Business & Economics

This book contains two Open Access chapters.

The 21st volume of Advances in Health Care Management presents informed commentaries solicited from leaders across the field of health care management. Each chapter tackles a specific health care challenge, describing the state of the research on the challenge, identifying appropriate organizational innovations to respond to the challenge, and setting out a future research agenda. Expert authors consider what is known, what is not known, and what is needed to fill the gaps and advance knowledge. Responding to The Grand Challenges in Healthcare Via Organizational Innovation explores in detail varied scenarios and suggestions for dealing with unexpected crises, improving diversity, equity and inclusion in health care, building strategic alliances for inter-sector collaboration, as well as analyzing organizational governance and physician financial risk models.

Formal financial systems are emerging rapidly in Africa, driven by rising financial literacy and technological innovation, and accelerated by informal savings groups that foster inclusive growth across the continent. While prevalent among the poor, the savings groups phenomenon extends to Africa’s growing, yet still fragile, middle class, underpinning economic resilience and providing a tool for community participation as well as cooperative entrepreneurial development. These groups are also becoming important agents for social and economic empowerment, independent of age and gender.

Transforming Africa: How Savings Groups Foster Financial Inclusion, Resilience and Economic Development gives voice to the local and international agents of grassroots economic empowerment initiatives that thrive in Africa. Presenting a unique through in-depth empirical research into savings group activities in over a dozen African countries, this book explores savings groups through the lens of financial inclusion, reflecting on formal finance, economic and social outcomes.

SG4Africa was launched in April 2018 to explore these dimensions of savings groups and provide novel, empirically-grounded research across different geographies in Africa. Led jointly by the Policy Experimentation; Evaluation Platform and the University of Johannesburg, the SG4Africa consortium includes members from more than a dozen African countries.

Advances in Accounting Behavioral Research promotes research across all areas of accounting, incorporating theory from, and contributing knowledge to, the fields of applied psychology, sociology, management science, ethics and economics. Focusing on research that examines both individual and organizational behavior relative to accounting, the series provides a unique opportunity for the exchange of peer reviewed knowledge across all areas of accounting behavioral research and the development, discussion and expansion of theories from psychology, sociology and related disciplines.

How can businesses around the world incorporate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into their models, policies and practices? The editors of Business in the 21st Century help answer this by bringing together scholars from around the world with chapters examining various industries ranging from finance, hospitality, aviation, tourism, food production and more.

With international perspectives, business concepts such as HRM, employee wellbeing, leadership and digitalisation are also researched within the framework of the SDGs. Insights from how to implement such policies in a post-pandemic world are introduced to help businesses navigate the biggest disruption they have faced in decades.

Business in the 21st Century provides a valuable framework for scholars, managers, leaders and business stakeholders to help navigate the incorporation of SDGs into the business world, shape strategy, improve practices and create a better business future.

Carlos Sánchez González fills this gap in our knowledge with this empirical study. He develops an innovative model that considers the management stages of mutual fund companies, overcoming the traditional dispute between the different approaches used in banking and insurance research. Using data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate efficiency levels, Sánchez González investigates the Spanish case, one of the most relevant industries in the Euro market, in order to provide insights into issues that have never been explored before.

His study consists of two parts. The first explains the basic concepts, offers a brief explanation of the basic DEA models, and gives a review of the most important applications to financial institutions, all while developing a unique set of industry-specific variables in order to show how to apply the original slacks-based measure (SBM) approach. The second reviews the major concepts of SBM variations and shows how they can be applied to the Spanish mutual fund family industry in order to obtain unprecedentedly accurate empirical measures of its efficiency.

This ground-breaking work offers much food for thought to academic researchers and postgraduate students of management, finance, and marketing.

Technology, Society, and Conflict comprehensively studies and systematically highlights technological inequalities as a source of conflict in digital development while developing an economic and legal approach to resolving them. With a progressive approach, chapters reveal the social nature of technological inequality and digital development conflicts and model them as social institutions. The conflicts of digital development are identified and analysed in detail: global conflict of the technological inequality in the modern world economy; gender conflict; conflict in the labour market in the context of automation based on Robots, Big Data, and AI; and conflict in international trade. The manifestations of the digital divide are considered based on international practical experience at all levels of management – country, regional, business and household levels.

This 30th volume of Contributions to Conflict Management, Peace Economics, and Development gives special attention to the latest experience in technological inequality and the aggravation of digital development conflicts in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis in 2019-2020 with foresight for the post-pandemic period.

This book contains an Open Access chapter.

Over the past two decades, the field of talent management has established itself as a key area of management practice and research. Emerging from the practitioner literature in the 1990s, the research evidence bases truly materialised in the late 2000s onwards. The launch of the EIASM Workshop on Talent Management in 2012 coincided with this surge in research interest, and we are now in a critical time in the evolution of our understanding of talent management.

Talent Management: A Decade of Developments presents valuables insights into the progression in the critical understanding of talent management, building upon a decade of the EIASM Workshops. Bringing together leading voices in talent management research to reflect on recent developments and the current state of research, examining key issues such as talent philosophies, star performers, talent turnover and retention.

Aimed at researchers, postgraduate students, and professionals in the field, this collection features the leading experts in their respective areas within talent management. Talent Management: A Decade of Developments charts the evolution of talent management, illustrating the progress, prospects, and challenges that have transpired over the last ten years.

Winner of the Ernest Bormann Research Award from the National Communication Association

The Emerald Handbook of Group and Team Communication Research considers the current research of group communication scholars, provides an overview of major foci in the discipline, and points toward possible trajectories for future scholarship. It establishes group communication’s central role within research on human behaviour and fosters an identity for group communication researchers. 

This book establishes communication scholarship as essential to group research by exploring the various dimensions of communicating in groups and teams. Communication is fundamental to group research, and the deeper, more nuanced treatment of the subject in this handbook consolidates and expands theory and research in the area.

Before 2019, coworking spaces were flourishing, however the COVID-19 pandemic put growth on hold. As organizations have begun to move towards more hybrid ways of working, they are becoming the preferred option and are particularly attractive for new business ventures. There are significant gaps in the research of coworking spaces: their forms, configurations, influences, challenges, and how to manage transformations of incumbents when establishing spaces. The trend is being noticed, but a better understanding of the phenomenon and a consideration of management innovations is needed to fully harness the true possibilities of coworking spaces.

In Awakening the Management of Coworking Spaces, the chapter authors combine a scientific approach with managing implications, developing theoretic constructs, reporting qualitative and quantitative findings about challenges, potentials, effects, managerial solutions, and success stories. The contributors are academics and practitioners, bringing together their research and real-world experiences to help organizations shape best practices.

An applicable and scholarly collection of chapters offers the latest research on coworking spaces – both the benefits and challenges – and provides a roadmap for corporations to get the best out of their employees whilst maximising their potential.

Women Courageous: Leading Through the Labyrinth is a collection of true experiences by women from different parts of the world, leading in the political, academic, non-profit public, and private sectors. The stories illustrate their courage and also include a scholarly analysis to reshape our understanding of courage - how it shows up, develops, and facilitates transformation.

Through this work, the editors offer a new definition: 'Courage is pushing forward, step by step, while everything is holding you back. Often unnoticed by others, courageous acts come with great emotional challenges, and also with a sense of purpose and determination. Courage is how we transform, not only ourselves but those we support and love and the work to which we have dedicated our lives.'

This international group of authors weaves insights, research, and practices gleaned from walking the leadership labyrinth in their military, aerospace, public works, university, and school education, and nonprofit careers. The book offers stories of ambition, self-actualization, co-creation, as well as conflict, loss, betrayal, and healing, that will echo your own experience. The book will surprise you with new wisdom and releases fresh courage in all of us, to rise and meet the monumental challenges of this moment.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent the leading governance frame with which the international community tries to address complex interconnected global issues. The SDGs were adopted in 2015 by all 193 UN member states and were also quickly embraced by most Multinational Enterprises (MNEs), International NGOs and leading business schools. But progress has proved slow. In 2020, the United Nations announced a ’decade of action’ to speed-up progress in the area. To what extent and under what circumstances can MNEs help in this effort: revitalize the SDGs and rescue the beneficial effects of globalization?

Volume 17 in the series Progress in International Business Research argues that the SDGs can be considered the only relevant agenda for progress in the years to come. This makes it all the more important to critically consider the role played by MNEs, as well as explore the way IB scholarship can help MNEs to ‘walk the talk’ on the complex issues that affect the sustainable development – thereby leveraging the future shape of ‘globalization’.

The book contains contributions by established as well as young scholars and is intended to stimulate present and future research, create new forms of conceptualizations and provide first evidence of more focused empirical research on the topic of MNEs and the SDGs.

Behavioural economists have developed alternatives to Expected Utility Theory as descriptive and normative models of risk preferences. One popular view is that these alternative descriptive models are generally better descriptively, but that they tend to be inferior normative models for guiding risky decisions. Models of Risk Preferences collects studies that critically review these two claims from the perspective of experimental economics.

The Research in Experimental Economics series focuses on laboratory experimental economics, but includes theoretical, empirical, or field economic research to encompass the broader experimental economics community.

Grounded in the awareness that many public sector inefficiencies remain unsolved, Identity in the Public Sector presents a critical consideration of the interplay between public sector reforms and organizational changes across a variety of levels.

Framing this issue and its importance within organizational and management studies, Andrea Tomo considers how organizational change is translated and experienced at the individual level, exposing why public employees often resist such projects. Building upon related literature for a better understanding and management of complex organizational change initiatives in the public sector, Tomo provides a more integrated picture of individual identity, emphasising the influence of cultural and context-specific factors, as well as their importance in policy-making processes, particularly their potential for improving the effectiveness of public administration.

Offering insights for public management into a murky, often complex research area, Identity in the Public Sector provides a new theoretical and practical approach for the analysis and interpretation of the intersection between identity and public enterprises and services.

This 25th edition of Research on Professional Responsibility and Ethics in Accounting includes articles from a diverse group of expert authors. Subjects covered explore many aspects across professional responsibility and ethics in accounting, including balancing values vs profits, whistleblowing, earnings management, ethical financial reporting, and moral identity.

A disruption occurs when human motivation embraces new technology and allows it to enhance and expand the experience of everyday life – the disruptor is the technology, while disruption is the human being engaged in a new behaviour. The acceptance and appropriation of new technologies creates a business disruption, which changes, interrupts, transitions, and eventually transforms people’s habitual way of doing things. The Philosophy of Disruption provides a structural understanding of how disruption differs from regular change, presenting methods for conceptualizing beneficial responses into products, services, or experiences.

Knowledge about disruption is not about knowing what happens, but how it happens. The core challenge of disruption is the essential questions we need to ask in every situation and why we need to ask them. Formulating testable principles of disruption, two critical phases are described in The Philosophy of Disruption, preparing rapid responses to disruptors: firstly, the transition phase – the immediate changes brought about by a radical new idea fundamentally altering our relationships. Secondly, the transformative change phase – using that radical new idea to establish and sustain an entirely new organization or system. 

Investigating and clarifying these transitions and transformations, The Philosophy of Disruption provides a framework for measuring, planning, and changing how organizations are run, offering processes for understanding and translating conceptualization into action.

Many of India’s most disadvantaged citizens face severe social and economic challenges. Social Sector Development and Inclusive Growth in India poses the essential question of whether growth strategies based on the human development approach, that is, social sector development, render growth inclusive. This comprehensive study considers all components of the social sector in aggregate and also covers both the financial and physical aspects to answer this question.

Author Ishu Chadda examines the various World Bank reports and scholarly literature on this subject to quantify inclusiveness in India. Her research further highlights the major dimensions of inclusive development like poverty alleviation, employment generation, and access to equal participation. Chadda’s research has been conducted to scrutinize the long-run and short-run association between the social sector and inclusive growth in India using the Autoregressive-Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach. Further, she looks at the relationship between social sector development and inclusive growth in India at a macro-level.

Inclusive and sustainable economic growth is essential for a fair society and is thus a key component of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. This timely study will provide vital information to academic researchers and postgraduate students within as well as outside of the Indian context. Policy makers and practitioners of development studies, sociology and developmental economics will benefit from the key insights provided.

The Covid 19 pandemic transformed the slow morphing of work modes into rapid shifts that heightened VUCA characteristics globally. The management of these shifts in work dynamics is the focus of the chapters in this volume. The variation of post-pandemic outcomes for businesses, from complete collapses to profit booms, easily motivates an interest in the values that influence truly positive outcomes. Also, the health sector, globally, has borne much of the brunt of the pandemic and needs to draw practical lessons to promote its adaptability and sustainability through future crises.

Responsible Management of Shifts in Work Modes – Values for Post Pandemic Sustainability, Volume 2 looks at specific issues relating to ethical leadership, people management, resilience, and the management of consequences for business and healthcare systems. In the process, contributors identify challenges to and engage in in-depth discussions of work values that enrich people management. The necessary qualities needed to develop these work values both now and in the future are thus highlighted in the different chapters: both individual and organisational characteristics are explored while developing ways to promote responsible management through fairness to stakeholders and ethical leadership.

As a post-pandemic future incorporates new realities distinct from the old normal and yet does not change the purpose of all responsible management, this book deliberates on the necessity of values, virtues, and skills to make the necessary work mode shifts in small, medium, and large organisations positively impactful for the future of humanity.

In 2009 three consultants, green to the consulting industry were tasked with a new challenge, the activation and licensing of a new, 100 bed hospital, in only 90 days. Pulling from concept of “Day in the Life” simulations used in the military, the Hospital Incident Command System (HICS), and adult learning theories the consultants developed a method that healthcare facilities could use to ensure readiness. Thus, was born the concept of Dress Rehearsal.

A Guide to Healthcare Facility Dress Rehearsal Simulation Planning: Simplifying the Complex provides a step-by-step scalable framework to coordinate an Interdisciplinary Dress Rehearsal event for a project or facility of any size.

Developed for use as a resource throughout your Dress Rehearsal journey, each chapter of this guide builds upon the last and should be read in succession. We hope you leverage our lessons learned and experience and apply them to your facility to support a safe Day 1 activation.

Volume 41 of Research in Economic Anthropology explores a wide range of topics of interest to economic anthropology. The opening paper presents a novel approach to anthropological-economic infrastructural research in England, specifically London’s Thames Tideway Tunnel. The volume’s first section consists of four papers that are tied together by two common threads: the roles of money in social ties between people, and moral concerns regarding these and other roles and uses of money in society. The section covers commercial surrogate mothers in Russia, social welfare provision in Pakistan, the management of a communal fund within a school alumni association in South Korea, and a credit scheme’s impact on women in Nigeria.  

Part two focuses on two basic necessities of human life—food and clothing - examining a New Zealand food security initiative that rescues “waste” food, modern transformations of a pre-owned clothing market in Hamburg, Germany, and Muslim fashion retail business in the same country’s capital city, Berlin.

Finally, the volume closes with a third section that fixes an anthropological lens on contemporary developments in Latin America, analyzing the larger fair trade movement and its particular manifestations and implications in Oaxaca, Mexico, the cost-effectiveness of the reintegration of ex-combatants in Colombia, and patron-client relations in Brazil and how these have been politically perceived and presented by domestic and foreign intellectuals and academics, respectively.

In this 30th volume of Advances in Taxation, editor John Hasseldine includes studies from expert contributors to explore topics such as: the stock market reaction to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act; strategic repatriations made by firms; and corporate social responsibility and tax planning. Three studies separately examine individual responses to taxation including the renunciation of U.S. citizenship due to the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, the imposition of a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, and the effects of social media on tax compliance in a developing country.

Reporting peer-reviewed research contributions from the U.S., Canada, and Malaysia Advances in Taxation Volume 30 is essential reading for those looking to keep abreast of the most recent research, including empirical studies using a variety of research methods from different institutional settings and contexts

Research Methodology in Strategy and Management advances understanding of the methods used to study organizations – including managers, strategies, and how firms succeed.

Offering innovative ideas that explore how strategy and management methodology can be developed, the chapter authors in Volume 14, Methods to Improve Our Field, consider approaches that range from the re-imagining of secondary data in the digital age and Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

Methods to Improve Our Field is a necessity for both academics and researchers interested in the progression and cutting-edge studies of management, strategy, international business, entrepreneurship, and organization theory.

Advances in Global Leadership collects insights from leading scholars and practitioners and fresh ideas from promising newcomers to the field. As in Volume 13, we begin by focusing on global leadership in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. Volume 14 is introduced with a tour-de-force analysis by twenty authors on the cross-cultural differences reflected in nineteen national responses to the global crisis. The resulting overarching lessons offer useful guidance to leaders grappling with the pandemic and beyond.

This volume is organized as follows:

• Part 1 presents research papers, many of which advance the conceptualization and practice of global leadership effectiveness, the topic promoted in our Call for Papers. Other chapters report on novel research that opens up pathways for other global leadership scholars.

• The Practitioner's Corner in Part 2 features interviews with practitioners and scholar-practitioners whose work illustrates global leadership effectiveness, by modeling its practice, development, and teaching.

• Finally, the editors reflect upon the contributions made toward advancing our understanding of global leadership effectiveness and suggest future research directions.

Given its focus on important and timely global leadership topics, this book is a must-read for both scholars from wide-ranging disciplines and practitioners with a diverse set of global leadership roles. The Advances in Global Leadership series, with its finger firmly on the pulse of this exciting field, is an essential collection of global leadership knowledge and novel research approaches.

The labour economy is being transformed by new technology, as employers embrace new practices that utilise flexible work contracts and a whole new generation of tech-savvy employees. Leaders and decision-makers, managers and aspiring professionals, and a whole generation of students soon to join the workforce, will find Reshaping the Future: Phenomenon of Gig Workers and Knowledge-Economy invaluable. Unique insight is given into the changing business environment and the laws that are being created to regulate it. Those that adopt successful strategies, as set out by Moghavvemi, Teng, and Mahmoud will have the competitive edge needed to survive these changes, and thrive, well into the mid-twenty-first century.

Most countries in the world today have entered an advanced phase of globalization with the objective of increasing growth of output and employment. With the evidence suggesting that this has been the case at a general level incorporated with a good sign of reducing income gap at the global level and an acceptable trend towards a global village, some inequalities across different groups of economies have been increasing in hand with the resultant increase in the aggregate pollution levels. The combined effects of these two negative impacts gives rise to the problem of maintaining sustainable development.

Globalization, Income Distribution and Sustainable Development: A theoretical and empirical investigation addresses these feasibility issues of globalization, focusing on the impact of globalization on income distribution in a wider perspective and exploring the impact of globalization on sustainable development in a range of countries across the globe.

With the help of new theories and the latest data, Globalization, Income Distribution and Sustainable Development asks the question: Are we eyeing for a better future?

Not all markets are alike: the European entrepreneur requires knowledge on how to avoid pitfalls before believing and focusing on opportunity. European Venture Toolbox features the leadership toolkit future decision makers, innovators, and entrepreneurs need to build a venture in Europe.

Many European entrepreneurs are prone to the rhetoric of company building based on fast-growing start-up survivors, abundance of circulating capital, and sub-optimal business models monetizing late. They fall into the trap of thinking a mildly successful company can survive in the European ecosystem even if it does not thrive. This toolbox provides a framework to assess risk and return of choices, iteratively implement business, and avoid being blinded by incorrect principles not grounded in financial reality.

European Venture Toolbox: The path for SMEs to grasp and defend opportunities is a compelling book for all small-to-medium enterprises. Written by a theoretician and a practitioner, it captures Europe-specific perspectives, examples, and case studies to provide an alternative insight.

The Entrepreneurial Behaviour series is focused on expanding the scope of Entrepreneurial Behaviour theory and analysis and enriching practice by encouraging multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary approaches.