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The purpose of this paper is to illustrate and discuss the main features and key challenges of an original post-graduate education program designed according to an innovative theoretical framework promoting design thinking in a rhizomatic approach. By involving different stakeholders, the aim of this entrepreneurship education program is to disseminate rhizomatic, design-based learning competencies and thereby contribute to revitalizing a region’s socio-economic fabric.

Through the use of a pilot case, the paper exemplifies the application of the design thinking approach combined with the rhizomatic logic. Design thinking enables dealing with the complexity, uncertainty, and ill-defined problems that often characterize a business reality while the rhizomatic process combines the production of collective knowledge through a non-linear, complex and emergent path that nurtures innovation.

This entrepreneurship education program exemplifies a viable strategy to deal with a regional economic crisis by engaging different local actors including enterprises, local institutions, municipalities, and universities. It demonstrates the potential value of a new educational approach as a powerful lever to activate the energy of people, their competencies, relationships, shared projects, and new entrepreneurial ventures. The first edition of the program offers ideas, practices, and challenges to all stakeholders of potentially similar education projects.

The depicted pilot case allows us to exemplify how a design thinking framework reinterpreted on the basis of a Deleuzian rhizomatic perspective can enable developing innovation as a way of overcoming difficulties and succeeding, an essential prerequisite for many entrepreneurial organizations today.

This study adopts the popular culture lens to investigate the collective understanding behind the human resources (HR) occupations.

The empirical study analyzes 129 characters from 87 movies, television (TV) series, books and comics. The measurement model was tested using structural equation modeling and cluster analysis identified five HR representations in the popular culture.

Popular culture reflects five HR representations: The Executor, the Hero, the Buddy, the Bore, and the Good-time person. Results suggest that public opinion pays scarce attention to the so-called HR “strategic position” while underlining the need for a more socially responsible HR approach.

The authors' study serves as a means for integrating past research on HR role and reputation, occupational image, self-identity and popular media. While most scholars have addressed popular culture as a single case and paid almost no attention to the HR domain, this article complements the literature by offering a fruitful way to distil HR summative popular culture representations, thus advocating for both a theoretical and a methodological contribution.

The research and practice agree that social media are reshaping strategy and organization rules across industries. Nevertheless, how social media can become a source of competitive advantage remains under-investigated and there is no evidence about which capabilities and competencies can effectively and strategically exploit social media. By merging the literature on social media management and hospitality, the authors develop and test a theoretical framework that identifies the most relevant capabilities and competencies for using social media in the food service sector. The paper aims to map them and understand which ones are relevant according to different strategic choices of social media use.

The authors adopted a qualitative methodology using semi-structured interviews to managers or owners of 14 restaurants in a big city in Northern Italy.

The theoretical framework suggests that social media could be strategically used for different aims by relying on specific capabilities and competencies. The authors tested it and found that, though nowadays restaurant managers mainly focus on a narrow set of social media competencies linked to relational and marketing capabilities, some also rely on social media to promote organizational change and innovation.

The authors propose a theoretical framework and preliminary evidence on capabilities and competencies declined for the food service sector. The model considers different uses of social media and related capabilities and competencies by mapping them accordingly to their strategic use. The authors preliminarily validate our framework and highlight the competencies possessed by the restaurant managers of our sample and their alignment with the strategic use of social media.

The purpose of this study is to examine, drawing on organization studies and stakeholder theories, the organizational configuration that enables the social enterprise to succeed by combining social and economic imperatives in a sustainable way.

The research project is based on the analysis of a multiple cross-national case study consisting of seven social enterprises that are active in the drug rehabilitation context. Multiple rounds of data gathering and analysis combined with within-case analysis and cross-case comparison enabled the authors to evaluate the perceived, declared and subjective organizational perspectives.

Results suggest that organizational performance – measured as the ability to achieve social goals, generate resources and pursue sustainability over time – depends on the implementation of a participative organizational configuration defined by the interaction of six organizational components (i.e. time and space designed for collective activities, low degree of formalization, social control, centralized decision-making processes, transformational leadership style and a workforce structure based on social stakeholders as workers). The involvement of social stakeholders emerges as a distinctive feature in the social enterprise domain.

The study contributes to extending the configuration approach to the social enterprise domain, also as a fruitful method to manage social stakeholders and to advance the discussion on hybrid organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the organizational redesign opportunities currently offered by web-based technological innovations contribute to rebuilding and strengthening the employee-HR department relationship, rendering personnel management policy criteria more transparent, increasing perceived fairness and thus helping to instil trust in the HR department, albeit in a diverse virtual context.

The authors designed a survey involving 526 Gen Y employees and tested the hypotheses using structural equation modelling analyses.

The results confirm a positive relationship between relational e-HRM system adoption, procedural justice and trust in the HR department.

The results provide evidence that technology can support the development of institutional trust in virtual environments and thus contribute to the growing e-HRM literature, to the more consolidated strategic HRM research domain and to the debate on trust in technology-mediated relationships.

The paper provides valuable and at times unexpected results on the new potential role of the HR department in the current fluid and insecure labour market, thereby forming the basis for defining some useful guidelines to design and implement the e-HRM architecture.

The paper focuses on understanding how relational e-HRM could impact on the direct employee-HR department relationship, from the Gen Y employees perspective, that is almost neglected in the growing literature. Moreover it suggests some unexpected insights on the role of technology innovativeness in moderating the impact of e-HRM on trust in the HR department.

This quantitative study seeks to explore HR professionals' perceptions regarding the adoption of technological applications under the fourth industrial revolution on 25 critical human resource management (HRM) challenges. Additionally, the authors compare data for potential cross-cultural differences.

A total sample of 251 HR professionals from 11 countries was divided into four different cultural clusters. They were asked about their attitudes to the most important HRM challenges when managing industrial relations. A 25-item structured Likert five-point scale questionnaire was used to explore the human vs technology relation and examine if there were any significant differences between clusters for each of the challenges.

The results suggest that most HR professionals believe that the use of technology instead of people cannot solve entirely human-centered and emotional based challenges, as those seem to be less exposed to machinery. Moreover, their views on only two of the 25 challenges present significant differences between cultural clusters, regarding making decisions solely on personal interest and managing confidential information after terminating employment.

This paper constitutes the first attempt of addressing the impact of the fourth industrial revolution on HRM challenges at a cross-cultural level. It is plausible that globalization and the fourth industrial revolution affect the perceptions of HR professionals worldwide. The study shows that respondents' perceptions about the “human vs technology” dilemma point toward the same direction, irrespective of their cultural background: that of enhancing human worker's role in business in the age of rapid technological advancements. In addition, the way our sample was drawn, taking into account the top Global Competitiveness Index 4.0 countries, makes our results robust and reliable.