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This study sought to understand how having a calling influenced engagement, work–life balance and career satisfaction for Professional Golfers Association of America (PGA) and Golf Course Superintendent of America (GCSA) professionals.

A conceptual model was used to examine callings among golf course supervisors and its impact on their engagement, work–life balance and career satisfaction. This study also explored the moderation effect of employees’ generalized or specialized role on the calling–engagement relationship. Surveys were collected from a single golf management company and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used for data analysis.

The results revealed significant relationships among all of the variables, with the exception of the impact of having a calling on work–life balance. Additionally, the more having a calling increased, the more important it was for supervisors to have specialized roles to increase their engagement.

This study identifies important differences in factors that promote career satisfaction for golf course supervisors and extends current understanding of role theory.

The authors investigate the role of people-related Total Quality Management (TQM) practices, specifically metaperceptions, in hearing care students' vocational decision-making. In Italy, audiologists are health professionals and must hold a degree in hearing care. They operate according to clinical principles but must also develop marketing and commercial skills. While employers take these aspects for granted, the expectations of hearing care students often differ from reality. Thus, the authors aim to investigate the vocational expectations of hearing care students.

A survey was distributed to 600 hearing care students. Multiple regression analysis with bootstrapped confidence intervals was employed to test the hypotheses.

Students who perceived audiology as their calling were more interested in the clinical aspects than the marketing and commercial aspects of audiology. Moreover, those desiring a meaningful career path in audiology were more interested in becoming a store owner or franchisee.

Universities and recruiters should consider the influence of relevant others' metaperceptions on students' self-perceptions of their aptitudes for different careers. Universities should assist students to identify aptitudes that are relevant to career-related decision-making. In this context, people-related TQM can help students avoid incorrect aspirations and expectations.

This study is the first to investigate the role of metaperceptions from a people-related TQM perspective. Metaperceptions play a crucial role in determining the correct course of study as well as job satisfaction and expectations.

This study explores the main factors considered when shippers and container shipping lines select their import/export and transshipment ports. In the present study, 38 container port selection indices were chosen from the previous research and field interviews. The scores of the 38 items were collected via survey to the three major maritime/port market players: shippers, shipping lines, and container terminal operators. In order to analyze the different priorities imposed on the port selection factors by the three market players, the ANOVA method has been employed. The empirical test shows the different perceptions about port selection attributes among service suppliers and demanders. In addition, the 38 items have been categorized into seven key factors through an exploratory factor analysis. The ANOVA technique was employed again to analyze the perspective differences for the port selection factors among the market players. The results show that there are significant differences among the players assessing the importance of the three port choice factors: liners and terminal operators give more weight to ‘hinterland and terminal basic conditions’ than shippers; terminal operators do not take ‘line operation’ as seriously as carriers and shippers; the factor of ‘terminal operation’ is more significantly considered by liners and terminal operators than by shippers.

Corporations are confronted with growing demands to take a stand on socio-political issues, i.e. corporate social advocacy (CSA), which affects their reputation in the public. Companies use different CSA message strategies, including calling the public to support and act on the issue they advocate. Using reactance theory, the authors investigate the impact of CSA messages with a call to action on corporate reputation in the case of a company's gender equality initiative.

A one-factorial (CSA message with or without a call to action) between-subjects experiment was conducted by surveying 172 individuals living in Switzerland. The CSA messages were created in the context of gender equality.

The authors' study indicates that CSA messages with a call to action compared to those without overall harmed corporate reputation due to individuals' reactance, which is higher for CSA messages with a call to action, negatively affecting corporate reputation. The impact of the CSA message strategy with a call to action on corporate reputation remains significant after controlling for issue alignment and political leaning.

Communicating about socio-political issues, especially taking a stand, is a significant challenge for corporations in an increasingly polarized society and has often led to backlash, boycotts and damage to corporate reputation. This study shows that the possible adverse effects of advocating for socio-political issues can be related to reactance. It emphasizes that companies advocating for contested issues must be more cautious about the message strategy than the issue itself.

The purpose of this article is to explore how agency is distributed between human actors and nonhuman elements in entrepreneurship.

It is based on an inductive longitudinal case study of a garden in a rural community in northern Sweden. The methodology includes an ethnography of the garden, spanning the course of 16 years, and a careful investigation of the entrepreneurial processes contained within it.

This article identifies and describes different practices to explain how agency is distributed between human actors and nonhuman elements in the garden's context. Three different practices were identified and discussed, namely “calling”, “resisting”, and “provoking”.

Agency/structure constitutes a longstanding conundrum in entrepreneurship and context. This study contributes to the on-going debate on context in entrepreneurship, and introduces a posthumanist perspective—particularly that of distributed agency—to theorising in entrepreneurship. Rather than focussing on a human (hero)-driven change process, induced through the exploitation of material objects, this novel perspective views entrepreneurship as both a human and a nonhuman venture, occurring through interactions located in particular places and times. Coming from the agency/structure dichotomy, this article reaches out for elements traditionally established on the structure side, distributing them to the agency side of the dichotomy. As such, it contributes to an understanding of the agency of nonhuman elements, and how they direct entrepreneurship in context. This theoretical development prepares entrepreneurship theories to be better able to engage with nonhuman elements and provides example solutions for the ongoing climate crisis.

Data economy is pervasively present in our everyday lives. Still, ordinary laypersons' chances to genuine communication with other stakeholders are scarce. This paper aims to raise awareness about communication patterns in the context of data economy and initiate a dialogue about laypersons' position in data economy ecosystems.

This conceptual paper covers theory-based critical reflection with ethical- and empirical-based remarks. It provides novel perspectives both for research and stakeholder collaboration.

The authors suggest invitational rhetoric and Habermasian discourse as instruments towards understanding partnership between all stakeholders of the data economy to enable laypersons to transfer from subjectivity to the agency.

The authors provide (1) theory-based critical reflection concerning communication patterns in the data economy; (2) both ethical and empirical-based remarks about laypersons' position in data economy and (3) ideas for interdisciplinary research and stakeholder collaboration practices by using invitational rhetoric and rational discourse. By that, this paper suggests taking a closer look at communication practices and ethics alike in the data economy. Moreover, it encourages clear, rational and justified arguments between stakeholders in a respectful and equal environment in the data economy ecosystems.

The emergence of technology-facilitated violence and abuse (TFVA) has led to calls for increased collaboration across and among sectors. Growing recognition of the need for multistakeholder collaboration (MSC) between industry, civil society, government, and academia reflects the number of moving parts involved, the need for specialized knowledge and skills in relation to certain issues, and the importance of recognizing the ways in which interlocking systems of subordination can lead to very different experiences with and impressions of social justice issues (Crenshaw, 1991). Numerous financial, professional, and personal factors incentivize MSC. Notwithstanding growing opportunities and incentives for TFVA-related MSC, collaborative efforts bring with them their own set of challenges. This chapter integrates elements of the literature on MSC, particularly those focusing on risks, benefits, and ways forward, with excerpts from a dialogue between an academic and community organization leader who are collaborating on a research partnership encompassing TFVA against young Canadians.

The evolution of technologies has unleashed a wealth of challenges by generating massive amount of data. Recently, biological data has increased exponentially, which has introduced several computational challenges. DNA short read alignment is an important problem in bioinformatics. The exponential growth in the number of short reads has increased the need for an ideal platform to accelerate the alignment process. Apache Spark is a cluster-computing framework that involves data parallelism and fault tolerance. In this article, we proposed a Spark-based algorithm to accelerate DNA short reads alignment problem, and it is called Spark-DNAligning. Spark-DNAligning exploits Apache Spark ’s performance optimizations such as broadcast variable, join after partitioning, caching, and in-memory computations. Spark-DNAligning is evaluated in term of performance by comparing it with SparkBWA tool and a MapReduce based algorithm called CloudBurst. All the experiments are conducted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Results demonstrate that Spark-DNAligning outperforms both tools by providing a speedup in the range of 101–702 in aligning gigabytes of short reads to the human genome. Empirical evaluation reveals that Apache Spark offers promising solutions to DNA short reads alignment problem.

Crises such as the Coronavirus pandemic pose extraordinary challenges to the decision making in management teams. Teams need to integrate available information quickly to make informed decisions on the spot and update their decisions as new information becomes available. Moreover, making good decisions is hard as it requires sacrifices for the common good, and finally, implementing the decisions made is not easy as it requires persistence in the face of strong counterproductive social pressures.

We provide a “psychology of action” perspective on making team-based management decisions in crisis by introducing collective implementation intentions (We-if-then plans) as a theory-based intervention tool to improve decision processes. We discuss our program of research on forming and acting on We-if-then plans in ad hoc teams facing challenging situations.

Teams with We-if-then plans consistently made more informed decisions when information was socially or temporally distributed, when decision makers had to make sacrifices for the common good, and when strong social pressures opposed acting on their decisions. Preliminary experimental evidence indicates that assigning simple We-if-then plans had similar positive effects as providing a leader to steer team processes.

Our analysis of self-regulated team decisions helps understand and improve how management teams can make and act on good decisions in crises such as the Coronavirus pandemic.

Liner connectivity plays an important role as a determinant in how a country is able to gain access to world markets. Liner shipping as the medium of seaborne transport for import and export of manufactured and semi-manufactured goods plays a significant part in international trade, which in turn potentially contribute towards the prosperity of a country and its surrounding region. Liner Shipping Connectivity Index (LSCI) is one of the most common benchmark to see how well connected a country in global trade, where it consists of five components, namely the number of ships, carrying capacity, ship size, services provided, and the number of companies that deploy container ships calling a country’s ports. This paper aims to tally from the most to the least which LSCI component contributes in improving the shipping connectivity with the most impact, in six Maritime South-East Asian countries, i.e., Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. By descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and panel data, this paper finds that the country port’s capacity to accept larger ship size provides the most significant impact towards the improvement of the connectivity in the region. To attract companies to deploy largest ship, the improvement needs to be complemented with the capacity that can meet the expected volume, offering a variety of service, and good turnaround speed at the country’s port. The paper is expected to present not only indicative recommendations on which logistics connectivity initiative needs to be invested first, but also necessary proposals to develop a programme for building the region’s overall logistics industry.

Paper Code: SLC-206