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This study aimed to determine the factors affecting consumers’ perceptions and intention to purchase home meal kit services (HMK), a convenient home-cooked meal option, considering the moderating effects of monetary restriction, through the lens of the theory of planned behaviour (TPB).

This cross-sectional study used an online, self-administered survey to collect data from 374 US adults. Results were tested for variable associations via multiple linear regression and moderation analyses.

HMK adoption intention was positively associated with attitude and subjective norms but negatively associated with perceived behavioural control. Consumers’ HMK attitude demonstrated a significant positive relationship with food safety concerns and perceived time constraints. Income and financial constraints were significant moderators of the associations between TPB determinants and HMK intention. The findings emphasised the possibility of using HMK as a foodservice option for time-challenged consumers with food safety concerns.

This study addressed the limited research on HMK, a competitive meal option that foodservice businesses could implement to boost revenue. The study establishes the contribution in understanding the motivators and barriers that potentially affect consumers’ HMK behaviour through the lens of TPB. The results expand the scope of the TPB application in food-related research, providing a deeper understanding of antecedents and other factors on consumers’ HMK behavioural attitudes. Understanding this information will enable practitioners to develop strategies that meet consumers’ concerns when embracing this service to promote HMK.

The entrepreneurial process often cannot be explained by a single entrepreneurial theory. Instead, it is more likely the result of the interaction between various entrepreneurial behavior patterns and different environmental conditions. However, existing research has frequently overlooked the complexity inherent in the entrepreneurial phenomenon. Building on a configurational perspective, this study aims to examine how new ventures can use different behavioral configurations to achieve high performance amid various uncertain environments.

Based on the survey data from 143 new start-ups in China’s software industry, this study uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

This study jointly considers multiple entrepreneurial behaviors − causation, effectuation and entrepreneurial bricolage and different types of environmental uncertainty − state uncertainty, effect uncertainty and response uncertainty. The findings reveal three behavioral configurations for high/nonhigh new venture performance.

This study expands previous insights into the relationship between entrepreneurial behaviors and new venture performance from the perspective of configurational theory. Moreover, it offers new insights into the types of uncertainty, further refining our understanding of the uncertainties inherent in entrepreneurial activities.

This paper investigates how various emergent theoretical perspectives in entrepreneurship research, representing diverse decision-making logics, influence firm growth and evolution. It explores the interaction among decision-making logics, including experimentation, affordable loss, flexibility and pre-commitment as components of effectuation, alongside causation and bricolage and their synergistic effects on firm growth.

This study uses a multi-phase, discovery-oriented approach. Initially, insights from existing literature on decision-making logic were combined with in-depth interviews with 10 Iranian entrepreneurs within the food sector. This phase used alternative template research to evaluate the principles of effectuation, causation and bricolage within case study data depicting firm growth. Subsequently, a self-administered survey was developed based on these insights and distributed to 205 entrepreneurs in Iran. The survey data was analysed using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to identify key factors and pathways influencing firm growth.

Using a discovery-oriented approach, this study formulates a comprehensive framework detailing decision-making logics that influence firm growth. Through fsQCA, 12 distinct paths are identified, highlighting the complex interplay of causation, effectuation and bricolage in high-growth firms within the food sector.

This study has limitations. FsQCA identifies only logically sufficient combinations, suggesting potential for exploring alternative pathways in future research. Given COVID-19’s impact on the food sector, examining decision-making logic across diverse contexts and industries is advisable. Additionally, exploring how bricolage, causation and effectuation affect outcomes like new product development and innovation is essential in a growth-focused context. It is also important to consider environmental and organizational factors influencing growth.

This paper pioneers the examination of emerging theoretical paradigms in entrepreneurship and their impact on firm growth. It identifies critical configurations of causation, effectuation and bricolage, providing actionable insights for navigating dynamic business environments.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into higher education (HE) represents a transformative shift in the way academic institutions operate and engage with students. This chapter explores the multifaceted impact of AI on HE, touching upon key themes that encapsulate this transformation. First, the chapter outlines the developments of AI in education. It discusses how adaptive learning systems make use of AI to personalise educational content to individual students and optimise their learning experiences. The discourse also explores AI-driven assessment tools that provide educators with data-driven insights into student performance, offering a more personalised and efficient approach to grading and feedback. Second, the chapter extends the discussion to AI in teacher administration, demonstrating how AI technologies streamline administrative tasks in HE. The text will examine the use of AI for enrolment and registration processes, reducing bottlenecks and enhancing efficiency, and AI’s role in student support services, where AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants offer timely and personalised guidance to students, improving their overall experience.

Organizational scholars studying compensation often place an emphasis on certain employee groups (e.g., executives). Missing from this discussion is research on the compensation systems for low-wage jobs. In this review, the authors argue that workers in low-wage jobs represent a unique employment group in their understanding of rent allocation in organizations. The authors address the design of compensation strategies in organizations that lead to different outcomes for workers in low-wage jobs versus other workers. Drawing on and integrating human resource management (HRM), inequality, and worker literatures with compensation literature, the authors describe and explain compensation systems for low-wage work. The authors start by examining workers in low-wage work to identify aspects of these workers’ jobs and lives that can influence their health, performance, and other organizationally relevant outcomes. Next, the authors explore the compensation systems common for this type of work, building on the compensation literature, by identifying the low-wage work compensation designs, proposing the likely explanations for why organizations craft these designs, and describing the worker and organizational outcomes of these designs. The authors conclude with suggestions for future research in this growing field and explore how organizations may benefit by rethinking their approach to compensation for low-wage work. In sum, the authors hope that this review will be a foundational work for those interested in investigating organizational compensation issues at the intersection of inequality and worker and organizational outcomes.

Following Joseph Schumpeter's conception of innovation as ‘new innovations’, this chapter contends that innovations that transform lives in developing countries of Southern Africa are not radically new and different novelties but rather ‘new combinations’ at the interface of new materialisations (creative expression) and exploitations of new opportunities (entrepreneurship). We argue that this posture is not a contestation of the reality that novelty enter the system through the development of new technologies, processes and new ways of organising, but rather such novelty is a process of recombining existing elements in new ways. I build on this argument to demonstrate that in resource-poor contexts where institutional voids frustrate entrepreneurs' potential to deploy innovation capabilities for generating groundbreaking innovation, innovations and entrepreneurship are outcomes of ‘tinkering’, improvision and refinement of unsophisticated creative ideas. Drawing on exemplars from health, education, finance and poverty alleviation interventions that support sustainable human development, I also demonstrate that high knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship (KIE) and low knowledge-intensive frugal innovations are mutually constitutive and recursive outputs of the interaction of knowledge application and innovation conversion rather than serial processes of cause and effect. Using combinative innovation, internal coupling and combinative capabilities as heuristics for understanding the entrepreneurship–innovation nexus, I provide empirical support to the view that entrepreneurial effectuation, new combinations, bricolage and improvision constitute useful cognitive arena for the conversion of entrepreneurial and innovation behaviours, practices and processes into KIE and frugal innovation outputs.

The main purpose of this study is to examine the impact of imported inputs on firms' productivity in selected South Asian economies, namely Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Furthermore, this study explores the complementarity between firms' capabilities and imported inputs in an augmented productivity framework.

A dataset comprising 7117 manufacturing firms of selected South Asian economies was taken from the World Bank for 2013 and 2014. The empirical analysis was based on stochastic frontier models, the ordinary least square method and instrumental variable estimation techniques.

The empirical results show that imported inputs have positive and significant effects on the firms' productivity in the selected countries. Moreover, the study findings demonstrate that firms' capabilities play a complementary role in expanding the firms' production frontier.

The study outcomes suggest that reducing tariffs on imported inputs will enhance the firms' productivity in the selected emerging economies. However, the study further finds that the potential gain of imported inputs is conditional on the firm's capabilities. It implies that firms operating in these countries can improve their performance by allocating more resources to capabilities, such as workers’ training, management and internal R&D effort.

The existing literature on the subject is sceptical about the positive impact of imported inputs on firms' productivity in the case of developing countries. In this regard, the shortage of skilled labour and firms' capabilities are compelling rationales that need to be explored. Thus, the potential contribution of the study lies in explaining the moderating role of firm's capabilities operating in the selected emerging economies in the nexus of imported inputs and productivity.

This study aims to investigate the use of voluntary disclosure on mainstream social media platforms to examine strategic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. It examines the influential factors and institutional pressures organisations faced when making disclosures on social media during the pandemic.

A two-stage qualitative approach was adopted. Stage one used content analysis to examine voluntary disclosures made by international organisations on social media during the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Stage two comprised semi-structured interviews with individuals who were involved in the decision-making process around the social media disclosures.

This study’s findings reveal significant changes in disclosure practices due to COVID-19-related pressures. In addition to the utilisation of social media for signalling conformance with new pandemic-related norms and connecting with stakeholders, the evidence also reveals how organisations made use of strategic responses to COVID-19-related institutional pressures.

The findings reveal how social media was used as a means of timely voluntary disclosure during the examined crisis. The findings can inform the development of organisational guidelines and policies for the use of social media as a disclosure medium.

This study reveals how organisations used voluntary disclosure on social media as a strategic response to institutional pressures and the COVID-19 pandemic; this context is under-researched. The study also extends the application of the strategic response framework regarding voluntary disclosure via social media.