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Crisis response has emerged as a salient concern for firms in the onset of COVID-19. While research suggests that resilience is critical during such disruptions, there remains a need to examine how firms build resilience during evolving situations. This study focuses on resiliency created through operational flexibility and examines how firms developed resiliency to COVID-19 through an adaptation of three technology-based levers of flexibility: change in a firm's product and service offerings, the channel it uses for sales and the location of a firm's workforce.

This study uses a unique cross-sectional dataset generated from a survey administered by a reputable financial institution, from March 20 to June 20, during the inception of COVID crisis. This study uses ordinary least squares to analyze data from 6,076 firms across 20 countries.

Results indicate that flexibility through a combination of a change in a firm's product and service offerings, with movement to selling through a digital channel, had a positive impact on firm sales. However, flexibility through a combination of change in product and service offerings with workforce location changes had negative impacts. Robustness analysis indicates that negative impacts worsen in countries with higher digitization and in manufacturing and retail firms as compared to service firms, indicating the inflexibility of physical goods–based business models. Results highlight dimensions through which technology-based flexibility can take place and the benefits of flexibility on firm performance.

This study provides managerial insights into technology-based operational flexibility mechanisms that can be employed for building performance resilience during unexpected disruptions. Research findings inform firms facing supply chain challenges and inflation pressures of business today.

Despite the impressive record of advancing toward higher education, women are substantially underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields compared to men. Less is known about the factors that explain gendered patterns of participation in STEM in countries with dissimilar national characteristics and educational systems. To fill this gap in the literature, this study first examines the historical trends of female representation in STEM fields cross-nationally. Then, this paper explores the relationship between women’s and men’s enrollments in STEM with various structural, national characteristics. Recognizing that the relationship may vary by subfields of STEM, the study further investigates the association separately for natural science and for engineering. Using time- and entity-fixed effects panel regression models pooled between 1970 and 2010, the study’s analyses built on earlier studies on gender segregation across fields of study and gender inequality in higher education. The findings suggest that the common assumption of tight, positive linkage between societal development and participation in STEM holds for only men at an aggregate level under the period covered. The authors find a negative association between national economic development and women’s participation in STEM, especially for engineering. On the other hand, they find positive associations between men’s enrollment in STEM as well as women’s enrollment in other fields of study with women’s participation in STEM. Taken together, the results suggest the significance of the diffusion of an inclusive logic in higher educational institutions.

Entrepreneurial approaches to public mass education are not easily developed or managed by public sector institutions. Instead, private sector entities are often responsible for the development and implementation of innovative and entrepreneurial education. Part of the reason may be the resistance to change that isomorphism in mass education engenders, but the involvement of privately-funded, organized, and managed organizations plays a significant role as well. Private sector-driven educational change has become the dominant mode of entrepreneurship in 21st century national educational systems, but there are challenges and obstacles to privately managing public sector institutions such as education and the activities or curricula that comprise its core. To understand this phenomena the promises and challenges for innovation and entrepreneurship are discussed through an institutional framework.

Human rights education (HRE) is a professional field and a developing curricular movement that combines work in human rights and education. A variety of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) endorse teaching human rights, an increasing number of national governments incorporate human rights content in formal school curriculum, and many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) throughout the world train teachers, produce teaching manuals, and advocate for HRE in schools. While the movement dates back at least to the 1970s, in 1995 the United Nations initiated a Decade for Human Rights Education and formally defined HRE as “training, dissemination, and information efforts aimed at the building of a universal culture of human rights through the imparting of knowledge and skills and the moulding of attitudes” (United Nations, 1998, p. 3).

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the role of academia in broader society. What is academia’s role beyond being a business and providing qualified professionals to other businesses? What kind of organization and ethos is consistent with academia’s proper role in society, considered as a higher-order cognitive system?

Society as a whole is modeled as a viable system, with subsystems dedicated to self-production in the here and now (systems 1-3) and subsystems engaged in exploring the outside and future of the system and in consolidating an identity and an ethos (systems 4 and 5). The role, ethos and proper organization of academia are derived from this model and from cybernetic considerations on the proper architecture of system 4 and system 5 cognitive systems.

To fulfill its role as part of society’s system 4 and system 5, academia must include areas that are sometimes considered redundant or an expensive luxury, such as the humanities or basic research. The humanities must strive to catalyze broad community participation as part of their contribution to system 5 and must strive to produce bridge languages between communities and disciplines to increase the connectivity of the World Brain. The publish-or-perish ethos of academia must be replaced by an erotic spirituality, understood as desire for otherness.

This paper integrates broad philosophical considerations on the role of academia with the use of cybernetic models of viable systems and of distributed cognition, yielding practical guidelines for the organization of academia.

The aim of this paper is to analyze responses of public universities to the introduction of New Public Management (NPM) as the outcome of balancing between the managerial logics endorsed by NPM and the academic professional logics. Building on the institutional logics approach, we develop a framework concerning how universities will achieve compliance to conflicting claims by strategies like compartmentalization and blending stipulations of both logics. Empirical results based on a large-scale survey of 26 universities in eight European countries display how compatibility is achieved through highly differentiated adoption of logics that depends on the task considered. The results reveal that the strength of NPM pressures strongly affects the adoption of managerial practices within universities yet has no significant effect on the academic characteristics.

The significant impact of innovation in stimulating economic growth cannot be overemphasized, more importantly from policy perspective. For this reason, the relationship between innovation and economic growth in developing economies such as the ones in Africa has remained topical. Yet, innovation as a concept is multi-dimensional and cannot be measured by just one single variable. With hindsight of the traditional measures of innovation in literature, we augment it with the number of scientific journals published in the region to enrich this discourse.

We focus on an approach that explores innovation policy qualitatively from various policy documents of selected countries in the region from three policy perspectives (i.e. institutional framework, financing and diffusion and interaction). We further investigate whether innovation as perceived differently is important for economic growth in 25 economies in sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1990–2016. Instrumental variable estimation of a threshold regression is used to capture the contributions of innovation as a multi-dimensional concept on economic growth, while dealing with endogeneity between the regressors and error term.

The results from both traditional panel regressions and IV panel threshold regressions show a positive relationship between innovation and economic growth, although the impact seems negligible. Institutional quality dampens innovation among low-regime economies, and the relation is persistent regardless of when the focus is on aggregate or decomposed institutional factors. The impact of innovation on economic growth in most regressions is robust to different dimensions of innovation. Yet, the coefficients of the innovation variables in the two regimes are quite dissimilar. While most countries in the region have offered financial support in the form of budgetary allocations to strengthen institutions, barriers to the design and implementation of innovation policies may be responsible for the sluggish contribution of innovation to the growth pattern of the region.

Segregating economies of Africa into two distinct regimes based on a threshold of investment in education as a share of GDP in order to understand the relationship between innovation and economic growth is quite novel. This lends credence to the fact that innovation as a multifaceted concept does not take place by chance – it is carefully planned. We have enriched the discourse of innovation and thus helped in deepening understanding on this contentious subject.

Sterilization is endorsed as a method of family planning by international governmental organizations; abortion is not. Focusing on policy development for these two issues in a single country, Peru, we ask how power and inequality operate under conditions of global consensus or dissensus. The case of sterilization unfolded the way many previous research studies would predict, with Peruvian state actions corresponding to a global diffusion process. We find that global consensus provided cover for top-down actions that violated the human rights of indigenous women in the country, who were predominantly poor, non-Spanish speakers, and residents of the mountainous, sparsely populated parts of the country. With respect to abortion in Peru, in the absence of global consensus, the state resisted calls for change, advocacy networks have worked at cross-purposes, and a powerful local actor, the Catholic Church, has effectively blocked liberalization efforts. As with sterilization, however, marginalized indigenous women and their interests were rendered invisible.