The Relationship Between Business Environment and Single Champion Enterprise Entrepreneurship

What kind of business environment can produce high single champion enterprise entrepreneurship is a new issue for discussion in research on entrepreneurship. Based on institutional configuration theory and the fcQCA method, the present paper analyses the relationship between the business environment and single champion enterprise entrepreneurship from the perspective of configuration. This paper studies the role of the business environment in 80 case cities all over the country in promoting high single champion enterprise entrepreneurship and discusses three business environment configurations concerning high single champion enterprise entrepreneurship and two configurations concerning non-high single champion enterprise entrepreneurship. Three typical business environment element configurations can promote high single champion enterprise entrepreneurship, namely, the market innovation type dominated by multiple resources, the financial service–driven type assisted by resources, and the market-driven type led by financial services, which reflects the significance of financial services and the market environment.

Slow Scholarship: Propositions for the Extended Curriculum Programme

Higher education has been deeply affected by neoliberalism and corporatisation, with their emphasis on efficiency, competitiveness and valorisation of quantity over quality. This article argues that in the context of South African higher education, and in the Extended Curriculum Programme (ECP) more particularly, such commodification of education is problematic. The article explores what the Slow movement has to offer ECP in terms of scholarship. It seeks to answer the question: How might ECP be reconfigured using Slow imaginaries? Various academic disciplines and practices have incorporated Slow philosophy to develop alternative ways of doing academia; however, it has hitherto not been considered for programmes such as ECP. This article approaches Slow pedagogy for ECP using posthuman and feminist new materialist sensibilities that are predicated on a relational ontology. The article puts forward the following 10 propositions for a Slow scholarship in ECP using ideas from posthumanism and feminist new materialism: practice attentiveness through noticing, engage in responsible relations, diffract rather than reflect (thinking together affirmatively), render each other capable, enable collective responsiveness, explore creatively, making thoughts and feelings possible, enact curiosity, ask the right questions politely, foreground process rather than product, and create conditions for trust by wit(h)nessing. It is argued that by practising Slow scholarship with these propositions, ECPs might resist market-driven imperatives that characterise contemporary academia.

Changes in the Marketing Orientation Within the Business Model of an International Retailer

Reported in this paper is an interview- and press release-based study that considers the market-driven and market-driving activities within the disaggregated components of a business model. This is based on an empirical study of IKEA in Malaysia over the past 20 years. Market orientation is perceived to be a position on a continuum, not a binary one. The components of the business model employed in this study were developed from Osterwalder and Pigneur. Findings show that over time the balance between driven and driving orientations of the company changed in a number of ways with respect to its business models. This chapter contributes by showing the disaggregated nature of market orientation of driving and driven activities and linking them to a given component of business model as well as reviewing what happened to the driven-driving balance over the course of time. This approach can widely be applied with respect to attempts geared towards understanding the dynamic nature of international retailing.

Farmers’ Perception towards Transformation of Rice-based Cropping System intoTea Garden

Transformation of agricultural lands into non-farm lands or plantations has got tremendousecological chaos and ripples. Northern part of West Bengal is undergoing rapid changes inrural areas where new opportunities are emerging in the form of demand-driven and market-driven agriculture. Due to persistent low returns from traditional rice cultivation, thetransformation of paddy fields into tea gardens has been a recent trend for this part ofWest Bengal. The present study has been conducted by selecting purposively three blocksfrom Alipurduar district and sixty respondents through random sampling, those who havealready transformed their crop field into tea gardens from these blocks. The farmers’perception towards transformation is taken as dependent variable along with a score offourteen independent variables. The responses are collected through a structured interviewschedule. The study envisaged that the farmers’ education level, number of family membersengaged in the garden, their economic motivation, sources of information, risk orientationbehaviour and distance from the tea processing factory showed significant contributiontowards the transformation behaviour. The future impact of such transformation on theecological dynamics in terms of livelihood, biodiversity restoration and ecological resiliencecan be brought under policy frameworks.

Real-time user clickstream behavior analysis based on apache storm streaming

This paper presents an approach to analyzing consumers’ e-commerce site usage and browsing motifs through pattern mining and surfing behavior. User-generated clickstream is first stored in a client site browser. We build an ingestion pipeline to capture the high-velocity data stream from a client-side browser through Apache Storm, Kafka, and Cassandra. Given the consumer’s usage pattern, we uncover the user’s browsing intent through n-grams and Collocation methods. An innovative clustering technique is constructed through the Expectation-Maximization algorithm with Gaussian Mixture Model. We discuss a framework for predicting a user’s clicks based on the past click sequences through higher order Markov Chains. We developed our model on top of a big data Lambda Architecture which combines high throughput Hadoop batch setup with low latency real-time framework over a large distributed cluster. Based on this approach, we developed an experimental setup for an optimized Storm topology and enhanced Cassandra database latency to achieve real-time responses. The theoretical claims are corroborated with several evaluations in Microsoft Azure HDInsight Apache Storm deployment and in the Datastax distribution of Cassandra. The paper demonstrates that the proposed techniques help user experience optimization, building recently viewed products list, market-driven analyses, and allocation of website resources.

Whose climate intervention? Solar geoengineering, fractions of capital, and hegemonic strategy

Proposals for slowing climate change by reflecting sunlight back to space, known as solar geoengineering (SG), are gaining traction in climate policy. Given SG’s capacity to slow warming without reducing carbon emissions, prominent criticism suggests that it will enable fossil fueled business-as-usual. This assessment is not without merit, yet the primary funders of SG research do not emanate from fossil capital. We analyze sources of funding for SG research, finding close ties to financial and technological capital as well as a number of billionaire philanthropists. These corporate sectors and associated philanthropies comprise part of “climate capital” – the fraction of the capitalist class aligned with climate action. We argue that SG is being positioned as a tactic for enabling incremental, market-driven decarbonization, explore key institutions advocating this approach in US climate policy, and conclude that SG is poised to serve as a tool for class compromise between fossil and climate capital.

Scaling up Sirohi: can women empowerment and sustainability drive a luxury brand?

Learning outcomes The case offers a unique opportunity to understand the market dynamics of a young luxury brand that aspires to empower women and pursue the broader goal of marketing sustainability in an emerging market. The discussion would enable learners to conduct environmental analysis and assess implications of crisis (current pandemic) on business, understand the marketing mix implications for a firm with societal orientation, learn to design effective brand positioning strategies and plan social and market driven brand strategies to ensure sustainable growth. Case overview/synopsis Gauri Malik, an investment banker-turned-social entrepreneur, forayed into the luxury home décor and furniture market with Sirohi, in 2019. In a market driven by exclusivity and design appeal, the brand had sustainability at its core. Malik worked with 200 women, from a conservative rural base in India to create traditional products that were hand-made with recycled natural fibres and upcycled plastic wastes. Driven by the goal of securing the livelihood for a larger group of women artisans, Malik wanted to scale up from 350 to 5000 products in the next five years. Hence, for materializing her ambitious plans she sought answers to- Could her home-trained women artisans deliver the promise of quality and finesse to support Sirohi scale up as a luxury brand? While it was extremely critical for Sirohi to have an articulated image-she wondered if the parallel focus on the up-market luxury brand image and sustainability-create competitive advantage or lead to diffused positioning? Complexity academic level Classified as MODERATE in terms of difficulty level, the case can be effectively used in post-graduate programmes for foundation courses on Marketing Management, elective courses on Brand Management or Sustainability Marketing. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available for educators only. Subject code CSS 8: Marketing.

The COVID-19 Pandemic: An analytical study on opportunities for circular economy practices in India’s healthcare sector

COVID-19 pandemic has long-lasting impact in social, personal, and economic area globally. When we think of the economic recovery of India in the future, we face the challenge of moving forward more sustainably. An international NGO ARUP had published a worldwide report named ‘Health.Care.Without.Harm’; mentioning that only healthcare sector itself is accountable for about 4.4 percent of universal net emissions. The present study, therefore, highlights the vulnerabilities in the linear economy and how the pandemic crisis challenges the linear economy and provide opportunity to uptake circular practices and sustainable development within India’s healthcare economy. The paper outlines the recommendations on the circular economy by suggesting policy and market-driven solutions for the healthcare sector’s sustainability. (*The paper was presented at the AICTE International Conference on Circular Economy, Management and Industry, Bharati Vidyapeeth’s Institute of Management Studies and Research, Navi Mumbai and Apeejay School of Management, Dwarka, Delhi, India. October 2021)

A Critical Framework for Examining Sustainability Claims of the Sharing Economy: Exploring the Tensions Within Platform Brand Discourses

The sharing economy represents a market-driven response to the perceived inefficient resource use arising from materialism, and as such, offers the possibility of a more environmentally sustainable form of consumption. However, the sustainability benefits attributed to the sharing economy remain contentious and fraught with paradox. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of three sharing economy brands (Lime, Rent the Runway and BlaBlaCar) we identify that sustainability discourses compete with claims arising from the espoused benefits of immateriality and platform brands’ desire for rapid growth. We identify and explore three platform brand discourses (disrupting unsustainable leaders, guilt-free choice, and non-commercial appeals) and their associated practices. In doing so we identify that tensions between these discourses and practices give rise to three sustainability-related contradictions: displacement of sustainable alternatives, hidden materiality, and creeping usage. Our findings contribute to our understanding of the sharing economy and its role in sustainability.