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While Christmas and the holidays are widely celebrated in society at large in the US, the question arises whether doing so has value in today’s organizations. In this light, the present study examined the relationship of workplace holiday practices with positive affect and emotional engagement, along with some boundary conditions of these relationships. Specifically, this research examined the moderating influences of religious orientation, political orientation and political environment.

Data were collected at two points in time via an online survey. At time 1, the participant survey included measures of workplace holiday practices, political orientation and demographic characteristics. At time 2 (approximately two weeks afterward), the participant survey included measures of positive affect and emotional engagement.

Workplace holiday practices were related to both positive affect and emotional engagement. There were slightly stronger effects for the impact of workplace holiday practices among individuals who reside in more conservative (“red”) states in the US on emotional engagement, but not positive affect. Individual political orientation did not moderate the relationships between workplace holiday practices and the outcomes. Counter to expectations, the absence of workplace holiday practices had a stronger negative effect on non-Christians’ emotional engagement than Christians. The interaction between workplace holiday practices and religious orientation with positive affect was nonsignificant.

The data from this research were obtained via a survey methodology. Although data on the independent and dependent variables were obtained at two different points in time, future research could experimentally manipulate features of the work environment related to the celebration of the holidays to more definitively establish cause-and-effect relationships.

This research highlights the value of celebrating Christmas and the holidays. In this light, organizations should not underestimate the potential value of such celebratory activity in promoting employee goodwill. At the same time, organizations must be cognizant that some individuals may value the celebration of Christmas and the holidays more so than others.

This research provides a framework for further research on workplace holiday practices and identifies theories that can be used in future research to explore the mechanisms that influence how and under what conditions workplace holiday practices impact employees’ experiences at work.

This case study presents the results of a collaborative effort of Library Assessment, Libraries Development and Alumni Relations and their Alumni Donor Board to increase donor engagement by utilizing board member professional expertise and tacit knowledge in refining “Donor Community Meetings.”

This study employed focus groups to solicit input from Development and Alumni Relations personnel, members of the Alumni Donor Board, library personnel and donors. Researchers leveraged a values-driven participatory design methodology and employed a data analytic guided by appreciative inquiry.

Focus group discussions identified strengths of the Donor Community Meetings including the ability to connect with experts and learn new things in addition to areas for improvement including selling the event and sharpening the process. Based on the findings, recommendations were proposed to improve and sustain interest in four key areas: Communications and Planning, Meeting Structure, Content and Sustainability.

This study adds to the limited body of evidence supporting donor engagement collaborations between academic libraries, their development offices and alumni development boards illustrating the value of leveraging the expertise and tacit knowledge of Alumni Donor Board members.

This research aims to empirically investigate the impacts of product and international diversification strategies on firm-level inventory performance.

This study empirically examines the associations between product and international diversification strategies and inventory performance based on a sample of 64,124 observations across 7,367 US publicly traded firms between 1989 and 2019 from the COMPUSTAT Segment, Fundamental Annual and Fundamental Quarterly data files. We employ both linear and nonlinear regression models to perform our empirical analysis.

This research provides strong evidence that there exists a U-shaped relationship between unrelated product diversification and inventory level and a partially inverted U-shaped relationship between international diversification and inventory level. We also find a positive impact of related product diversification on inventory level, but there is no significant curvilinear relationship between related product diversification and inventory level.

Our research findings offer important insights into top management’s strategic planning for diversification strategies and operations manager’s inventory control policies to achieve the strategic fit between corporate diversification and inventory management.

Product and international diversification strategies not only play an essential role in the firm’s competitive advantage, but also have a significant influence on operations manager’s inventory decision. This research is among the first to systematically investigate how top management’s related product, unrelated product and international diversification strategies may have complex nonlinear impacts on inventory performance.

This concluding chapter provides a historical reflection of my bridging theories of ethnography and evaluation and the mentor guides who influenced this initial work from Charlottesville, VA, to Baltimore, MD, to Pittsburgh, PA. In reflecting on these Sankofa reflections by looking backward and forward, just as the Adinkra bird symbol illustrates, I highlight key lessons learned in doing ethnography as a doctoral and postdoctoral student, which sparked my initial conceptual and bridging work in public health, anthropology of education, and evaluation. My nascent ideas were fostered with advisors and mentors, Dell Hymes and Michael Agar, who themselves were bridging and leveraging theories and concepts from vast (inter)disciplinary networks and experiences in the field. The featured manuscripts below were meant to illustrate the ethnography-evaluation connections that I thought were so necessary then for my own understandings and lay fodder for the coalescing transformative, intersectional, and comparative themes of the book. Fast forward 25 years and the themes that I garnered as a “fair-haired youth” in the field are now more mature as reflected by the authors of this important and timely book. The beauty of the volume of chapters that preceded this conclusion is their conceptual depth toward notions, especially positionality, criticality, authenticity, and reciprocity. As such, I take these overarching concepts that are embedded in the chapters like the Sankofa bird's feet – with an eye toward the future. The concepts illustrated in the book do not reside in only one chapter but reflect a commonality across chapters and common concepts discussed in the overall volume.

The research provides new strategies for enhancing resilience in pharmaceutical manufacturing by addressing the dynamic nature of digital technology within the challenging framework of a VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world, focusing on the concept of digital twins (DTs). This paper aims to emphasize the pivotal role of resilience in navigating disruptions and propose future research directions to contribute to the industry’s effective adaptation to uncertainties and dynamic challenges.

This research uses a qualitative approach, drawing insights from an extensive literature review on pharmaceutical manufacturing resilience and the integration of digital technologies. Methodologically, it synthesizes information from scholarly articles, empirical studies and industry reports to construct a comprehensive understanding. This design facilitates a thorough examination of the subject, providing valuable insights for practitioners, researchers and policymakers in the pharmaceutical industry.

This paper illustrates the practical application of DTs in vaccine production, emphasizing their critical role in ensuring quality, safety and adaptability. It adopts the “seizing, sensing and transforming” framework, showcasing the strategic integration of Industry 4.0 technologies to address dynamic challenges. Key insights include the significance of human elements alongside technological advancements, the need for real-time monitoring using Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) and the transformative potential of sustainability practices, diversified supply chains and collaborative ecosystems.

This paper highlights the integration of human and digital elements, emphasizing IoT, AI and DTs for resilience. It underscores sustainable practices, supply chain diversification and collaboration as key strategies for addressing pharmaceutical industry challenges.

This paper offers practical insights for pharmaceutical manufacturing, emphasizing the need for robust cybersecurity measures, strategic investments in digital technologies and proactive regulatory compliance. Managers are encouraged to allocate budgets for digital integration, prioritize change management for technology adoption and invest in a skilled workforce. The adoption and management of DTs are highlighted to enhance resilience. Overall, the paper guides pharmaceutical organizations in navigating the complexities of the VUCA environment, ensuring the quality and safety of products through a multifaceted approach that combines advanced technologies with sustainability practices, supply chain diversification and collaborative ecosystems.

The research addresses VUCA challenges, including volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity in pharmaceutical manufacturing. It emphasizes societal benefits such as uninterrupted drug supply, environmental responsibility through sustainable practices and enhanced collaboration among stakeholders. By leveraging digital technologies and resilience strategies, the study highlights the pharmaceutical sector’s pivotal role in managing health crises and ensuring patient safety.

This paper offers substantial originality and value by presenting a comprehensive framework for bolstering resilience in pharmaceutical manufacturing within the VUCA environment. The integration of advanced digital technologies, notably DTs, is explored in-depth, providing novel insights into their practical application. The “seizing, sensing and transforming” concept contributes a nuanced approach, considering both technological and human dimensions. This paper addresses the gaps in current literature by combining diverse elements such as Industry 4.0, risk assessment, sustainability practices and collaborative ecosystems. Its practical implications for managers and detailed exploration of research directions add tangible value, guiding future endeavors in enhancing pharmaceutical industry resilience.

We examine whether the social capital of the area where a firm’s headquarters is located affects that firm’s credit rating. Given that credit rating agencies only infrequently visit a firm’s headquarters, it is pertinent to investigate whether this soft information is considered.

In order to test whether social capital affects firms’ credit ratings, we estimate the following model using an ordinary least squares regression: Rating_it = β₀ + β₁ Social Capital_it + ∑ Controls_it + Industry fixed Effects_i + State−year fixed effects_it + ε_it. We follow recent accounting and finance research and measure societal-level social capital at the county level (Jha & Chen, 2015; Cheng et al., 2017; Hasan et al., 2017a, b; Jha, 2017; Hossain et al., 2023). We use four inputs to calculate social capital: (1) voter turnout in presidential elections, (2) the census response rate, (3) the number of social and civic associations and (4) the number of nongovernmental organizations in each county.

W provide evidence that social capital has a causal effect on credit ratings. Interesting is that this effect is not merely localized to firms near credit rating agencies. We also find that the effect of social capital on credit ratings is concentrated among firms with moderate levels of default risk. For firms with extremely low or extremely high default risk, social capital appears irrelevant to credit ratings, suggesting that social capital plays a larger role in more ambiguous contexts or when greater judgment is required. We demonstrate that the effect of social capital on credit ratings disappears when the rating agency has extensive experience in a particular region. This result is consistent with rating agencies stereotyping certain regions of the USA and using that information to inform their ratings when they have less experience in the region. Finally, we find that while social capital is associated with credit ratings, it has no association with future defaults.

Though we cautiously followed prior studies and were confident in our data construction process, it is possible that we are measuring social capital with error.

Our findings suggest that credit rating agencies could benefit from reevaluating how they incorporate non-financial information, such as social capital, into their assessment processes, potentially leading to more nuanced and equitable credit ratings. Additionally, firms could use these insights to bolster their engagement with local communities and stakeholders, thereby enhancing their creditworthiness and attractiveness to investors as part of a broader corporate strategy. The findings also underline the need for regulatory frameworks that foster transparency and the inclusion of social factors in credit evaluations, which could lead to more comprehensive and fair financial reporting and rating systems.

Recognizing that social capital can influence economic outcomes like credit ratings may encourage both communities and firms to invest more in building and maintaining social networks, trust and civic engagement. By demonstrating how social capital impacts credit ratings, our research highlights the potential to address inequalities faced by regions with lower social capital, guiding targeted social and economic development initiatives. Moreover, understanding that regional social capital can influence credit ratings might affect public perception and trust in the impartiality and accuracy of these ratings, which is essential for maintaining market stability and integrity.

Our research provides fresh insights into how social capital, an intangible asset, influences credit ratings – a topic not extensively explored in existing literature. This sheds light on the dynamics between social structures and financial outcomes. Methodologically, our use of the 9/11 attacks as an exogenous shock to measure changes in social capital introduces a novel approach to study similar phenomena. Additionally, our findings contrast with prior studies such as Jha and Chen (2015) and Hossain et al. (2023), by delving deeper into how proximity and familiarity impact financial assessments differently, enriching academic discourse and refining existing theories on the role of local knowledge in financial decisions.

Applying the broaden-and-build theory, this paper aims to examine the effect of entrepreneurial wellbeing (EWB) on the opportunity recognition (OpR) ability and how it changes over entrepreneurial stages.

This study was based on the survey data of 307 entrepreneurs in Vietnam, which is an emerging market with full support for entrepreneurship by the government.

The results indicated that EWB has a salient effect on the OpR ability of entrepreneurs. Besides, in the later stages of the entrepreneurial process, EWB increases in its importance toward the ability to recognize potential business opportunities.

This study contributes to EWB and entrepreneurship research by providing theoretical and empirical evidence of wellbeing as a crucial psychological resource in entrepreneurship. Besides, this study uncovers the dynamic nature of entrepreneurship by analyzing when EWB can produce higher levels of entrepreneurs’ OpR along entrepreneurial stages.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the existing literature on workplace mindfulness and suggest positive organizational behavior (POB) scholarship as a suitable domain to understand the scientific and secular nature of mindfulness.

This conceptual paper is based on the critical analysis of the literature on POB and contemporary mindfulness at work. This paper highlights the limitations of workplace mindfulness in terms of its research and practice. Then, the limitations of workplace mindfulness are analyzed in relation to POB scholarship to suggest a way forward for research and practice.

The findings imply that contemporary mindfulness meets the inclusion criteria of psychological capital and thus it can be adopted and investigated in the workplace using the POB scholarship.

It suggests implications for research and practice by considering mindfulness as a psychological capital construct in the workplace context.

Mindfulness is an interesting topic for organizational researchers, and many organizations are adopting mindfulness to improve their workplace functioning. In recent years, scholars have highlighted potential ethical issues with the adoption of the spiritual and religious nature of mindfulness for workplace benefits. In this regard, the understanding of the scientific and secular nature of mindfulness is limited in organizational literature. This paper advances the knowledge of the literature on contemporary mindfulness and POB and argues the importance of the inclusion of mindfulness in psychological capital.