Serving Time: Volunteer Work,Liminality and the Uses of Meaningfulness at Music Festivals

Drawing from a participant‐observer study of volunteering in the context of UK music festivals, we examine how the sense of meaningfulness and community relate to instrumental goals of consumption and efficiency. We argue that the liminal nature of the festival setting supports an ambivalence in which meaningfulness is established through constructions of community, while the commodification of community feelings leads to heterogeneous understandings of the work setting. Our findings reveal heterogeneous ways in which work was rendered meaningful by festival volunteers, ranging from (1) A commodity frame, characterizing work as drudgery seeking ‘fun’ through consumption (2) A ‘communitas’ frame, emphasizing a transcendental sense of collective immediacy and (3) A cynical frame, where communitas discourse is used instrumentally by both managers and workers. We discuss meaningful work as caught between creative community and ideological mystification, and how alternative workspaces vacillate between emancipatory principles of solidarity and neo‐normative forms of ideological control.     

Financing constraints and investment efficiency: evidence from a panel of Canadian forest firms

This article examines the financial constraint of 18 listed Canadian forest firms between 2000 and 2014 following the stochastic frontier approach. Empirical results support the observation that Canadian forest firms have a strong dependence of using both equity financing and debt financing as the coefficients of both equity and debt financing mean functions are significant at 1% level. The distribution of investment efficiency index (IEI) of all 18 firms demonstrates a loss of around 40% of the rate of investment due to financing constraints. Regional analysis demonstrates that the time-varying patters of IEI of three provinces are significantly different.     

Linking Customer Engagement to Trust and Word-of-Mouth on Facebook Brand Communities: An Empirical Study

Given the rise of social networking sites, particularly Facebook, companies have started engaging with customers in this newly emerged digital space. This study explores the role of customer engagement in enhancing trust and word-of-mouth on brand communities over Facebook. The effect of customer involvement on customer engagement is also checked. This study also investigates the direct relationship of customer involvement with trust and word-of-mouth. A pen-and-paper questionnaire survey of 450 Facebook account holder students was used. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results reveal that a higher level of involvement with the brand community leads to a higher level of customer engagement. Customer engagement leads to customer trust and word-of-mouth activities. The results further suggest a direct positive relationship of customer involvement with trust and word-of-mouth, but the mediation of customer engagement strengthens the mentioned effect.     

Signaling by early stage startups: US government research grants and venture capital funding

Entrepreneurship researchers have documented that early stage startups rely on signals to demonstrate the transitions in their identities that they must make when they cross organizational life cycle thresholds. However, early stage startups in emerging industry contexts tend to have few good signals upon which to rely. Public agencies can play a valuable role in this process, but prior research has not sufficiently examined how startups effectively leverage this support. In this paper, therefore, we develop a framework to investigate the role that signals can play for early stage startups when they win prestigious government research grants. We test this framework in the setting of the emerging U.S. clean energy sector and find that in comparison to a matched sample of clean energy startups that have not won prestigious research grants, startups with these grants were 12% more likely to acquire subsequent venture capital (VC) funding. Another significant result is that the value of this signaling is greater for startups that have fewer patents. The important contribution of this finding is that it shows that signaling has the potential to redistribute benefits rather than just provide an additional accrual of advantages to the already high status actors. Together these results highlight the advantages for startups in emerging industries of pursuing signaling strategies with public agencies when they attempt to make important transitions through the stages of their organizational life cycles.

The direct and indirect effects of economic wealth on time to take-off

Our objective is to decompose the influence of the economic wealth on the time to sales take-off into a direct effect and an indirect effect through time to introduction. We use a traditional regression based and an advanced counterfactual framework for our analysis, based on adoption data for four generations of mobile phone from 172 countries. Our study extends the sales take-off literature by better understanding how the commercialization stage (time to introduction) affects the confirmation stage (time to sales take-off) in innovation diffusion while controlling for local market structure, socio-economic, demographic and cultural variables suggested in the literature. We show that economic wealth exerts: a positive direct effect by shortening sales take-off time; a negative indirect effect by shortening time to introduction which tends to extend time to sales take-off. The uncovering of this relationship is achieved by treating time to introduction as a mediating variable, departing from previous studies where it is treated as an exogeneous variable. We further show that the negative indirect effect is diluted in the case of high income countries but not in the case of upper middle-income countries. A sensitivity analysis shows the robustness of our findings. Our findings will help firms develop optimal market entry strategies considering the resources available.     

The Bilateral J‐Curve in Australia: A Nonlinear Reappraisal

Since the introduction of error‐correction and cointegration techniques, the J‐curve effect implies an initial short‐run deterioration of the trade balance, followed by improvement later due to currency devaluation. In a previous study of Australia’s bilateral trade, with each of her 23 partners, using the linear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach we found the J‐curve effect in the model with the United Kingdom only. However, after incorporating the ARDL model that allows for nonlinear adjustment of exchange rate changes, we found the effect on four more partners – all asymmetrically. Furthermore, we document short‐run asymmetry in exchange rate changes in almost all models; short‐run adjustment asymmetry, and impact‐asymmetry in almost half of the models.     

The influence of demographic characteristics of hospitality alumni on entrepreneurship factors in Egypt

The purpose of this article is to study the effect of demographic characteristics of hospitality alumni on entrepreneurship factors, and determine which factors are the most important for the alumni to become entrepreneurs. A questionnaire had been developed and distributed online using Google Forms. Data were collected from 314 hospitality alumni. All the hypotheses have been supported, proving that the investigated demographic characteristics have a significant effect on entrepreneurship factors, particularly motivation, innovation and personal skills. The study’s sample was limited to alumni of faculties of tourism and hotels in governmental universities only. Policy-makers implication, practical implication, and social implication are discussed based on the results of this study. This is one of the first studies in Egypt to study the effect of demographic characteristics of hospitality alumni on entrepreneurship. Moreover, it provides significant findings that can enhance the overall status of entrepreneurship in Egypt’s hospitality industry.     

Corporate Disclosure in Relation to Combating Corporate Bribery: A Case Study of Two Chinese Telecommunications Companies

This paper investigates the association between global community concerns about bribery activities and anti‐bribery disclosure practices by two Chinese telecommunication companies operating internationally, namely China Mobile and ZTE. Based on content analysis of annual reports and global news media articles over a period of 16 years from 1995–2010, the findings suggest that the changes in the level of disclosures by the two major Chinese telecommunications companies were closely associated with the level of international concerns over bribery practices within the Chinese telecommunications industry. This finding indicates that the companies adopt anti‐bribery disclosure practices in order to minimise the gap of trust (social capital) between companies themselves and global stakeholders. In this paper we argue that, for domestic companies in China, culturally constructed social capital, such as guanxi, creates a level of trust between managers and their stakeholders, which obviates the need for managers to disclose anti‐bribery performance information. However, for companies operating internationally, as social capital is inadequate to bridge the gap of trust between managers and global stakeholders, managers use disclosures of anti‐bribery performance information as a way to minimise such a gap.     

Disclosures of Social Value Creation and Managing Legitimacy: A Case Study of Three Global Social Enterprises

This study seeks to fill the gap in the existing literature by examining how and whether disclosure of social value creation becomes a part of the legitimation strategies of social enterprises. In particular, using Suchman's (1995) moral dimension of legitimacy theory, this study sets out whether and how disclosures by three global social organisations – Grameen Bank, Charity Water and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – conform to the expectations of the broader community. The study finds that there is an apparent disconnection between disclosure and action by social enterprises. With reference to a few incidents, social enterprises use disclosure as a part of their managerial efforts, rather than to create moral legitimacy. The notion of apparent disconnection between disclosure and real action by social enterprises is evident. The notion is consistent with extant disclosure literature capturing the motivations for the disclosure practices of corporations. The findings of this paper suggest that when an organisation (whether it is a corporation or a social enterprise) faces a legitimacy crisis, it appears to disclose good news rather than bad news, which calls into question organisational moral legitimacy.     

Microcredit Programme Participation and Household Food Security in Rural Bangladesh

Lack of access to credit prevents poor households in developing countries from diversifying into income‐generating activities that could safeguard them against unforeseen shocks and seasonality, leaving them susceptible to food deprivation, even when aggregate food supplies are adequate. Microcredit programmes help these households to access financial capital that could help improve their food security situation. We examine how microcredit affects different measures of food security; namely, household calorie availability, dietary diversity indicators and anthropometric status of women of reproductive age (15–49 years) and children under the age of 5 years. We find that microcredit programme participation increases calorie availability both at the intensive and extensive margins, but does not improve dietary diversity and only has mixed effects on the anthropometric measures. We also find that the effect of microcredit participation on food security may be non‐linear in which participation initially has either no effect on food security or may actually worsen it, before improving it in the longer run. Our results help to explain why existing short‐term evaluations of microcredit sometimes do not show any positive effects.