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Underground space is a valuable commodity — no less valuable because it is largely unseen. This space is especially valuable in towns and cities where land values are at a premium. The need for a study of these tracts below street level is becoming increasingly urgent, if only to assess the true value of this capital vested underground. Perhaps equally important to our consideration of it are the long term prospects for the vast service network buried beneath our cities.

‘Prospective teachers are stigmatized and told they have a social responsibility to do this or not to do that,’ says Mrs Annie Trotter, President of the Students' Union at Whitelands College of Education, and unofficial leader of the student teachers' campaign against ‘out‐dated’ college regulations. This, she believes explains why colleges of education, more than other colleges and universities, still have repressive regulations and disciplinary procedures.

The paper investigates factors that contribute to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) surviving major exogenous shocks. Global crises such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have increasingly heightened scholarly interest in post-crises responses. However, studies that compare the relative responses to external shocks and the outcomes for SMEs operating in different institutional settings are limited. We examine the relative degrees of success European and African SMEs experienced in avoiding the worst consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We use the resource dependency theory (RDT) with variants of institutional theory since the RDT has been shown in practice to have greater explanatory power when used in this way. We augment our framework with a feminist theory dimension. To test our hypotheses, we apply regression analyses using cross-sectional data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES), which include responses from private enterprises in 26 European and eight African countries. We construct our data by combining the COVID-19 follow-up surveys with relevant firm-specific characteristics from the WBES conducted in 2020–2021 using firm-specific unique IDs. After removing the firms with missing observations, the sample number of SMEs is 15,178.

Our empirical findings support the theoretically posited positive effects of innovativeness, institutional connectedness and governance capability on SMEs’ survival in the face of external shocks. Further, we confirm the importance of firm-specific characteristics (financial status, size and age) for SMEs’ survival. Female-owned SMEs are more likely to suffer during COVID-19, especially in Africa. The results are more nuanced when we consider industry specificity and heterogeneity of government support.

Our article helps answer the theoretical (and policy-relevant) question of whether SMEs that are resilient to major exogenous shocks may share certain characteristics despite operating in different institutional environments. If that is so, then it may be that lessons from one continent may have at least some relevance for the other. Our approach’s broad value lies in its capacity to test the degree to which established bodies of theory developed in the Northern Hemisphere may be deployed in Africa, well beyond the contexts which provided their initial empirical basis. This paper also contributes to the literature on the effect of environmental-change shocks on entrepreneurship performance outcomes.

The chapter provides a brief review of team diversity research from its roots in group composition and workforce demographics through recent trends toward dynamic multilevel models. The divergence from this research area's early motivations in social justice and inclusion to a primarily economic motivation is highlighted. The chapter also reviews major theories that have been used to explain diversity effects in team interactions and outcomes. The review leads to a discussion of three broad critiques of mainstream diversity research, namely a predominance of US cultural outlook, a narrow disciplinary base in organization sciences and psychology, and inadequate attention and overly simplistic perspective on communication processes. The chapter ends with implications for team diversity research and a discussion of how the suggestions can be applied to emerging dimensions of diversity.

Despite politicians sometimes playing an active agentic role in firms’ resource dependency and in the outcomes of corporate political activity (CPA), there is limited research on the supply-side dynamics of political markets and the contingent role of normative institutions. This study aims to examine the relationship between managerial regulatory engagement (MRE) − a type of CPA − and access to bank finance, and how this relationship is moderated by country-level religiosity and religion policy regime.

Using data from over 37,000 firms in 43 sub-Saharan African countries and drawing on resource dependency and institutional theories, the authors deploy robust and sophisticated statistical analyses to test their hypotheses.

This study finds that MRE has a positive impact on access to bank finance. This effect is stronger in countries with more formal religion restriction where morality does not inhibit politicians’ discriminatory behaviour. However, this effect is weakened in countries where high levels of religiosity and more formal religion support curtail amoral rent provision.

These findings shed light on how firms’ use of CPA to manage resource dependency is affected by the influence of institutional religiosity on the agency of politicians. This study offers important theoretical contributions to the literature and generate useful implications for managers and policymakers.

Business corporations (and unincorporated joint-stock companies) formed in Britain and the United States in the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century were lightly regulated by today’s standards and, as startups, sold equity directly to investors without the aid of intermediaries, yet they suffered relatively few governance breakdowns. That is because republican government-style checks against the arbitrary power of any group of stakeholders (managers, blockholders, directors) suffused their founding documents (charters/constitutions, articles of agreement, bylaws), raising the expected costs of defalcation above the expected benefits. Over the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, the original checks disintegrated. They were functionally replaced twice, first by financial capitalism a la J. P. Morgan, then by corporate raiders and takeover specialists like KKR, but politicians neutralized the first and managers (and judges) the second, leaving many widely held corporations today under the control of CEOs/Board Chairmen who can self-deal with near impunity and have apparent incentives to do so. A return to the precepts of the republican model could help to improve governance outcomes in the future.

Conducting research with young migrants offers an important opportunity to understand better their own perspectives on their migration experiences. Yet, engaging migrant youth in research can be fraught with ethical and methodological challenges. Institutional ethics processes have a tendency to prioritise standard principles – many of which depart from the ethical sensitivities that emerge during research practice. In this chapter, the authors explore some of the procedural and situated ethical issues involved in conducting research with child and youth migrants in Ghana. In particular, the authors highlight how the diversity of young migrants prompts definitional issues about what constitutes childhood and youth, and in different socio-cultural spatial settings. Differing categorisations of child and youth generate issues of representation and guide adult-led decisions about children’s assumed competencies and vulnerabilities to participate in research. The precarious living circumstances of many migrant children, including the absence of parental figures or legal guardians, coupled with language and cultural barriers, present particular difficulties for securing informed consent. Challenges of this kind can deny young migrants the opportunity to participate in research about their own lives and serve to reproduce dominant power asymmetries and assumptions about these children’s vulnerabilities. The authors conclude by offering some suggestions for how researchers might develop critical ethical reflexivity to support the meaningful and ethical engagement of young migrants in research.

Academic inquiry into entrepreneurial phenomena has had a rich history over several decades and continues to evolve. This editorial draws attention to the classics: seminal articles that make profound contributions to the development of an academic field in entrepreneurship studies. We focus on the formative years of entrepreneurship research, specifically the 1970s and 1980s, to identify classics using a key informant approach that surveys members of the journal editorial board. Each nominated classic is introduced and discussed by an editorial board member, with particular focus on research opportunities that may be pursued going forward. Analyzing classics allows for the recognition of substantive advances in entrepreneurship research and provides an opportunity to delve into the academic progress achieved in understanding entrepreneurial phenomena.

Generally, theory and research investigating the effectiveness of mentoring has offered little resounding evidence to attest to mentoring programmes being a strategic initiative that make a real difference in reducing the educational inequities many minority students endure. In contrast to this existing research base, the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) has often been cited as one of the most successful mentoring initiatives within Australia. It is the purpose of this chapter to examine how AIME may impact on the educational aspirations and school self-concept of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.

A series of multi-group analyses were centred around Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling techniques that sought not only to explore the psychometric validity of the measures utilized within this study, but also to identify how the measures may be related after accounting for background variables (e.g. gender, parental education).

The results found that the measures utilized held strong psychometric properties allowing an increased level of confidence in the measures used and the conclusion that may be drawn from their use in analyses. Overall, the results suggested that AIME is an effective tool for increasing not only the educational aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students but also their levels (and utility) of School Self-concept and School Enjoyment.

The implications suggest that not only is AIME an essential tool for closing the educational gap between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Aboriginal students, but also our understanding of mentoring must be extended well beyond simplistic notions of role-modelling.