This paper examines human resource management (HRM) practices in Ghana's local government and advances a twofold argument. First, it shows that decentralization reforms introduced in the 1980s and 1990s locked the system into a path-dependent governance trajectory. This has narrowed the scope for alternative approaches to achieving an effective HRM system. Second, despite formal provisions establishing local governments as autonomous and non-partisan, the findings reveal that informal norms, political patronage, and asymmetric power relations remain central in shaping HRM decisions. These realities affect staff motivation, retention, and organizational performance, often impairing formal HR procedures and meritocratic intent. The paper challenges taken-for-granted assumptions that implementing cookbook governance and/or new public management prescriptions can automatically improve institutional effectiveness and service delivery in developing countries. Instead, it argues for greater attention to historical legacies and political contexts. The paper contributes to scholarly debates on public sector management and state capacity by highlighting the limits of technocratic and one-size-fits-all approaches to strengthening subnational governance

ABSTRACT Migrant entrepreneurs are generally assumed to come from rather than settle in Africa. This paper systematically reviews scholarship on immigrant entrepreneurs operating on the continent, a topic of interest to Africans more than the general scholarly community. Using Scopus and two Africa-focused databases, Africa Journals Online and Sabinet, we identified 123 relevant papers. Papers cross various disciplines are generally descriptive, theory-poor, from unranked journals, and with South Africa strongly overrepresented. Currently, papers mostly mirror themes from work in high-income contexts, with resourcing an important exception. We highlight opportunities to further advance research on the challenges of and diverse types of resources in a resource-poor context. The need to include Africans into scholarly endeavors is often expressed, but in this case African scholars dominate. We discuss how African scholars can improve the quality and impact of their work, both by facilitating the emergence of a community around the topic and thematically.

ABSTRACT Innovation is at the heart of economic growth and societal progress. It’s a driving force that keeps businesses competitive and economies thriving. However, Moroccan SMEs often struggle with financial barriers that limit their innovative capabilities. Despite government initiatives offering subsidies and guarantee schemes, the effectiveness of these mechanisms in fostering innovation remains uncertain. The aim of this study is to examine the impact of public financial support on innovation intensity within Moroccan SMEs, addressing a gap in understanding how direct and indirect financial support influence product, process, and technological innovation. Data were collected from a survey of 133 SMEs in the Casablanca-Settat region, gathering insights into innovation practices, public support received, and firm characteristics. The Ordered Probit regression model was employed to assess the determinants of innovation intensity, providing a rigorous analysis of how subsidies and guarantee schemes impact innovation while accounting for firm-specific factors. Results indicate that guarantee schemes have a consistently positive and significant effect on all forms of innovation, demonstrating their effectiveness in reducing financial risk and enabling firms to invest in innovative projects. Conversely, subsidies show limited and occasionally negative impacts, suggesting a misalignment with SMEs’ specific needs. Our findings suggest that expanding guarantee schemes could significantly enhance innovation in SMEs. However, subsidies need to be restructured to better target innovation, potentially through R&D grants and innovation vouchers. Policies that promote workforce development are also essential, as the research’s findings prove that employees’ training directly contributes to a firm’s innovation capacity.

This research explores differences in how marginalized groups in leadership roles within the South African private sector engage in sensemaking, influenced by intersecting gender and race identities. Primary data was collected with semi-structured intersectional interviews. Thematic and axial coding was carried out. Coded data was tagged and quantitized to determine which forms of sensemaking occurred and how each sub-group of participants arrived at that form of sensemaking. Findings suggest that gender and racial identities significantly shape sensemaking processes, with notable differences in how meaning is constructed across sub-groups. By integrating intersectionality, sensemaking, and identity work, the study challenges traditional leader-centric theories that often overlook the role of social context in shaping leadership experiences. This study contributes to leadership theory by providing a nuanced understanding of how marginalized identities navigate leadership roles and construct meaning in a historically unequal social context. These insights also offer practical implications for advancing inclusive and contextually relevant leadership practices.

ABSTRACT This paper shares new insights on the dynamics of entrepreneurship in the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector, focusing on the case of sub-Saharan Africa. Despite being the region’s most important rural nonfarm activity, and generating finance that sustains a sizable portion of its subsistence/smallholder agricultural economy, ASM has barely featured in the business and management literature. It has rather been scholars from other disciplines who have shared opinions on the individuals who pursue work in this sector and why. They are in broad agreement that in sub-Saharan Africa, ASM sites attract, at the one extreme, people who are desperate for income (the “poverty-driven” category) and, at the other extreme, individuals motivated by the possibility of becoming wealthy (the “get-rich-quick” category). These two narratives map, virtually wholesale, on to the necessity-based-opportunity-based typology of entrepreneurship that business and management scholars have interrogated for decades. This paper fuses these narratives with the typology, with the goal of showcasing ASM within an evolving body of literature on entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa. It then draws on a case study of Kéniéba District (Mali), the location of one of the region’s more dynamic gold-panning industries, to articulate more clearly the sector’s different entrepreneurs.

ABSTRACT This study highlights how constructs of importance to management in Africa – ambidextrous leadership and team learning – can extend or modify our existing management theories. Adopting an exploratory design with an interpretive philosophy, this study explores how supermarket store managers engage their subordinates in team learning sessions to enable their collective ambidexterity, facilitated by the presence of reflective conversations (RC) and ambidextrous human resource management (HRM) policies and practices. Based on our raw data, we develop a process-based model that shows how ambidextrous leadership behaviors can help develop team-level ambidexterity, including the supporting roles of RC and ambidextrous HRM practices in the process. This model thus seeks to motivate theoretically future ambidexterity research in Africa, as the theoretical ideas and themes in this study can be replicated and be broadly applied to future ambidexterity research on the continent. This model will, therefore, contribute to the theoretical development of African management literature and, accordingly, adds significant value to the mainstream ambidexterity literature.

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to examine the argument that the social capital and market performance link is more pronounced when it is channelled through the new product development capability of the firm. The study further argues that the indirect effect of social capital on market performance, via new product development capability, is conditional upon levels of environmental dynamism. We tested the hypotheses using data from 313 managers and owners of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Ghana. We analyzed the data using the conditional PROCESS analysis software, in SPSS 23.0, and structural equation modelling (SEM). We found that new product development capability partially mediates the relationship between social capital and market performance. The study further discovered that the indirect relationship between social capital and market performance is significantly enhanced at higher levels of environmental dynamism. This study's finding will help managers of SMEs understand the need to invest in building their social capital resource and the complementary new product development skills needed to improve firm performance.

ABSTRACT There have been calls in social entrepreneurship research to move beyond conceptual arguments and to ground definitions and conceptualizations of this field in empirical research, especially pertaining to the developing world. Owing to the socially embedded nature of social enterprises, the context in which social enterprises originate is a key determinant of their modus operandi. In South Africa, a context fraught with social ills, the lack of clarity on the nature and form of social enterprises constrains research and policy formulation. Using a survey methodology, we collected data from a sample of 453 social enterprises on domains of social entrepreneuring identified in previous studies and performed a cluster analysis to identify different types of social entrepreneuring models. The findings point to the existence of two main types of social entrepreneuring models in South Africa: beneficiary-centric entrepreneurial nonprofits and customer-centric social businesses. This paper contributes a more contextual understanding of social entrepreneuring models in South Africa. By showing that social enterprises in South Africa are partly unique to their context, this paper underscores the theoretical and empirical importance of the context in which social enterprises originate and operate when testing the universal validity of social entrepreneuring models.

ABSTRACT With a rapidly growing population, Africa faces a significant job creation challenge. One solution to this is to encourage local entrepreneurship. Yet, entrepreneurs are facing an environment where resources are scarce. A way to enact entrepreneurial opportunities in such a penurious environment is to use bricolage and create products or services by making do with what is at hand. We support the notion that bricolage can to some extent be learnt at the individual level. We examine this viewpoint in an empirical study in Ghana with 353 actual and aspiring entrepreneurs. We examine the direct effects of informal learning in the workplace on bricolage, while investigating the moderating effects of higher-level formal education and unemployment. Our findings show that bricolage can be fostered at the individual level through informal learning, and thereby enables individuals in Ghana to form opportunities through bricolage.

ABSTRACT Multinational firms often face challenges in integrating host-country suppliers into their global value chains; this is particularly the case in developing economies. Training entrepreneurs is one approach to improve supplier integration. We conducted a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to measure the efficacy of entrepreneurship training of unskilled workers’ participation and performance in an animal bones supply chain in Ethiopia. The aim of this supply chain was to recycle the naturally occurring phosphorus from bones and convert it into fertilizer. Our results show that training increased worker participation. We also provide evidence that training increased performance, but problems with the RCT implementation make these results more nuanced. We present some lessons learned for future researchers who are seeking to conduct similar RCTs. Our findings will be of interest to multinational enterprises seeking to develop supply chains for disaggregated resources, to governments seeking foreign direct investment, and to NGOs seeking to create jobs.