Expert Systems (ES) are a core element of human decision making. Initially, in the 1970s and 1980s, ES were focused on extracting explicit knowledge from human experts. With the availability of big data, after the 2000s, ES incorporated data-driven models, thus being associated with business intelligence, big data, data science, and machine learning systems (Cortez & Santos, 2017). The importance of data-driven models in the ES area is confirmed by the recent Wiley’s Expert Systems (EXSY) literature survey that analyzed all journal research articles published from 2000 to 2016 (Cortez et al., 2018). The survey revealed data-driven as the most prevalent ES method type, corresponding to around 35% of all recently published EXSY papers. The first “Knowledge Discovery and Business Intelligence” (KDBI) track was held at the EPIA conference onArtificial Intelligence in 2009, with the goal of strengthening the interaction between Knowledge Discovery (KD) and Business Intelligence (BI). Both are important data related topics. KD is the subfield of Artificial Intelligence that is focused on the extraction of human interesting knowledge from raw data (Fayyad et al., 1996). BI is an umbrella term that encompasses methodologies and technologies (e.g., data warehousing and dashboards) to support managerial decision making (Delen et al., 2014). Following the success of its first 2009 edition, the KDBI workshop become a regular track of the biannual EPIA conference, with its fifth edition taking place at the 18th EPIA conference, held at Porto, Portugal, in September 2017. Since 2011, the track had a dedicated special EXSY issue (Cortez & Santos, 2013, Cortez & Santos, 2015, Cortez & Santos, 2017). This is the fourth special issue on Knowledge Discovery and Business Intelligence, and it includes extended versions of the best papers presented at the 5th KDBI thematic track of EPIA 2017, which received 20 paper submissions. The EXSY special issue included two rounds of reviews, which involved reviewers from the 5th KDBI track of EPIA2017 and also the EXSY journal. After the revision stage, a total of five papers were accepted to be published in this issue, which corresponds to an acceptance rate of 25%. While in the last decade there have been remarkable developments in the KD and BI areas, there are still challenges and opportunities. For instance, most KDBI research has been focused on processing structured data but little has been devoted to Mining Software Repositories (MSR), which is quite valuable for the software engineering industry. Also, feature selection is a challenging task in the context of large genomics datasets. Some domain applications, such as food truck recommendation, produce difficult multi-label classification tasks. Another challenge comes from the development of online recommendation systems, which are relevant for high velocity data and big data streams. Moreover, imbalanced domains are important in several real-world applications, such as medicine and finance, often prejudicing the predictive performance of the data-driven models. These challenges are approached in the five accepted papers published here. In the next section, we summarize the main contributions of these papers.

The present article, which opens this special issue, focuses on unconventional forms of entrepreneurship not captured sufficiently by current theory. Changes in society and escalating economic difficulties have led to a mutation in entrepreneurship, driven less by conventional professional interest and more by passion, a new paradigm that in turn has opened the door to an unconventional approach to entrepreneurship. We here seek to discern the main elements that help define the unconventional entrepreneur, including 1) the role that passion plays, notably in the pursuit of leisure and adventure; 2) the important role of tribes before, during, and after entrepreneurial creation; and 3) liquid society as a cause of the identity crisis and a factor of the quest for entrepreneurial recognition. Lastly, we discuss the possibility of this unconventional entrepreneur being part of a type of governmentality as a perfect example of neoliberal alienation.

Introduction

Unconventional’ is a rather trendy word in the management realm. When a scholar wants to break free from previous works, s/he states that s/he is studying an unconventional phenomenon or developing an unconventional approach. This may be a way of avoiding formulaic research and routine content (Alvesson & Gabriel, 2013). Unconventional ‘somethings’ have flourished across management disciplines such as “unconventional marketing” (Cova & Saucet, 2014), “unconventional finance” (Buchner & Wilkinson, 2015), “unconventional management research” (Clair et al., 2016), and even “unconventional research contexts” (Bamberger & Pratt, 2010). Much of the time, these works overly use terms such as “alternative” or “new” in attempting to break with the mainstream of their discipline. Here, we propose returning to the etymology of unconventional: not adhering to established convention or accepted standards. In the entrepreneurship discipline, an established convention corresponds to the standard – if not canonical – profile of the Schumpeterian entrepreneur. Even if the last decade has seen a flurry of research on such alternative profiles as the accidental entrepreneur (Shah & Tripsas, 2007), the user entrepreneur (Haefliger, Jäger, & Von Krogh, 2010), and the lifestyle entrepreneur (Bredvold & Skålén, 2016), entrepreneurship seems to face difficulties in breaking free from the Schumpeterian figure. The point of departure to breaking free from it is thus the notion of opportunity recognition that lies at the core of the entrepreneurial process. Ardichvili, Cardozo, and Ray (2003, p.106) argue that “identifying and selecting the right opportunities for new businesses are among the most important abilities of a successful entrepreneur”. Conventionally, and corresponding to the stereotypical entrepreneur, opportunity recognition consists in recognising the opportunity first and then developing an organisational development path as described in the traditional literature. Unconventionally, we argue that opportunity recognition is not a necessary first step, and that the desperate search for opportunities could end in failure. We propose looking at entrepreneurship as a shared passion and communal incentive to develop something that could become a successful business venture. Passion and interaction with other passionate people as well as the environment lead to generating potential opportunities (Cova & Guercini, 2016). We thus argue that the entrepreneur’s profile pertains to the single entrepreneur, while obviously the literature has moved on to consider the entrepreneurial team (Lechler, 2001) and the community sharing the passion (Martin & Schouten, 2014).

Proactively preparing nurses and students to meet population needs in a shifting global environment is challenging. Nurses must be agile; able to identify and respond expertly and efficiently to personal, patient, institutional, and system needs (Alleyne, Hancock & Hughes, 2011). The ability to meet the changing demands in complex health care systems mandates that nurses be leaders, in addition to care providers. Nurse educators adopt and adapt a wide variety of modalities to prepare graduates to best meet current and emerging population health needs. As leaders and role models for their students, colleagues, and communities, nurse educators often seek innovative ways to engage learners and prepare nurses. Transformational leadership theory has been successfully employed in many arenas to improve patient outcomes and nurse satisfaction (Fisher, 2016). Nurse education and continuing professional development may also benefit from Drenkard’s adaptation of transformational leadership theory (2012) as a framework for enhancing engaged learning and thereby preparing population health focused nurses with leadership acumen. Globally, cardiovascular disease accounts for nearly 17 million deaths every year, and is increasing rapidly (Schwartz et al., 2015; World Health Organization, 2015). Non-communicable diseases (NCD), and especially cardiovascular diseases, are increasing at an alarming rate. If the current trend continues, the highest mortality rate will be from NCDs in low to middle income (WHO, 2013). Hypertension is a significant component of, and an increasing contribution to, the burden of disease in sub-Saharan East Africa (Ataklte et al., 2015). In 2008, the researchers who conducted this study began working together. The capacity building efforts of Uganda nurse leaders and educators have focused on education, leadership, and research methods. Over the years, studies have been collaboratively planned and implemented on nursing research priorities, work-related quality of life, and task shifting in Uganda. The Ugandan team members identified the growing problem of NCDs and recommended focusing the team’s work in 2016 on hypertension prevention and treatment due to the high prevalence and harmful sequelae.

مقاله سال 2016

 مجله مدیریت خرید و تامین – Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management

The 24th IPSERA1 conference in Amsterdam was organised by the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of the VU University and the Faculty of Business and Economics of the Hungarian University of Pannonia in Veszprém.

The conference theme was “Preparing for new competitive challenges”. The theme refers to the various new competitive challenges organisations face, such as resource depletion, increasing demand in developing countries, increasingly demanding customers in traditional markets and increasing global competition. At the same time, organisations have to deal with a changing business or task environment (Wheelen et al., 2015), which has an impact on business policies and strategies, in line with the traditional strategic management literature (Johnson et al., 2008; Treacy and Wiersema, 1993). We know that the most critical factors or external forces that have an impact on the purchasing function and its policies and organisation are the degree of complexity and the dynamics, turbulence or volatility in the environment (Mintzberg, 1979; Emery and Trist, 1965; Gadde and Håkansson, 1993; Kamann et.al., 2001). The occurrence of these critical factors is exactly what has been taking place, especially after the financial crisis of 2009. Companies had to rapidly assess their strengths – and vulnerabilities – and act swiftly, often resulting in shifting production locations, technologies and organisational structures. During this period of reorientation of business activities and strategies, we observed a further increase in the role and centrality of logistics and concurrently an increased concentration in these logistic services, resulting from mergers and take-overs. Horizontal cooperation, mergers and take-overs are believed to be beneficial by actors in the sector (cf. Cruijssen et al., 2007; Verstrepen et al., 2009). We also observed that logistics services are increasingly combined with advanced IT services (LQ, 2007), where ‘track-and-trace’ is just one example. This applies both to consumer goods – with Amazon being the obvious example – and to business-to-business operations. While most models apply to ‘regular’ business flows and supply chains, we also find exceptions, like the increased attention to humanitarian supply chains requiring a tailored approach (Richardson et al., 2016).

These developments reflect a change in the causal texture of the business environment (Emery and Trist, 1965), but what does this all mean for the purchasing manager? What does it mean to the academic in the PSM field? While purchasing managers learned – or were conditioned – to see their business environment in terms of portfolio archetypes – either based on Kraljic (1983), Olsen and Ellram (1997) or Bensaou (1999) – in 1999, we described as part of a ‘vision for the future’ how suppliers would increasingly be forced to specialise into one of three possible supplier roles: broker, co-maker or capacity supplier, where logistics would be the ‘bonding agent’ between the various business processes. Fig. 1 shows these new roles, and this figure also incorporates the position on two axes: one that reflects the need for face-to-face contacts versus digital IT contacts, and one reflecting whether one is a virtual organisation in the extreme case or having in-house production. For logistics companies, actually, the same three roles would be valid: capacity suppliers – usually referred to as ‘wheels’ ‘mom-and-dad-stores’ or ‘1-car companies’ – co-makers providing total packages and brokerage roles just re-distributing, sub-contracting or – in more general terms – allocating tasks to capacity suppliers.

مقاله سال 2016

Try to imagine a service encounter between customers and employees, but in which none of them would be allowed to use any kind of language. This thought comes across as unnatural or even impossible, and hence all of our service marketing theories and models implicitly or explicitly assume a dominant role of language. Emerging logics such as service logic (Grönroos & Voima, 2013), service-dominant logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2016) and customer-dominant logic (Heinonen & Strandvik, 2015) all conceptualize an interaction between a customer and a service provider. Even in a world where self-service technology (e.g. Blut, Wang, & Schoefer, forthcoming) and smart services (e.g. Wünderlich, von Wangenheim, & Bitner, 2013) are gaining importance, language still represents an essential component (either implicit or explicit) in any interaction.

Despite its importance, research on the use of in services remains relatively scarce. Holmqvist and Grönroos (2012) identifies a paradox: while the dyadic nature of service makes an understanding of language use far more important than in advertising or in product settings, the bulk of the research on language in marketing developed in the latter two areas. Globalization, in addition to the fact that many countries in the world are inherently multilingual, frequently cause customers and service providers not to share the same native language (Comrie, 2011; Duchêne, 2009). Studies providing empirical examinations of consumers’ language preferences in service encounters however are limited. These studies typically focus on outlining the situations in which customers expect to be served in their native language (e.g., Goethals, 2015, 2016; Holmqvist, 2011; Holmqvist & Van Vaerenbergh, 2013), understanding customer reactions to being served with an accent (Mai & Hoffman, 2014; Wang, Arndt, Singh, Biernat, & Liu, 2013), or understanding customer reactions to language divergence, that is, being served in a second language (Van Vaerenbergh & Holmqvist, 2013, 2014).

These studies focus explicitly on customer evaluations of spoken interactions during service encounters. While this represents an important focus on language in service research, we contend that this might represent a too narrow conceptualization of how language influences services in three ways. First, as Holmqvist and Grönroos (2012) suggest, service providers need to manage language issues before, during, and after the customer engages in an interaction with the service provider. Given the increased focus on understanding and managing the customer experience across the entire customer journey (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016), understanding how language influences customers’ service experience across various touch points becomes imperative. Second, the current focus on spoken interactions might yield a too narrow set of language issues in services, as language can also refer to written language and body language, among others (Yule, 2014). Third, current research mainly focuses on customer reactions to language issues in services. Services, however, need to be managed as integrated systems in which employees and the organizational context also play a valuable role (Schneider & Bowen, 1995).

مقاله سال 2016

Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber spent two years living among the Arapaho Indians and studying their material and social values using the cultural relativism paradigm. Embedding himself in the Arapaho culture, Kroeber learned the language and customs, offering insights not accessible to average observer. Examining moccasins, Kroeber remarks, “[t]his strongly-marked decorative character of Arapaho art, however, is accompanied by a realistic tendency of such development as at first acquaintance would not be suspected by a civilized person” (Kroeber, 1901, p. 309). He notes that combinations of symbols serve as written records or stories about personal experiences, maps, or myths. Kroeber’s experience suggests that the key to understanding human behavior is field work and emersion into the group of interest. A one-shot data point probably misses the mark both regarding the informants’ values and feelings as well as how the researcher interprets the behavior.

This special edition offers an example of how marketing researchers use anthropology data collection methods. Like Kroeber, these researchers seek a deeper understanding of human behavior. Field observations, unstructured long interviews, studying cultural folk tales, examining consumer artifacts, and digging through secondary data provide new insights on how and why people behave. Longitudinal studies also demonstrate transformative behavior. The evidence supports the proposition that consumer behavior is like a finely cut diamond and the popular consumer behavior research methodologies provide a view of only one facet. Using different methodologies tile the diamond in different directions and reveal other equally important aspects of consumer behavior.

To better understand consumer behavior, Marketing Anthropology Research (MAR) offers a unique vantage point for contributing to the discipline of marketing research. MAR embraces adherence to several central propositions including the following viewpoints. Advances in theory in the field of marketing research require accurate and deep explication of naturally occurring thinking, assessments, communications, and behavior of consumers (see Woodside & Martin, 2015). MAR recognizes the severe limits in asking questions and encourages advancement of methods beyond scaled response metrics. MAR researchers are historically and locally situated within the phenomena studied. They recognize that research methods are not neutral in their effects on theory creation and testing. Consumer research joins the research and researched (see Denzin, 2001). Rather than adopting a net effects standard on the influence of individual independent variables, MAR researchers more often embrace a gestalt recipe perspective – both in crafting and in testing theory. MAR researchers are bricoleur, piecing together data from multiple sources.

To provide a better understanding of the approach, Fig. 1 shows a simple PLS path model with four latent variables, Y1 to Y4 (represented by circles), determined as the weighted sum of their assigned indicators x (represented by the rectangles). In other words, in the measurement model (also called the outer model), a block of directly observable indicators represents each latent variable that is not directly observable. In the structural model (also called the inner model), the latent variables have pre-defined and theoretically/conceptually established relationships.

The goal of the PLS-SEM approach is to generate latent variable scores that jointly minimize the residuals of the ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions in the model (i.e., maximize the explanation). The resulting latent variable scores are unique and determine the case values of each observation (i.e., the algorithm provides determinate latent variable scores). They also make it possible to predict the indicators (x7-x12) of the endogenous or dependent latent variables in the structural model (Y3 and Y4). In short, PLS-SEM is a variance-based method that estimates composites representing latent variables in path models. Hair, Hult, Ringle, and Sarstedt (2017), for example, provide additional explications of PLS-SEM, including details on how to create and estimate PLS path models and how to evaluate the results (also see Chin, 1998, 2010; Falk & Miller, 1992; Haenlein & Kaplan, 2004; Hair, Ringle, & Sarstedt, 2011; Henseler, Hubona, & Ray, 2016; Roldan & Sanchez-Franco, 2012; Tenenhaus et al., 2005 ).

During the past three decades, many emerging markets around the world have undertaken economic reforms of varying magnitude with objectives that include a move away from inward-oriented import substitution policies toward outward-oriented export-led growth, improved access to foreign technology and capital in order to make domestic firms competitive in the global economy, and enhanced capabilities in value-added manufacturing industries to enable a broader shift of the economy away from traditional commodity goods (Hoskisson, Eden, Lau, & Wright, 2000; Wright, Filatotchev,Hoskisson,&Peng, 2005).While theseeconomic reforms have yielded country-level benefits reflected in positive trade balances and economic growth, there is growing concern whether liberalization and global integration has the expected positive influence on the innovation capabilities and competitiveness of emerging economy firms (Chittoor, Aulakh, & Ray, 2015).

Recent research suggests that in place of the projection model of global expansion where firms expand into international markets to exploit their home-grown knowledge advantages, there is an imperative for firms to treat the world as a learning laboratory. Unlike traditional multinationals, new multinationals identify emerging knowledge from around the world, leverage it into innovations, and turn these into value. Companies are transitioning fromthe vertically integrated “do-it-all-yourself” approach toward a new model of open innovation in which they import ideas from without and let their own innovations enter the wider marketplace. This implies an important ‘sensing’ role for research and development (R&D), andthe need to prospect foreignmarkets for knowledge, take the knowledge home, convert it into innovation capabilities, and develop new products. Participating in global resources and product markets therefore serves as a critical learning conduit (Hitt, Li, & Worthington, 2005; Luo & Tung, 2007; Mathews, 2006).

Research has focused on ways to understand how multinational corporations (MNCs) from developed nations enter and compete in various emerging markets. Furthermore, scholars are contributing to a growing body of research that concentrates on how firms from emerging markets internationalize to compete in the global arena. There is unanimity among researchers that competing within emerging markets and internationalizing out of these markets require strategic choices that are markedly different from those prescribed in traditional models of MNC behavior (Aulakh & Kotabe, 2008; Contractor, Kumar, & Kundu, 2007; Hoskisson, Wright, Filatochev, & Peng, 2013; Luo & Tung, 2007; Meyer, Estrin, Bhaumik, & Peng, 2009). But how firms learn and manage knowledge as they compete in and out of emerging markets is yet to gain serious scrutiny in the contemporary international business research (Lahiri, 2011; Peng, Bhagat, & Chang, 2010). The aim of this JWB special issue is to foster scholarship that develops new theory and promotes novel empirical and practitioner insights on learning and knowledge management (LKM) strategies in the context of emerging markets.

The fields of international business (IB) and international management (IM) are concerned with business activities transacted by firms across national borders, the interactions between firms and other organisations, how these activities are managed, and the consequences that arise from these phenomena. Institutions – largely taken-for-granted, culturally-embedded understandings of appropriate social arrangements and behaviours – have been central to this heritage. Early perspectives in IB/IM emphasised the power of institutions to determine patterns of action and organisation, thereby explaining the convergence of MNEs and managerial practices within the same institutional environment. That is, firm and individual behaviours were viewed as being shaped and constrained by pre-existing formal and informal institutions that reside at the country or international levels of analysis (e.g. laws, intellectual property rights protection regimes, financial market institutions, dimensions of national culture). Particularly prominent are studies that examine countrylevel institutions, how institutional environments determine the most effective strategies and structures for a diversity of firms, how institutions facilitate or impede the diffusion of organisational practices throughout MNEs, and the institutionaltransformation of transition or emerging economies and its impact on firms.

Institutions, however, do not only constrain, but also are outcomes of human agency (i.e., purposive action by individuals, firms, coalitions, and other actors). Hence, organisational actors are not only bound by institutions, but also enact and reconstruct them. As a corollary, the role that organisations and individuals play in institutional creation, maintenance and change has come to the fore in academic debates, albeit primarily outside IB. The recent concept of ‘institutional entrepreneurship’, whereby actors purposefully mobilise resources to create new institutions or change existing ones for their own interests (DiMaggio, 1998), is illustrative of this shift towards active agency in an institutional context. Similarly, agency is central to co-evolutionary perspectives that connect patterns of institutional change in wider business systems with more micro processes of, for example, variety generation, experimentation and sensemaking within and across individual firms. The substantial institutional contradictions inherent in the international business environment bring to the fore opportunities for agency. This distinctiveness of the international business environment invites longitudinal process-oriented studies. It also holds potential for stronger theory testing and building at the intersection of institutions and agency, and eventually the export of new or refined theories from IB scholarship to adjacent fields and disciplines.

Accordingly, through this special issue we sought to encourage in IB research the more nuanced view of the nexus between agency (as purposeful action) and institutions (of different kinds and residing at various levels of analysis) that we perceived to be emerging. In this introductory essay, we first briefly elaborate thedevelopment of research in IB concerning the interplay of institutions and agency and point to gaps in our knowledge. We suggest that recent developments from adjacent fields offer a theoretical foundation for further insights into the nexus of institutions, agency and co-evolution. In particular, we discuss the concepts of institutional work (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006) and institutional entrepreneurship (DiMaggio, 1988), and refer to representative literature on these topics from both within and outside the field of IB. This sets the stage for our discussion of how the papers that appear in this special issue further develop and expand our understanding of institutions, agency and co-evolution. We conclude by offering questions and directions for future research.