Conceptualizing businesses as social actors: A framework for understanding sustainability actions in small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises

Small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) can play a crucial role in advancing environmental and social well‐being. Yet various—often conflicting—explanations have been offered to clarify why SMEs pursue sustainability. Some arguments foreground possibilities of profit maximization, whereas others emphasize individual values and convictions. Research supporting such contradicting explanations is often biased towards large enterprises or small, innovative frontrunners. In this article, we examine the underlying drivers of social and environmental interventions of SMEs by exploring empirical data from a survey of over 1,600 Canadian SMEs and complementary in‐depth interviews. We argue that sustainability actions of SMEs can be understood by viewing these firms as social actors—organizations that are shaped by individual values, internal and external interpersonal relationships, and are embedded in a social environment. This conceptualization directs attention to the full range of factors that shape sustainability engagement of SMEs and highlights frequently overlooked forms of sustainability‐oriented actions.     

Combine harvesting

Mix the wisdom of internal and external networks and you might just come up with brilliant and unexpected solutions to apparently intractable problems. Julian Birkinshaw and Stuart Crainer report on how Roche Diagnostics is exploring an experimental approach to harvesting bright ideas.     

Youssef Cassis and Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglou, eds. Entrepreneurship in Theory and History

In a paper delivered during the founding of Harvard's ResearchCenter in Entrepreneurial History, Joseph Schumpeter commented,"Personally, I believe that there is an incessant give and takebetween historical and theoretical analysis and that, thoughfor the investigation of individual questions it may be necessaryto sail for a time on one tack only, yet on principle the twoshould never lose sight of each other" [Joseph Schumpeter, "EconomicTheory and Entrepreneurial History," in Change and the Entrepreneur(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), p. 264]. With thenotable exception of the theoretically inspired work producedat the Research Center in the early 1950s, historians largely     

A review of research on personality in teams: Accounting for pathways spanning levels of theory and analysis

Over the last half century there has been a great deal of interest in the role of personality in teams. In this article we review the theoretical and empirical research on this topic to summarize what we have learned and also to provide a foundation for future research necessary for application of this knowledge to human resource management decisions. We describe research that emphasizes both team- and individual-levels of analysis and theory, and we discuss recent efforts that attempt to bridge these two levels. We conclude by identifying several issues that should take precedence in research in order to advance our understanding of the role of personality in teams.     

Accommodating spatial correlation across choice alternatives in discrete choice models: an application to modeling residential location choice behavior

This paper presents a modeling methodology capable of accounting for spatial correlation across choice alternatives in discrete choice modeling applications. Many location choice (e.g., residential location, workplace location, destination location) modeling contexts involve choice sets where alternatives are spatially correlated with one another due to unobserved factors. In the presence of such spatial correlation, traditional discrete choice modeling methods that are often based on the assumption of independence among choice alternatives are not appropriate. In this paper, a Generalized Spatially Correlated Logit (GSCL) model that allows one to represent the degree of spatial correlation as a function of a multi-dimensional vector of attributes characterizing each pair of location choice alternatives is formulated and presented. The formulation of the GSCL model allows one to accommodate alternative correlation mechanisms rather than pre-imposing restrictive correlation assumptions on the location choice alternatives. The model is applied to the analysis of residential location choice behavior using a sample of households drawn from the 2000 San Francisco Bay Area Travel Survey (BATS) data set. Model estimation results obtained from the GSCL are compared against those obtained using the standard multinomial logit (MNL) model and the spatially correlated logit (SCL) model where only correlations across neighboring (or adjacent) alternatives are accommodated. Model findings suggest that there is significant spatial correlation across alternatives that do not share a common boundary, and that the GSCL offers the ability to more accurately capture spatial location choice behavior.