Linking participatory and GIS-based land use planning methods: A case study from Burkina Faso

Sustainable land use planning is crucial for realizing the aim of food security and for combating land degradation in the Sahel. A participatory land use planning workshop was organised in a village in the eastern region of Burkina Faso to investigate land use problems, their causes, effects and possible solutions. Participatory research tools and GIS were combined to get insight into possible conflicts or synergies between different land use options as mapped by different ethnic groups. Pictograms were used to locate alternative land use options on the map, after which they were digitised for analysis with GIS. The workshop confirms the importance of integrating scientific and local knowledge to develop concrete options for sustainable land use that fit to local realities and aspirations. Local people are knowledgeable about the driving forces behind land degradation, they take actions to combat the effects of degradation, and they have concrete ideas about alternative land use options. The use of GIS proved its added value in the participatory process of integrated land use planning. The maps that were produced also facilitate discussions between community members, researchers and government representatives at the regional level, both regarding current land use problems and regarding alternative options as perceived by the local population.     

Small business survival and inheritance: evidence from Germany

This paper investigates whether small businesses face financial constraints that affect their survival. A model of moral hazard is developed in which financial constraints arise endogenously. The model predicts that higher private assets relax financial constraints and have a positive effect on the firm’s probability of survival. The empirical analysis confirms that the entrepreneur has a higher propensity to stay in business when she inherits capital. This effect is particularly strong for entrepreneurs who switch from self-employment into wage employment.

Is the Ethical Culture of the Organization Associated with Sickness Absence? A Multilevel Analysis in a Public Sector Organization

The main aim of the present study was to examine whether an ethical organizational culture is associated with sickness absence in a Finnish public sector organization at both the individual (within-level) and work unit (between-level) levels. The underlying assumption was that employees working for organizations that are characterized by a strong ethical organizational culture report less sickness absence. The sample consisted of 2192 employees from one public sector city organization that included 246 different work units. Ethical organizational culture was measured with the Corporate Ethical Virtues scale covering eight sub-dimensions. Sickness absence was inquired by asking the participants to report how many days they had been absent from work because of their own sickness over the past year. Multilevel structural equation modelling showed that, at the individual level, perceptions of a strong ethical organizational culture were associated with less sickness absences after controlling for the background factors. This link was not found at the work-unit level. The findings indicate that an ethical organizational culture plays a significant role in enhancing employee well-being measured as sickness absence. It seems that especially supervisor’s ethical role modeling and possibilities to discuss about ethical issues are important factors in preventing sickness absence in the organizations.     

Customer perceived value,satisfaction, and loyalty: the role of willingness to share information

This study proposes and tests an integrative model to examine the relationships among customers’ willingness to share information, satisfaction, perceived value, and loyalty in a retailing context. This study extends research on customers’ willingness to share information from trust and privacy concerns toward key outcome measures such as perceived value, customer satisfaction, and loyalty, and is thus among the first to model customers’ willingness to share information with companies in robust theoretical retailing frameworks. The proposed relationships were tested using data from two retailing contexts – groceries (N = 429) and do-it-yourself (DIY) (N = 895). Findings from the two samples suggest that both perceived value and satisfaction are significant determinants of customers’ willingness to share information with a company. Although some differences emerge in the two studies, structural modeling largely supports the hypothesized framework and positions customers’ willingness to share information as an important antecedent of their loyalty intentions and behavior. This study provides practitioners with preliminary insight into the relationship between willingness to share information and perceived value, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. This study advances retailing research, as it is one of the few empirical studies investigating the role of customers’ willingness to share information in driving loyalty and its relationship with perceived value and satisfaction in a retailing context.     

Effects of time pressure,type of shopping,and store attributes on consumers’ satisfaction with grocery shopping

The aim of this study is to investigate whether satisfaction with grocery stores is affected by type of grocery shopping in conjunction with time pressure, and which attributes are important for satisfaction. Fictitious grocery stores are constructed according to a fractional factorial design by varying access, price level, supply quality/range, and service quality. In an Internet survey, 1023 Swedish consumers rated satisfaction with major vs. fill-in shopping imagining they were under high or low time pressure. The results showed that satisfaction is higher for fill-in shopping than major shopping, that time pressure has no effect on satisfaction, and that price level, service quality, and product quality/range are more important for satisfaction with major shopping, whereas access is more important for satisfaction with fill-in shopping. It is also found that the importance of attributes for satisfaction depends on type of shopping more than on individual characteristics.     

Network embeddedness in the internationalization of biotechnology entrepreneurs

This study investigates how entrepreneurs of biotech enterprises embed in domestic and international networks so as to internationalize. We advance a contextual framework of embeddedness of internationalizing entrepreneurs, providing a contribution (i) by synthesizing and applying existing conceptual insights from the networking literature to provide a more culturally sensitive view of getting embedded for international entrepreneurship in the biotech industry and (ii) by adding insights into the practices and (micro)processes of how and in what ways embeddedness integrates with the internationalization of biotech entrepreneurs. Our study involves six entrepreneurs from Canada, Finland, and New Zealand. Context-specific embeddedness was studied by exploring the (i) type, (ii) strength, (iii) locality, and (iv) importance of the international and national network ties among internationalizing entrepreneurs. We found differences in relation to the locality of universities and research institutes, role and type of financiers, and customer focus in internationalization. For instance, while customers were central to the embeddedness of Canadian and New Zealand entrepreneurs, Finnish entrepreneurs had no focus on their customers, but acted solely through sales channels and partners. The customer focus of New Zealand entrepreneurs was mainly international, whereas it was domestic in the case of Canadian entrepreneurs.     

When value co-creation fails: Reasons that lead to value co-destruction

Value co-destruction is a possible outcome of business, public and consumer collaboration. We examine reasons that lead to value co-destruction and when these reasons emerge. Since previous research on the topic is limited, our research approach is abductive qualitative research. The empirical data emerges from 19 semi-structured interviews conducted in seven organizations operating in Finland. Results indicate that value co-destruction emerges due to eight reasons. Our empirically grounded framework for value co-destruction demonstrates when these reasons emerge (before or after the collaboration or interaction) or they are time-independent. Results provide important insights for academics and managers into how value co-creation efforts can have negative outcomes and at what stage each reason is more likely to happen.