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This study explores the interplay between governance and growth in privately held, family-run small and midsize enterprises.

We used an abductive, exploratory and longitudinal methodology, using data from two semi-structured interviews and an online questionnaire completed by 17 owner-managers of family farms in Quebec, Canada.

The study highlights the crucial role of corporate governance in facilitating the growth of family farms. The findings indicate that implementing formal governance mechanisms early in a firm’s lifecycle can significantly facilitate growth. Three distinct phases of corporate governance were identified, with governance either concurrently or sequentially related to growth, depending on the phase. Farms progressed to a new lifecycle phase when gaps arose between their growth trajectory and their human and organizational capacities or due to changes in ownership or generational turnover.

The findings indicate that, to foster growth, farmers should proactively establish formal governance mechanisms from the onset, tailored to their specific growth objectives. Recommended practices include financial, strategic and investment planning; delegating operational responsibilities and the creation of governance bodies, such as family councils or boards.

This study advances our understanding of corporate governance lifecycles by confirming the dynamic relationship between growth and governance in private, family-run enterprises, including during the early stages of development.

Knife-enabled crime in England and Wales has increased by 7% in the year ending December 2023. Such increases in incidents are cause for concern due to the potential for significant injury and loss of life. This study aims to propose a model of differentiation of offending across 70 cases of violent knife crime (VKC) committed in England and Wales between 2015 and 2020 to inform preventative strategies.

Incident data was collected from online news articles and offender, victim and offence characteristics were recorded. Characteristics were subject to a non-metric multi-dimensional scaling procedure, smallest space analysis (SSA) to differentiate behavioural styles.

Regional interpretation of the SSA identified three distinct themes (Intimate Partner Violence, Gang-Influenced and Reactive Violence) that related to distinct styles of offending. Classification according to identified offence theme was possible for 69% of cases. Findings are discussed with reference to Social Identity Approach and Criminal Narrative Theory. Potential future research is discussed with recognition of the need to further differentiate offending behaviour in cases of reactive violence.

The theorical and practical implications are discussed with consideration of how the findings may inform preventative strategies as part of a public health approach.

While SSA has been used to differentiate behavioural styles across several types of crime, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first instance in which the method has been used to differentiate behavioural styles across cases of VKC.

This study aims to propose a new conforming tax measure based on the work of Badertscher et al. (2019).

This study divides total tax avoidance/management (TM) into nonconforming and conforming portions through a regression. The residual of the regression is treated as the conforming tax measure. In addition, the new conforming tax measure is validated via three approaches. Then, this study examines the moderating effect of nonconforming earnings management (EM) on the relationship between conforming TM and firm performance.

The empirical results show that the model has stronger explanatory power than the model proposed by Badertscher et al. (2019). Additionally, the validation results show that the mean value of the conforming tax measure is lower in quasi-private corporations (financially constrained companies) than in matched public corporations (nonfinancially constrained companies), and firms under high market capital pressure are less motivated to engage in conforming tax practices. Furthermore, nonconforming EM positively moderates the conforming tax–ROA association, implying that nonconforming EM can reduce financial reporting costs resulting from conforming tax practices.

This study contributes to conforming tax research in the following ways. First, this study proposes a new conforming tax measure by substituting the cash book tax difference (BTD) for the BTD in the model of Badertscher et al. (2019) (“BKRW”). Second, this study demonstrates theoretically why the cash BTD should outperform the BTD in computing the BKRW conforming tax measure and confirm this empirically. Third, this study presents a three-way conceptual schema that divides corporations into two groups along each of three tax-relevant dimensions. The group of firms that use both conforming and nonconforming tax strategies have different characteristics compared to the other group. This study also validates the conforming tax measure across the two-group dichotomies.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the existing research on the significance of corporate governance in micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) to identify significant contributors, emerging trends and prospective future research areas.

The authors perform a bibliometric analysis using a data set of 343 papers extracted from the Scopus database. R-studio software was used for performance analysis, while VOSviewer software was used for scientific mapping.

The study’s findings demonstrate that the research has attracted the attention of academics, which has led to a major rise in research over the previous two decades. “Corporate Ownership and Control” is the top contributing journal with the publication of 16 articles. The USA and UK are the top most productive countries. Simon Fraser University of Canada is the most contributing institution. Moreover, this study has identified four major themes: corporate governance assistance to small and medium enterprises, the role of corporate governance in society and management, family ownership and its importance in entrepreneurship, corporate governance issues, family firms and firm performance. Furthermore, the paper also defines the future research scope in each theme.

This study serves as a guide by mapping and analysing the intellectual structure of the corporate governance of MSMEs’ publications. Through this research, the authors better understand the academicians, managers, entrepreneurs and regulators about the condition of entrepreneurship and how they help businesses improve their performance. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to thoroughly analyse the literature on the role of corporate governance in MSMEs using bibliometrics.

A growing body of management research is investigating how organizations can provide solutions to major social and ecological issues. Scholars suggested alternative organizations, in particular those that prioritize community and democratic decision-making, as more effective in engaging with societal challenges. The purpose of this paper is to explore cooperatives and their capacity in addressing them.

By engaging with the United Nations’ resources and the grand challenges literature in management, the authors first identified the core issues underlying each sustainable development goal. Next, the authors looked for empirical research on cooperatives that engage with those specific social and ecological issues. The authors articulated patterns as to how cooperatives address them and grouped them under five themes. The authors also articulated struggles where cooperatives fall short in fully addressing the issues at hand.

Based on the analysis, the authors identified five fundamental ways that cooperatives commit to and facilitate addressing challenges: providing economic gains for the many; facilitating access to essential resources; focusing on long-term community well-being; prioritizing ecological well-being; and promoting cooperation and partnership for justice. While most research on cooperatives illustrates these capacities, the authors also noted other studies that show struggles in various areas, most importantly in reducing inequalities.

While there is growing research on grand challenges, the literature has not paid attention to cooperatives and their capacity in tackling them. This paper comprehensively engages with four types of cooperatives and articulates how they facilitate addressing social and ecological issues. The findings contribute to organization design and grand challenges literatures as well as offer implications for broader management research.

This paper aims to examine the role of bullying victimization in predicting psychopathology, encompassing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), risk of developing prodromal psychosis and emotional and behavioural problems, among in-school Nigerian adolescents.

A total of 351 junior secondary students (n = 173 males, 178 females; age range: 9–17 years) were recruited from five randomly selected public secondary schools in Nigeria. Students completed a variety of self-report measures, including a socio-demographic questionnaire, the prodromal questionnaire – brief version, the strengths and difficulties questionnaire (SDQ) and the multidimensional peer victimization scale. They were also interviewed using the PTSD module of the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview-Kid Version.

Although bullying victimization was not found to predict the presence of PTSD, it predicted the risk of developing prodromal psychosis. All SDQ subscales also held significant positive associations with bullying victimization. This indicates that higher levels of victimization are associated with increased behavioural and emotional difficulties among adolescents.

The study findings add support to whole system approaches involving relevant stakeholders in health, education, social and criminal justice sectors via protective policies to address the problems of bullying in schools.

The study contributes to evidence demonstrating a need for improved understanding regarding the role of exposure to bullying victimization in predicting various forms of psychopathology. Furthermore, there is specifically a need for research with this focus in developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the Nigerian education system.

This paper aims to explore (a) the dynamics of place and space in an institutional setting and (b) institutional work done in different spaces of the same place.

Traditional ethnographic methods (participant-observation, interviews and artefacts) were used over the course of 12 months of fieldwork in a multi-organizational video game development space.

The paper presents two main findings. First, the authors show how the place was a dynamic rainbow constellation and manifested as different spaces over time and for different actors. The authors describe the spaces based on existing literature (accelerator, experimental, incubator or coworking space) or inductively (atrium and hybrid). Second, the authors show how institutional work changed depending on the spatial conceptions of the institutional place. In particular, the authors show dynamic rainbow constellation of fluid spaces raises different forms of institutional policing work (self, backroom, spectacle, tangential and preventative) and the conditions under which institutional policing work is subtly fluid and takes form, but also changes.

Significant contributions are made to understanding how actors work at forming a rainbow constellation ring of fluid labels and spaces of a place. This paper explicates and amplifies the forms of institutional policing work, providing a novel case example of that social interaction.

For this paper, the authors focus on Porter’s competitive advantage. Hybrid strategy refers to how a firm creates value vis-à-vis competitors by simultaneously relying on lower costs and greater differentiation to achieve a competitive advantage. This strategy emphasises both and aims to provide much more monetary value to customers through the combination of reduced cost and a higher rate of differentiation. In addition, this research focuses on family small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), because they have particularities arising from the incorporation of family members both as owners of the SME and in managerial positions. The porpose of this study is to analyse whether the existing differences produced by the role of the family in strategic decision-making and the concentration of family power have a higher impact on performance and innovation than non-family SMEs.

Structural equation modelling was used to analyse Spanish firms with fewer than 250 employees. This study randomly selected SMEs operating in Spain from the Spanish Central Business Directory (2021) database. The overall sample design was based on stratified sampling.

SMEs are facing new challenges, and this has led to the emergence of new competitive strategies. Companies have started to combine differentiation strategies with cost strategies to achieve superior performance and better adapt to these changes. This study confirms a positive relationship between the adoption of hybrid strategies and market performance in SMEs. In addition, hybrid strategy reinforces innovation, which has a mediating role between hybrid strategy and market performance. Finally, the findings indicate that family SMEs achieve a greater impact of hybrid strategy on innovation than non-family SMEs. Moreover, innovation plays a mediating role only in the case of family firms, which enhances the relationship between hybrid strategy and market performance.

For SMEs to survive in turbulent environments, this study proposes the adoption of hybrid strategies instead of pure strategies. The novel model links hybrid strategy (as opposed to “stuck in the middle”), innovation and market performance. The research is valuable for owners and managers of family SMEs because this study finds differences in the relationships studied compared to non-family SMEs.

This paper aimed to shed light on the relationship between blockchain technology intensity and tax evasion and whether this relationship is moderated by good governance.

Data from a sample of 50 European companies selected from the STOXX 600 index between 2010 and 2019 were used to test the model via panel data and multiple regression. Here, we used the generalized least squares method estimated on panel data. A multivariate regression model was used to analyze the moderating effect of good governance on the association between blockchain technology intensity and tax evasion. For the robustness analyses, we included the comparative study of legal systems. We performed an additional analysis by testing the dynamic dimension of the data set using the generalized method of moments to control for the endogeneity problem.

Expectedly, the results showed a negative relationship between blockchain technology intensity and tax evasion. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the moderating variable negatively affects the relationship between blockchain technology and tax evasion.

To our knowledge, this study supports the existing literature. Firstly, it expands the scientific debate on tax evasion. Secondly, it extends the scope of the agency theory, which is used to explain the phenomena associated with tax evasion. This study is one of the first to examine the moderating effect of good governance on the association between blockchain technology intensity and tax evasion.

In recent years, the development of metaheuristic algorithms for solving optimization problems within a reasonable timeframe has garnered significant attention from the global scientific community. In this work, a new metaheuristic algorithm inspired by the inflection mechanism of the avian influenza virus H5N1 in poultry and humans, taking into account its mutation mechanism, called H5N1.

This algorithm aims to explore optimal solutions for optimization problems by simulating the adaptive behavior and evolutionary process of the H5N1 virus, thereby enhancing the algorithm’s performance for all types of optimization problems. Additionally, a balanced stochastic probability mechanism derived from the infection probability is presented. Using this mechanism, the H5N1 algorithm can change its phrase, including exploitation and exploration phases. Two versions of H5N1, SH5N1 and MH5N1, are presented to solve single-objective optimization problems (SOPs) and multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs).

The performance of the algorithm is evaluated using a set of benchmark functions, including seven unimodal, six multimodal, ten fixed-dimension multimodal to solve SOPs, ZDT functions and CEC2009 has been used to demonstrate its superiority over other recent algorithms. Finally, six optimization engineering problems have been tested. The results obtained indicate that the proposed algorithm outperformed ten algorithms in SOPs and seven algorithms in MOPs.

The experimental findings demonstrate the outstanding convergence of the H5N1 algorithm and its ability to generate solutions of superior quality.