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The purpose of this paper is to challenge the older perspective on the nature of workplace politics and its disruptive role in organizations. In particular, this paper references the positive aspect of meaningful relationship building that is promoted by workplace politics and how the very politicking becomes a necessary tool for generating and maintaining social capital within the organizational boundaries.

The paper relies on presenting author’s viewpoint on positive workplace politics and its intertwined relationship with social capital.

In the process of politicking, the relationships built, the networks established and maintained and the social capital acquired are of immense value. To thwart the negative effects of organizational politics such as disengagement from work, intentions to quit, low job satisfaction, etc., we must look into the multidimensional nature of politics and the value that social capital adds to it.

The positive side of politics has long been in the shadows of its pronounced negative side. The paper presents the ground work for exploring the many colours of organizational politics and also delve into the factors that can thwart the negative effects of politics that may be experienced by the employees.

The paper contends that workplace politics is not just responsible for the disruptive and unwanted behaviours but is rather an important source of the positive and productive interpersonal relationships that are often useful in accomplishing individual and organizational goals.

An attribute common throughout Lor’s distinguished career has been a passion for learning and continuous improvement in an approach that sets high standards, both for himself and others. Taking on the informal mantle of both mentor and mentee, these contributions have blended with no clear boundaries or timelines.

Lor has been active in the library and information sector (LIS) landscape since the 1960s. A stalwart of the library and information profession, the author is being honoured by International Federation of Library Associations and Institution (IFLA) with a prestigious festschrift in recognition of a librarian who has made a sustained contribution to the library and information profession over decades with significant impact on academia, scholarship, praxis, communities and individual librarians.

Lor is recognized as a lifelong mentee as evidenced by his unbounded forays into discovery driven by a natural curiosity that, in turn, shaped his approach to mentoring through teaching, instilling best practices in research methodology and significant contributions to international librarianship. Today this continues in a regular column for South African librarians, drawing from the international literature of books, libraries and information, his role as a key figure in the establishment of Library and Information Association of South Africa (LIASA) in the 1990s, as well as experience from close involvement in developing LIS policies for post-apartheid South Africa, drafting guidelines for national library legislation and serving as IFLA Secretary-General in The Hague.

This viewpoint has been an attempt to share reflections on one individual’s lifetime of influence without borders or timelines. Without doubt, Lor’s global mentorship reach remains unbounded in his approach to critical thinking and desire for continuous improvement for himself and others.

Emergence is a key concept in service-dominant (SD) logic; however, the literature is neonatal on the underlying mechanisms that lead to emergence within service ecosystems. This study aims to address the call by Vargo et al. (2022) for understanding the role of actor engagement in emergence of novel outcomes, by identifying a process of how various actor roles in entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) emerge as resource through the actor engagement.

Following a longitudinal design, this study conduct interviews from 20 respondents over eight months in three phases (group interviews, post-training, post-funding). This study analyzes the respondents’ engagement in an entrepreneurial service context. This study uses qualitative inductive approach and thematic analysis.

Results show that actor roles emerge as role expectations from essential provider and beneficiary position in a service ecosystem through actor role readiness, manifested as engagement properties in the actor engagement process. This study identifies five actor roles and their corresponding role readiness dimensions that emerge. Based on these propositions through which the authors position generic actor roles emergence within the actor engagement process in a service ecosystem.

This paper advances the understanding of micro-level process in emergence literature in SD logic by providing a conceptual understanding of emergence of actor roles as a resource through actor engagement. By grounding the study in EE, this study provides empirical evidence to the underlying mechanisms at the micro level of resource emergence process in a service ecosystem.

The goal of this study is to propose and test a model of the effect of the socio-cultural context on the disability inclusion climate of organizations. The model has implications of hiring people with disabilities.

To test the model, we conducted a cross-sectional study across four countries with very different socio-cultural contexts. Data were gathered from 266 managers with hiring responsibilities in Canada, China, Norway and France. Participants responded to an online survey that measured the effect of societal based variables on the disability inclusion climate of organizations.

Results indicated support for the theoretical model, which proposed that the socio-cultural context influenced the disability inclusion climate of organizations through two distinct but related paths; manager’s value orientations and their perception of the legitimacy of legislation regarding people with disabilities.

The vast majority of research regarding employment of people with disabilities has focused on supply side factors that involve characteristics of the people with disabilities. In contrast, this research focuses on the less researched demand side issue of the socio-cultural context. In addition, it responds to the “limited systematic research examining and comparing how country-related factors shape the treatment of persons with disability” (Beatty et al., 2019, p. 122).

This study aims to help understand individual donors’ preferences over different designs of humanitarian–business partnerships in managing humanitarian operations and to help understand if donors’ preferences align with their actual donation behavior.

Choice-based conjoint analysis was used to understand donation preferences for partnership designs, and a donation experiment was performed using real money to understand the alignment of donors’ preferences with actual donation behavior.

The results show that partnering with the business sector can be a valuable asset for humanitarian organizations in attracting individual donors if these partnerships are managed well in terms of partnership strategy, partnership history and partnership report and disclosure. In particular, the study finds that the donation of services and products from businesses corporations to humanitarian organizations are preferable to individual donors, rather than cash. Furthermore, donors’ preferences are not necessarily aligned with actual donation behavior.

The results highlight the importance of presenting objective data on projects to individual donors. The results also show that donors value the provision of services and products by business corporations to humanitarian operations.

Partnerships between humanitarian organizations and business corporations are important for the success of humanitarian operations. However, little is known about which partnership designs are most preferable to individual donors and have the biggest chance of being supported financially.

This paper aims to use the origin story of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management as a foil for unpacking the tensions between deep disciplinary specialization and liberal education in business schools in Canada and the USA. Ultimately, the paper reveals that those tensions are not irreconcilable, and that through the fortunes of historical contingencies and deliberate decision-taking, a faculty can embrace the benefits of both breadth and depth.

The paper proposes a critical organizational history of management education through a case study. By drawing on secondary literature and archival sources, the authors focus on moments in business education, such as the founding of the Wharton School of Business, the release of the Carnegie and Ford Reports and the trend towards increased specialization to situate a case study of Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Management.

The authors find that the evolution of business education in North America from its broad, liberal origins towards narrow, specialization has come at a cost to some of the benefits of business and management education. An alternative approach, one reflected in the design of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management, its programme offerings and its interconnection with other disciplines, enables the advantages of deep disciplinarity to co-exist (and cross-inform) with the advantages of liberal approach to knowledges.

The Dalhousie model offers business schools an example of a faculty that balances the rich insights of liberal interdisciplinarity with the need for sophisticated approaches to more granular, often disciplinary, topics. In addition, the paper offers the story of a multidisciplinary management faculty, some explanation for how that faculty was maintained despite pressures towards specialization; and in doing so, contributes to the limited historical research of management education, particularly in Canada, post-2000.

This article aims to develop a measurement scale for assessing agripreneurial competencies relevant to emerging economies in alignment with the SDG2 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals 2030.

The scale development procedure includes item development and refinement, data collection, reliability and validity tests and scale purification with exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

The validated scale carries eight dimensions of competencies: Agreeableness (AG), Technological Competency (TC), Competitive Spirit (CS), Innovativeness (IN), Self-Confidence (SC), Social Responsibility (SR), Conscientiousness (CO) and Leadership (LS). The analysis puts forth a good and fit model, and the new scale reports sufficient convergent and discriminant validity.

This study is focused on the agripreneurial competencies of individual agripreneurs; institutional agripreneurs are excluded from the study.

Identifying prominent agripreneurs using the scale developed from this study will aid in allocating various government and non-governmental organisations' assistance to agripreneurs. Since developing economies rely heavily on agriculture, any positive contribution can help alleviate poor economic growth, end hunger, and promote sustainable agriculture (SDG 2 of 2030).

Though several scales for measuring entrepreneurial competencies are available, there is no standard scale to measure agripreneurial competencies. This article presents the development and validation of a measurement scale to assess the major competencies of agripreneurs that influence agripreneurship performance.

In parallel with the rising importance of innovation and digital technologies, research on platform ecosystems is rapidly accumulating. This study aims to summarize the current research published in leading technical and innovation management (TIM) journals and provide recommendation for future research.

In this paper, the authors combine multiple quantitative literature review methods (social network analysis, citation analysis and co-citation analysis) with a systematic literature review of articles published in the 13 most influential TIM journals over a 15-year period.

The citation network of 168 selected papers is sparse, with low network density indicating the emerging nature of the field. Using network centrality values, the authors identified the 33 most influential articles. The review of methodologies in these articles found that conceptual and case study research dominate, suggesting the need for additional confirmatory and quantitative analysis. Co-citation analysis of the references identified six research clusters: foundation, network-centric innovation, complementor management, platform competition, ecosystemsand product platforms.

This analysis is among the first to examine the knowledge structure of platform ecosystem research in the TIM domain by using multiple evidence-based analysis methods. The authors also apply the theory, context, characteristics and methodology framework to suggest areas for future research.

This study investigates the validity of Ferreira et al.’s (2020) Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale by examining its distinctiveness from similar constructs (perceptions of organizational politics, organizational cynicism, procedural justice) and its predictive validity through its relations with important organizational attitudes (organizational identification) and behaviors (counterproductive work behavior and organizational citizenship behavior). This study also examines the moderating effects of honesty–humility on the relations between organizational bullshit perception and the outcomes of counterproductive work behavior, organizational citizenship behavior and organizational identification. Finally, this study examines the incremental validity of organizational bullshit perception in predicting counterproductive work behavior, organizational citizenship behavior and organizational identification above and beyond similar constructs in an exploratory fashion.

Survey data were collected from a sample of working adults online via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform across two waves (final N = 323 for wave 1 and 174 for wave 2), one month apart.

The results indicate that organizational bullshit perception, as measured by Ferreira et al.’s (2020) scale, represents a distinct construct that has statistically significant relations with counterproductive work behavior, organizational citizenship behavior and organizational identification, even after controlling for procedural justice, organizational cynicism and perceptions of organizational politics. The results, however, showed no support for honesty–humility as a moderator.

These findings suggest that organizations can benefit from assessing and working to alleviate their employees’ perceptions of organizational bullshit. This construct predicts behaviors and attitudes important for organizational functioning.

This study adds to Ferreira et al.’s (2020) original work by demonstrating organizational bullshit perception’s distinctiveness from existing constructs in the literature and its implications for organizations and their employees.

When a crisis occurs, do corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities protect organizational reputation by buffering negative effects or do CSR activities intensify negative effects, potentially leading to a worse reputation compared to if the organization had no prior CSR engagement? The authors hypothesize that if a crisis emerges in a domain aligned with an organization’s CSR initiatives (crisis-congruent CSR) backfire effects would arise, adversely affecting the organization’s reputation. Conversely, in cases of incongruence, where the crisis emerges in a domain not aligned with an organization’s previous CSR involvement, a buffering effect would manifest, protecting the organization’s reputation.

The authors conducted an experiment with a 3 (crisis-congruent, crisis-incongruent, and no CSR activities) × 2 (repeated measures) mixed factorial design. In the first scenario, no information was provided concerning a company’s social commitment. Alternatively, participants were exposed to an article illustrating the company’s dedication either to healthcare (crisis-incongruent commitment) or to combating sexism (crisis-congruent commitment). Afterward, participants were presented with a newspaper article addressing allegations of sexism against the company’s CEO.

The findings demonstrate that prior CSR activities have the potential both to serve as a buffer and to cause backfire effects in times of crisis. Domain congruence is the decisive moderator of these effects: Crisis-incongruent CSR activities acted as a buffer, crisis-congruent CSR activities “backfired” and led to more negative perceptions of the company’s reputation.

The study directly contributes to the understanding of CSR effects in crisis communication, while also addressing the often paradoxical and contradictory findings of prior studies.