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Using the upper echelon framework, the present study delves into the interplay between the financial styles of senior executives (CEOs and CFOs) and their impact on earnings and risk management within non-financial firms across BRICS countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The period of study is 2011–2022. The analysis utilizes panel data that aligns managers with their respective firms to track the fixed effects of managers on earnings and risk management practices. The overall result of the study underline that the financial styles of top executives, captured through their manager-fixed effects, along with their observable characteristics, exert significant influence on decisions related to earnings and risk management. This study's findings contribute a novel contextual perspective and enhance comprehension within the realm of emerging markets, thereby enriching the existing understanding of the subject matter.

This paper employs the difference-in-differences (DID) to investigate the impact of “going global” on enterprises' financialization. Baseline estimation shows that the degree of financialization of enterprises participating in the Belt and Road Initiative was lower compared with those not participating in the Initiative. Mechanism analysis reveals that “going global” through Belt and Road Initiative has improved enterprises' profitability of real sector investment and inhibited their motivation of financialization. These findings provide new perspectives for more effectively promoting enterprises to participate in the Belt and Road construction and helping inhibit enterprises’ financialization.

This paper examines the relationship between the family governance evolutionary stages and the rate of return required by family businesses' shareholders (ke), building on an institutional and relational governance lens. We make the distinction between the informal stage, the family council stage and the family constitution stage. Findings from a sample of Spanish private family firms reveal that family firms in the family constitution stage have a lower ke than family firms in the family council stage and the informal stage. Surprisingly, family firms in the family council stage seem to have a higher ke than family firms that are in the informal stage, which points to ceremonial adoption effects and a mismatch between governance needs and practices in the family council stage. We also find that the effect of different family governance stages on ke is conditional on the number of family shareholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to explore the negative impacts of social relationships (SR) on business activity. As a research context, the video game industry (VGI) and the video game developers’ (VGDs) relationships are analyzed.

This study finds that imitation increases the productivity of laggards more than that of leaders, while innovation has the opposite effect. As firms approach the productivity frontier, the effect of imitation on productivity decreases, while that of innovation increases. The empirical evidence suggests that search costs are the mechanism underlying this effect. Firms increase their productivity by imitating productive firms. When they become more productive, search costs increase, because they have fewer opportunities to imitate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that participate in network platforms can effectively overcome resource bottlenecks and reduce the impact of the coronavirus pandemic of 2019. However, the reasons for this phenomenon remain unclear. To further investigate this issue, we selected 310 Chinese SMEs to examine the relationship between platform network ties, network bricolage, platform empowerment, and enterprise innovation, including both radical and incremental innovation. The empirical results demonstrate that platform network ties can enhance enterprises’ innovation performance. Furthermore, the empirical verification of this study's assumptions provides evidence that network bricolage mediates the relationship between network ties and enterprises’ innovation performance, while platform empowerment plays a moderating role. The study results could potentially contribute to the more effective management of platform networking ties, empowerment, and bricolage, thus benefiting the management of SMEs.

Excessive usage of social networking sites (SNSs) has permeated individuals’ daily lives, leading to negative outcomes such as reduced cognitive performance and physical problems. Regardless of the threat, few researchers have examined the negative consequences of social networking sites on employee performance. This study uses cognitive theory and Eysenck's theory of personality as the foundation of the proposed model to explore whether excessive social networking site usage deteriorates workers’ cognitive performance. We propose that excessive use of social networking sites negatively impacts employees’ cognitive performance, that extroverted individuals are the most distracted by social networking sites compared to introverts, and that ambiverts are the least distracted by them in the workplace. A sample of 266 Chinese and Pakistani users of social networking sites from the software house service sector was tested empirically to validate the proposed model. This study contributes to mitigating the negative impact of excessive SNS usage by implementing and using digital well-being applications to control addictive behavior. Furthermore, it provides theoretical and practical insights for organizations to improve employees’ cognitive performance.

Drawing from the resource-based view of the firm, Penrosean theory, and the resource dependence theory, it is argued in this study that the characteristics of directors are key factors for achieving the resources that listed SMEs will require to develop innovation, a scenario that often highlights the necessary replacement of the founding board members. We test our proposed relationships with a sample consisting of all the companies listed on the MAB (Alternative Spanish Stock Market) between 2010 and 2017. Our results offer new insights into the role of the founding board members, highlighting the need for the professionalization of the governance of these SMEs, by appointing independent outside directors and by decreasing the proportion of founding members on the board. Likewise, our results showed that this relationship is moderated by the age of the company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have examined various aspects of the entrepreneurial mindset, which have provided insights into its attributes, qualities, and operations. However, the different perspectives have led to a diverse array of definitions. With the array of differing definitions, there arises the need to better understand the concept of an entrepreneurial mindset. Therefore, the question remains as to what exactly is the entrepreneurial mindset and how do people tap into it. In examining the literature, we find that three distinct aspects have arisen through the years: the entrepreneurial cognitive aspect—how entrepreneurs use mental models to think; the entrepreneurial behavioral aspect—how entrepreneurs engage or act for opportunities; and the entrepreneurial emotional aspects—what entrepreneurs feel in entrepreneurship. Using those as a basis for our work, we unravel the entrepreneurial mindset by examining deeper into the perspectives and discuss the challenges for implementing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have advocated the development of entrepreneurship as a design science. One foundational challenge in a design science is to identify design principles. We argue that a particular field can draw on a design knowledge from different design sciences to develop design principles. In particular, we show that entrepreneurship research can learn from one branch of artificial intelligence studies called "genetic algorithm," which is a design field that creates solutions for complex, nonanalytical, and ill-structured problems. We illustrate the analogous transfer process by identifying complementary design principles for one exemplary entrepreneurship theory, namely effectuation. In turn, these additional effectual design principles further effectuation theory as a design science and help advance entrepreneurship as a nascent design science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital entrepreneurship has been described as a "great leveler" in terms of equalizing the entrepreneurial playing field for women. However, little is known of the emancipatory possibilities offered by digital entrepreneurship for women constrained by social and cultural practices such as male guardianship of female relatives and legally enforced gender segregation. In order to address this research gap, this paper examines women's engagement in digital entrepreneurship in emerging economies with restrictive social and cultural practices. In so doing, we draw upon the analytical frameworks provided by entrepreneurship as emancipation and cyberfeminism. Using empirical data from an exploratory investigation of entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia, we examine how women use digital technologies in the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities. Our findings reveal that women in Saudi Arabia use digital entrepreneurship to transform their embodied selves and lived realities rather than to escape gender embodiment as offered by the online environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explored the balance between societal benefits that negatively affect firms' financial performance by eroding their competitive advantage and positive effects that enhanced their reputations as technological leaders to study the effects of forward citations upon firms' financial performance. Results suggest that the potentially negative effects of receiving forward citations that diffused internally-developed knowledge through users' subsequent inventions is sometimes offset by potential increases in the reputational effects enjoyed by competitors that persistently produce blockbuster patents (as well as by inventions that prove to be highly basic or "gateway" in their impact upon subsequent technology streams). This positive effect is not universal for all firms as the number of highly cited patents that benefit firms' abilities to realize higher returns on sales is limited by the speed with which diffusion of knowledge embedded within patented inventions occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study articulates the importance of an entrepreneurial method approach to leadership, relevant contextual issues, and policy implications for developing entrepreneurial ecosystems in a rural context. The entrepreneurial method is proposed as the foundations of a new leadership style to facilitate the creation and success of rural entrepreneurial ecosystems. The contextual issues that make rural entrepreneurial ecosystems unique include the critical need for entrepreneurial leadership in their creation and development; the role of entrepreneurial social infrastructure in enabling and supporting development; the need to leverage networks and virtual platforms to access markets, knowledge, and funding; the scarcity of and need to develop enterprising individuals; the role of institutions and supportive governance; and the importance of natural capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We test experimentally whether individuals high in some entrepreneurial characteristics are more likely to engage in destructive behavior than other individuals. In the joy‐of‐destruction game, participants can either preserve or costly burn the endowment of each other. In some treatments they can hide from other participants whether they are responsible for destruction. We found that participants high in some entrepreneurial characteristics are significantly more likely to adopt destructive behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on an analysis of how service firm digitalization is reflected in the business model design. We make use of an eclectic research approach combing insights from digitalization research, service firm research, and business model research. Against the background of nine in-depth case studies including 41 interviews and covering a 3-year-period of time (2014–2017), we identify four digital service firm business model archetypes. Our findings show that implementing digital technologies and digitalizing business activities helps service firms to overcome traditional service-related business constraints. Digital technologies help to speed up service processes and to disentangle the still very often assumed linkage between human activities and services. Our data further reveals that service firms are enabled to enhance service availability and service efficiency in this realm. Interestingly, we observe no effect of ongoing digitalization on the firms' service-related knowledge base. Changes in the knowledge base only relate to digital knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work addresses motivation for participating in volunteered geographic information systems (VGIS), which enable a crowdsourcing process to create information-driven value. VGIS, implemented by executing a project and its crowdsourcing strategy, are driven by online networked community participation enabled by a technological infrastructure. However, without community engagement, crowdsourcing, the core process of a VGIS, fails to create value and its main advantage becomes one of its biggest challenges. To address this problem, we present a conceptual framework to assist in designing engagement strategies to motivate and facilitate goal-oriented participation. To this end, we examine the relation between Maslow's human needs and VGI, its different goals, and current studies on motivation. We analyze intrinsic and internalized motivation, focusing on the needs outlined in self-determination theory. Finally, we apply Vroom's expectancy theory of motivation in relation to VGI. As a result, the proposed framework consists of three design tools: core drivers, participant types to whom efforts to motivate should be aligned with the project rationale, and an engagement process consisting of three main actions: Enroll, Grow and Retain. With this framework, future VGIS developments can have a structured approach that guides participation and the design of engagement strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Learning from experience and knowledge management described in existing literature evidence that there are different practices that enable these processes, and that a distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge is essential for our analysis.

While much work has considered trust's effect on workplace organization, particularly the granting of job autonomy, this relationship remains essentially a black box, lacking insight on the deeper process underlying employers' ultimate trust or autonomy decision. I seek to unpack the trust-organization nexus, focusing on the role of employers' inferences about employees' trustworthiness. Integrating extant literatures, I posit that employers use group membership—and specific group-level traits—as an observable signal concerning individual employees' trustworthiness and decide how much autonomy to grant to employees that have similar observable individual-level qualities but belong to different, easily recognizable social groups. Empirical analysis of job autonomy differentials between groups of migrants with different ethnonational identities reveals systematic patterns of variation that cannot be explained on the basis of observable employee traits alone. Hence, the evidence strongly supports the signalling value of group membership, demonstrating an important real-world feature of trust governing workplace organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The entrepreneurial ecosystem, an emerging and developing theoretical stream, has the potential to expand our understanding of entrepreneurship. In previous research, this concept has been studied from the university perspective, but it has not yet been introduced in the field of entrepreneurial support. Additionally, the growing number of university business incubators has led to increasing research interest in the entrepreneurial support field. This research project seeks to develop a more robust understanding of sustainable university-based entrepreneurial ecosystems through an in-depth analysis of an essential entrepreneurial support element: the university business incubator. Our exploratory research study draws on 48 face-to-face interviews with key members of university-based entrepreneurial ecosystems to explore the operation of three cases through the lens of social capital theory. Our analysis suggests that all three social capital dimensions are relevant to the effective functioning of the university-based entrepreneurial ecosystem and contribute to its sustainability: applying the structural dimension of social capital enhances access to resources; addressing the cognitive dimension strengthens relationships among ecosystem members; and investing in the relational dimension enhances complementarity and trust while the ecosystem evolves. Thus, the interaction of these dimensions may further contribute to the sustainability of the university-based entrepreneurial ecosystem. Enhancing the development and application of the three social capital dimensions as an aspect of proactive management of the entrepreneurship ecosystem has the potential to improve outcomes for ecosystem members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in a firm’s backward-dispersion patent-citation score are a useful, non-financial indicator of patent value that is positively-related to Tobin’s q. V-scores, which analyze content patterns between patents’ technological-class codes and those of their antecedents, provide contemporaneous information for investors to assess firms’ economic prospects that is more time-sensitive than forward-looking information such as forward citations. V-score analysis offers useful insights about the nature of post-acquisition learning within technologically-tumultuous industries like media-services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims at analyzing an under-researched and important topic in the context of family business, namely the conflicts between active and non-active shareholders stemming from their different roles and goals. It seeks to understand why and how roles and objectives of non-active shareholders differ in family firms and why and under which circumstances conflicts between active and non-active shareholders arise. Using a multiple-case, inductive research design and drawing on identity theory, we develop a conceptual framework explaining when active and non-active shareholders based also on their different roles and goals tend to get into conflict with one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of a transgenerational orientation is one of the most significant challenges that family businesses face and only a small number actually survive across generations. While prior research has focused on the business unit to provide us with a solid understanding of how corporate governance affects business performance and continuity, the role of the business family in the development of a transgenerational orientation has received less attention. To address this gap, this article applies a new systems and social identity theory framework to examine how family governance and business family identity can contribute to strengthening the transgenerational orientation of the business. A transgenerational orientation is defined as a decision premise to maintain the family's control over the business across generations. Using a large data set, findings show that the presence of family governance measures and the business family's identity are positively related to a transgenerational orientation of the business, with business family identity acting as a mediator. Thus, the development of family governance measures can foster communication within the business family and enhance the family members' emotional investment in the business which strengthens the transgenerational orientation in the business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a theoretical model in which for-profit and nonprofit employers compete to hire a worker who derives intrinsic motivation from the nonprofit's social mission. Using a unique data set of California establishments, we document a new empirical result that training has a higher incidence in nonprofits than in for-profits. In nonprofits, we also find evidence of lower base wages (with the wage gap increasing in skill level) and less incentive pay. We use the model to interpret the new result concerning training and the results (both here and from the prior literature) on base wages and incentive pay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the effect of the individual perceptions of social capital and culture in entrepreneurial aspirations before and after the economic crisis in Western Europe. Following the approach of the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50, 179-211, 1991), we advance the analysis of the effect of the perception of subjective norms in the entrepreneurial intentions. We studied the Total Early-Stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) of twelve countries in 2006 and 2010. The results reveal that the perception of having social networks is significant for the TEA, and it increases after the economic crisis. However, the cultural factors do not have a significant impact, except the one related with the perception of social equality. The results obtained through the double perspective of this analysis (individual's social capital vs cultural factor of individualistic perspective) offers a certain dilemma when we try to understand the entrepreneurial intntion through the individual's perception of subjective norms, following the Ajzen's model. The more individualist is a person, the lower the weight of its social capital. However, the more a person has access to social networks, the greater his entrepreneurial intention will be. This result opens future lines of research focused on understanding the value of the individual's social capital for different countries and groups of entrepreneurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to develop elements of answers to the effect of adequate entrepreneurial activity that would have effects on economic growth. This work analyzes the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth for a panel of developing countries over the 2004-2011 periods. In this study, we used two measures of entrepreneurship: the new density and the potential of innovation. We estimated a growth function using the method of static and dynamic panel data. Our results show that the new density and growth are significantly and positively correlated. Our results also show that if the short-term impact of technological innovation on growth is negative, this effect is positive in the long term. This result confirms the theoretical predictions, namely the theory of spillage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to their roles in protein biosynthesis, components of cellular ribosomes perform roles that contribute to a number of important cellular processes. Exploitation of processes has led to the use of ribosomal parts as solubility enhancer partners and purification matrices in protein expression. In this work, an engineered version of the E. coli ribosomal protein L29 (L4H2) as a fusion partner for enhancing cellular expression of proteins that are poorly expressed in bacteria was exploited. It was demonstrated that a chimeric fusion of L4H2 with various Fcγ receptors increases total expression up to 3.2-fold, relative to Fcγ receptors expressed without the fusion. Mechanistic insights using a novel application of in vivo ribosome display suggested that, although total cellular mRNA levels of L4H2-Fcγ receptor remained unchanged relative to wild-type Fcγ receptors, mRNA levels of actively translated L4H2-Fcγ transcript increased about 3.8-fold relative to actively translated levels of wild-type Fcγ transcript. Similar increases in protein expression in the context of the other proteins tested, showing the generality of this approach for proteins beyond human receptors was observed. These results extended the number of potential schemes by which orthogonal ribosomal parts can be used to enhance complex protein expression in bacterial platforms. Within a larger scope, this study features the possibility of engineering 5′ tags that enhance mRNA affinity to ribosomes as strategies to augment translation. It was envisioned that the successful application of profiling active ribosomes in a highly targeted manner could be beneficial for mechanistic translation studies concerning synthesis of target proteins. © 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Biotechnol. Prog., 32:285-293, 2016 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]