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In the EU and especially in Germany, public procurement is bound to a tight legislation that also sets and enforces strategic goals such as innovation or sustainability. The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether different archetypes of public procurement organizations (centralized or decentralized; state-level or local-level) perceive and implement strategic goals differently. A survey with data from 104 entities is used for this purpose. The findings reveal that the implementation of strategy is different in centralized or state-level organizations compared with decentralized or local organizations. Centralized organizations give goals such as innovation, transparency, and sustainability a high priority, while local ones highlight regional development and SME support

The purpose of this paper is to describe the further development of the Koha 3.0 library management system (LMS) and the involvement of external software consultants at the Complementary and Alternative Medicine Library and Information Service (CAMLIS), Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital.

The paper takes the form of a report based on internal documentation.

Since its implementation in winter 2007/8 Koha has grown into an LMS that supports the wide‐ranging needs of a busy and fast‐growing specialist library. CAMLIS had Koha modules modified and added to meet its needs flexibly, using simultaneously both UK‐based consultancy firms with Koha expertise.

This is among the first implementations of Koha in the UK. Experience and conclusions from this installation might influence decisions at other libraries.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between the family generational stage and the intended use of the Initial Public Offering (IPO) proceeds disclosed in the prospectus. With the aim to explore family business (FB) heterogeneity, it also explores the moderating role of the family CEO.

We draw on signalling theory and hand-collected data on Italian family IPOs that occurred in the period 2000–2020, disentangling the intended use of IPO proceeds as distinguished into three categories. We employ logit regression to test our hypotheses.

According to our theoretical predictions, we find that the family generational stage positively affects the disclosure of the investment reason as the intended use of IPO proceeds, while it negatively influences the use for recapitalization and general corporate purposes. The first relationship is moderated by the presence of a family CEO. Our results remain robust with different FBs definitions and a different empirical method.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to address the topic of the intended use of IPO proceeds in FBs. In doing so, it opens avenues for future research by enriching an underdeveloped, albeit growing, area of research, that of preparing for the market scrutiny in family IPOs.

This paper seeks to provide a brief overview of what is business history as an academic discipline, with some reflection about its evolutionary patterns and heuristic value in other fields, as for instance, management studies. A peculiar and increasingly practised subfield of business history is that of family business studies, which is thus a promising crossroads and meeting point for both business historians, practitioners and scholars in management studies.

Through an extensive analysis of the literature on family business studies in business history, this article highlights some potential areas of collaboration and suggests some reflections about the way in which the research methods of historians can be beneficial for management scholars.

Business history has in fact a high potential in providing, through its longitudinal and comparative approach, evidence for building new theories and challenging the existing ones.

This article tries to move a step beyond from the consideration of history as a repository of interesting evidence, to a new role for the discipline as an heuristic tool, and new chances of cooperation between historians and management scholars.

This study enriches the theory of effectuation by discussing the four independent dimensions of effectuation and their relationships with causation. Additionally, we fill the gap in prior literature by showing how entrepreneurial experience moderates the relationship between effectuation and innovativeness of the venture. Our study of 171 practising entrepreneurs regarding their entrepreneurial decision-making logic yielded multiple findings. The authors find that entrepreneurs rely on causation as well as effectuation in their decision-making; the more experienced entrepreneurs are, the more they actually use causation; and entrepreneurial experience moderates the relationship between effectuation and innovativeness of the venture firm.

Limiting the use of antibiotics in food animals is a cornerstone of contemporary EU policy. Despite that marketing of antibiotics for growth promotion and nutrition has been banned since 2006, the use is still high and varied. This paper aims to investigate the forces behind the different usage patterns in Italy, with one of the EU’s most extensive use of antibiotics in animals, versus Sweden, with the union’s most restricted use, including how these usage patterns are related to EU and national policies.

The industrial network approach/the 4R resources interaction model is adopted to investigate the major forces behind the different antibiotic usage patterns. Furthermore, the study relies on the notion of three main characteristics related to the use of a resource activated in several user settings (Håkansson and Waluszewski, 2008, pp. 20–22). The paper investigates the Swedish and the Italian using settings, with a minimised, respectively, extensive usage of antibiotics. The study is exploratory in nature and based on qualitative data collected through a combination of primary and secondary sources.

The paper underlines the importance of integrating forces for policy to succeed in attempts to reduce the use of a particular resource. It reveals that Sweden’s radically reduced use was based on great awareness, close interactions between animal-based food producers and policy – and that integrating forces were supported by an era of state-protected food production, with promising ability to distribute the cost of change. The Italian characteristics hindering the integration of forces mounting for reduced use were restricted awareness, top-down business and policy interactions – and a great awareness about the difficulties of distributing the cost of change.

The study deals with the analysis of forces affecting the different usage of antibiotics within two EU settings. The investigation, based on the industrial network approach’s notion of connectivity of economic resources, that is, of exchange having a content and substance beyond discrete transactions, reveals how indirect related contextual forces, neglected by policy, have an important influence on the ability to achieve change, in this case of antibiotics usage patterns.

Search engines, the most popular online services, are associated with several concerns. Users are concerned about the unauthorized processing of their personal data, as well as about search engines keeping track of their search preferences. Various search engines have been introduced to address these concerns, claiming that they protect users’ privacy. The authors call these search engines privacy-preserving search engines (PPSEs). This paper aims to investigate the factors that motivate search engine users to use PPSEs.

This study adopted protection motivation theory (PMT) and associated its constructs with subjective norms to build a comprehensive research model. The authors tested the research model using survey data from 830 search engine users worldwide.

The results confirm the interpretive power of PMT in privacy-related decision-making and show that users are more inclined to take protective measures when they consider that data abuse is a more severe risk and that they are more vulnerable to data abuse. Furthermore, the results highlight the importance of subjective norms in predicting and determining PPSE use. Because subjective norms refer to perceived social influences from important others to engage or refrain from protective behavior, the authors reveal that the recommendation from people that users consider important motivates them to take protective measures and use PPSE.

Despite its interesting results, this research also has some limitations. First, because the survey was conducted online, the study environment was less controlled. Participants may have been disrupted or affected, for example, by the presence of others or background noise during the session. Second, some of the survey items could possibly be misinterpreted by the respondents in the study questionnaire, as they did not have access to clarifications that a researcher could possibly provide. Third, another limitation refers to the use of the Amazon Turk tool. According Paolacci and Chandler (2014) in comparison to the US population, the MTurk workers are more educated, younger and less religiously and politically diverse. Fourth, another limitation of this study could be that Actual Use of PPSE is self-reported by the participants. This could cause bias because it is argued that internet users’ statements may be in contrast with their actions in real life or in an experimental scenario (Berendt et al., 2005, Jensen et al., 2005); Moreover, some limitations of this study emerge from the use of PMT as the background theory of the study. PMT identifies the main factors that affect protection motivation, but other environmental and cognitive factors can also have a significant role in determining the way an individual’s attitude is formed. As Rogers (1975) argued, PMT as proposed does not attempt to specify all of the possible factors in a fear appeal that may affect persuasion, but rather a systematic exposition of a limited set of components and cognitive mediational processes that may account for a significant portion of the variance in acceptance by users. In addition, as Tanner et al. (1991) argue, the ‘PMT’s assumption that the subjects have not already developed a coping mechanism is one of its limitations. Finally, another limitation is that the sample does not include users from China, which is the second most populated country. Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo has been blocked in China, so it has not been feasible to include users from China in this study.

The proposed model and, specifically, the subjective norms construct proved to be successful in predicting PPSE use. This study demonstrates the need for PPSE to exhibit and advertise the technology and measures they use to protect users’ privacy. This will contribute to the effort to persuade internet users to use these tools.

This study sought to explore the privacy attitudes of search engine users using PMT and its constructs’ association with subjective norms. It used the PMT to elucidate users’ perceptions that motivate them to privacy adoption behavior, as well as how these perceptions influence the type of search engine they use. This research is a first step toward gaining a better understanding of the processes that drive people’s motivation to, or not to, protect their privacy online by means of using PPSE. At the same time, this study contributes to search engine vendors by revealing that users’ need to be persuaded not only about their policy toward privacy but also by considering and implementing new strategies of diffusion that could enhance the use of the PPSE.

This research is a first step toward gaining a better understanding of the processes that drive people’s motivation to, or not to, protect their privacy online by means of using PPSEs.

The purpose of this paper is to identify entrepreneur mentor benefits and challenges as a result of entrepreneurship mentoring in higher education (HE).

An entrepreneurship mentoring scheme was developed at a UK university to support prospective student entrepreneurs, with mentors being entrepreneurs drawn from the local business community. A mentor-outcomes framework was developed and applied to guide semi-structured interviews.

Results supported the broader applicability of our framework, with a revised framework developed to better represent the entrepreneur mentor context. Alongside psychosocial and personal developmental outcomes, mentors benefitted from entrepreneurial learning, renewed commitment to their own ventures and the development of additional skills sets. Enhanced business performance also manifested itself for some mentors. A range of challenges are presented, some generic to the entrepreneur setting and others more specific to the higher education (HE) setting.

The framework offered serves as a starting point for further researchers to explore and refine the outcomes of entrepreneur mentoring.

The findings serve to support those considering developing a mentor programme or including mentoring as part of a formal entrepreneurship education offer, specifically in a university setting but also beyond.

The vast majority of entrepreneurship mentoring studies focus on the benefits to the mentee. By focusing on benefits and challenges for the entrepreneur mentor, this study extends our knowledge of the benefit of entrepreneurship mentoring. It offers an empirically derived entrepreneur mentor outcomes framework, as well as offering insights into challenges for the entrepreneur mentor within an HE setting.

Qualitative and recent quantitative research indicates that market orientation exerts a positive effect on the performance of new entrepreneurial firms. However, the question whether in this context organizational culture, which has been identified as an important antecedent of market‐oriented behavior in established firms, also that shows a significant influence on the level of market orientation has so far been neglected. Using a sample of 143 new entrepreneurial firms, the present analysis shows empirically that market‐oriented behavior is in fact rooted in this type of culture. Thereby, organizational culture does exert an indirect influence on the performance of new entrepreneurial firms.