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This study contributes to the participative budgeting and budget misrepresentation literature by exploring: (1) whether managers’ judgments of fair behaviors are malleable and context-dependent and (2) if these judgments of fair behavior impact cost reporting misrepresentations. Two experiments investigate these questions. Experiment 1 (n = 42) tests whether the behavior that managers judge to be “fair” differs based on the decision context (i.e., initial economic position [IEP]). Experiment 2 (n = 130) investigates: (1) how managers’ deployment of fairness beliefs influences their reporting misrepresentations and (2) how decision aids that reduce task complexity impact managers’ deployment of fairness beliefs in their misreporting decisions. The study found that managers deploy fairness beliefs (i.e., honesty or equality) consistent with maximizing their context-relevant income. Hence, fairness beliefs constrain misrepresentations in predictable ways. In addition, we find more accounting information is not always beneficial. The presence of decision aids actually increases misrepresentations when managers are initially advantaged (i.e., start with more resources than others). The implications from these findings are relevant to the honesty and budgeting literature and provide novel findings of how managers’ preferences for fairness constrain managers from maximizing their income. The chapter demonstrates that contextual factors can influence the deployment of managers’ fairness beliefs which, in turn, differentially impact their reporting misrepresentation. Another contribution is that providing decision aids, which reduce task complexity, may not always benefit companies, since such aids may increase misrepresentation under certain conditions.

Why is it that highly trained and seasoned executives fail? On the surface, this doesn’t make sense because they are very successful; yet research in the organization sciences provides no shortage of evidence to prove just that. From the classic Mann Gulch fire disaster of Weick’s famous collapse of sensemaking study, to studies of myopia of learning, escalation of commitment, threat-rigidity, dominant logic, the architecture of simplicity, the Icarus Paradox, to core competencies turning into core rigidities, and navigating new competitive markets using “old” cognitive maps, and many more such examples point to a ubiquitous phenomenon where highly trained and experienced professionals find themselves “stuck” in the heat of battle, unable to move and progress. On the one hand, for some, there is a desperate need for change, but are unable to do so, due to their trained incapacities. On the other hand, some simply cannot see the need for change, and continue with their “business as usual” mentality. For both, their visions of the world shrink, they have a tendency to cling onto their past habitual practices and oversimplify the complexity of the situation. In moments like these: DROP YOUR TOOLS and UNLEARN! This book chapter introduces a framework (grounded in clinical psychology) that has had consistent success in helping seasoned executives and key decision-makers open up the alternatives whenever they find themselves stuck with complexity.

Promoted for its inclusivity, agricultural value chain (AVC) financing leverages social capital and mechanisms such as off-take agreements and forward contracts to reduce borrowing and lending costs and risks for both farmers and lending institutions. AVC financing has been defined as the flow of financial products and services to and among the various actors within the AVC to address constraints of production and distribution and fulfill the needs of those involved in the chain by reducing risk and improving efficiency. This paper investigates how farmers' involvement in AVC affects their access to credit.

The authors collected primary data from 400 crop farmers in northern Ghana through a semi-structured questionnaire and analyzed the data, using the multinomial endogenous switching regression model.

Joint participation in AVC increased the amount of formal and informal credit received by 64 and 78%, respectively, compared to nonparticipation. Similarly, participation in AVC horizontal linkage and AVC vertical linkage increased the amount of formal and informal credit received by 40 and 47% and 46 and 74%, respectively, compared to nonparticipation. Irrigation farming, extension visits, knowledge of AVC in the community, access to a storage facility and trust in contract farming significantly influenced farmers' participation in AVC.

The authors’ work offers valuable insights into how different dimensions of value chain participation can impact smallholder farmers' access to credit. This work also underscores the importance of considering both formal and informal credit sources when analyzing the outcomes of value chain participation. The findings could enable formal financial providers to identify, liaise and/or resource informal financial players such as value chain actors to supply both formal and informal credit to farmers in AVCs.

This chapter seeks to shed light on the many factors that contribute to people becoming school shooters. These factors are divided into four domains: biological, psychological, social, and cultural. At the biological level, this chapter explores the potential influence of genetics, pre- and post-natal development, and body-related issues that may affect the perpetrators' sense of self. A psychological typology is presented, consisting of psychopathic, psychotic, and traumatized school shooters. Socially, school shooters often have multiple setbacks, failures, and rejections that contribute to their distress. Finally, the cultural domain includes such factors as media violence, role models for killing, and ideologies of hatred and supremacy. Rather than attributing school shootings to a simplistic cause such as bullying, this chapter discusses a wide range of potential influences that combine to cause mass attacks at schools.

The duality of online socialization can be examined by looking at the dynamic contrast between cyberbullying and online friendships. From the beginning of instant messaging to what we know now as direct messaging, the impact of rapid and continuous interactions in online spaces can have a widespread impact on youth. As the landscape of technology and technological access continues to evolve, the virtual interactions that arise in daily life also evolve. Therefore, understanding the impact of these interactions becomes an increasing concern. This chapter evaluates the unique characteristics, and related reciprocity, of online friendships and cyberbullying by assessing the impact of online socialization on school-aged youth. Overall, by juxtaposing both cyberbullying and online friendships, this chapter aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the complexities that increased online socialization can have on youth in a digital age.

The Whole Child Initiative (WCI) was developed over the past 15 years as a blueprint to promote long-term development and success of all children, as well as their families and communities. This chapter describes three aspects of the WCI model: (a) the need for a public health approach to sustainable, communitywide change targeting the whole child; (b) a clear, future-oriented vision for equipping educators, caregivers, and service providers with the skills and attitudes required to deliver high-quality instruction; and (c) the infusion of social and emotional learning practices to transform environments in which youth live and play. We provide examples of how schools, communities, and families can come together to create a common culture fostering stable and nurturing relationships essential for enhancing youth well-being. We close with recommended “super strategies” – low-cost, simple, and effective practices that can be broadly implemented to keep every child healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged in the community at large.

Endeavoring to expand their global market presence, firms often launch products into emerging markets where managers face the daunting task of deploying products by managing available, and often limited, supply chain resources. Yet, literature has not empirically examined managerial resource orchestration in this context. Accordingly, by embedding resource orchestration theory (ROT) into the emerging market context, the authors offer middle-range theorizing on supply chain resource orchestration (SCRO) and empirically test how acquiring, bundling and leveraging activities impact new product launch performance.

The authors test the model by analyzing empirical data from 175 individual product launches into emerging markets using a survey methodology.

The authors’ results suggest that SCRO holds the promise of being a viable middle-range theory in the supply chain field, especially where managers face limited resources and must “work with what they have to do what they can.”

The authors’ study also has some limitations. First, because a panel data service company was used to collect the data, the authors were not provided with any information regarding the respondents' company names or other identifying data. Second, because the authors did not directly interact with the respondents nor were the authors able to contact multiple individuals from their respective organizations, the study was limited to a single-respondent design. However, to counter issues associated with single-response bias, the central constructs in the study referenced phenomena related to a specific product launch project as opposed to constructs at the firm or inter-firm relational level.

The authors’ results reveal that SCRO activities can enhance the performance of new product launches, even in resource-starved emerging market contexts.

The results validate measures for several of the SCRO processes (i.e. supply chain resource acquisition, supply chain resource bundling and supply chain leveraging) and provide evidence that supply chain resource bundling and supply chain leveraging mediate the relationship between supply chain resource acquisition and product launch performance. Further, soft logistics infrastructure is found to be an important boundary condition for these relationships.