on how humanities research and doctoral education contribute to society. In this vein, the notion of impact has become a central part of the academic language, often associated with terms like use, effects and outputs, stemming from neoliberal ideologies. The purpose of this paper is to explore how humanities academics are living with the impact agenda, as both experienced researchers and as doctoral supervisors educating the next generation of researchers in this post-pandemic era. Specifically, the authors are interested in the supervisor-researcher relationship, that is, the relationship between how the supervisors navigate the impact agenda as researchers and then the way they tell their doctoral students to do likewise.

The authors have studied how the impact agenda is accommodated by humanities academics through a series of qualitative interviews with humanities researchers and humanities PhD supervisors, encompassing questions of how they are living with the expectation of impact and how it is embedded in their university and departmental context.

The study shows that there is no link between how the supervisors navigate the impact agenda in relation to their own research work and then the way they tell their doctoral students to approach it. Within the space of their own research, the supervisors engage in resistance practices towards the impact agenda in terms of minimal compliance, rejection or resignation, whereas in the space of supervision, the impact agenda is re-inscribed to embody other understandings. The supervisors want to protect their students from this agenda, especially in the knowledge that many of them are not going to stay in academia due to limited researcher career possibilities. Furthermore, the paper reveals a new understanding of the impact agenda as having a relational quality, and in two ways. One is through a positional struggle, the reshaping of power relations, between universities (or academics) and society (or the state and the market); the other is as a phenomenon very much lived among academics themselves, including between supervisors and their doctoral students within the institutional context.

This study opens up the impact agenda, showing what it means to be a humanities academic living with the effects of the impact agenda and trying to navigate this. The study is mapping and tracking out the many different meanings and variations of impact in all its volatility for academics concerned about it. In current, post-pandemic times, when manifold expectations are directed towards research and doctoral education, it is important to know more about how these expectations affect and are dealt with by those who are expected to commit to them.

This study aims to investigate the influence of the reviewed establishment’s price level and the user’s social network size and reputation status on consumers’ tendency to post more visual imagery content. Furthermore, it explores the moderating effects of user experiences and geographic distance on these dynamics.

This study adopts a multi-method approach to explore both the determinants behind the sharing of user-generated photos in online reviews and their internal mechanisms. Using a comprehensive secondary data set from Yelp.com, the authors focused on restaurant reviews from a prominent tourist destination to construct econometric models incorporating time-fixed effects. To enhance the robustness of the authors’ findings, the authors complemented the big data analysis with a series of controlled experiments.

The reviewed establishments price level and the users reputation status and social network size incite corresponding motivations conspicuous display “reputation seeking” and social approval motivating users to incorporate more images in reviews. “User experiences can amplify the influence of these factors on image sharing.” An increase in the users geographical distance lessens the impact of the price level on image sharing, but it heightens the influence of the users reputation and social network size on the number of shared images.

As a result of this study, high-end establishments can increase their online visibility by leveraging user-generated visual content. A structured rewards program could significantly boost engagement by incentivizing photo sharing, particularly among users with elite status and extensive social networks. Additionally, online review platforms can enhance users’ experiences and foster more dynamic interactions by developing personalized features that encourage visual content production.

This research, anchored in trait activation theory, offers an innovative examination of the determinants of photo-posting behavior in online reviews by enriching the understanding of how the intricate interplay between users’ characteristics and situational cues can shape online review practices.

Public safety (communicators; e.g. 9-1-1, police, fire and ambulance call-takers and dispatchers), like many other public safety personnel (e.g. police, paramedics), (re)suffer operational stress injuries (OSIs) that are too often hidden and at a prevalence higher than the general population. Unfortunately, there are very little data for OSI rates in Canadian communicators. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the only pan-Canadian study focusing on organizational culture, and its potential influence on OSIs, within the communicator context.

The authors conducted a 179-item online survey of Canadian communicators comprising 17 validated screenings for occupational stress injuries and symptoms and four open-ended questions relating to their agency's organizational culture. The authors thematically analysed participants' open-ended responses and their screening scores.

A semi-grounded thematic approach revealed that managers and supervisors were significant contributors to negative perceptions (n = 165) of organizational culture, potentially resulting in or worsening existing OSIs. Specifically, leadership was viewed as ineffective, inconsistent, unsupportive, abusive and toxic, with limited understanding of communicator roles. Communicators described feeling devalued, particularly when leaders fail to recognize communicator OSIs, which can perpetuate stigma. Conversely, positive leaders (n = 24) were described as supportive, communicative and encouraging.

The findings suggest that while leadership behaviours are a key factor in employee well-being, it varies considerably across agencies, impacting treatment-seeking behaviours. The authors’ new understandings of leaders' roles in OSIs may help reduce the frequency and severity of communicator OSIs, helping ensure that emergency services are delivered to Canadians.