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Traditionally the role of the external examiners in UK universities or more formally Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) is that of quality assurance (QA). Typically, an experienced academic who is not affiliated with the HEI (i.e., someone from another university) is invited to act as an external examiner for a particular course or a module. The external examiner’s primary role is to provide impartial and independent advice to ensure academic standards are upheld for a degree program; and that the degree is comparable with similar programs across the country and that the achievements of students are also comparable with students on courses at other universities. This primary role makes external examiners highly valued people in UK universities, and as a result, their views are nearly always taken seriously. Over and above this recognized primary role of QA, external examiners can also be engaged by the host university in other ways. These additional roles or tasks of the external examiner can help enhance teaching and learning in higher education. This chapter will reflect on the range of roles, including the ones that go beyond QA.

This study explores how top management teams make strategic decisions. The findings indicate that the top management team performs a variety of monitoring and control functions within most firms, but that a single team with stable composition does not make strategic choices in most organizations. Instead, different groups, with members from multiple organizational levels, form to make various strategic decisions. A stable subset of the top team forms the core of each of these multiple decision‐making bodies. The findings offer a possible explanation for inconsistent findings in the top management team literature, and suggest several new directions for future senior team research.

This paper aims to adopt a practice-theory, “site ontology” perspective to understand how venture capitalists (VCs) add value to their portfolio companies (PCs).

The empirical research involves a field ethnographic study of a VC firm in Dubai, focused on revealing what constitutes value and what VCs do to add this value to their PCs.

Value adding is a profoundly social, embedded process interconnected with other ecosystem actors, investment practices and organizations. The value adding threads of VC activity are part of a holistic configuration of practices that span the investment lifecycle and different levels within the firm.

This research contributes a rich account of the social, symbolic nature of VC activity, depicting the everyday activities that comprise value adding practices. It is among the first to introduce practice theory to the VC context and open up a new conversation about its social ontology.

Taking the entrepreneur’s perspective and a broad view of business advisory services, the purpose of this paper is to examine to what degree the need of business advisory services among Swedish start-ups, first-generation immigrants compared to non-immigrants, is fulfilled.

The sample data consist of a unique and comprehensive firm-level database and contain telephone interviews with 2,800 Swedish start-up entrepreneurs. The study examines 20 different kinds of business advice services, in terms of both need and use. Statistical methods such as Mann-Whitney test and regression analysis are used while controlling for entrepreneurial characteristics.

The findings suggest that immigrants’ compared to non-immigrants’ need for business advisory service was not fulfilled. Of the 20 different business advices, ten were fulfilled and ten were not fulfilled. Both strategic advice and operational advice were fulfilled as well as unfulfilled. Apart from ethnicity, other variables did influence the need of business advisory services.

The author was not able to make comparisons between different immigrant groups.

This study offers an explorative approach that contributes on how business advisory services are differentially tailored between start-ups by immigrants and those by non-immigrants. It illustrates to what extent public- and/or private-funded organizations contribute to fulfilment of the needs of immigrant and non-immigrant start-ups.

Few studies take the entrepreneur’s perspective and from such a perspective examine the fulfilment of needs of advice regarding both private and public organizations role in the area. Both the need and the use of business advisory services are studied as well as the kind of business advice that is needed.

This paper aims to examine the perceptions of small business entrepreneurs regarding the efficacy of external business advisers in delivering sustainable strategic and operational guidance.

The research is interpretivist, exploring the narratives of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) owner/managers in manufacturing. Five in-depth interviews were carried out, revealing a range of decision stories about the use of external business advisers.

While there was some scepticism towards the use of advisers in certain situations, the research revealed that levels of trust, relationship building and the credibility of the consultant are substantial factors in determining whether the engagement is successful.

As a small-scale study, it would be worthwhile to examine the perceptions of additional entrepreneurs to business advisers to compare research findings.

Policy regarding advice to small businesses should be framed in terms of the local context of the firm and its owner, rather than on broad and generalisable systems of business knowledge. Time and effort is required to build a sustainable relationship between advisers and owners, and it is recommended that particular attention be paid to the process.

The research suggests that potentially, industrial policy regarding current delivery of small business advice requires readjustments towards more of a relationship focus.

Little established research appears to exist in relation to the tendency or otherwise, for SME decision makers to pursue and use external advice. This paper helps to fill an important gap in the literature while offering some significant and nuanced insights into the perceptions of SME owner managers.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the role played by tacit knowledge in marketing decision making in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and to extrapolate the ramifications, in terms of practice and theory generation.

To provide support for the existence of tacit expertise, research was framed around three key questions and in-depth interview data drawn from SME senior managers. Although limited in number, interviewees represent a range of different types of SME businesses.

In SMEs, tacit knowledge presents a reservoir of expertise that reflects the recondite characteristics of marketing decision making. Strategies in marketing were found to be about locally situated networks, intersubjective knowledge and intuitive based judgements that led to important company advantages in the market place.

Based on an analysis of the findings and despite the abstruse nature of tacit knowledge, this paper tentatively suggests ways for marketers to unravel it. The suggestion is that tacit and locally significant experience and expertise in marketing is a basis for theory and practice, with potential for dissemination.

Tacit knowledge is a notable, yet widely overlooked area of SME marketing. Highlighted here are both managerial and learning challenges in terms of better conceptualising the understanding of marketing and SME activity regarding this largely unarticulated base of practice.

The overall purpose of the research presented is to ascertain whether independent non-executive directors (INEDs) in Malaysian publicly listed companies (PLCs) are involved in corporate strategy.

A qualitative approach, consisting of a series of interviews with board members, was chosen. The sampling frame was made as large as possible and, for the purpose of this study, consisted of board members who sit on PLCs of the main board and Malaysian-owned.

The findings reveal that INEDs in Malaysia may display the same types of involvement in the formulation phase as their counterparts in UK, which McNulty and Pettigrew (1999) categorised as taking strategic decisions, shaping strategic decisions and shaping the context, conduct and content of strategy. The findings also show that the three phases of strategy are linked and that INEDs’ behaviour during evaluation may be moderated by the strategy’s success or failure and by their involvement in the earlier phases.

This research utilised interviews. Generalisations may be an issue when interviews are used as the method of inquiry. Also, the sample is not random, as access to many directors depended on recommendations. In addition, respondents were consciously selected to obtain various board positions that include independent and non-independent directors.

Findings from this research suggest that the involvement of INEDs in different phases of corporate strategy is an indication that INEDs are no longer focusing much on policing the management. Although control is still a major issue on the board agenda, their strategic involvement may suggest that INEDs are adequately meeting their responsibilities of providing long-term direction to their companies and also suggests that INEDs are in a position to support the Chair effectively. Their active involvement is likely to result in successful strategic formalization and conclusion.

There is a lack of work on studying barriers to INEDs' effectiveness in developing countries, whereby previous work and literature review were predominantly based upon the experience of Western economies.

Considerable ignorance exists as to what directors actually do. Increasingly the legitimacy of the board is being challenged. Much controversy surrounds the question of to whom the board should be responsible. The role of directors and the inevitability of stakeholder conflict are reviewed. The merits of different board structures are considered from the international perspective. Major conceptual alternatives are proposed. It is concluded that however mechanistically efficient structure may be, its success will be inhibited by the strategic skills of its constituents.

As a generalisation, the sports industry is a multifaceted, complex and diverse industry, perhaps making it difficult to offer business support and advice. This paper aims to identify and analyse, through sport and recreation business owners, their experience of business support and advice. The study can therefore be seen as contributing to related studies by Mole et al. and responding to Pawson and Tilley's request for a more nuanced view of how public‐support programmes work.

A qualitative, collective case study design is adopted. Three in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with Directors of Sport Businesses were undertaken to identify business support in the West Midlands Sports sector. Interviews focused on business development, the support and advice directors received and the future direction of their business. Interviews were analysed using inductive and deductive content analysis.

The findings from the case studies highlight a variety of general support and advice mechanisms, e.g. Women's Business Development Agency, with differences in regional provision evident. One strong emerging theme indicates that specialised business support occurs which appears critical but ad hoc.

This paper considers the specific business support needs in a largely unreported, yet growing sports sector (based upon a demand led inquiry) into existing providers and business recipients. These findings are pertinent for various organisations such as policy makers, small business support agencies, as well as sports businesses themselves; as they seek to both identify specific sector support needs and evaluate existing practice.

The authors suggest ways CEOs can orchestrate their relationship with their board to optimize its potential to become a strategic asset for the company, as distinct from its more traditional role as overseer of management.

To better understand how CEOs can actively engage their boards to make them become strategic assets, the authors conducted research involving more than 50 conversations with Fortune 1,000 CEOs, board chairs, directors, academics and external board advisors to ask them to share their experience and perspectives.

The challenge for both CEOs and boards is to fight the natural tendency to evade confrontations or smooth things over, rather than harness conflict to achieve higher-value decisions.

CEOs can also model confident transparency for their executive teams and send a strong signal that it is okay to share information about work in progress with the board even if it is not finalized.

The stakes have never been higher for CEOs as they are expected to manage, make sense of and take advantage of unprecedented levels of ambiguity and uncertainty. To help do this, they need board members who are fully engaged and willing and able to prod, push, challenge and champion–to work with their CEOs to get to better insight and decisions.