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Drawing on the dynamic capabilities theory, this paper proposes that supply chain (SC) strategies (i.e. the lean SC and agile SC strategies) will mediate the relationship between big data analytics (BDA) and SC performance. Furthermore, from the perspective of strategic alignment, this study hypothesizes that the effect of the SC strategy on SC performance is differently moderated by the information system (IS) strategy (i.e. the IS innovator and IS conservative strategies).

This study used 159 match-paired questionnaires collected from Chinese firms to empirically test the hypotheses.

Results show the positive direct and indirect impact of BDA on SC performance. Specifically, the lean and agile SC strategies mediate the relationship between BDA and SC performance. Furthermore, the results indicate that the IS innovator and IS conservative strategies differentially moderate the effect of the lean and agile SC strategies on SC performance. Specifically, the IS innovator strategy positively moderates the effect of the agile SC strategy on SC performance. By contrast, the IS conservative strategy positively moderates the effect of the lean SC strategy on SC performance but negatively moderates the effect of the agile SC strategy on SC performance.

This study provides a comprehensive understanding of how SC and IS strategies can help firms leverage BDA to improve SC performance.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of board gender diversity (BGD) on working capital management (WCM) decision by scrutinizing different positions covered by female board directors.

This study uses a panel data regression model with fixed effect estimations and the generalized method of moments (GMM) to determine the impact of BGD on WCM strategy. This study uses a panel data analysis for 277 non-financial firms listed on Bursa Malaysia over the period from 2011 to 2019.

The results of this study show that female directors fulfilling either monitoring or executive positions increase the investment in working capital (WC), suggesting a conservative WCM. Precisely, results from this study are consistent with the embedded risk aversion traits of female executives and, hence, preserve high level of investment in WC, which allows superior levels of liquidity to meet firms’ financial commitments. The results also show that Malaysia commitment to gender equality is a key moderator in the female directors – firm WCM relation. The authors find that when the level of gender equality is greater, female directors support firms in adopting aggressive WCM strategies.

This study’s findings provide insights for corporate decision-makers in helping them to determine the board’s design in term of roles and composition that enhances the efficiency of WC. The results also provide guidelines for policymakers and regulators to formulate strategies that support more female board representation. In this way, firms should appoint more female directors on their boards to ensure prudent WC decisions. Moreover, given that female directors are an important determinant of a firm’s WC policy, investors and various internal or external monitoring groups need to factor boardroom gender diversity into their investing, hiring and monitoring mechanisms.

While prior research has examined the effect of BGD on firm performance, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the effect of BGD on the WCM decision.

This study investigates the mediating role of working capital management (WCM) efficiency between board diversity (based on gender and financial knowledge) and firm performance. The study further examines which WCM approach (conservative, moderate, and aggressive) they employ to increase (decrease) firm performance.

The study employs listed energy firms of Pakistan over the period 2010 to 2019. The system generalized method of moments estimator and logit model are utilized to estimate the underlying relationships.

The results show that WCM efficiency partially mediates the relationship between board financial expertise (BFE) and firm performance. Nonetheless, the presence of female directors is merely symbolic until they reach a certain level as only the quadratic term of board gender diversity (BGD) has a significant effect on firm performance. Female directors do not influence WCM efficiency. The results also demonstrate that BGD encourages a conservative WCM approach, while BFE encourages a moderate WCM approach. Furthermore, both conservative and moderate WCM approaches are significantly associated with firm performance.

The findings hold implications for increasing the representation of women and financial experts on board to improve the capital structure decisions of the energy firms in Pakistan.

This study is the first attempt to explore the mediating role of WCM efficiency between board diversity and firm performance. To the best of the authors' knowledge, no previous study has investigated the effect of BGD and BFE on different WCM approaches distinctly.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of entrepreneurial export orientation on the performance of SMEs in Nigeria.

The study follows a quantitative research design using survey methods with statistical treatment. Several t‐tests and correlation tests were used to ascertain whether differences exist between proactive export orientation and conservative export orientation and performance.

The findings indicate that proactive entrepreneurs were more engaged in the export market than conservatives. The findings also suggest that firms that adopted proactive orientation achieved higher performance, profitability, and growth compared with those that adopted a conservative orientation. It was also found that proactive entrepreneurs allocated more financial resources for export activities than conservative entrepreneurs.

The research was limited to four cities; a broader geographic sampling to include larger urban and rural areas would better reflect the national profile. The study is limited to four industrial sectors; thus the results cannot be applied to other sectors that were not part of this study.

The study offers practical suggestions on how SMEs can improve growth, performance, and profitability by engaging in proactive export orientation behaviors. The paper also stresses the importance of developing export markets because it enhances growth, performance, and profitability.

The study draws owners'/managers' attention to the fact that proactive export behavior enhances performance, growth, and productivity. It also provides insight into the export orientation and performance issue, which should contribute to the future development of this line of research, particularly in developing countries such as Nigeria. Therefore, the study is of significant value to practitioners and scholars alike.

The objective of this paper is to illustrate and examine the different flexibility strategies adopted by supply chain participants as a result of different environmental uncertainties.

An exploratory multi‐case study, involving five Chinese companies in the textile and apparel industry, was conducted.

The analysis, based on the supply chain literature, reveals that the unpredictable dynamics of the supply chain can arise from a variety of internal and external sources, including suppliers, operating systems, customers, and competitors. In response to the various environmental uncertainties and risks in the supply chain, four types of flexibility strategy are identified in our case analysis: laggard, conservative, agile, and aggressive. The results also suggest that the adoption of flexibility strategies should match a firm's business environment and that better supply chain responsiveness can be achieved in two ways: by reducing uncertainties and by improving supply chain flexibility.

The key limitation of the study is that it focuses solely on the textiles and clothing industry, which makes it difficult to generalize the results to other industries. Another difficulty arises from the subjective criteria employed in some constructs, such as the perceived aggressiveness of competition, the predictability of customer demand, and the designations of companies in the proposed strategy categories.

The proposed theoretical framework can assist managers in properly diagnosing and deploying supply chain flexibility strategies. The actions identified for promoting supply chain flexibility can also be used to assess the various options for exploiting or acquiring flexibility strategies.

Expanding on the previous research approach of examining flexibility strategies from the perspective of a single firm, this study draws on the multi‐case approach to posit a series of propositions that link the adoption of specific supply chain flexibility strategies to various environmental conditions in a supply chain context and proposes a conceptual framework to illustrate how supply chain responsiveness can be improved in today's volatile market environment.

As widely known and well established, strategic decision-making at family firms is an interface between business interests and family considerations. The purpose of this paper is to understand the underlying basis of decision-making in setting corporate strategy and designing chief executive officer (CEO) compensation at founder- vis-à-vis descendant-led family firms in the Indian pharmaceutical sector.

A sample of 106 BSE-listed pharmaceutical companies have been studied over the period 2012–2017 resulting in a total of 636 firm-year observations. Impact of family involvement in business (FIB) on corporate strategy and CEO compensation has been analysed by constructing multivariate panel data regression models. To deal with the problem of endogeneity, Arellano-Bond (1991) dynamic panel data estimation procedure has moreover been conducted.

Supporting stewardship theory, founder-owned and governed firms have been found to favour “growth” strategy and distribute “conservative” executive pay, thereby exerting a positive moderating impact on the strategy-compensation linkage. On the contrary, descendants/second-generation entrepreneurs have put forth a “conservative” stance for growth and innovation, and have rather been observed to favour a “liberal” compensation policy, thereby showcasing the application of behavioural agency theory.

The research is a novel attempt to unravel the interaction between corporate strategy and CEO compensation in a family firm backdrop carried out in the context of an emerging economy. The study, moreover, adopted an all-encompassing definition of FIB (ownership, management and governance).

This paper attempts to reconcile two opposing views of the strategies and conduct of closely held firms: that of entrepreneurship and that of family business. The former view suggests that these firms tend to be value maximizing organizations that pursue growth strategies and outperform. The latter often argues that these businesses are utility maximizers that pursue conservative harvest strategies and fail to outperform.

In order to reconcile the controversy, this paper examines the literature in an attempt to relate ownership priorities and risk taking preferences to governance distinctions relating to family involvement, ownership, and management.

It concludes that the value‐maximization expectations of the entrepreneurship literature apply only to lone or unrelated founder businesses whose owners, unencumbered by family distractions, embrace growth and outperform. By contrast the utility‐maximization expectations of the family business literature apply when there are multiple family owners or executives. These parties are argued to be harvest‐oriented, mediocre performers, especially after a new generation has entered the firm. This may be because their priorities and loyalties are shared between business and family considerations. However, family and lone founder firm outcomes are argued to be further shaped by owners' levels of control and ownership, their managerial roles, and the breadth of family personal and generational involvement.

The analysis has implications for the effective governance, board composition, and management of these different types of firms.

The paper reconciles two important literatures to derive implications for strategy and performance that must be addressed by agents of corporate governance in family and founder firms.

This paper explores budgetary practices in a Tanzanian university after decentralization.

Data were collected through interviews, document analysis, and observation. Moreover, Bourdieu's theory was used in open and axial coding procedures for data analysis.

The findings show that decentralized budgeting was a disillusionment. Administrators failed to transfer financial authority to resource recipients. Budgetary practices were shaped by the social structure/budget cycle (field), resources possessed by budgetary actors (capital) and the sincerity patterns of actors in budgetary practices (habitus). Most resource recipients had insincerity in budgeting habitus deploying subversive strategy, while the minority had sincerity in budgeting habitus, deploying submissive strategy. On the other hand, administrators had sincerity and insincerity in budgeting habitus, deploying conservative strategy.

In order to enhance effective decentralization, resource recipients should be provided with adequate financial resources and budgeting skills. Furthermore, they should be trusted and recognized. Moreover, in order to shape budgeting strategies and practices towards achieving organizational objectives, managements should identify and work on internal, external and technical budgetary constraints. In addition, they should promote sincerity in budgeting habitus as habitus can be created, altered, and reproduced through knowledge.

This is the first paper to investigate budgetary practices in a university setting, employing all Bourdieu's six theoretical concepts. It contributes to Bourdieu's theory by introducing a submissive strategy. In addition, it introduces “episteme” concept as the opposite of “doxa.” Moreover, the paper responds to the call by Deering and Sá (2018) to investigate what guides budgetary practices in a university setting. The paper has also demonstrated the role of approval organs and subordinates which were neglected in prior studies. It proposes a theory of budgetary practice in a University setting when budgeting is decentralized. It thus responds to the call to investigate and theorize the role of actors in calculative practices (such as budgeting) in a University setting (Argento et al., 2020; Aleksandrov, 2020; Grossi et al., 2020; Ozdil and Hoque, 2017).

This paper aims to explore the trade-off between liquidity, risk and return under sectoral diversification across distinct economic settings and investment strategies.

A novel multi-objective portfolio model is proposed to assess investment decisions under sectoral diversification, where the objective functions and constraints are interval-valued. The objective functions used are risk minimization (through the semi-absolute deviation measure of risk), maximization of liquidity (using turnover as a proxy) and the maximization of logarithmic return. Besides coherence constraints (imposing that the sum of the percentages of investment assigned to each stock should be equal to 100%), constraints regarding the maximum proportion of capital that can be invested (ensuring a minimum level of diversification) and cardinality constraints (to account for transaction costs) are also imposed.

Besides the trade-off between return and risk, the study findings highlight a trade-off between liquidity and return and a positive relationship between risk and liquidity. Under an economic crisis scenario, the trade-off between return and liquidity is reduced. With the economic recovery, the levels of risk increase when contrasted with the setting of the economic crisis. The highest liquidity levels are reached with the economic boom, whereas the highest returns are obtained with the economic recession.

This paper suggests a new modeling approach for assessing the trade-offs between liquidity, risk and return under different scenarios and investment strategies. A new interactive procedure inspired on the reference point approach is also proposed to obtain possibly efficient portfolios according to the investor's preferences. Regarding previous approaches suggested in the literature, this new procedure allows obtaining both supported and unsupported efficient solutions when cardinality constraints are included.

The present study aims to seek the strategic analysis of the entrepreneurship of agricultural colleges (AC).

In terms of approach, this research was a combination of exploratory and hybrid methods. The present study was conducted in four stages. In the first stage, an open-ended questionnaire was designed to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of entrepreneurship in AC (qualitative method). In the second stage, the Delphi-Fuzzy questionnaire was designed based on the results obtained from the first stage. In the third stage, the criteria of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of entrepreneurship of AC were analyzed based on the pairwise comparison (quantitative method) by the sample using a fuzzy hierarchical analysis process (FHAP). In the fourth stage, presented strategies were ranked based on pairwise comparison using FHAP.

From the analysis of weaknesses, strengths, opportunities and threats facing AC for entrepreneurship, 12 strategies were presented in 4 groups of aggressive, conservative, competitive and defensive.

The literature review showed that no research has been done so far to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing university entrepreneurship, especially AC. So the present study analyzes the weaknesses, strengths, opportunities and threats and proposes practical strategies for moving toward the formation of entrepreneurship AC. According to the gaps in providing SWOT of the AC, the results of this research can pave the way for policy makers and planners in this field.