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The purpose of this study is to theoretically and empirically advance a concept of competitive antecedents to absorptive capacity (AC) research and to explain their relationship to a firm’s innovative performance. A firm’s competitive antecedents involve a relative advantage in a firm’s ability to access external knowledge – (i.e. relative advantage in external knowledge flows) – and a relative advantage in appropriating these external knowledge flows (i.e. relative advantage in appropriability regime).

By drawing on network and market share explanations, hypotheses were developed in which a firm’s AC is argued to mediate the influence of these competitive antecedents on a firm’s innovations. In using linear and negative binomial estimation methods, a mediation analysis of the US biotechnology industry was conducted.

A firm’s competitive antecedents have a positive influence on a firm’s AC and that these influences indirectly impact a biotechnology firm’s product innovations.

While a firm’s innovation is widely attributed to its AC, this study’s concept of competitive antecedents shows that a firm’s competitive advantage lies upstream from its AC.

According to behavioral research, aspirations influence a firm's search – exploitive and explorative – for solutions that satisfy a firm's goals. Yet, such goal seeking behavior is adaptive to a firm's past experiences and not to a manager's expectations of its firm's future. A manager's expectations are often explained in terms of their confidence in future events. The purpose of this study is to address the following research question: how does a manager's confidence influence its expectations of a firm's future performance and goals; and how do these future expectations influence a firm's exploitive/explorative search?

In drawing on cognition and legitimacy research, a conceptual model was developed to explain the antecedents and outcomes of a firm's “forward-looking” aspirations. The antecedents to a firm's forward-looking aspirations are attributed to a manager's overconfidence – anchoring, confirmation and availability – biases. In using strategic legitimacy explanations, these biases introduce distinct types of forward-looking (exploitive/explorative) search that legitimize/de-legitimize a manager's forward-looking aspirations.

A key finding of this study is that it introduces a strategic decision-making process in which a firm's exploitive/ explorative search is adaptive toward its forward-looking aspirations.

This forward-looking strategic decision-making process offers research implications to understand how a firm's future goals and expectations can offer new understandings of their past experiences and traditions and explains how a manager's overconfidence biases can influence the assessment of a firm's social aspirational groups.

In addition, this study also offers practical implications in which illustrative examples are used to explain this study's forward-looking strategic decision-making process.

A distinct contribution of this study is that it introduces a forward-looking orientation that has not been previously examined the backward focus of behavioral research.

As the prioritization of family goals depends on the resolution of family conflict, this study's purpose is to explain how a dominant coalition (DC) of parental family members prioritizes their family economic and non-economic goals when faced with different types of family conflict.

A conceptual framework is developed drawing on a socio-cognitive approach to explain a family's goal formation process. This socio-cognitive approach extends the stakeholder salience underpinnings of family influence/essence theory. It shows that family conflict arises from the complex and novel social settings of a family business and that a DC prioritizes their family's goals by drawing on heuristic biases to resolve such family conflict.

A key finding of this study is the introduction of a distinct type of agency to family influence/essence research. Unlike the salient explanations, a family's goal formulation process is attributed to a DC's heuristic response in resolving their family business conflict.

Scholars have called for a greater need to investigate the social and cognitive underpinnings of a family's goal formation process. While the social settings of a family business are often explained in terms of family conflict, an understanding of the sources of such conflict and their resolution have received limited attention. This study opens new avenues to understanding the sources of such family conflict and the cognitive mechanisms needed to overcome them. This understanding is critical not only to the prioritization of a family's goals but also to the idea that “influence” defines the essence of a family business.

This study draws on resource dependence theory (RDT) to explain a board's governance function in the United States (US) nonprofit healthcare industry. Specifically, while various nonprofit research studies have appealed to agency theory (AT) to explain the monitoring role of an outside board, RDT offers an alternative explanation that emphasizes an outside board's resource gathering role.

In drawing on the nonprofit GuideStar database, a fixed effect (FE) panel estimation was conducted on a sample of 230 US Non Profit Healthcare Organizations (NPHCOs). This panel estimation examines the relationship between the composition of an outside board and an NPHCO’s revenue and public support performance.

A key finding of this study is that the composition of an outside board involving its' number, compensation and gender impacts an NPHCO’s revenue and public support.

This study shows that the composition of an outside board impacts an NPHCO’s ability to gain access to external resources. As NPHCOs face increasing pressure to seek external forms of revenue support, this study suggests that boards should favor a larger number, compensation and female representation of outside members.

The composition of an outsider board can offer external sources of revenue support that lower the poor's requirements for financial assistance and thus affirm an NPHCO’s identity as a charitable organization.

As an NPHCO’s identity as a charitable organization is dependent on serving the medical needs of the poor, an outside board not only introduces a resource gathering function that is absent in the monitoring explanations of AT, but that this resource gathering function is important to affirming this identity.

Medicaid home and community-based services (HCBS) support community living for three million disabled people in the United States. As a state-federal partnership, these programs are highly variable across states. Because eligibility determination and services differ from state to state, this Medicaid structure becomes a barrier for those HCBS users whose desired futures include cross-state moves.

I examine narratives of citizenship and personhood for Medicaid HCBS users circulating within policy arenas and explore tensions between these and the stories Medicaid HCBS users tell of their own lives. Specifically, I explore the degree to which narratives about Medicaid HCBS users include an affirmation of the right to cross-state movement. My analysis includes data from public statements from policy makers, legislative texts, organizational framings of Medicaid policy, and 18 semi-structured interviews with Medicaid PCA users who desired or pursued cross-state moves.

I conclude that institutional narratives of Medicaid HCBS users are an inadequate representation of the stories told by those who rely on this program and, in consequence, programs stemming from policy fail to offer services that would allow service recipients to pursue their objectives.

Medicaid HCBS policy is part of a broader story of disability rights progress over the last four decades, making its role as an obstacle to cross-state movement a bit of a paradox. This paradox points to the value of narrative analysis in calling attention to invisible contradictions and the need for institutional and organizational change.

This paper argues for the following sensitizing proposition. At its core, much of consumer behavior that involves brand meanings is an attempt to influence, or symbolically mark, interpersonal relationships.

This paper presents a conceptual argument based on a literature review.

First, I argue that our pervasive concern with other people is a basic genetic component of human beings, and discuss some possible evolutionary pressures that may have led to this result. Then I discuss how this pervasive concern influences consumer behavior related to brand meanings. This discussion is structured around two aspects of social relationships: interpersonal closeness and social status. Relationship closeness is discussed with regard to brand communities, gifts, special possessions and brand love, and the often hidden ways that social relationships permeate everyday consumer behavior. Social status is discussed with reference to materialism. Materialism is sometimes misunderstood as an obsession with physical object, or as occurring when people care more about products than they do about people. In contrast, I argue that materialism is better understood as a style of relating to people.

This paper integrates a range of disparate findings in support of a broadly applicable generalization that nothing matters more to people than other people. This generalization can function as a sensitizing proposition that managers and researchers can bear in mind as they seek to interpret and understand how brand meaning influences consumer behavior.

Using attribution theory, this study examined the effects of situational factors [time budget pressure (TBP), organisational ethical culture (OEC) and quality control procedures (QCPs)] and dispositional factors [auditor professional commitment (APC) and internal locus of control (ILOC)] on audit quality threatening behaviour (AQTB). In addition, it observed the moderating role of religiosity in the relationship between situational and dispositional factors and AQTB.

A total of 189 external auditors responded to the survey questionnaire. This study employed structural equation modelling via SmartPLS to analyse the proposed model.

The results documented that the OEC and QCPs situational factors were negatively related to the incidence of AQTB, whilst TBP was positively linked to the incidence of AQTB. Dispositional factors APC and ILOC were negatively connected to AQTB. Furthermore, the findings recorded the moderating effect of religiosity on most of the situational and dispositional factors related to AQTB.

Regulators and accounting firms' efforts to promote high audit quality (AQ) may consider the theological/religious lens and reinforce ethical culture and quality control to reduce AQTB.

The findings provide further insights into situational and dispositional factors that may cause or impede the incidence of AQTB in auditing practices, as well as the moderating role of religiosity in curbing AQTB.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of internet on the e-lifestyle of the youth of emerging markets (EMs) in contemporary digital world using Ghanaian youth as a case study.

Survey data were obtained from students of five leading universities in Accra, the nation’s capital, between February and June 2017. Of the 300 questionnaires administered, 276 were usable representing 92 per cent collection rate. Respondents were randomly approached and oriented on the object of the study and asked to complete the instrument voluntarily using the face-to-face approach at student events. Both the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and the structural equation modelling procedure of partial least square (PLS-SEM) were used to analyse the data.

From the study, drivers of the e-lifestyle of youth in EMs were listed in order of importance: socio-importance, interest, entertainment, necessity, novelty, academic, transaction and concern needs. Surprisingly, the quest for academic information does not motivate the youth to surf the internet compared to aspiration to satisfy social, interest and entertainment-driven needs.

E-lifestyle addiction compels the youth to surf the internet via mobile phones, computers and other devices for e-lifestyle satisfaction, requiring internet service providers, marketers and academics to develop innovative e-lifestyle products to stimulate continuous internet usage of internet by the youth.

This study provides practical insight for internet service providers, web and application developers and members of the academic community to consciously develop internet-based products that direct the youth towards fulfilling e-lifestyle motivation.

The convergence of the youth on the internet will in no doubt impact social behaviour, thereby influencing lifestyles.

As very little work has been done on youth e-lifestyle in EMs, this study serves as a pioneering work in EMs using Ghanaian youth as a case study. Ironically, students of EMs spend less time on the internet doing academic concerns compared to social activities. Additionally, the importance of transaction (payments) needs as a driver of internet use among the youth has been emphasised in this study.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that cause government construction projects failure in a developing economy.

The study used the sequential data collection approach through an in-depth semi-structured interview (16 participants) and questionnaire survey (230 participants) to solicit their perceptions from project management practitioners (PMP), contractors and client (government officials) about the factors that lead to Ghanaian Government construction projects. The relative importance index was used to determine the relative importance of the factors identified. This was followed by Spearman rank correlation coefficient and Kendall’s coefficient of concordance to measure the degree of agreement among the participants on their perceptions.

In total, 34 factors were identified as the main factors that lead into Ghanaian Government construction projects failure. The top ten most important factors that cause Ghanaian Government construction projects failure are: political interferences, delays in payment, partisan politics, bureaucracy, corruption, poor supervision, lack of commitment by project leaders, poor planning, starting more projects than the government can fund and change in government. The failure factors were grouped into four main themes and found that the most important failure factors are leadership. This is followed by management and administrative practices, resources and external forces, respectively.

This study is limited to only the public sector, and therefore the findings may not be applicable in the private sector.

Policy makers and construction PMP would be able to use the findings as a guide during the implementation of government projects in order to reduce and/or avoid government construction projects failure.

Construction projects failure in developing countries is high. Accordingly, the extant literature has been devoted to identifying the factors that lead to failure; however, they have mainly been discussed from a generic point of view or individual case studies. Researches that focus exclusively on government construction projects in developing countries are rare despite the dynamics in which these projects are implemented. This research extends the construction project management literature by focussing on government construction projects in a developing economy, where there are weak public institutional systems coupled with partisanship politics and bad cultural orientation towards government sector work inherited from a colonial rule.