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This paper identifies the forces that drive digital adoption among SMEs from low and high-tech industries in Malaysia.

This research uses multiple case analyses based on data gathered by in-depth interviews with key representatives of 20 firms from low and high-tech industries in Malaysia.

The findings suggest that digital adoption among SMEs derives by four fundamental forces, which are sales, marketing, process improvement and product development.

This study employed qualitative research, but lack of geographic diversity limits the generalisability of the case findings. This study provides several suggestions to policymakers and technology suppliers on how to encourage adoption of digitalisation among SMEs.

This study proposes a model that presents the critical forces that drive digital adoption for export-oriented firms, thus enriching the knowledge in SME digitalisation literature.

Many employees do not use work-family practices to their full extent, even when they are in need of them. Drawing on the concept of psychological safety the authors propose a new construct: psychological accessibility– employees' sense of embracing the benefits of work-family practices without experiencing a fear of using them. The authors argue that the psychological accessibility of work-family practices could explain the variations in the utilization of work-family practices among employees with similar levels of family needs. Furthermore, the authors propose multilevel contextual factors that could affect the psychological accessibility of work-family practices.

The authors develop a theoretical multilevel framework for work-family practices that places psychological accessibility at its core and addresses accessibility of work-family practices from a macro level that includes institutions and the different attributes of the national culture, a meso level that includes work time norms in organizations, and a micro level, that includes the social context at the team level in organizations.

As part of the conceptual development the authors offer 10 propositions.

The authors' multilevel model of psychological accessibility could explain the variations in the utilization of work-family practices across different national, organizational and group contexts. This paper refocuses scholarly attention to the psychological antecedents of the utilization of work-family practices. The authors offer some practical recommendations to make the utilization of work-family practices a psychologically safe activity.

This study aims to explore the community strengths/ weaknesses and the opportunities/ threats of the Nepalese communities in Hong Kong that have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The infection of COVID-19 among the ethnic minorities (EM) population in western democracies was reported higher, and it was wondered whether it was due to structural discrimination of the underprivileged.

This study is situated in Hong Kong during the peak of pandemic in 2020–2021. The authors followed the work of an EM service agency and interacted with their Nepalese clients to explore their reactions in coping with the sudden physical and economic adversities and examined their capacity amid the pandemic.

The authors noticed their effective self-mobilization that was strategically facilitated by veteran social workers and thus have strong resilience compared to other EM clusters in the territories.

The ways of their interactions offer useful insights for the authors to examine the prevailing strategy for achieving the mission of social inclusion in Hong Kong with 8% of the EM population.

This study scrutinised Shanghai junior high school teachers’ emotions and emotion management strategies in relation to teachers’ work settings and content. A mixed-methods approach was applied to collect data via field observations, interviews, and a quantitative survey. The aim of this study was two-fold. Firstly, it aimed to identify the typical work settings in which teachers experienced work-related emotions. Secondly, it aimed to reveal teachers’ priority work in school and how it affected teachers’ choices of emotion management strategies.

The data were analysed through the lens of emotional labour theories and professional agency theories. Findings showed that classroom teaching and the professional learning community activities were two typical settings in which the teachers experienced the most intensive emotions. Most Shanghai teachers managed their momentary emotions by either genuinely expressing their emotions that matched their roles and the scenario, or by purposely suppressing emotions to meet social and organisational expectations. Furthermore, most teachers adopted the long-term mood regulation strategy by aligning their emotions with long-term goal achievement in the future. As professional agents, the Shanghai teachers did not only manage their own emotions at work using these two strategies, but also managed students’ emotions as part of the moral education.

This paper aims to specify a set of methodological stages to conduct case studies. It presents a graphical representation of these stages, describes how it assists management researchers to build theory from data gathered in the field, and outlines its value for achieving sound management research.

A sample of nine cases published in Management Decision within the last two years (2003‐2004) is selected in order to illustrate these processes.

The paper's major contribution to research methodology is to specify a set of guidelines for conducting case studies and being explicit in how to apply a series of quality criteria for evaluating case studies in practice. The proposal not only helps to conduct research, but also documents the links between the research topics (in the conceptual framework), data (observations and interpretations in the field), data analysis (coding using the concepts in the conceptual framework and emergent themes) and the theory and knowledge accumulated through the research process.

The increasing use of case studies in management, and the desire to build theory from qualitative data, has highlighted a gap between existing proposals and the criteria for rigorous case studies. This contribution helps to close this gap by providing guidelines and the practical application of the quality principles. It assists management researchers working in these paradigms to build theory from qualitative data.

The proposal adds to the tools that management researchers can follow to produce sound research. This paper illustrates several case studies in order to show their epistemological approach, and to evaluate their quality level by applying our principles.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the implementation of mobile learning in a nursing course at The Open University of Hong Kong, and identify the potentials of, and constraints on, introducing mobile technologies in the instructional design of nursing education. The paper also considers the pedagogical implications of the expansion of mobile learning in the field of nursing.

The research adopts a qualitative approach to obtain the students’ and teacher’s experiences, opinions, and expectations on mobile learning. Two focus groups with 20 student participants were conducted and an in-depth interview with the course teacher was arranged. The Framework for the Rational Analysis of Mobile Education (FRAME) model was used as the research framework to support data collection and analysis.

The aspects of device usability, interaction learning, and social technology as suggested in the FRAME model were partly fulfilled in the study. Mobile technology enhanced the portability and accessibility of learning information, and networking tools facilitated interaction among students and between students and the teacher. However, the readability of text was limited due to constraints on the user interface and screen size, and concerns over the reliability of learning content were also raised, given the abundance of unfiltered online information. The difficulty in updating the content of multimedia materials and sourcing videos of an appropriate level, together with the problem of device networking, also limited the usefulness of mobile learning. Attention should also be paid to the perceptual differences between students and the teacher on the nature and functions of mobile learning.

This empirical study provides a detailed evaluation of the delivery of mobile learning in a nursing course. The findings reveal the strengths and limitations of using mobile technologies to support the nursing education.

This chapter assists in Iran’s start-ups swift internationalisation from the onset. Indeed, it sheds in-depth qualitative and quantitative insights into analysing the propelling factors towards entrepreneurial internationalisation. To accomplish this feat, a mixed method of Systematic Literature Review (SLR), Fuzzy-Delphi (FD) and Fuzzy-DEMATEL (Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) – ISM (Interpretive Structural Modelling) – MICMAC (Matrix-based Multiplication Applied to a Classification) (FDIM), along with a multi-scenario analysis have innovatively been applied. As a result, entrepreneur characteristics and an accessible qualified workforce, even in foreign countries, are the most prominent drivers. Most probably, the institutional voids, interconnected benchmarking and the advent of new disruptive technologies form the independent factors which can sharply influence the whole system, particularly the entrepreneur characteristics as a dependent one. Moreover, social media, customer orientation and the domestic market cover autonomous drivers, which can moderately be affected or influence the abovementioned factors.

In this opening chapter the authors analyse current scholarship on teacher emotion and leader emotion produced almost entirely in western countries, and call for contextualising this research by juxtaposing emotion with basic characteristics of traditional and transitional societies. Some attention is given to the meaning of emotion across national culture, including those of developing countries.

Emotional labour is an important area of research in organizational psychology especially in the context of service industry. Past research in this area has primarily focused on the negative consequences of emotional labour. The present study is carried out to explore whether professors working in higher educational institutes experience emotional labour and how does it impact them.

The study adopted a qualitative approach. Twenty in-depth interviews were conducted.

Three broad themes emerged from the study: (1) work environment leading to emotional labour (2) factors facilitating emotional regulation and (3) consequences of emotional labour. The findings revealed that the consequences of emotional labour are context specific and in the context of educational setting, it has interesting positive outcomes.

The findings of the study provide critical insights regarding how to deal with employees who experience emotional labour at work.

The study adopts an inductive approach to explore the experiences of emotional labour of professors in higher educational institutes.

This study is a response to the paucity of research into early internationalising firms based in India. We seek to explore the internationalisation of small and new Indian firms and the decision-making process of their entrepreneurs/managers.

The study uses original, primary data gathered from in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted with the managers of six such firms to explore the factors that might facilitate, motivate, or impede the efforts undertaken by young Indian firms to embark upon a process of early internationalisation.

Our findings suggest that, in line with their counterparts from other countries, the early internationalisation of small firms from India is driven primarily by the search for more favourable demand conditions overseas and is facilitated by new technologies. However, we find no evidence suggesting that the emergence of early internationalising firms from India is driven by the search for more favourable production conditions or by the direct international experience and exposure of their founders. In line with prior scholarly work, our research suggests that government support is an important facilitator of early internationalisation of small firms.

The study provides insights into the internationalisation process of INVs from India and contributes to broadening our understanding of the behaviour of firms under a set of specific institutional conditions. Based on our findings, we develop a conceptual framework which can be useful for further empirical testing. Our study is also one of the few to be conducted on a sample of INVs from India.