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The appearance of social media in small and medium enterprise (SME) business operations seems to be increasing in recent years. SME owners have started to understand that digital marketing tools can benefit their businesses significantly. Hence, in this study, we explore further the relationship between organisations and customers, and how SMEs use social media as an opportunity to develop their enterprises. We report the results by relying on qualitative methods to explore the insights from a wider stakeholder perspective. The findings contribute to the existing literature in agreement with the latest theories that SMEs in Greece are aware of the hidden opportunities and try to apply branding with the combination of social media. This study explores further the role of electronic word of mouth (eWOM) in a business transition, customers' experience and competitive business advantage.

Since Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX) was signed into law, the landscape of sport in the United States has changed dramatically, not only in terms of sport participation rates for girls and women but also increased levels of support, sponsorship, viewership, competition and media coverage. While educational institutions were slow to develop and implement policies to comply with Title IX, decades later, girls' and women's sports have shown clear signs of having reaped the benefits of the law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex or gender in educational programmes receiving federal funding. As girls' and women's participation in scholastic and collegiate sport has grown, however, so too have reported incidents and public exposure of harmful hazing activities among female athletes. The purpose of this chapter is to examine hazing practices in girls' and women's sports, including the perspectives of female athletes and the broader community. Based on quantitative and qualitative survey data, interviews with college female athletes and public responses to hazing reports in the media, this chapter presents an analysis of hazing in girls' and women's sports 40+ years post-Title IX. Findings showed mixed opinions about the dangers and perceived utility of hazing ceremonies, highlighted athletes' ideas to promote positive team interactions in lieu of hazing and considered the impact of contemporary social and cultural shifts on athletes' ability and willingness to speak out against hazing and other forms of violence and abuse in sports.

Recommend ways to increase the entrepreneurial performance score for city-centered entrepreneurial ecosystems (EES) and the possible role within the triplex helix concept. The former applies to lower-ranked EESs. For the latter, the authors hypothesize that the standard triple helix model of counting on some existing, well known multi-party interest in bringing together businesses and other stakeholders (especially universities and government) is insufficient. Including more players and alternative cooperation models may truly enable a long lasting productive interplay of cooperative and competitive forces leading to genuinely innovative (non-marginal, non-opportunistic) businesses and also to more regional well-being. This study aims at leveraging the city-based view on entrepreneurial ecosystems, to enable new ways of boosting the functionality of triple-helix minded programs, especially so for emerging economies and their cross-border regions.

Methodology is dual: (1) paying tribute to the history of entrepreneurial behavior and reviewing the diverse sources of support (institutional and otherwise), eventually leading to today’s concentrations of successful innovative business, and (2) analyzing modern data on performance of city-centered EESs. Putting emphasis on path-dependence (meaning that history matters) the authors analyze data distributions of measures concerning city-centered EESs and also nation-wide entrepreneurial aggregates, searching signs of long-tail statistic, an indicator of path dependence. Furthermore the authors statistically analyze if and to what extend, key university performance indices translate into successful EESs. From these results, recommendation follow.

Historical developments and cultural backgrounds of different countries lead to different ways of support for new ideas and approaches. Entrepreneurship success is path-dependent and there are entrepreneurial approaches more easy – but others way more difficult – to imitate (e.g. “Hidden Champions”). Statistical analysis of entrepreneurial performance data confirms power law decay, which confirms the action of path-depend processes. Statistical models show that university performance is just weakly influencing entrepreneurial success. This leads to proposing a new, polycentric approach for organizing robust cooperation between the stakeholders, potentially capable of lifting low-score EESs into a more productive regime.

Research limitation primarily concern data availability, as potentially useful information is not publicly available. The findings lead to further questions, and to questioning too optimistic expectations about cooperation readiness of the implied triple helix stakeholders. As pointed out repeatedly, other important players are non-university research organizations with more focused goals (national labs, etc.), which should be explicitly accounted for. Another directions is distinguishing between support for (a) short-term high-tech, and for (b) longer term, deep-tech entrepreneurs. The latter may require new evaluation techniques and specially tailored private-public partnerships. Finally, polycentric and polycentric cross-border cooperation requires more research into networked organizations.

Triple-helix based, cooperative agreements should rethink the effective functionality of EESs. City-centered, EESs tend to be most expressive in their projects but also subject to a stronger long tail-effect. This implies “success-breads-success” for the front-runners, enjoying very low ranking mobility. Lower-positioned EESs may profit from the mobility within this score region. However, the still lower positioned ones face strong downward rank mobility, implying that special effort (support) is needed. The authors’ proposal of polycentric cooperation, especially the cross-border variant, would credibly enable such support by bringing in both, more players and more levels of play, helping robust networking.

This research has potentially profound social implications. Acknowledging the path-dependence of intellectual capital formation and emergence of entrepreneurial spirit in the modern sense helps to understand which techno-entrepreneurial endeavors would have increased chance of success of being brought up in the respective EES. It is also useful to identify the oversold (over-hyped) entrepreneurial projects. Concerning the cross-border polycentric organizations harboring EESs one may have to concede that national borders are sub-optimal, at least with regard to lifting up the entrepreneurial reputation of border-adjacent regions. Implicitly, opportunistic and marginal entrepreneurship (e.g. in Eastern Europe) would reduce.

This research claims originality for combining a qualitative-historical approach with a statistical modeling approach, which can explain the dynamic nature of the involved entrepreneurial processes (long-tails). While the historical approach is deemed to be necessary for understanding the reasons for the large differences in entrepreneurial success across nations and regions, the statistical modeling is helping to identify lower-score intervals within the entrepreneurial score hierarchy which are more easy, or, alternatively, very hard to escape. This in turn leads to adapted recommendations and mobilizing special efforts for creating new, potentially robust, cooperative arrangements beyond the triple-helix concept.

This article develops a benefit curve and a cost curve that relate the strength of a CEO’s social tie to its benefits and costs respectively, and thereby develops a cost-benefit framework for understanding the strengths of CEO social ties. In particular, this framework helps address the basic, yet largely unanswered questions of why one tie is stronger than another and why a CEO utilizes social ties to a greater extent in one context than in another.

As a conceptual paper, this article develops a cost-benefit framework for understanding the strengths of CEO social ties.

This article suggests an important shift of research focus and a different way of thinking regarding tie strength. Specifically, it suggests that the more fundamental question might not be whether a social tie is beneficial or one tie is more beneficial than another, but rather what its optimal strength is, given the underlying relational factors such as resource dependence and demographic similarity. Relatedly, the question might not be whether a CEO’s level of utilization of social ties has a more positive effect on firm performance in one context than in another, but rather what the optimal level of utilization is, given the contextual factors such as environmental uncertainty.

This article addresses a widely accepted, yet potentially misleading understanding of the relationship between a tie’s strength and its benefits (i.e. the strength of weak ties argument). By doing so, it develops a benefit curve that integrates into a coherent, parsimonious function three seemingly conflicting key ideas in the literature (i.e. the overall notion that social ties are beneficial, the strength of weak ties argument, and the liability of strong ties argument). Relatedly, it develops a coherent framework for understanding the strengths of CEO social ties.

This study sought to examine how women founders navigate gender and cultural influences in constructing network ties in Jordan.

In-depth interviews document the experiences of 14 women founders operating digital technology-based businesses in Amman, Jordan.

Gender homogenous ties were perceived to be of diminished quality, limiting the ability of the women founders to acquire resources while risking isolation from diverse networks. Formal professional, male-centric ties were perceived to offer more business impact due to the applicability and usefulness of information. Formal communication, use of intermediaries and industry events were used to develop network ties. These approaches enable founders to respect gendered collectivist norms, such as adhering to family members’ expectations about occupational roles, while meeting new business associates. The strength of network ties emerged as a continuum with strong, weak and midpoint ties. Midpoint ties offered valued encouragement and emotional support but were perceived to be less effective and provided fewer resources compared to strong network ties.

Mechanisms of gender inequality are evidenced in how gender, culture and social networks operate in relation to each other. Perceptions reflect culturally situated, within-group stereotypes, informing how women founders discount other women’s knowledge and experience.

Effective customer journey design (ECJD) is considered a key variable in customer experience management and an essential source of brand meaning and pro-brand behavior. Although previous research has confirmed its importance for driving brand attitudes and loyalty, the role of consumer-brand identification as a social identity-based influence in this relationship has not yet been discussed. Drawing on construal level and social identity theories, this paper aims to investigate whether effective journeys and the resulting overall journey experience are equally powerful in driving brand loyalty among customers with different levels of consumer-brand identification.

The present article develops and tests a research model using data from the European and US service sectors (N = 1,454) to investigate how and when ECJD affects service brand loyalty.

Across two cultural contexts, four service industries and 33 service brands, the results reveal that ECJD is a crucial driver of service brand loyalty for customers with low consumer-brand identification. Moreover, the findings show that different aspects of journey effectiveness positively impact the valence of customers’ experience related to those journeys – a process that is ultimately decisive for their brand loyalty.

This study is unique because it generates theoretical and practical knowledge by combining the literature streams of customer journey design, customer experience and branding. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that consumer-brand identification is a critical boundary condition to be considered in the relationship between ECJD and brand loyalty in services.

Celebrity endorsers are usually considered to bring positive effects to associated nodes, such as brands and corporations. However, limited evidence suggests that brands and corporations are equally responsible for affecting celebrities and their credibility. Drawing on associative network theory, this study explores the effects of brand credibility and corporate credibility on celebrity credibility, both directly and through the mediating and moderating effects of advertising credibility. The research addresses three main issues: (1) whether brand credibility, corporate credibility and advertising credibility have significant effects on celebrity credibility; (2) whether advertising credibility has a significant mediating effect on the effects of brand credibility and corporate credibility on celebrity credibility and (3) whether advertising credibility has a significant moderating effect on the effects of brand credibility and corporate credibility on celebrity credibility.

The study used a quantitative approach involving structural equation modelling. Data were collected from 675 participants from London and focussed on four leading international brands, corporations and celebrity endorsers.

The findings show that brand credibility and advertising credibility have positive direct effects on celebrity credibility; and that advertising credibility mediates the effects of both credibility constructs on celebrity credibility. Furthermore, moderating effects of advertising credibility are also found.

This study will help managers to understand the reverse effects, i.e. the effects of brand credibility and corporate credibility on celebrity credibility. They will be able to understand that a credible brand and corporation like a credible celebrity can also bring significant effects on the associated elements. This will help them to recruit celebrity endorsers who have historically earned their credibility from previous endorsements of credible brands and corporations. Further, these findings will help managers to understand that credibility of the brand and corporation can also affect the credibility of the associated advertising, resulting in having a significant effect on the credibility of the celebrity. This on the consumers’ side will enhance their preferences, attitudes and behaviours, while for the corporation, it will enhance their economic and commercial performance.

This is the first study in the literature, where a conceptual model based on the reverse effects of both credibility constructs on celebrity credibility is examined, directly and based on the moderating and mediating effects of advertising credibility. Hence, the contributions to the literature are threefold: first, the study examines the reverse effect of celebrity endorsement, whereby the credibility of a brand or corporation is transferred to a celebrity endorser; second, the study examines the mediating and moderating effects of advertising credibility on this reverse effect and finally, associative network theory is used to examine the importance of the model.

This article focusses on the hybrid strategy, a simultaneous combination of cost leadership and differentiation strategy. The study aims to examine the impact of hybrid strategy on firm performance through its anticipated positive effects on process and product innovation. In addition, we study the moderating role of adaptive capacity in the direct relationships of hybrid strategy with process and product innovation.

Structural equation modelling was used to analyse 1,842 Spanish firms with fewer than 250 employees. We randomly selected small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in Spain from the Spanish Central Business Directory (2021) database. The overall sample design was based on stratified sampling.

We found that hybrid strategy is positively related to firm performance and to process and product innovation. Additionally, in firms implementing hybrid strategies, process innovation fostered firm performance. Finally, adaptive capacity strengthened the relationships of hybrid strategy with process and product innovation. This sheds light on how and when hybrid strategy is most effective in fostering SME performance.

We highlight that SMEs need to establish strategies that use diverse resources and capabilities and not just generate competitive advantage using one strategy (cost leadership or differentiation strategy). This requires an agile and flexible systems and structures.

Our research provides novel results by proposing the adoption of hybrid strategies instead of pure strategies (cost leadership and differentiation strategy) as a way for SMEs to survive during crises. Unlike “stuck in the middle” strategies, our study demonstrates the importance of hybrid strategies in a comprehensive model that links them to innovation and firm performance, with adaptive capacity being a determining factor.

Intumescent coatings are nowadays a dominant passive system used to protect structural materials in case of fire. Due to their reactive swelling behaviour, intumescent coatings are particularly complex materials to be modelled and predicted, which can be extremely useful especially for performance-based fire safety designs. In addition, many parameters influence their performance, and this challenges the definition and quantification of their material properties. Several approaches and models of various complexities are proposed in the literature, and they are reviewed and analysed in a critical literature review.

Analytical, finite-difference and finite-element methods for modelling intumescent coatings are compared, followed by the definition and quantification of the main physical, thermal, and optical properties of intumescent coatings: swelled thickness, thermal conductivity and resistance, density, specific heat capacity, and emissivity/absorptivity.

The study highlights the scarce consideration of key influencing factors on the material properties, and the tendency to simplify the problem into effective thermo-physical properties, such as effective thermal conductivity. As a conclusion, the literature review underlines the lack of homogenisation of modelling approaches and material properties, as well as the need for a universal modelling method that can generally simulate the performance of intumescent coatings, combine the large amount of published experimental data, and reliably produce fire-safe performance-based designs.

Due to their limited applicability, high complexity and little comparability, the presented literature review does not focus on analysing and comparing different multi-component models, constituted of many model-specific input parameters. On the contrary, the presented literature review compares various approaches, models and thermo-physical properties which primarily focusses on solving the heat transfer problem through swelling intumescent systems.

The presented literature review analyses and discusses the various modelling approaches to describe and predict the behaviour of swelling intumescent coatings as fire protection for structural materials. Due to the vast variety of available commercial products and potential testing conditions, these data are rarely compared and combined to achieve an overall understanding on the response of intumescent coatings as fire protection measure. The study highlights the lack of information and homogenisation of various modelling approaches, and it underlines the research needs about several aspects related to the intumescent coating behaviour modelling, also providing some useful suggestions for future studies.