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This paper aims to look at the growing need for ethical leaders, suggesting that a strata of society called “cultural creatives” may answer that need. It investigates how the cultural creatives can be attracted and nurtured in positions of leadership and puts forward tangible action points and suggestions to help organizations take practical actions.

The paper is an interpretative phenomenological analysis of four cultural creatives who are in positions of leadership.

The finding with the maximum impact for organizations perhaps is that they all left positions where they felt unsupported and undeveloped, rather than push their employer for that support. Participants were predictably people-oriented, although this meant different things for each person. Their styles of leadership varied, but all shared a desire to become role models and leave a legacy. Only one worked within the third sector, and all were quite pragmatic and motivated by money, something that seems to be different from the original research on this group.

The paper highlights five key indicators organizations must consider to attract and nurture cultural creatives: flexibility in leadership style, levels of autonomy, acting as mentors, appropriate financial rewards, and opportunities for authentic, self-determined work.

The cultural creatives are reportedly the third largest social strata in Western society, after the modernists and traditionalists. They are growing as a group, and this study looks at how they operate and feel about their workplace. It provides insights into what it is like to be a cultural creative.

This is the only known research on cultural creatives since the original research in the early 2000s.

Credible influencers play a key role in shaping the views and preferences of social media users. However, many influencers intentionally use disinformation (e.g. false narratives) to deceive users and gain their trust. This can have serious repercussions, not only for the firms that associate with these influencers but also for users. Further, and alarmingly, many influencers who use disinformation can sustain their credibility over time. This research explores how influencers use disinformation to establish long-term credibility on social media.

Drawing on self-presentation theory, we use an in-depth qualitative case study to address our research question, primarily relying on archival data obtained from multiple sources.

Our findings suggest that three stages of self-presentation are required to establish influencer credibility based on disinformation: backstage (preparing to deceive), experimentation (testing deception), and frontstage (launching deceptive ideas on a large scale). We also find that when fraudulent influencers simultaneously weaponise a counterculture and mindfully encase disinformation, users view them as highly credible.

We offer practical suggestions for regulating fraudulent influencers, including enacting fact-checking procedures, using IT artefacts as reliability signals, and building awareness programmes to develop vigilance in social media communities.

We contribute to self-presentation theory by adding experimentation as a critical stage in developing disinformation that works for long periods. We also contribute to the literature at the intersection of social media influencers and disinformation research by revealing why social media users believe in fraudulent influencers.

This study aims to examine individual behaviours regarding coronavirus disease-2019 vaccine brands.

Firstly, qualitative research identified the reasons for vaccine hesitancy in relation to specific brands using data gathered from 36 semi-structured interviews and processed with Leximancer software. Secondly, a new conceptual model was developed with data from 917 questionnaires and analysed using partial least squares-structural equation modelling. The model integrates health treatment effectiveness, vaccines’ immediate health benefits and individuals’ hope as antecedents of perceived vaccine brand reliability and company reputation and their relationships with choice uncertainty.

The results reveal that vaccine hesitancy can be linked with individual, group and contextual and vaccine brand influences and that brand reliability and company reputation antecedents have variable but statistically significant effects on choice uncertainty.

This research’s contribution lies in its analyses of vaccine acceptance and uncertainty from a vaccine brand perspective. The results can guide brand management policies implemented by public and private organisations.

This study contributes to academic literature by filling in two gaps. The first was that no prior studies have directly addressed vaccine brands’ impact, whereas the second gap was the need for brand management policies that public (e.g. governments and public health agencies) and private organisations (e.g. pharmaceutical laboratories) can apply.

The purpose of this paper is to continue and extend the ongoing conversation about greatness in American business.

This survey, conducted in 2021, replicates and extends McCormick and Folsom’s 2001 and 2011 rankings of the greatest entrepreneurs and businesspeople in American history. The authors’ pool surveyed 51 experts to develop an updated ranking and explore factors of greatness.

Henry Ford topped the ranking followed by John D. Rockefeller and Steve Jobs. Business scholars ranked Oprah Winfrey the greatest female and minority businessperson.

The authors extend previous research by surveying the authors’ expert pool about factors of greatness in American business history. “Ability to imagine or envision the future” ranked highest with “created wealth for shareholders” in last place.

This study aims to present an overview of leading research trends in the lean six sigma domain published in the International Journal of Lean Six Sigma (IJLSS) since its inception.

The study analyses articles published between 2010 and 2019 in IJLSS using the bibliometric technique. The results of data analysis identify the most prolific authors, their affiliation, citation trends and highly cited articles from the journal. Further, a graphical analysis involving bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis of the corpus enriches the investigation.

The results of the bibliometric analysis suggest that the number of IJLSS’s publications and citations grew markedly over time (from 4 citations in 2010 to nearly 1,324 in 2019). The organizational diversity and collaboration among authors publishing in IJLSS are trending upwards. Case study and focus group are the two most common research designs in publications. In the study, three major themes emerged: implementation of lean on business, integration of lean and six sigma and the effects of lean six sigma on businesses.

The study finding informs and educates practitioners and scholars about various qualitative research tools, applications and methods of implementing lean six sigma tools in different industry sectors.

The study uses bibliometric analysis to propose a novel categorization of research published in IJLSS and to report on the utilization of various lean tools in the journal. The study provides guidance for new future research besides offering a thorough introspection of the lean and six sigma domains.