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1 – 10 of 90Christine T. Domegan, Tina Flaherty, John McNamara, David Murphy, Jonathan Derham, Mark McCorry, Suzanne Nally, Maurice Eakin, Dmitry Brychkov, Rebecca Doyle, Arthur Devine, Eva Greene, Joseph McKenna, Finola OMahony and Tadgh O'Mahony
To combat climate change, protect biodiversity, maintain water quality, facilitate a just transition for workers and engage citizens and communities, a diversity of stakeholders…
Abstract
Purpose
To combat climate change, protect biodiversity, maintain water quality, facilitate a just transition for workers and engage citizens and communities, a diversity of stakeholders across multiple levels work together and collaborate to co-create mutually beneficial solutions. This paper aims to illustrate how a 7.5-year collaboration between local communities, researchers, academics, companies, state agencies and policymakers is contributing to the reframing of industrial harvested peatlands to regenerative ecosystems and carbon sinks with impacts on ecological, economic, social and cultural systems.
Design/methodology/approach
The European Union LIFE Integrated Project, Peatlands and People, responding to Ireland’s Climate Action Plan, represents Europe’s largest rehabilitation of industrially harvested peatlands. It makes extensive use of marketing research for reframing strategies and actions by partners, collaborators and communities in the evolving context of a just transition to a carbon-neutral future.
Findings
The results highlight the ecological, economic, social and cultural reframing of peatlands from fossil fuel and waste lands to regenerative ecosystems bursting with biodiversity and climate solution opportunities. Reframing impacts requires muddling through the ebbs and flows of planned, possible and unanticipated change that can deliver benefits for peatlands and people over time.
Research limitations/implications
At 3 of 7.5 years into a project, the authors are muddling through how ecological reframing impacts economic and social/cultural reframing. Further impacts, planned and unplanned, can be expected.
Practical implications
This paper shows how an impact planning canvas tool and impact taxonomy can be applied for social and systems change. The tools can be used throughout a project to understand, respond to and manage for unplanned events. There is constant learning, constantly going back to the impact planning canvas and checking where we are, what is needed. There is action and reaction to each other and to the diversity of stakeholders affected and being affected by the reframing work.
Originality/value
This paper considers how systemic change through ecological, economic, social and cultural reframing is a perfectly imperfect process of muddling through which holds the promise of environmental, economic, technological, political, social and educational impacts to benefit nature, individuals, communities, organisations and society.
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Ibrahim Nandom Yakubu, Ayhan Kapusuzoglu and Nildag Basak Ceylan
This study seeks to empirically examine the influence of corporate governance on corporate performance in Ghana.
Abstract
Purpose
This study seeks to empirically examine the influence of corporate governance on corporate performance in Ghana.
Design/methodology/approach
The study employs data from 30 listed firms spanning from 2008 to 2018 and applies the generalized method of moments technique. The authors use economic value added, shareholder value added (SVA) and economic margin (EM) as measures of corporate performance.
Findings
The findings reveal that the presence of both inside directors and outside (nonexecutive) directors significantly improves corporate performance, lending credence to both the stewardship theory and the agency theory. The inclusion of women on the corporate boards and frequent meetings of the board reduce the economic profits of firms. The authors find that CEO duality impedes corporate performance, supporting the presumption of the agency theory. The study further reveals that audit committee size and ownership concentration positively drive the performance of quoted firms in Ghana.
Originality/value
Prior studies on corporate governance and firm performance nexus have chiefly adopted traditional accounting-based performance measures such as return on assets and return on equity to evaluate firm performance. However, these indicators are critiqued for being historic and fail to consider firms' cost of equity. In light of the shortcomings of the accounting-based proxies, this study takes a unique direction by using value-based metrics, which are considered superior measures of performance. Besides, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this study provides a first attempt to investigate the link between corporate governance and firm performance using SVA and EM as performance indicators.
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Linda M. Waldron, Danielle Docka-Filipek, Carlie Carter and Rachel Thornton
First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based…
Abstract
First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.
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Magnus Hoppe, Mats Westerberg and Eva Leffler
The purpose of this paper is to present and develop models of educational approaches to entrepreneurship that can provide complementary analytical structures to better study…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present and develop models of educational approaches to entrepreneurship that can provide complementary analytical structures to better study, enact and reflect upon the role of entrepreneurship in higher education.
Design/methodology/approach
A general framework for entrepreneurship education is developed by using theory as well as practical experiences from the fields of business, engineering and pedagogy. The paper is mainly conceptual where the unfolding Swedish practice is used as contextual backdrop.
Findings
The FOR/IN/THROUGH/ABOUT (FITA) taxonomy is presented and used to develop three models of how to approach entrepreneurship in higher education depending on purpose. As there exists a didactical divide between entrepreneurial education for business and entrepreneurial approach to teaching and learning, educators and researchers ought to let their specific context influence the adoption of the taxonomy as well as the presented models.
Research limitations/implications
The differentiations suggested by the presented models can be used to both structure the designs and limit claims of future research. More heuristic research is called for.
Practical implications
The use of FITA in the designing of entrepreneurship education offers new opportunities for enhancing complementary student learning in higher education.
Social implications
The study suggests that any political or scholarly initiative must acknowledge the diversity of entrepreneurship education and chose different approaches depending on what is to be achieved.
Originality/value
The multidisciplinary approach has made it possible to present and create models that denote a common ground for a productive discussion on how to better understand and make use of entrepreneurship in higher education.
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Stephen W. Wang and Waros Ngamsiriudom
Celebrity-themed aircraft campaigns have become a popular tactic that airlines adopt as part of their experiential marketing efforts. The campaign aims at differentiating their…
Abstract
Purpose
Celebrity-themed aircraft campaigns have become a popular tactic that airlines adopt as part of their experiential marketing efforts. The campaign aims at differentiating their airline from competitors through delivering and/or reforming consumers’ flying experience. The paper aims to discuss this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on data collected from Taiwan, this study investigated the influence of four antecedents – attitude toward celebrity-themed aircrafts, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control and celebrity worship − on purchase intention.
Findings
The results revealed significant positive relationships between all four antecedents and purchase intention. Furthermore, celebrity worship changed the relationships between attitude, subjective norms, as well as perceived behavioral control and intentions.
Originality/value
This study investigates the potential role of marketing program of airlines with a fictional celebrity-themed aircraft that offer immersive flying experience to consumers. The experience starts on the outside where consumers can see the aircraft painted with celebrity-themed livery, and on the inside where the consumers get to experience many celebrity-related products, services, and spirit. According to the results, airlines can influence consumer purchase intention of the airlines services by offering consumers more celebrity related services, including celebrity-themed aircraft, customized products, and limited-amount souvenirs for their patronage. The results also demonstrate that celebrity worship has a significantly moderating effect on consumers’ perception on purchase intention. The results can vary depending on the intensity of celebrity worship.
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Carlos Costa, Zelia Breda, Fiona Eva Bakas, Marilia Durão and Isabel Pinho
This paper aims to investigate the ways in which gender influences entrepreneurial motivations and barriers in the Brazilian tourism sector. As an economic process, tourism…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the ways in which gender influences entrepreneurial motivations and barriers in the Brazilian tourism sector. As an economic process, tourism entrepreneurship is widely spread in Brazil, with tourism development programs promoting it as a strategy to empower women, however limited research exists on how gender roles influence entrepreneurial ideals. This nationwide study aims to provide a contemporary insight into how tourism entrepreneurs in Brazil are situated within current entrepreneurship theorizing by questioning the complexity caused as gender roles influence entrepreneurial conceptualizations of what constitute motivations and barriers.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses online questionnaires aimed, for the first time, at a large variety of tourism sub-sectors in Brazil. Having nation-wide scope, the questionnaires produce knowledge on what motivates and what constrains Brazilian tourism entrepreneurs through a gender lens. Quantitative analysis using SPSS statistical software tests the statistical significance of results and is complemented by the integration of feminist economic theories into the analytical framework.
Findings
The current study’s findings highlight the invisibility of gender’s workings, as the majority of participants did not conceive gender as playing a role in their entrepreneurial experience. Entrepreneurial motivations and barriers show a departure from past literature, such as the fact that similar numbers of male and female tourism entrepreneurs perceive networking as a significant entrepreneurial barrier. This and other interesting findings prompt for alternative conceptualizations of discourses surrounding women’s involvement in tourism entrepreneurship.
Originality/value
This study consists of an original contribution to knowledge on tourism entrepreneurship in Brazil as this is the first time an empirical study has been made on a nation-wide scale regarding the role of gender in Brazilian tourism entrepreneurs’ motivations and constraints.
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Birna Dröfn Birgisdóttir, Sigrún Gunnarsdóttir and Marina Candi
Leadership is an essential contributor to employee creative self-efficacy, and past research suggests a positive relationship between servant leadership and creative…
Abstract
Purpose
Leadership is an essential contributor to employee creative self-efficacy, and past research suggests a positive relationship between servant leadership and creative self-efficacy. However, the relationship is complex and contingent upon moderating variables, and this research examines the moderating effect of role clarity by drawing on social exchange theory and social cognitive theory.
Design/methodology/approach
Data collected from a survey among 116 emergency room employees is used to test the research model using moderated ordinary least squares regression.
Findings
The results confirm a positive relationship between servant leadership and creative self-efficacy and suggest a U-shaped relationship between role clarity and creative self-efficacy. Furthermore, role clarity positively moderates the relationship between servant leadership and creative self-efficacy.
Research limitations/implications
The sample used for this research mainly consisted of highly educated employees within a specific setting. Future research is needed to study if the relationships found in this research can be generalized to other organizational settings.
Practical implications
This research suggests that leaders can support employees' creative self-efficacy through servant leadership, particularly when coupled with high role clarity.
Originality/value
Rapidly changing work environments are characterized by decreased role clarity, so attention is needed to its moderating role on the relationship between servant leadership and creative self-efficacy.
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Eva Hamplová, Václav Janeček and Frank Lefley
The question has been asked, “Where are the women?” explicitly looking at the public relations (PR) industry, but this is a broader issue reflected in many senior management…
Abstract
Purpose
The question has been asked, “Where are the women?” explicitly looking at the public relations (PR) industry, but this is a broader issue reflected in many senior management roles, especially at the corporate board level. One of the solutions suggested is “quotas”. This paper explores the literature to identify the prominent arguments for and against representation regulations (quotas) concerning corporate board gender diversity and concisely presents the findings.
Design/methodology/approach
The exploratory research path first focuses on a literature search using the keywords – “gender diversity”, “board structures” and “female traits” to identify the various issues concerning female members serving on corporate boards. This led to the investigation exploring if 'quotas' could play a role in increasing the number of female directors and, if so, what kind of impact this would have. When the authors discovered the paper by Place and Vardeman-Winter (2018), it was realised that a possible gap in the literature might have been identified. The focus then turned to the PR and corporate communications literature, where it was discovered that the issue of gender quotas was not explored. This paper brings together the germane literature from a wide range of disciplines. To obtain a broad perspective of the arguments, the authors conducted a review of this diverse field of literature through various databases and websites, including Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, publishers' databases such as Emerald Insight, Taylor and Francis, Macmillan, Blackwell, Oxford University, etc.
Findings
There are solid arguments both for and against quotas. However, many opposing views appear to be less sound than the positive ones, which allowed the authors to concur in favour of quotas and the broader adoption of female directors. It is only by identifying problems that solutions can be found – the issues concerning corporate board gender quotas relate to the perception of the arguments for and against quotas; the reality is often different. While there is a strong “business case” and “stakeholder influence” for the inclusion of women on corporate boards, some governments have put further pressure (either voluntary or mandatory) on organisations by imposing a “quota” system. At the same time, other countries are undecided on what action, if any, to take.
Practical implications
This paper can serve as guidance to countries that have not yet implemented quotas or those looking to move from a voluntary to mandatory quotas system. In addition to that, the paper should be valuable to academics, managers, regulators, legislators and policy-makers.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors knowledge, this is the first academic paper to present the critical arguments raised in the diverse literature on corporate board gender quotas succinctly and concisely and, therefore, adds value to the literature. It is also believed to be the first paper to address the issue of quotas in the PR and corporate communications literature.
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This contribution is focused on diversity management in the Czech Republic (CR) with a special focus on foreigners and ethnic diversity management. The importance of diversity…
Abstract
Purpose
This contribution is focused on diversity management in the Czech Republic (CR) with a special focus on foreigners and ethnic diversity management. The importance of diversity management, as part of human resources management, in the CR has increased after the integration into the European Union (EU) in 2004.
Methodology
The chapter introduces three current cases of companies which demonstrated the implementation of diversity management principles. The author of this text supervised the research where internal documents were studied and interviews with a survey were conducted.
Findings
The topic is relatively new both in theory and in Czech practice with the increase in academic publications after the year 2000. It has become an important issue as a consequence of the changing workforce structure due to demographic changes in the Czech society, followed by globalization of the labor market. Foreigners make 5% of the total number of citizens in the CR. Majority of them live in Prague and Middle Bohemia. More than half of foreigners legally residing on Czech territory have permanent stay. The most common nationalities have been for many years Ukrainians, Slovaks, and Vietnamese. Foreigners working in the CR make 9.1% of total employment in the national Czech economy. The most common foreign workers coming to CR to seek for a job are EU citizens, mainly Slovaks, followed by people from Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria. Ukrainians are the most common from the third countries. The number of foreigners in the CR is rising mainly due to foreigners from EU. The main pull factor is work. The most frequent groups are Ukrainians, Slovaks, Vietnamese, and Russians. Three case studies are introduced to show current developments in international companies which are successful in the area of ethnic diversity management.
Research Limitations
For further development of the knowledge about recent trends, it is very valuable to collect case studies. I suggest to continue in this activity and collect more studies to have a wider space for comparison.
Practical Implications
These selected cases show the developments in the CR (and Slovakia) in the past 20 years. Local branches of multinational companies have been inspired by experiences from the headquarters and the needs where adapted to local conditions. As the second case shows, it can be also a rather different story with an original Czech company which rapidly succeeded not only on the market but also in the implementation of diversity management. Companies are using benefits of diversity by enrichment of working teams using specific features of multi-ethnic composition of workers. Diversity management is used in the broader meaning, respecting national, cultural, gender, and other differences. All these examples of activities, projects, clubs, councils, or reports can be an inspiration to anybody who aims to increase diversity in any organization.
Originality
This chapter brings original contribution about current trends in diversity management in the region. It can bring very valuable information to academics, experts in diversity management, managers, students or public in general.
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Hesborn Wao, Clement Oduor Otendo, Jackline Syonguvi, Petronilla Muriithi, Damazo T. Kadengye and Eva M. Brodin
This study aims to understand master’s students’ experiences of service-learning, following their participation in a workshop with local social innovators whose activities had…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to understand master’s students’ experiences of service-learning, following their participation in a workshop with local social innovators whose activities had contributed to combating poverty in East Africa and to determine how this participation affected work on the students’ theses. The authors also explored possible gender differences in this context.
Design/methodology/approach
The study was based on pretest–posttest mixed methods research design. Data were collected from master’s students within the social sciences and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, respectively, in Kenya and Uganda, via surveys and interviews before the workshop, immediately afterwards and six months later.
Findings
Students’ immediate experience was that the workshop contributed to increased critical awareness, adoption of transdisciplinary community-serving approaches and strengthened self-confidence. Six months later, most had related their projects to social problems (e.g. poverty) in their communities. Moreover, the results motivated integration of gender-sensitive curricula based on service-learning in East Africa.
Practical implications
Based on the results, the authors suggest a framework for gender-sensitive curriculum development that can stimulate service-learning in master’s students. Implementation of such a curriculum could eventually contribute to community development, including, e.g. poverty reduction.
Originality/value
Studies on service-learning are rare in Africa, especially in postgraduate education. Gender-sensitive studies on service-learning are generally scarce and the same holds for studies on encouraging STEM students to integrate social innovation into their thesis work. By combining these aspects, this study presents an original contribution to existing research.
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