George Kuk’s research while affiliated with Nottingham Trent University and other places

Research on how COVID-19 is creating a crisis-within-a-crisis situation for the world’s most vulnerable communities by compounding their daily struggles and economic hardships is still developing. Accordingly, we utilise the everyday trading experiences of micro-entrepreneurs in Kenya’s informal settlements to contextualise how they tackled this unfolding situation through digital community currency (DCC). Our mixed-methods research draws on effectuation and connects entrepreneurial action with DCC. While field work yielded new knowledge on how micro-entrepreneurs sustained their livelihoods and maintained savings by leveraging DCC, statistics demonstrated evidence of effectual reasoning in alleviating the adverse effects of COVID-19 in terms of access to necessities and the application of affordable loss logic in price setting. Micro-entrepreneurs who were able to deploy available means to implement COVID-19 preventive practices were proactive in adjusting selling prices, whereas those who found it difficult were more likely to increase the prices of their traded goods and services.

This research explores the ways micro–entrepreneurs used humanitarian aid cash transfers in the form of digital community currency (DCC) to alleviate hardship during COVID–19 pandemic. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, we draw on two streams of literature on necessity entrepreneurship and effectuation to examine how DCC enables micro–entrepreneurs to sustain trading. Findings from the field study in Kenya’s informal settlements show that in addition to providing a temporary relief for access to basic essentials such as food, toilet access and water, DCC allows micro-entrepreneurs to create new means for trading and savings, and notably to apply effectual reasoning in adjusting prices for the essential commodities and services that they traded. Quantitative findings provide additional validity checks of this necessity effectuation framework and further revealed that micro–entrepreneurs who proactively engaged in preventive practices that sought to reduce the impact of COVID–19 on their livelihoods showed a more responsive pricing approach. In stark contrast, micro–entrepreneurs who were less capable to adopt the preventive practices tended to resort to increase prices of their traded goods and services to alleviate their economic hardships.

Computational artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are increasingly used to support decision making by governments. Yet algorithms often remain opaque to the decision makers and devoid of clear explanations for the decisions made. In this study, we used an experimental approach to compare decision making in three situations: humans making decisions (1) without any support of algorithms, (2) supported by business rules (BR), and (3) supported by machine learning (ML). Participants were asked to make the correct decisions given various scenarios, while BR and ML algorithms could provide correct or incorrect suggestions to the decision maker. This enabled us to evaluate whether the participants were able to understand the limitations of BR and ML. The experiment shows that algorithms help decision makers to make more correct decisions. The findings suggest that explainable AI combined with experience helps them detect incorrect suggestions made by algorithms. However, even experienced persons were not able to identify all mistakes. Ensuring the ability to understand and traceback decisions are not sufficient for avoiding making incorrect decisions. The findings imply that algorithms should be adopted with care and that selecting the appropriate algorithms for supporting decisions and training of decision makers are key factors in increasing accountability and transparency.

This conceptual paper focuses on bricolage and it pays particular attention on the context of micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in resource-constrained environments – a common feature of most emerging economies. Knowledge about the underlying factors that determine bricolage as a common practice among MSEs operating in emerging economies is yet to advance and develop within the mainstream entrepreneurship literature. Much of this scholarship tends to focus on multi-national enterprises (MNEs) in advanced economies and it discusses bricolage as their strategic choice. Such an approach has led to a lack of meaningful theoretical paradigms for defining the business approaches MSEs adopt as a way of mitigating their perennial operational issues inherent in their environment. Thus, in this conceptual paper, which adopts a scoping review approach, we study the constructs of bricolage particularly their application in MSEs operating in emerging economies. From our analysis a fresh deterministic model mapping out the causal factors that give rise to bricolage behaviour in MSEs that operate in difficult conditions emerged. Thus, we contribute to entrepreneurial behaviour theories by identifying distinctive business methods MSEs adopt to withstand operational difficulties inherent in their environments.

Blog management is central to the digitalization of work. However, existing theories tend to focus on environmental influence rather than managerial control of a blogs attractiveness at a microlevel. This study provides an agentive account of the adaptive behaviours exerted by the bloggers through the ways they use contents of their blogs to locate and harness their structural network positions of a blogosphere. We collated individual characteristics of 165 bloggers who blogged about economics, and then analysed the ways they maintained the contents of their blogs. We used network analysis and monomial logistic regression to test our model predictions. Our findings show that in contrast to less attractive blogs, bloggers who are mindful of their peers contents as a means of maintaining network positions attract a significantly higher level of traffic to their blogs. This agentive perspective offers practical insights into how nodal preferences can be reversed in blog management. We conclude the paper by discussing contributions to theory and future research.

This paper examines the development of service innovation as a research field since the publication of Richard Barras’ seminal paper ‘Towards a Theory of Innovation in Services’ in 1986. It presents an exhaustive literature review of 31 years of research on service innovation. It offers some cross-sectorial perspectives on twelve key themes emerging from the literature, and on the broader research landscape and trajectories. Researchers, technologists and policy makers in the field of service innovation face issues arising from theories borrowed from economics since the 1980s and evolving through operationalization of its core themes over the last 20 years. After a description of the field, theoretical underpinnings of the field drawn from organization and management theory are discussed. The field has reached a stage where it can provide theoretical knowledge beyond the scope of the original service innovation theory, such as social innovations. A research agenda is suggested in both theoretical and thematic perspectives.