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  • ItemOpen Access
    Can external and internal corporate social responsibility contribute to green customer behaviour? The mediating role of green trust in hotels
    (Wiley, 2023-11-20) Jaaron, Ayham A. M.; Garcia, R. L. Fernando; Javaid, Mudaser
    To date, hospitality literature has mainly used an aggregated measure of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to assess hotels' green trust (GT) and green customer behaviour (GCB). The differential impact of internal and external CSR on GT and GCB is crucial as this may lead to different levels of impacts on hotels' environmental performance. This study investigates how internal and external CSR impact customers' GT and GCB. It also investigates how GT mediates the relationship between internal and external CSR and GCB. Using survey data from 304 customers from eight green hotels in Manila and employing the PLS-SEM technique for analysis, the results show that internal and external CSR positively impact GT and GCB. Moreover, GT mediates the relationship between internal CSR and GCB, but not between external CSR and GCB. This study extends stakeholder theory and the theory of planned behaviour by providing novel insights into how customers' GT and GCB may differ in relation to internal and external dimensions of CSR.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Stick or Twist? Evaluating small business opportunity for sustainable growth
    (ISBE Conference 2023, 2023-10-19) Evans, Marian
    Topic: The paper seeks to examine the key judgment criteria and social cognitive processes used by small business directors and managers to assess and evaluate opportunities for growth. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative approach was taken using a ‘think-aloud’ interview method. A sample of participants from several ‘Help to Grow Management’ programmes consented to take part in the study. Transcripts were analysed using NVivo 14 software and thematic analysis. Findings: Findings suggest that small business directors and managers as key decision makers use three main judgment criteria to assess and evaluate opportunity attractiveness: gain estimation, loss estimation and perceived feasibility. Additionally, they use social, cognitive processes to help validate their assessment for further evaluation. Homophilic teams are more commonly used to assess organisational capabilities and competences. These findings question assumptions about opportunity evaluation as a single event and highlight the process as a cognitive, multidimensional concept. Research limitations/implications: As a relatively small sample was used, findings cannot be generalized to a wider population. However, the study implies that future research should explore the three judgment criteria in greater depth, using a longitudinal design. Practical implications: Team development, promoting homophily as a team strategy and improved understanding on opportunity evaluation as a social and collective process can be enhanced using systematic interventions by trainers and practitioners. This would encourage knowledge exchange, encourage re-evaluation and incorporate feedback at a collective level. Originality/value: This study adds to existing empirical research and supports identification of key judgment criteria for improved approaches to evaluation methods. It also highlights opportunity evaluation as a social process, rather than solely an individual one, and moves the research field away from previous singular event focus on the topic. This approach is still relatively underexplored.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Meeting Migrant Women Entrepreneurs Where They Are: Alternatives to Formal Interventions
    (World Conference on Gender and Women Studies, 2023-11-12) Mwila, Natasha Katuta; Woldesenbet Beta, Kassa; Abi, Meskerem
    This paper presents the findings of an empirical study conducted on internally displaced women entrepreneurs in Ethiopia and internally migrant women entrepreneurs in Zambia. The study elucidates the challenges faced by these women in accessing support and interventions aimed at fostering entrepreneurship. It unveils a critical issue: the failure of formalised interventions in meeting the unique circumstances and needs of these marginalised groups. Historically, governments and organisations have implemented formal interventions to support women entrepreneurs, often requiring participants to conform to rigid formalisation requirements. This paper reveals that such formalised structures inadvertently exclude a significant number of internally displaced and migrant women entrepreneurs who operate in informal sectors due to circumstances beyond their control. We underscore the necessity of reevaluating intervention strategies to ensure inclusivity and effectiveness. We advocate for alternative approaches that embrace the informal nature of these women's businesses and tailor support systems accordingly. These alternatives could include flexible financing options, skill-building initiatives tailored to the informal sector, and mentorship programs that accommodate the unique challenges faced by internally displaced and migrant women entrepreneurs. By highlighting the limitations of formalised interventions and proposing alternative strategies, this paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on empowering marginalised women in entrepreneurship. It emphasises the importance of meeting these women where they are, acknowledging the resilience and resourcefulness they exhibit within their informal businesses, and creating interventions that empower them. Ultimately, this paper calls for a more inclusive and nuanced approach to supporting the entrepreneurial aspirations of internally displaced and migrant women.
  • ItemOpen Access
    A Middle-Range Framework for Mapping African Small-Scale Farmers’ Relationships in the Agri-Market: Implications for the UN Decade of Family Farming
    (The Academy of Marketing Conference, July 2023, University of Birmingham, 2023-07-06) Bannor, Bernard; Ojeme, Mark; Takhar, Amandeep
  • ItemOpen Access
    Outside looking in: Gendered roles and the well-being of working student mothers studying for a part-time PhD.
    (2023-10-04) Cronshaw, Sue; Stokes, Peter; McCulloch, Alistair
    This article contributes to the growing evidence base on well-being in doctoral study. It draws on 35 qualitative, in-depth interviews to explore how the well-being of an understudied group - working doctoral student mothers - is affected when undertaking part-time PhDs. Whilst there is a growing literature on the research student experience and an increased awareness of mental health issues in doctoral study, there has been little exploration of the experiences of part-time PhD students. Moreover, this is particularly true of mothers undertaking doctorates on a part-time basis. The experiences of this sub-group of research students constitutes the gap to which this paper responds. It explores the consequences of having to straddle a number of competing domains and examines how the gender role conflict, marginalisation and lack of support experienced by doctoral student mothers impacts on their psychological, physical and social well-being. The article concludes with a number of recommendations which institutions may wish to consider.
  • ItemEmbargo
    Wrestling with the “sustainability” conundrum: considering ways forward for the business school curricula – the DBA as a solution?
    (2023-09-28) Stokes, Peter; Smith, Simon
    Sustainability remains a vital grand challenge for the 21st century. In spite of multifarious initiatives, actions and ambitions it, in many instances, finds itself at an impasse. While there is evidence of some innovative valuable and positive thinking and practice taking place in some business school (BS) curricula, nevertheless, there remains a significant number of BS programmes which, all-too-often, continue to operate embedded and implicit calcified curricula comprised of modernistic educational approaches and introspective institutionalised research regimes. Such contexts are commonly predicated on producing students who, often unwittingly, focus on capitalistic reductionistic targets, profit and their career in spite of purported ideals. This is not to say that many students are not equally concerned with values and alternatives sustainability models – especially as new generations and thinking emerge. Nevertheless, BSs find themselves at the epi-centre of this challenge and, indeed, they must even take a degree of the responsibility for, at the very least historically, for engendering some of the sustainability dilemmas. This chapter considers this problematic status quo using a framework of organizational ambidexterity and promotes the DBA as a potent way of responding to this intractable conundrum.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Pooled Longitudinal Dataset on the Assessment of an Apprenticeship-Based Entrepreneurship Intervention in Nigeria
    (Brill, 2023-09-18) Olofinyehun, Adedayo; Adeyeye, Jumoke; Egbetokun, Abiodun; Olomu, Michael; Oluwadare, Jessica; Sanni, Maruf; Orisadare, Monica
    This dataset presents longitudinal data collected through four surveys (in six-monthly intervals) of fresh university and polytechnic graduates in Nigeria. The data were collected from 21,940 unique young men and women who underwent National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) programme across ten states in Nigeria. The NYSC programme is a compulsory one-year national service that all Nigerians under the age of 30 years must undergo after graduation. A key component of the one-year service is the Skills Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development (SAED) programme of the NYSC. The dataset is useful for many purposes. It contains enough information to fully profile the entrepreneurship and apprenticeship characteristics of the fresh graduates. Moreover, it can be used to quantify the potential pool of future entrepreneurs among highly educated Nigerian youth. The dataset was originally used to assess the impact of NYSC, being an apprenticeship-based entrepreneurship intervention, on entrepreneurial outcomes among young persons. However, its use may also extend to an assessment of the impact of compulsory entrepreneurship training in the Nigerian university system that produced most of the respondents.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Guts, Grit and God? Spiritual Capital and Entrepreneurial Resilience in a Turbulent Environment
    (Elsevier, 2023-06-06) Kolade, Oluwaseun; Egbetokun, Abiodun A.; Adegbite, Emmanuel
    This paper investigates the role of spiritual capital in a turbulent sub-Saharan African context, where religion plays a dominant role in society and firms are grappling with macroeconomic shocks and institutional instability recently exacerbated by covid-19 pandemic. The study draws from a survey of 622 firms in one of Africa’s biggest business hubs – Lagos, Nigeria. The results show that spiritual capital significantly mediates the impact of social capital on entrepreneurial resilience, helping entrepreneurs to cope in unstable and difficult terrain. The study highlights the significance of spiritual capital as a distinct resource complimenting other intangible resources such as social capital.
  • ItemEmbargo
    ‘Frenemy’ of progress? Investigation of the disruptive impacts of generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) on learning and assessment in higher education
    (2023-08) Kolade, Oluwaseun; Owoseni, Adebowale; Egbetokun, Abiodun
    ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art chatbot built upon Open AI’s generative pre-trained transformer (GPT-3), has generated a major public interest and caused quite a stir in the higher education sector, where reactions have ranged from excitement to consternation. With approximately 175 billion parameters at its command, GPT-3 is one of the largest and most powerful natural language processing AI models available, with vast and versatile capabilities surpassing previous chatbot models. We conducted a quasi-experiment in which we deployed ChatGPT to generate academic essays in response to a typical assessment brief, and then subjected the essays to plagiarism checks. In addition, Chat GPT was instructed to generate contents in various formats, including editorial and poetry, and the output was subjected to summary thematic analysis. The results of the quasi-experiment show that ChatGPT is able to generate highly original, and high quality, contents from distinct individual accounts in response to the same assessment brief. However, it is unable to generate multiple original contents from the same account, and it struggled with referencing. The discussion highlights the need for higher education providers to rethink their approach to assessment, in response to disruption precipitated by artificial intelligence. Thus, following the discussion of empirical data, we propose a new conceptual framework for AI-assisted assessment for lifelong learning, in which the parameters of assessment extend beyond knowledge (know what) testing, to competence (know how) assessment and performance (show how) evaluation.
  • ItemMetadata only
    Organizational Behaviour
    (Pearson, 2017-05-01) Robbins, Stephen; Judge, Tim; Campbell, Timothy
  • ItemMetadata only
    The Four Day Work Week: A Chronological, Systematic Review of the Academic Literature
    (Springer, 2023-04-13) Campbell, Timothy
    Despite having been propounded for at least 50 years, the four-day work week (4DWW) has recently attracted global attention. The media headlines are dominated by the positive outcomes that can be expected by converting to a 4DWW. However, on examination the claims often have foundations that derive from reports published by advocacy groups and organisation’s self-reported results rather than scholarly research. This paper turns to the academic literature and uses a chronological, systematic review method to address the questions of what positives and negatives can be attributed to the 4DWW? Does the scholarly research support the popular contemporary claims? And what can be learned from more than 50 years of scholarly 4DWW publications that can inform future research? Drawing on 31 academic articles that specifically researched the 4DWW, the conclusions found that the majority demonstrated favourable results such as increased morale, job satisfaction, cost reductions and reduced turnover whilst negatives included performance measures and monitoring being intensified, scheduling problems, and that benefits may fade over time. The impact on productivity and the environment were inconclusive. Overall, the scholarly research paints a more complicated and ambiguous picture compared to that presented by 4DWW advocates and the media. More contemporary research utilising rigorous methodologies is required.
  • ItemEmbargo
    Mind the Gap – A Comparative Analysis of (In-)Congruences in HRD Role Perception
    (Routledge, 2023-08-29) Lundgren, Henriette; Stewart, Jim; Kah, Sally; Jones, Jenni; Poell, Rob F.; Hamlin, Robert G.; Scully-Russ, Ellen
    Inspired by role conceptualisations and calls to rethink and reshape activities and competencies of professionally qualified HRD practitioners, we examine HRD’s role and its associated activities through established versions of role theory. We ask: To what extent is there congruence in role expectations of HRD practitioners and other stakeholders? We study this question by interviewing 71 HRD practitioners and non-HRD managers across 16 organisations in three countries (US/UK/NL) and analysing their responses on HRD role expectations and perceptions, congruences and incongruences. We map our findings on a 2 × 2 matrix and find that only a small number of organisations see professional HRD practitioners as strategic partners; most organisations find themselves within a more operational HRD role definition, or somewhere ‘on the fence’, with mixed ideas of role perceptions. Yet, a few organisations struggle to find alignment on HRD’s strategic aspirations and how those play out in practice. While our findings highlight the progress that HRD practice has made towards strategic partnership, we conclude that many HRD practitioners struggle to gain a seat at the table. We close our paper by discussing implications for HRD practice and scholarship.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The role of collective intelligence and collective agency in enterprising communities
    (Emerald, 2023-08-29) Blenker, Per; Rae, David
    Purpose This paper aims to introduce the concept of Entrepreneurial Collective Intelligence (ECI) as a means of understanding how communities of entrepreneurial actors learn to act both collectively and knowingly. It explores how connections between processes of CI, agency and action can explain and enable the development entrepreneurial community organisations. Design/methodology/approach There is a selective literature review of prior works on the related fields of community and collective entrepreneurship; collectives and intelligence; agency and action. The review is used to propose a framework of collective entrepreneurial intelligence, agency and action. An interpretive approach is used to research four case studies of community organisations which use CI to generate entrepreneurial outcomes. Findings The cases are compared with themes from prior literature to develop a conceptual model of four ECI processes which enable intelligence, agency and action: collaborative processes; distributed working; intelligence representations and organisation of infrastructures. These are theorised to discuss ideas, challenges, methods and questions to enhance entrepreneurial actions, based on sharing knowledge and learning, in the context of collective agency, action and intelligence. Research limitations/implications The four processes, both together and separately, represent a coherent framework useful for further studies on the role of collectives in enterprising communities. Practical implications The four processes each represent a central area of attention, not only for development, learning, decision-making and leadership within enterprising communities but also for entrepreneurship education in terms of alternative didactics, pedagogies and learning forms. Social implications The improved knowledge on the role of collective agency and CI within entrepreneurial processes is useful for strengthening civil activism and other fruitful forms of entrepreneurial collective processes. This may help solve complicated societal problems where traditional conceptions of entrepreneurship fail. Originality/value The conceptual contribution is to explain the dynamic relationships between ECI and action, mediated by collective agency. The role of CI in informing entrepreneurial communities is explored and four enabling processes are proposed. This coherent framework is useful for further studies on the role of collectives in enterprising communities, whilst informing their learning, decision-making and leadership.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Top 500 Companies in the East Midlands 2023 Report
    (Cross Productions, 2023-08-08) Rae, David; Brown, Adam; Iben, Manisha; Charles, Alexandra; Rossiter, William
    Celebrating the business success of the East Midlands as a region, the East Midlands Top 500 Companies 2023 report showcases a strong, diverse range of resilient firms. Professor David Rae of De Montfort University has compiled and analysed the data providing the fourth years’ insight into the most influential Companies and the largest industries operating from the East Midlands
  • ItemOpen Access
    Local Solutions for National Problems: How Nonprofit Organisations Tackle the Sustainable Development Goals
    (Social Innovations Partners, 2023-08-09) Kah, Sally
    There are many studies on several actors (including organizations) attempting to tackle the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, especially at the strategic level. However, attempts by local actors in developing economies are often underexplored. Through multiple in-depth interviews with nonprofit organizations, this article provides evidence of how nonprofit founders develop solutions for national problems using local resources. The findings from multiple interviews with the founders revealed that they demonstrate pro-social behaviour but have distinct personal experiences and backgrounds that shaped their nonprofit model. Interestingly, both founders utilize knowledge of the local environment, grants from international NGOs, educational hubs, and local community actors to enact activities (and actions) to end period poverty, vocational skills gap, and gender inequality.
  • ItemMetadata only
    Retail analytics: store segmentation using Rule-Based Purchasing behavior analysis
    (Taylor and Francis, 2021-04-29) Bilgic, Emrah; Cakir, Ozgur; Kantardzic, Mehmed; Duan, Yanqing; Cao, Guangming
    Retailers are facing challenges in making sense of the significant amount of data available for a better understanding of their customers. While retail analytics plays an increasingly important role in successful retailing management, comprehensive store segmentation based on Data Mining-based Retail Analytics is still an under-researched area. This study seeks to address this gap by developing a novel approach to segment the stores of retail chains based on ‘purchasing behavior of customers’ and applying it in a case study. The applicability and benefits of using Data Mining techniques to examine purchasing behavior and identify store segments are demonstrated in a case study of a global retail chain in Istanbul, Turkey. Over 600 K transaction data of a global grocery retailer are analyzed and 175 stores in Istanbul are successfully segmented into five segments. The results suggest that the proposed new retail analytics approach enables the retail chain to identify clusters of stores in different regions using all transaction data and advances our understanding of store segmentation at the store level. The proposed approach will provide the retail chain the opportunity to manage store clusters by making data-driven decisions in marketing, customer relationship management, supply chain management, inventory management and demand forecasting.
  • ItemMetadata only
    How to detect illegal corporate insider trading? A data mining approach for detecting suspicious insider transactions
    (Wiley, 2019-08-12) Esen, M.Fevzi; Bilgic, Emrah; Basdas, Ulkem
    Only in the U.S. Stock Exchanges, the daily average trading volume is about 7 billion shares. This vast amount of trading shows the necessity of understanding the hidden insights in the data sets. In this study, a data mining technique, clustering based outlier analysis is applied to detect suspicious insider transactions. 1,244,815 transactions of 61,780 insiders are analysed, which are acquired from Thomson Financial, covering a period of January 2010–April 2017. In order to detect outliers, similar transactions are grouped into the same clusters by using a two-step clustering based outlier detection technique, which is an integration of k-means and hierarchical clustering. Then, it is shown that outlying transactions earn higher abnormal returns than non-outlying transactions by using event study methodology.
  • ItemMetadata only
    Human Resources Information Systems: A Recent Literature Survey
    (Emerald, 2020-11-18) Bilgic, Emrah
    With the advent of technology and science, the business environment will keep changing very fast. Today, Information Technology (IT) is used in almost all business applications. The most important improvements are being realized at the management side since IT is fully supporting decision-making processes now. Human Resources Management (HRM) is being affected by IT such as web-based technologies and intelligent systems and these systems make HRM much more effective. Today’s HRM-related software do not deal with just payrolls, they also include recruiting and record-keeping, training and performance appraisal which have transitioned HRM from task-oriented to people-oriented. Today, Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) and electronic HRM (e-HRM) are being utilized by many organizations all over the world and play a strategic role in decision-making processes for effective and efficient HRM. This study investigates the recent literature on HRIS, e-HRM and Decision Support Systems in HRM to identify the improvements and debates on contemporary Human Resources Management.
  • ItemMetadata only
    Analysis of traffic accidents with fuzzy and crisp data mining techniques to identify factors affecting injury severity
    (IOS Press, 2021-12-31) Tuncali Yaman, Tutku; Bilgic, Emrah; Esen, M. Fevzi
    Injury severity in motor vehicle traffic accidents is determined by a number of factors including driver, vehicle, and environment. Airbag deployment, vehicle speed, manner of collusion, atmospheric and light conditions, degree of ejection of occupant’s body from the crash, the use of equipment or other forces to re-move occupants from the vehicle, model and type of vehicle have been considered as important risk factors affecting accident severity as well as driver-related conditions such as age, gender, seatbelt use, alcohol and drug involvement. In this study, we aim to identify important variables that contribute to injury severity in the traffic crashes. A contemporary dataset is obtained from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). To identify accident severity groups, we performed different clustering algorithms including fuzzy clustering. We then assessed the important factors affecting injury severity by using classification and regression trees (CRT). The results which would guide car manufacturers, policy makers and insurance companies indicate that the most important factor in defining injury severity is deployment of air-bag, followed by extrication, ejection occurrences, and travel speed and alcohol involvement.
  • ItemRestricted
    Clear vision: a step towards unravelling student recruitment in English universities?
    (Emerald, 2023-07-24) Gandy, Rob; Wolstencroft, Peter; Geer, Katherine; de Main, Leanne
    Purpose The recruitment of undergraduate students within English universities is of vital importance to both the academic success and the financial stability of the organisation. Despite the primacy of the task, there has been a dearth of research looking at related performance and how to ensure that the process is optimised. The purpose of this study was to investigate the degree of variation both within a university and between different universities. The reliance that individual programmes and/or universities place on the Clearing process is key; given its uncertainty, resource demands and timing shortly before students take up their places. Design/methodology/approach The Nomogramma di Gandy diagrammatical approach utilises readily available data to analyse universities’ performance in recruiting students to different programmes, and the degree to which they each rely of the Clearing process. Inter-university performance was investigated on a whole-student intake basis for a sample of English universities, representative of type and region. Findings The study found that there were disparate patterns for the many programmes within the pilot university and also disparate patterns between different types of universities across England. Accordingly, universities should internally benchmark their programmes to inform both strategic and tactical decision-making. Similarly, Universities and Colleges Admissions Service benchmarking inter-university patterns could inform the overall sector. Originality/value The approach and findings provide lessons for analysing student recruitment which could be critical to universities’ academic and financial health, in an increasingly competitive environment.