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The role of women entrepreneurs in the food industry is becoming increasingly significant, as this sector is dynamic and competitive. This study seeks to enhance theoretical comprehension by assessing the role of social capital on business performance through mediating role of network resources and moderating role of national culture.

The researchers have employed a cross-sectional causal design for this analysis. This research methodology enables us to examine the intricate interrelationships among several variables in the domain of female entrepreneurs in the food industry. The study included 403 female entrepreneurs actively engaged in the food industry.

The results indicate that a firm's internal and external social capital investments positively influence network resource acquisition. In addition, network resource acquisition positively affects business performance in women-led food enterprises and mediates the relationship between social capital and business performance. Moreover, national culture moderates the association between social capital and business performance.

The study is limited by its narrow focus on the food sector industry and its restriction to the geographic location of India, hence reducing its generalizability.

This study significantly contributes to the existing body of knowledge in entrepreneurship and social network research. This study deviates from previous research by introducing a strategic intermediate variable called network resource acquisition between social capital and business performance. Moreover, the moderating role of national culture, which has been understudied in previous works, has also been examined in the proposed research framework.

We investigate practitioner integration (PI) within higher education institutions (HEIs) by taking a closer look at the entrepreneur in residence (EiR) initiative. Engaging experienced entrepreneurs through EiR initiatives to facilitate entrepreneurship education (EE) has become a familiar PI model within HEIs; nevertheless, how EiRs perceive their role and integration in academia has been under-researched. We deepen the understanding of how EiRs facilitate EE and their role and fit into academia.

This qualitative research employs interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) as the methodology. Following IPA guidance, we purposively selected seven EiRs working within HEIs and conducted one semi-structured interview with each participant. The data were analysed using IPA data analysis guidelines.

The findings suggest that the previous experiences of EiRs influence their confidence, skills and intrinsic motivation in their role in academia. EiRs play a multifaceted role that goes beyond students and simple educational activities to develop trust and understanding among university communities while bridging academic–practitioner, structural and communication gaps that hinder entrepreneurship in higher education. The study reveals the disconnected nature of EiRs’ role in academia and the tensions between academics and EiRs.

This study provides space for unheard EiRs’ voices, enriching the scarce EiR literature by advancing our knowledge about their role and fit in academia. The novel insights into the role of EiRs broaden the scope of EE to university communities beyond students. The findings deepen our understanding of how EiRs foster entrepreneurship by acting as a trust ladder and developing a networked approach to supporting university stakeholders. The challenges lie in how EiRs are integrated and the tensions between academics and practitioners. We also found that EiRs with greater authority, prior exposure to strategic roles within the institution and strong relationships with institutional leaders perform their role efficiently. Hence, this study establishes the importance of a more coordinated, strategic approach to PI within HEIs.

This paper aims to reconsider the role of universities in the context of the grand challenges of the Anthropocene era, namely, climate change, biodiversity loss, ecosystems collapse, growing inequalities, welfare deficiencies and social unrest.

The paper uses the “idealized design” methodology, which suggests imagining what the ideal solution would be and then working backward to where the authors are today. In line with this methodology, the paper redefines the idea of the university in the context of the Anthropocene and analyzes the shortcomings of today’s universities. Then, it proposes a solution framework for transforming universities to become planet-positive institutions and discusses the internal and external barriers of this transformation.

This study advances a view of the university as an autonomous learning community and redefines its functions as follows: to generate an universal orientation across disciplines and cultures, to assist the whole person development of its members, to create a new holistic understanding of planetary challenges, including transdisciplinary codesigned, stakeholder engaged and solutions-oriented research, to bring forth responsible practitioners, to enhance the problem-solving capabilities of society and to catalyze progressive changes in human–Earth systems.

The paper presents examples of transformative university initiatives from the USA, Europe and India. It discusses the required changes in university actions, research and policy to cope with the new reality of the Anthropocene era.

The purpose of this study is to address a critical gap in the existing literature on business excellence implementation. While various studies have examined different aspects of business excellence, there is still a lack of comprehensive research on the optimal organizational excellence architecture (OEA) for an award-winning business excellence journey. The absence of a unified framework has led to inconsistent practices across organizations. The aim of this research based on data collected from 50 organizations across 17 countries is to address this gap and present a refined OEA model.

This study employed quantitative and qualitative data collection methods. Member organizations from the Global Excellence Model (GEM) Council participated through an online survey administered via the Qualtrics software platform. Quantitative data were analyzed using the SPSS and Microsoft Excel software tools, while content analysis techniques were applied to the qualitative data to gain detailed insights.

The findings refine and extend the OEA model. These contributions lead to a refined OEA definition and open avenues for future research, enriching the current understanding of BE implementation.

This study introduces a novel concept of OEA to the literature on business excellence implementation. The refined OEA model provides a fresh perspective on the critical components necessary for an award-winning business excellence journey. This research offers significant value to both practitioners and academics by presenting a unified approach to BE implementation, effectively addressing the previously identified gap in BE research.

Diversity in boards has gained attention as a reflection of societal imbalances. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of diversity in terms of both gender and nationality in management boards of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on firm performance from an upper echelons perspective. The authors also examine how board-specific characteristics influence the structural makeup of boards in gender and nationality diversity terms.

The authors focus on the UK because of its individualistic society and flexible labour market and assess 309 SMEs in the manufacturing industry over 2009–2019. A 3-stage least squares (3SLS) estimator is used to analyse the data, the Shannon index to measure board diversity, return on assets as proxy for firm performance, and owner-manager presence, board member age and tenure are the board-specific characteristics of primary interest.

Both gender and nationality diversity contribute to firm performance and represent distinct upper echelon characteristics that change the cognitive and psychological dynamics of boards. Firms with larger boards do not perform better, but diverse boards reduce the narrowing view of CEOs. Yet the presence of owner-managers, despite their performance-enhancing contribution, holds firms back from benefitting from diversity as a strategic choice.

This study extends the upper echelons theory to include board diversity as an important aspect that should become more central in upper echelon thinking when understanding firm performance. The authors’ findings suggest that theoretical developments in search of understanding firm behaviour must proceed by accounting for diversity and not simply focusing on decision-making styles.

Drawing on the ability-motivation-opportunity model, this study investigates how gender-inclusive human resource management practices and overall fairness perception promote the career progression of female employees via psychological empowerment.

Partial least structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was applied to two-waves data collected from 308 respondents from Pakistan to confirm hypotheses.

Findings suggest that gender-inclusive HRM practices substantially affect female employees' psychological empowerment and career progression. Psychological empowerment is a mediating mechanism that explains the effect of gender-inclusive HRM practices on female employees' career progression. Finally, overall fairness perception further amplifies the effect of gender-inclusive HRM practices on psychological empowerment and career progression.

The study provides evidence to policymakers that organizations may promote psychological empowerment and career progression of female employees by implementing gender-inclusive HRM practices and promoting overall fairness perception.

This study contributes to achieving the SDGs by examining the impact of gender-inclusive HRM practices and overall fairness perception on female employees' psychological empowerment and career progression. Specifically, it aligns with “Goal 5 - achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” and “Goal 8 - promote sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all”.

This paper finds the returns from soil conservation practices and examines whether the welfare implications of adopting the conservation practices are heterogeneous across the farming groups in Indian agriculture.

The study uses an endogenous switching regression (ESR) method on the data collected from the 77th round of National Sample Survey (2019–21) to quantify the returns from adopting soil conservation practices.

It finds that farmers adopting soil health conservation practices would have reduced their crop yield by 13% if they did not implement them. Similarly, smallholders who have not adopted soil health management practices would have increased crop yield by 16% if they had adopted the practices. The authors also observed that the returns from adopting soil health management practices vary across farming groups, where marginal and large farms tend to gain higher yields. Finally, the authors find that regardless of farm size, smallholders who did not adopt soil health management practices would benefit from adopting these with increased crop yields of 29%–31%.

More data could have been better for drawing policy implications, since the number of soil card users are relatively less.

This research work uses nationally representative data, which is first in nature on this very aspect.

Due to the recent disruptions caused by COVID-19, global supply chains are stress tested. The affected supply chains have interfered with market tonnage prices for the yield of perishable products like mangoes that are highly dependent on their quality. This research, through empirical findings, thus determines and comprehends the factors influencing mango quality (size).

A framework is developed for finding the potential factors of quality building on the previous literature and studies on the available topic. The data collection included face-to-face interviews comprising 240 farmers, hired managers and preharvest contractors in India's Jangaon, Rangareddy and Yadadri Bhuvanagiri districts of Telangana state. The data analysis is done using multiple regression, and the outcomes form the basis of the design of the experiments model.

The empirical insights support that the quality of mango is affected by factors such as the number of picking cycles, the cost of fertilizer, the variety of fertilizers used, the variety of pesticides used and pesticide application frequency. The direct implications are the benefit to farmers in improving mango quality and maximizing profit per yield cycle.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the first research that has specifically focused on holistically improving the quality(size) of mangoes.

The findings contribute to the perishable supply chain literature, specifically to the mango study, to comprehensively showcase the factors impacting the quality of mangoes and provide guidance to farmers regarding orchard practices.

The core notion of this study is to examine the change in tariffs impacts of Pakistan Sri Lanka Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) on the micro-level financial factors like profits, debt ratios and dividend payments.

The investigation has been conducted by using regression analysis. The data of 157 listed non-financial local and international firms are collected from Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSE).

The results depicted that because of modification in tariffs, various firms are facing trade contest experience, a decline in profitability, surge in debt ratios as well as reduction in dividend payments. However, several firms improve their productivity by importing contemporary technology and other firms, which surge their exports leading to enhanced profitability, reduced debt ratios and surge in dividend disbursement.

To the best of my knowledge, this study is unique in a sense that it identifies the potential exports sectors of Pakistan and helps the decision-makers to develop the trade agreements with other South Asian economies. Moreover, the financial managers are able to create a financial policy for the multinational company to compete in South Asia.

Mental health issues such as stress, anxiety and depression are prevalent among the prisoners, highlighting the urgent need to address mental health challenges in prison facilities. Existing research highlights the crucial role of recreational and extracurricular (R&E) programs in promoting the mental well-being of prisoners. Another stream of literature identifies the importance of effective leadership within the prison system to the success of these programs and services aimed at improving the mental health of incarcerated individuals. The purpose of this study is to provide a thorough examination of the breadth, scope and characteristics of the published literature, focusing on how positive leadership in prison settings can foster the success of R&E programs in addressing mental health challenges among prisoners.

In this scoping review, a systematic literature review (SLR), using the guidelines of preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis (PRISMA, 2020) by Page et al. (2021), was followed which provides guidelines for study selection and research question, identification of relevant studies via databases and registers, multi-step screening to exclude literatures that are not directly relevant and finalizing body of literature for theory development, summarizing and reporting. The included studies for theory development were appraised for quality using methodology-specific tools. A critical narrative synthesis was adopted to present a theoretical framework for positive leadership influence on R&E programs to promote prisoner engagement and their mental well-being.

The SLR procedure resulted in a total of 122 studies that met the inclusion criteria for the topics of the current paper. The finalized list of studies that were used for theory development included 21studies in the area of prison and prison system (including organizations), 33 in the area of individual and team behavior (including inmates and correctional officers), 26 in the area of leadership (both organizational and correctional facilities), 12 in the area of R&E (including training and education), 31 in the area of mental health and behavior and 2 studies on research methods. Of these 122 studies, 83 studies were peer-reviewed scientific publications, selected chapters from 7 books, while the remaining 32 included nonscientific and anecdotal reports.

Despite the plethora of literature on the significance of effective leadership within organizational strategies and operations, there remains a notable gap in literature regarding the role of leadership and other enabling factors in the implementation and management of effective programs within correctional facilities aimed at improving the mental well-being of prisoners. This paper explores the role and relationship of leadership and R&E programs and activities in prisons to improve the mental well-being of prisoners. Specifically, a program’s resource sufficiency, positive reinforcement of prisoner behavior during the engagement and psychological conditions of the program are critical for successful prisoner engagement in such programs. Based on organizational theories of positive leadership and engagement (i.e. prisoner participation and engagement in R&E programs), this study offers four propositions to develop a theoretical framework of positive leadership in influencing such programs, which in turn can be a catalyst to reduce mental health issues among prisoners in correction facilities.