ISG Business School

ABSTRACT Combining trends in style and form with religious considerations, modest fashion has grown worldwide despite a series of intense controversies in Western countries from the mid-2010s. Building on the sociology of scandal, we identify three rhetorical strategies that structure nontarget majority consumers’ responses to modest fashion, i.e. the place of religion in modern society, the defence of freedom, and the search for a harmonious society. Interestingly, the strategies of both the detractors and promoters of modest fashion appear to be built upon common values and norms, though at a collective vs. an individual level, respectively. This discursive dynamic allows the former to moralise their attack while neutralising the defence of the latter, thereby setting the public agenda, and leading to Muslims’ marketplace exclusion.

Abstract This paper focuses on the Traveling Repairman Problem (TRP), an extension of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), which has gained significant attention in various practical fields such as humanitarian logistics, machine scheduling, computer networking, and service-based distribution. Previous research on the TRP has primarily focused on exact and approximate algorithms, with limited attention given to heuristics. This paper introduces a new hybrid method called Guided Quantum Particle Swarm Optimization (GQPSO) to effectively solve the TRP. This GQPSO apporoach combines the Quantum Particle Swarm Optimization (QPSO) metaheuristic with the Guided Local Search (GLS) algorithm. We introduced several enhancements to improve the efficiency of QPSO when addressing the TRP: (i) The initialization phase of the QPSO algorithm is modified. (ii) A guided local search method is integrated within QPSO and used as an intensification strategy for each position generated throughout the search process. (iii) Several acceleration strategies are implemented to expedite the process of the local search procedure. The experimental results achieved on a collection of benchmark problems sourced from the literature clearly prove the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid approach for addressing the TRP when compared to other heuristic methods from the state-of-the-art.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to illustrate how research on the intersection of public policy and entrepreneurship has been bounded by its static approach and how a processual analysis based on Austrian economics can advance the understanding of the subject matter.Design/methodology/approachRooted in the Austrian school of economics, this conceptual paper adopts a processual approach in order to unveil the effects that public policy exerts upon entrepreneurship and the market process.FindingsThe authors argue that by interfering with the market process, public policy detrimentally alters what otherwise would have been the market's natural evolution reflecting acting individuals' subjective valuations. It causes progressively self-reinforcing market distortions which result in comparatively lower levels of both capital accumulation and societal wealth.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper urges future research to rethink public policy's effects on entrepreneurship and to explore them more comprehensively, utilizing market process analysis.Practical implicationsThis research suggests that public policy can never be neutral but necessarily comes with distortive and often detrimental effects. That is, public policy comes at the innate expense of hampering the entrepreneurial process. Thus, new public policies and those already in place should be carefully reconsidered in light of these effects.Originality/valueThis paper offers a novel take on how to best understand the effects public policy has on entrepreneurship and the market process.

The level of social responsibility expected by society has risen significantly in recent years. Some companies used to pursue Corporate Social Opportunity (CSO) thinking about how companies engage with significant social shocks over the short-term. These actions are symbolic and empty gestures. Based on our collected business cases and conceptual analysis, we suggest a three-part framework for turning short-term windows of opportunity into long-term value-creation: knowing, doing, and repeating the right things. Going beyond corporate social opportunity towards responsibility requires authentic long-term strategy driven by social impact.

Knight’s thinking is very rich and sheds original light on many issues of economic life. The aim of this article is to show that Knight’s work can at a theoretical level illuminate an understanding of the expertise of a particular type of financier: namely, the venture capitalist. Their expertise, which we describe as Knightian, is based on a capacity for judgment under radical uncertainty, the pillars of which are experience and intuition.

The strategic human resource management field has increased the contributions, comparing cross-cultural aspects, mainly involving the East and West cultures, but there is a gap regarding on knowing how the implementation practices impacts and how they are impacted by cultural differences. Through a qualitative contribution, this research was developed in a multinational company in Sweden with a subsidiary in Brazil. The focus is to answer the questions: How high-performance work systems are applied in different cultural contexts? How do cultural dimensions affect high-performance work systems' adaptation? The findings have shown that strong organizational cultures could overlap country differences, but adaptations could allow innovative exchanges and raise employee commitment and participation. High-performance work systems are practices that could be used in cross-cultural territories, but not without considering cultural and local adaptations. After institutionalized, the local adaptation could be able to enlarge organizational performance.

Abstract Nowadays, huge amounts of tracking data related to moving objects are being generated and collected in suitable repositories thanks to GPS devices, RFIDsensors, satellites and wireless communication technologies. Tracked moving objects could be pedestrians, cars, vessels, planes, animals, natural disasters. Those letters generate trajectory data that contain a great deal of knowledge. For this reason, these trajectory data sets need an urgent and an effective analysis process and constitute a rich source for inferring mobility patterns. Predicting the future position of a given moving object is one of the important tasks we can find in the knowledge discovery process. In fact, being able to predict a moving object’s future position related to natural phenomena, would allow decision makers to take strategic decisions in order to help the humanity, and prevent or avoid the propagation of natural catastrophes. The aim of this paper is to propose a new approach to predict the future position of a moving object, especially a moving region based on mobility patterns. To achieve this aim, we experiment our approach on a real case study related to hurricanes as moving regions. The proposed approach is composed of three phases. The first phase allows generating object mobility patterns. In the second phase, spatio-tempoal mobility rules are extracted from the generated patterns. In the third and last phase, hurricane future position prediction is accomplished by using the extracted rules.

This research theoretically and empirically explores the notion of Perceived Managerial Ex-emplarity (PME). PME is based on Virtue ethics (Aristotle, 350 BCE; Plato, 375 BCE), So-cial learning theory (Bandura, 1977) and Authentic leadership (George, 2003; Luthans & Avolio, 2003). Empirical exploration of PME consists of a theme analysis of 17 middle man-ager interviews, resulting in a processual model including a) Behaviors perceived by employ-ees as exemplary, as independent variable, b) Process of attraction, identification and projec-tion, as moderating variable, and c) the effects of perceiving exemplarity with two dependent variables: a) long term impact on individual transformation, b) short term team performance and well- being. Applying the Churchill (1979) paradigm, themes and items are built into a survey sent to 1400 employees of a multinational corporation. An 80% response rate provides 1172 records from 28 countries, processed through regressions, exploratory factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM). The analysis of 700+ verbatim enriches the final model. Results suggest the perception of managerial exemplarity concerns managers’ being rather than their doing or knowing, pointing towards attitudes, underlying intentions and motives rather than skills or rank. Virtuous self-development is proposed here as a managerial oppor-tunity and foundation for leadership and workplace effectiveness.