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This study aims to assess the alignment of South Korea’s government-certified social enterprises (GCSEs) with prevailing social enterprise (SE) models, notably the entrepreneurial nonprofit, social cooperative and social business models delineated in the “Emergence of Social Enterprises in Europe” (Defourny and Nyssens, 2012, 2017a, 2017b) and the “principle of interest” frameworks (Defourny et al., 2021). Thereby, it seeks to situate these enterprises within recognized frameworks and elucidate their hybrid identities.

Analyzing panel data from 2016 to 2020 for 259 GCSEs, this study uses tslearn for k-means clustering with dynamic time warping to assess their developmental trajectories and alignment with established SE models, which echoes the approach of Defourny et al. (2021). We probe the “fluid” identities of semi-public sector SEs, integrating Gordon’s (2013) notion that they tend to blend various SE traditions as opposed to existing in isolation.

Results indicate that GCSEs do align with prevalent SE frameworks. Furthermore, they represent a spectrum of SE models, suggesting the versatility of the public sector in fostering diverse types of SEs.

The concept of a semi-public sector SE model has been relatively uncharted, even though it holds significance for research on SE typologies and public sector entrepreneurship literature. This study bridges this gap by presenting empirical evidence of semi-public SEs and delineating the potential paths these enterprises might take as they amalgamate various SE traditions.

Public sector institutional entrepreneurship efforts may contribute to addressing social challenges by creating an enabling regulatory environment that promotes social enterprise formation and fosters complementarity between the public sector and social enterprises. The outcomes of such public sector institutional entrepreneurship are explored in this study. To assess the outcomes of such public sector initiatives in South Korea, the perspectives of executives (n = 40) of government-certified social enterprises are assessed.

Several research methodologies were combined, including purposive sampling with an 11-point Likert scale, hierarchical clustering and principal component analysis. The literature on government–nonprofit relations as well as public sector institutional entrepreneurship was leveraged.

This research results indicate that the enabling regulatory environment with entrenched funding and incubation mechanisms produces mixed-to-positive outcomes if framed with reference to public sector–social enterprise complementarity. The authors identified three perspective-based ideal types that have differential views of isomorphic regulatory pressures, the efficacy of incubation and scaling programs, participation in policymaking and other aspects of public sector patronage.

This study contributes to relating the literature on public sector institutional entrepreneurship and government–third sector relations by empirically assessing how social enterprises attracted by government demand-side signaling to become certified as social enterprises encounter and perceive an ostensibly enabling regulatory ecosystem, with its derivative policies and mechanisms, crafted by the public sector.

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.

Village health volunteers are community health volunteers in Thailand that have helped the government deliver public health services for many years, particularly during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Though labeled as “volunteers,” the village health volunteers are recruited, trained and supervised in a manner similar to how a government agency recruits, trains and supervises its street-level bureaucrats (SLBs). This study examines the two factors that affect how these street-level quasi-bureaucrats use their professional discretion: transformational leadership and public service motivation (PSM). Transformational leadership means a leadership style that develops, shares and sustains a vision to elevate SLBs to higher levels of performance, while PSM is defined as an SLB’s predisposition to make a difference by working in the public sector with a sense of calling. This study attempts to analyze the mediating role of psychological empowerment in the relationship between transformational leadership, PSM and professional discretion.

The paper uses a three-wave survey-based quantitative method to avoid common method biases. This method provides evidence gathered from 105 subdistrict health promotion hospitals and 798 village health volunteers (VHVs) in five provinces in Thailand.

PSM and transformational leadership influence the village health volunteers' use of professional discretion indirectly through the psychological empowerment mechanisms that make them feel positive toward their village health volunteer role and responsibility. The authors' findings suggest that the hospital directors' transformational leadership induces the village health volunteers' use of professional discretion by making them feel competent to do their work and feel fulfilled and valuable about their work. Similarly, the village health volunteers' PSM leads them to use professional discretion by making them feel fulfilled and valuable and by convincing them of the social and community impact of their work.

While existing research focuses on VHVs' role in alleviating capacity constraints on the health care system, this study revealed an equally important role played by hospital directors. These directors' transformational leadership was instrumental in enhancing VHVs' psychological empowerment – particularly their perceptions of the meaning of their work and their competence – that ultimately enabled them to use professional discretion in their work. This study also highlighted the importance of VHVs' PSM, which leads to their use of professional discretion via the meaning and impact dimensions of psychological empowerment. Based on this study, PSM should also be incorporated into the community health volunteers' recruitment criteria. Also, public health agencies should consider including transformational leadership in the hospital directors' training programs and their promotion criteria.

As VHVs' high-PSM level was found to enhance their professional discretion, the process of recruiting ordinary citizens to serve as community health volunteers should incorporate assessment of the candidates' PSM. Also, the Ministry of Public Health should design and assign tasks that citizen volunteers, particularly VHVs, consider meaningful and at which they feel competent.

Aside from technical training, directors of the subdistrict health promotion hospitals should regularly receive soft skill training (i.e. leadership training) and transformational leadership characteristics should be included in the government criteria for promotion.

While past research has examined the impact of other leadership styles on psychological empowerment, this study took a further step by examining the mediating effects of psychological empowerment on the relationship between transformational leadership and professional discretion among VHVs. The authors analyzed the mechanism linking PSM to the VHVs' professional discretion. In addition, by examining the relative importance of different dimensions of psychological empowerment, this study offers a nuanced understanding of the psychological processes by which transformational leadership and PSM shape the SLBs' use of professional discretion in their work.

Social enterprises are embedded in ecosystems with multiple actors interested in the field’s growth. One way to enhance social enterprises is through public policies and developing countries like Brazil included this in the public agenda. After an important mobilization of private organizations and public managers, the Brazilian federal government implemented in 2017 the National Impact Investment and Business Strategy (ENIMPACTO) renamed in 2023 to National Impact Economy Strategy with the same abbreviation. Since its creation, ENIMPACTO saw significant modifications leading to a decree in 2023 extending its mandate, amplifying membership and changing its name to the National Impact Economy Strategy while maintaining the same acronym. This experience leads us to the following question: How was ENIMPACTO created and developed?

We used institutional arrangements and advocacy coalition theory to analyze the key elements that contributed to ENIMPACTO’s creation and its evolution through time. A qualitative, single-case study on the Brazilian experience implementing ENIMPACTO was conducted through semi-structured interviews with national strategy members, participant observation, document and data analysis.

We argue that advocacy coalition and institutional arrangements frameworks combined are needed to understand Enimpacto’s complexity. The strategy presented an extensive multiple-actor articulation involving shared beliefs that were also important to gather support on recreating and expanding Enimpacto when external events threatened its continuity. Yet, it presented important challenges on how to achieve consensus and alignment regarding important concepts and regulation strategy among the actors and manage the public policy governance and activities implementation.

We combine institutional arrangements and advocacy coalition frameworks and apply them to analyze a public policy composed of actors of multiple sectors that play an active advocacy coalition role. We also present empirical evidence that elements of the advocacy coalition framework add analytical elements to institutional arrangements literature and how they affect each other. We point to two important elements of the institutional arrangements framework (territoriality and subsidiarity) that were not initially considered by ENIMPACTO and were later incorporated because of tensions in the field. We provide empirical evidence of the incipient role that public administration can play in promoting social enterprises' agenda that might base similar strategies to boost social enterprises in other locations.

The study focuses on drug safety regulation capture, reveals the inner mechanism and evolutionary characteristics of drug safety regulation capture and provides suggestions for effective regulation by pharmacovigilance.

The article introduces prospect theory into the game strategy analysis of drug safety events, constructs a benefit perception matrix based on psychological perception and analyzes the risk selection strategies and constraints on stable outcomes for both drug companies and drug regulatory authorities. Moreover, simulation was used to analyze the choice of results of different parameters on the game strategy.

The results found that the system does not have a stable equilibrium strategy under the role of cognitive psychology. The risk transfer coefficient, penalty cost, risk loss, regulatory benefit, regulatory success probability and risk discount coefficient directly acted in the direction of system evolution toward the system stable strategy. There is a critical effect on the behavioral strategies of drug manufacturers and drug supervisors, which exceeds a certain intensity before the behavioral strategies in repeated games tend to stabilize.

In this article, the authors constructed the perceived benefit matrix through the prospect value function to analyze the behavioral evolution game strategies of drug companies and FDA in the regulatory process, and to evaluate the evolution law of each factor.

As social media has become an ingrained aspect of our lives—including our political relationships with other citizens and the state—various governments have warned public servants that being politically active online might threaten the reputed impartiality of themselves and the public service. This study examines whether public servants are less likely to be politically active on social media than other citizens, and seeks to understand public servants’ varying disposition to be politically active online by investigating the role of employees’ underlying Big 5 personality traits.

Multivariate regression, along with marginal effects and predicted probabilities, are used to investigate public servants’ online political activity with survey data from Canada, a country where impartiality is a core public service value, and where governments, public service commissions and even public sector unions have voiced cautious messages about the threat online political activity presents to the reputed impartiality of public servants, and the public service at large.

Analysis of the direct effects of being a public servant and each Big 5 personality trait finds that being a public servant significantly, and substantively, reduces the probability of engaging in online political activity, meanwhile, Extraversion and Conscientiousness have consistent, significant and substantive relationships with being politically active online. Subsequent analysis investigating the dynamic between the Big 5 and being a public servant, uncovers a more complex story. Among public servants, Openness and Neuroticism, rather than Extraversion and Conscientiousness, are associated with significant and substantive changes in the probability of engaging in some online politically activities. This is consistent with research investigating the relationship between the Big 5 and risk aversion, given that public servants in Canada work in an environment with a highly cautious discourse portraying social media as a serious risk to impartiality.

The findings also speak to best practices for public service human resource managers by shedding light how public servants’ behavior can be better understood and managed by paying attention to their underlying personality traits.

This study moves beyond analyzing trends between public and private sector employees, to instead examine public servants’ online political activity. This study offers theoretical and empirical insight into how public servants’ disposition to be politically active online is, in part, influenced by their underlying Big 5 personality traits, specifically, Neuroticism and Openness.

Despite the widespread study and application of public-private partnerships (PPPs) since the 1980s, the field lacks a universally accepted definition that captures the concept's complexity. This study aims to offer a definition and foster a more substantive and comprehensive discourse on PPPs to improve communication and understanding between academics and practitioners from diverse disciplines and legislative backgrounds.

Grounded in the family-resemblance concept proposed by German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, this study conducts a comprehensive literature review to identify core and non-core elements frequently cited in PPP descriptions. The authors used these findings to develop the PPP sunflower model as a structured framework for defining PPPs.

The analysis elucidates six core elements consistently present in PPP descriptions: clarity of roles and responsibilities, appropriate risk allocation and sharing, injection of expertise and resources, cooperation and teamwork, a bundle of services, and long-term contracts. Coupled with identified non-core elements, these core components comprise the PPP sunflower model, a structured framework for defining PPPs that accommodates their multi-faceted nature.

The PPP sunflower model distinguishes itself as a unique contribution to the PPP literature. It offers a rigorous theoretical framework that can elucidate the complexity of PPPs for various stakeholders. The model serves as a practical tool for evaluating the authenticity and viability of PPP projects. The study's novelty lies in its adoption of the family-resemblance concept, thereby providing a comprehensive, multi-dimensional framework that enhances the understanding of PPPs across different disciplines and legislative contexts.

Culture is considered a critical aspect of social media usage. The purpose of this paper is to explore how cultures and languages influence multilingual users' cross-cultural information sharing patterns.

This study used a crowdsourcing survey with Amazon Mechanical Turk to collect qualitative and quantitative data from 355 multilingual users who utilize two or more languages daily. A mixed-method approach combined statistical, and cluster analysis with thematic analysis was employed to analyze information sharing patterns among multilingual users in the Chinese cultural context.

It was found that most multilingual users surveyed preferred to share in their first and second language mainly because that is what others around them speak or use. Multilingual users have more diverse sharing characteristics and are more actively engaged in social media. The results also provide insights into what incentives make multilingual users engage in social media to share information related to Chinese culture with the MOA model. Finally, the ten motivation factors include learning, entertainment, empathy, personal gain, social engagement, altruism, self-expression, information, trust and sharing culture. One opportunity factor is identified, which is convenience. Three ability factors are recognized consist of self-efficacy, habit and personality.

The findings are conducive to promoting the active participation of multilingual users in online communities, increasing global resource sharing and information flow and promoting the consumption of digital cultural content.