Search

Academic excellence is brought about by effective leadership, which may encompass the concept of distributed leadership, which signifies a collective engagement. However, leadership positions within higher education are frequently filled with scholars lacking leadership skills and experience, which can be detrimental both to their performance and well-being. To address this, we explored via interviews with academic leaders how academic leadership is defined and conceptualised and what their developmental needs are. Participants ( N = 23) came from junior, middle and senior management levels. Findings suggest that their notions of leadership as well as any developmental needs/activities perceived useful, differ according to their leadership level. Although junior leaders were more concerned with procedural elements of leading, senior leaders focused on mentoring, social expectations and knowledge of academia. These findings have important implications for a wider theoretical conceptualisation of academic leadership, which are typically focused on individual senior leaders. Further, our findings inform leadership development programmes, as universities’ dealings with academic leaders tend not to consider the differing requirements of junior, middle and senior academic leaders.

Knowledge workers’ use of digital technologies and enactment of constant connectivity has been regarded an issue causing interruptions of their work. Such interruptions or distractions from work ha...

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the process and competitive factors of entrepreneurship in digital space in Iran.Design/methodology/approachIn the last decades, the development and advancement of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the business innovations related to them have defined a new economy which is known as “digital economy”. Establishing and running businesses in this digital space means carrying out a kind of electronic commerce by exploiting the internet and other electronic networks. The new digital economy provides exceptional opportunities for many entrepreneurs to create new ventures in different business areas according to electronic commerce models. Given that researchers in Iran have not studied digital entrepreneurship and there is a great interest in digital entrepreneurship, further research is needed on this subject. According to research in Canada by Carrier et al. on cyber entrepreneurship, the authors used the same method and studied five cases that work in digital entrepreneurship in Iran. In this paper, the authors first review the literature of digital entrepreneurship – digital entrepreneurship framework that include a typology of digital ventures and their characteristics, characteristics of digital entrepreneurs, and the distinctions between digital and traditional entrepreneurship. Then five digital entrepreneurs in Iran were surveyed to explore the process of their entrepreneurship and competitive elements applied by them.FindingsThe most notable contribution of this research is the focus on the process of this type of entrepreneurship and the steps which were used by entrepreneurs. Unlike the traditional forms of entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurs in cyber space in Iran did not examine the feasibility of their projects; also, the identification of a business opportunity created business ideas. Another contribution is that the authors found ten factors as the internet‐based entrepreneurs' competitive elements in Iran, and also found interesting results about characteristics of internet‐based entrepreneurs.Originality/valueThis paper provides an overview of internet‐based entrepreneurship in Iran. According to collected information, the authors propose the process of internet‐based entrepreneurship and its competitive elements, and establish a basis for future research.

This paper aims to explore the importance of designer’s perception of the user’s/practitioner’s habitus (institutional context) and how this perception misalignment with the user’s habitus (institutional context) in the case of information artefacts (configurational in nature) brings forth collective affordances and introduces new forms of self-awareness to potential interruptions. Our discussion introduces two theoretical contributions. First, by exploring the specialised practices related to information artefacts in particular institutional context of Iran, we highlight the role of the designer’s perception of the user’s/practitioner’s institutional context in appropriating these artefacts and actualising ‘collective affordances’. Second, by looking at the appropriation processes of these configurational information artefacts, we describe how the misalignment of this perception with that of the user’s/practitioner’s institutional context initiate the new forms of self-awareness among practitioners.