Qamar Farooq

Despite the centrality of international opportunity concept in international entrepreneurship field, SMEs’ internationalization literature has focused mainly on SMEs’ international performance with limited attention paid by researchers to understanding the factors influencing the identification of international opportunities especially among mature internationalized SMEs. To this end, the current study examined the impact of SMEs managers’ global mindset (GM) and adaptive marketing capabilities (AMCs) on international opportunity identification (IOI) among mature Chinese SMEs with emphasis on the moderating impact of export market dynamism (EMD). Initial exploratory study using interviews with five managers of exporting SMEs was conducted to figure the relevance of GM and AMC in explaining IOI; and the presence of EMD. Later, self-administered questionnaires were used to collect data from founders/managers of 217 exporting SMEs. Findings showed that IOI is positively influenced by SME manager’s GM and AMCs. Despite the presence of EMD, it had no significant moderating impact on the relationship between GM and AMCs; and IOI. In the respondents’ characteristics analysis, it was revealed that no significant statistical impact of SME’s size, SME’s age, and SME manager’s international experience on IOI. This paper ends with drawing a set of implications and future research avenues.

Purpose: Previous research features the international experience of managers in the decisions regarding internationalisation speed. However, the vitality of the role a chairperson plays in shaping the internationalisation decisions of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from emerging economies is intriguing. Moreover, the decision-making process and leadership context of SME internationalisation are not fully understood. Drawing upon the upper echelons decision-making theory and the cognitive perspectives of decision, this paper examines the impact of a chairperson's previous experience on the post-entry speed of internationalisation, highlighting the conditioning effects of leadership contingencies – the functional variety and power of the chairperson.Design/methodology/approach: The study uses a panel data set of Chinese SMEs active from 2010 to 2019 to test the research hypotheses. A feasible generalised least-squares estimator was applied to test the hypotheses.Findings: The results show that the international experience of a chairperson speeds up the depth and breadth of the post-entry speed of internationalisation. However, the strength of these relationships depends on the leadership context. The chairperson's functional variety alleviates the influence of international experience, whilst the power of the chairperson reinforces its impact.Originality/value: The results show that the international experience of a chairperson speeds up the depth and breadth of the post-entry speed of internationalisation. However, the strength of these relationships depends on the leadership context. The chairperson's functional variety alleviates the influence of international experience, whilst the power of the chairperson reinforces its impact.

Critical discourse analysis aims to explore the dialectical relationship between discourse and ideology. Based on psycholinguistic research, this paper analyzes the Chinese and American media's news reports and comments on the COVID-19. It aims to expose the hidden psychological messages and ideologies behind the words. The corpus in this paper is mainly from the official media of China Daily and Time from December 2019 to January 2021 in China and the United States. This paper uses Wang Zhenhua's Appraisal Theory and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar as tools to make a comparative analysis of the corpus. At the textual level, languages are classified and lexical choices are analyzed followed by the analysis of the reporter's ideology after reviewing the motivation of the reporters of two countries. On the level of social responsibility expression and discourse, the paper analyzes the news reports, which are characterized by the combination of the reporter's views on the news. In the aspect of social practice, the social and cultural factors and background of news reports are analyzed. China calls for strengthening cooperation and exchanges with other countries to jointly fight the epidemic. The Chinese government has actively shared its experience and made corresponding contributions to international economic recovery. However, the US government shirks its responsibility by claiming that the effective implementation of Chinese methods and experience in China does not mean that it can achieve corresponding results in Europe and the US. At the same time, the United States provides medical supplies to other countries. This study hopes to help awaken readers' critical thinking and increase their awareness of the anti-control of mass discourse. At the same time, it is hoped that readers can view the epidemic from a more scientific perspective, understand the facts and reject the unwarranted panic. It will also help reshape Chinese and American discourse.

The accounting framework of businesses massively expanded in the 1990s to triple bottom line (TBL) with consideration of social and environmental performance in addition to financial performance. To meet the challenges of expressing care to the environment as well as to internal and external stakeholders associated with society, research on investment of resources through corporate volunteering (CV) programs is accelerated in the current decade. Researchers have started using the philosophy of epistemology with the positioning of interpretivism explaining how the people participate in cultural and social life. Reintegrating the important fundamental and scattered concepts of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and TBL, this article highlights the motivational facet of employees of socially responsible companies, being termed as “Internal People‐Line” theory as the significant and nonidentical subset of TBL. With the ingredients of self‐determination theory, the internal people line (IPL) by relational, moral, and instrumental motivations would be useful for recognition, repeated participation in community programs, and managerial support. This research has two major contributions to the literature of society: (a) Identification of seventh P for the bottom line and (b) Development of IPL theory. It is found that effective utilization of the resources in CV programs largely depends upon the intrinsic motivation of IPL (employees). This article is the first to accumulate and interpret the strewn basic concepts of CSR (macro to microlevel) using holistic approach to advance the research model of TBL with the introduction of IPL theory.

Bullying at workplaces is a growing problem associated with several antecedents and outcomes of psychological disorders. Extant literature shows the relationship of victimization with the owning‐up curriculum to confront bullying, but so far there is little research to cure the issue of bullying through ethics and there is no study to check the impact of ethical lessons and exercises in training materials to curb bullying at workplace. The current paper is based on a literature review of aggression and bullying, and chiefly addresses the HR practices in rescuing the people from peer victimization. Conceptually segregating supervisor‐subordinate (vertical) and peer‐peer (horizontal) bullying psychology, this paper attempts to see what possible corrective steps can be taken by senior managers, supervisors and psychologists to resolve this critical problem through interior capacities. In this paper, we have developed three propositions for conducting a future empirical investigation in connection to a cohort study. By addressing the counterproductive/deviant behavior, the present report is likely to be beneficial for psychology scientists and HR practitioners in noticing and resolving the bullying issues at the workplace for the well‐being of employees.

With the incremental growth in overall world population, environmental related aftermaths of industrial development are becoming challenges for sustainability. In social perspective, poverty eradication is still the biggest global need which is an indispensable prerequisite for sustainable development (SD). As a solution, business organizations in various industries need to do the efforts with zero‐sum competition for a trailblazing initiative of SD in context of social and environmental protection. Based on triple bottom line theory, this paper introduces the terminologies of social and environmental collective protection (SECP) and social and environmental collective development (SECD) by answering the research question as how the nonprofit orientation can be promoted and sustained within the for‐profit businesses. Using textual analytical approach, this research achieves the main objective to highlight the impact of mutual corporate initiatives as a business strategy on social and environmental sustainability. This article finds that social and environmental development depends upon social and environmental protection when it is measured in terms of collective SD goals. In addition to initiating the new terminologies contributing to the literature of SD measures for society and environment, this paper has practical implications for United Nations (UN) for their 2030 vision of social development for SD. Utilization of this paper is not limited till 2030 because it is expected that a broad range of researchers will use our described concepts for scholarly discussions and future empirical studies.

Computerization in management information systems has thickly segregated employment and unemployment which are being discussed due to technological implementation at operational and strategic levels. In this article, we have evaluated the criticism and internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) challenges caused due to the espousal of computer-based information systems (CBIS) by the companies. Based on existing measures, a comprehensive questionnaire was designed and distributed to 120 employees of the companies having the adoption plan of CBIS. The hypothesized model of CBIS implementation intention disclosure and human factor was tested with correlation and regression analysis of the data received from 108 employees (90% response rate). Results show a positive relationship between technological trends and motivation of computer literate employees. We have established our study in the context of human capital management which is a sociobehavioral notion for meeting the internal CSR. Theoretical implications of this study have been progressively discussed simultaneously with the limitations therein. Our research has practical implications for corporate managers, human resource managers, and management information systems managers in manufacturing industries.

Summary: In the present modern age, a robot works like human and is controlled in such a manner that its movements should not create hindrance in human activities. This characteristic involves gesture feat and gesture recognition. This article is aimed to describe the developments in algorithms devised for obstacle avoidance in robot navigation which can open a new horizon for advancement in businesses. For this purpose, our study is focused on gesture recognition to mean socio-technological implication. Literature review on this issue reveals that movement of robots can be made efficient by introducing gesture-based collision avoidance techniques. Experimental results illustrated a high level of robustness and usability of the Gesture recognition (GR) system. The overall error rate is almost 10%. In our subjective judgment, we assume that GR system is very well-suited to instruct a mobile service robot to change its path on the instruction of human.