Resilient Entrepreneurship among European Higher Education Graduates

The Impact of the Family Background on Students’ Entrepreneurial Intentions: An Empirical Analysis

In the current economic and social environment, a real challenge for youth is the acquisition and development of the relevant skills in entrepreneurship in order to consider entrepreneurship as a desirable employment choice. Given this aspect, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the main factors influencing students’ entrepreneurial intentions, paying particular attention to their entrepreneurial family background. Additionally, the paper aims to explore the effect of entrepreneurial family background on the relationship between effectiveness of entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention. We conducted a study where results were based on the outcomes of a survey among Romanian high school and university students in the final year (N = 617). Our four main hypotheses were tested through independent samples t-tests, correlation analysis, and hierarchical multiple regression analysis. The findings highlighted that the students with an entrepreneurial family background reported a higher entrepreneurial intention than those without such a background. The variables that positively influenced the entrepreneurial intentions of the students were entrepreneurial family background, effectiveness of entrepreneurship education, and entrepreneurial personality traits. Furthermore, this entrepreneurial family background negatively moderated the relationship between effectiveness of entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention. For this reason, emphasis should be placed on both formal and informal entrepreneurial education, which will increase the propensity of young people to choose an entrepreneurial career.

Regional Sustainability, Individual Expectations and Work Motivation: A Multilevel Analysis

In the context of the recent labor shortages in Eastern European countries, Romania included, companies, organizations and decision makers need to strongly address the issue of labor motivation for increasing worker performance and also for attracting the scarce labor resources. The main goal of the research is to explore new determinants of work motivation, such as regional sustainability and also individual factors related to individual expectations. Therefore, the responsive methodology used for this purpose implies a multilevel econometric modelling, in which the first level regards individuals, and the second one consists in development regions. Moreover, the role of individual factors is tested using Vroom’s theory of expectations and filling a gap in the existing literature on work motivation in developing, post-communist economies. The main findings prove that one dimension of sustainability, namely social sustainability has a significant impact on work motivation, alongside with four dimensions of individual factors. Economic and environmental sustainability have no significant impact on work motivation in the case of Romanian workers.

Sustainability, Resilience and Population Ageing along Schengen’s Eastern Border

Border and administrative divisions usually have considerable severe impacts on the economic growth and sustainable management of natural and human on both sides of the border. Schengen border regions mostly perform less well economically in comparison to non-border regions, and the citizens and businesses are facing all sorts of barriers on a day-to-day basis when crossing EU Schengen borders. Therefore, the research is focused on the resilience of the frontier areas of Slovakia and Ukraine, both experiencing rising out-migration, demographic ageing and, therefore, less resistance to threats. The proposed Regional Resilience Index (RRI) is based on three resilience capacity domains: (1) The entrepreneurial domain containing partial indicators of industrial diversity, entrepreneurial activity, unemployment and the possibilities to save money; (2) the socio-demographic domain, whose partial indicators are ageing and the health status of the population, and (3) the domain of interconnectedness of communities with its partial indicators of public infrastructure and settlement stability. By calculating RRI, the overall resilience capacity of the monitored districts of Slovakia and Ukraine is estimated. The index shows that the border factor is significant in explaining the differences in each of the index’s three domains. In addition, migration for work is shown to be a key factor increasing vulnerability and is therefore studied in more detail. The prediction and evaluation of risks associated with strategic and territorial planning is a necessary approach in relation to extraordinary events and minimization of consequences.

Contemplating the Antecedents of a Sustainable Work Life in an Emerging Economy: Lessons from Early Retirees in the ICT Sector of Pakistan

Sustainable careers at present are characterized by elements of both planned and unplanned career transitions traversed over the entire life course. Planned career transitions involve voluntary departure from the routine career while unplanned career displacements come in the form of involuntary retirement decisions resulting from the job-cuts imposed by organizations. Involuntarily-displaced workers are challenged with threats, such as an unwelcoming job-market, depleted skillsets and potential obsolescence which results in limited employability. For developed nations, extant research has investigated to a reasonable extent this budding avenue of post-retirement career decision making and its dependency on various micro-level socioeconomic determinants. However, the same avenue is, as yet, unexplored for developing economies. In an endeavor to fill this gap, the present research is undertaken to study different post-retirement career trajectories chosen by middle-aged and elderly workers after a job loss from the information and communication technology (ICT) sector in Pakistan. We employ the technique of multinomial logistic regression on data obtained from 295 early displaced workers (M = 217, F = 78) to compare different retirement decisions in the light of various socioeconomic factors, such as age, gender and specific measures of human, social and financial capital and risk-taking ability. Age, gender and health status are observed to be major deterrents to sustainable career participation while technical qualification helps to sustain reemployment opportunities. Our research offers notable contributions to the realm of sustainable career development by identifying the factors which influence workers’ employability for sustainable workforce participation. Managerial and theoretical implications are discussed followed by conclusions and research limitations.