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This case aims to illustrate the hurdles that a young venture might experience in the early stages of its life cycle and showcase how managers must use ingenuity to climb over obstacles.

The case is based on interviews with the founders and additional secondary data.

RepositBox, a Canadian-based provider of credentials verification solutions, is a new venture coping with the challenges posed by the introduction of its innovative new product to the marketplace.

The case is suitable for use in undergraduate or graduate courses in new venture creation, entrepreneurial marketing and launching a technology-based enterprise.

Reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

The iconic BlackBerry has become so addictive to many of its users that it's earned the nickname “crackberry”. It's not the only such mini‐miracle on the market, of course, but it does punch well above its weight in the “brand icon” stakes against such competition as Nokia, Apple and Palm.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to digest format.

This paper documents and accounts for the globalization of the so-called national bourgeoisie in the late twentieth century. A substantial and growing body of sociological literature holds that firms and investors from the developing world have been denationalized, neutered, or destroyed by their efforts to penetrate international markets – and that cross-national economic competition is therefore giving way to transnational class conflict over time. By way of contrast, I hold that not only peripheral capitalists but their elected and appointed representatives are compelled to undertake large-scale, fixed investments, exploit their competitive advantages, and challenge foreign firms – and their respective representatives – on their own soil by the very logic of capitalist competition, and that the aforementioned challenges will occur on political as well as economic terrain.

A strange phenomenon among women writers of the late eighteenth century, both conservative and liberal minded, was the predominance of female villains in their novels. While this can be seen as an after-effect of masculine patriarchal discourse, particularly for those women writers who possessed a more religious-based ideology, why was it prevalent among feminist writers of the time who should have been aware of misogynistic stereotypes? Two such writers who emulated this strange paradox were Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith. Both these women had been vilified by the Anti-Jacobin British 18th press as notorious and corrupt ‘female philosophers’ who followed in the footsteps of Mary Wollstonecraft. This chapter will conduct a historical feminist close comparative reading of Robinson's novel, Walsingham, and Smith's novel, The Young Philosopher, based on feminist scholarship on eighteenth-century female writers. It will examine how the female villains in the novels overpowered even the male antagonists and were often the cause behind the misfortunes, directly or indirectly, of the heroines/heroes. While these villains did serve as warnings against inappropriate behaviour, they illustrated the disaster for women when there is a lack of female community. Specifically, in the case of Robinson, her Sadean villains illustrated that no one is spared from the corruption of power and that the saintly female figure is nothing but an illusion of the male imagination. They were fallen Lucifers, rebels who relished in their freedom and power despite their damnation and punishment. The patriarchal system was temporarily demolished by them.

Resurgent interest in the life and work of the Italian Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa is leading to New Directions in Sraffa Scholarship. This chapter introduces readers to some of these developments. First and perhaps foremost is the fact that as of September 2016 Sraffa’s archival material has been uploaded onto the website of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, as digital colour images; this chapter introduces readers to the history of these events. This history provides sharp relief on the extant debates over the role of the archival material in leading to the final publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, and readers are provided a brief sketch of these matters. The varied nature of Sraffa scholarship is demonstrated by the different aspects of Sraffa’s intellectual legacy which are developed and discussed in the various entries of our Symposium. The conclusion is reached that we are on the cusp of an exciting phase change of tremendous potential in Sraffa scholarship.

In the early 1930s, Nicholas Kaldor could be classified as an Austrian economist. The author reconstructs the intertwined paths of Kaldor and Friedrich A. Hayek to disequilibrium economics through the theoretical deficiencies exposed by the Austrian theory of capital and its consequences on equilibrium analysis.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The integration of capital theory into a business cycle theory by the Austrians and its shortcomings – e.g. criticized by Piero Sraffa and Gunnar Myrdal – called attention to the limitation of the theoretical apparatus of equilibrium analysis in dynamic contexts. This was a central element to Kaldor’s emancipation in 1934 and his subsequent conversion to John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). In addition, it was pivotal to Hayek’s reformulation of equilibrium as a social coordination problem in “Economics and Knowledge” (1937). It also had implications for Kaldor’s mature developments, such as the construction of the post-Keynesian models of growth and distribution, the Cambridge capital controversy, and his critique of neoclassical equilibrium economics.

The close encounter between Kaldor and Hayek in the early 1930s, the developments during that decade and its mature consequences are unexplored in the secondary literature. The author attempts to construct a coherent historical narrative that integrates many intertwined elements and personas (e.g. the reception of Knut Wicksell in the English-speaking world; Piero Sraffa’s critique of Hayek; Gunnar Myrdal’s critique of Wicksell, Hayek, and Keynes; the Hayek-Knight-Kaldor debate; the Kaldor-Hayek debate, etc.) that were not connected until now by previous commentators.

For Leftists engaged in the study of political economy during the 1960s and 1970s, Cuba and China held particular promise as postrevolutionary states working to construct systems of production and distribution which were predicated on solidarity and mutuality, rather than on the exploited and alienated labor upon which capitalism depended. Against the claim that the desire for individual material gain was irreducibly a part of the human experience, China and Cuba offered the possibility of – in the parlance of the time – a “new man”: a political subject whose motivations were in alignment with a socialist economy rather than a capitalist one.

Based on research in multiple archives, this paper explores efforts on the part of radical economists in the United States – including the Marxists at Monthly Review, the young academics who founded the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), and a handful of older Left-Keynesians – to witness Third World experiments in nonmaterial incentives firsthand. What have often been dismissed as pseudo-religious “pilgrimages” were, in reality, voyages of discovery, where radicals searched for the keys to develop a sustainable, rational, and moral political economy.

While many of the answers that radicals found in Cuba and China were ultimately unsatisfying, Third-World experiments in moral incentives serve as a powerful example of “solidarity in circulation” during the “long 1960s,” and as an important reminder that attempts to keep social science research free of political contamination serve to reify disciplinary norms which are themselves the product of the political culture in which they were formed.

The new teleworking conditions imposed by extreme events such as the COVID-19 pandemic blur the border between home and official working space, amplifying the conflicting demands of family and work life experienced by employees across national cultures. Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study explores cross-national variances in the underlying mechanism of how family–work conflict (FWC) affects employees’ operational and marketing productivity in the global epidemic-induced teleworking context.

This study conducts a large-scale and cross-national survey of 710 remote employees who worked from home partially or fully during the COVID-19 outbreak across three countries: the USA, the UK and Vietnam.

The results show that FWC drives affective commitment, leading to greater employees’ operational and marketing productivity when teleworking. We also find distinct moderating effects of organizational factors (i.e. task control) and employees’ psychological factors (i.e. emotional exhaustion) on the FWC–operational productivity link across the three countries. Moreover, centralization positively moderates the effect of operational productivity on marketing productivity in the teleworking context in Vietnam, while it is not the case in the USA and the UK.

This study fills a gap in the literature by revealing cross-national differences in the underlying mechanism of the FWC effects on employees’ operational and marketing productivity in the pandemic-induced teleworking conditions. It extends extant studies in the work–family literature by introducing affective commitment as an important mediator in translating the negative consequences of FWC to operational and marketing productivity gain in crisis-driven teleworking across national cultures. We also provide insights into the distinct moderating roles of task control and emotional exhaustion in determining the FWC effect on operational productivity as well as that of centralization in driving marketing productivity. The findings have substantive implications for teleworking design and management to improve employee productivity across different national settings.