Digital Commons Network^™

Founder Teams, Social Networks, And New Firm Performance, Joyce Zhou, Jun Yu, Arturo Rodriguez, Josh Tolleson

Journal of Business & Entrepreneurship

Research has shown that entrepreneurs’ social networks have a positive effect on the performance of new business ventures. However, much of the research in this area has focused on the individual entrepreneur, even though it is recognized that most new business ventures are started by a team of entrepreneurs. Integrating theories of social networks, top-management teams, and the resource-based view, this study focuses on the effect of the characteristics of entrepreneur teams on entrepreneurial social networks as well as the availability of resources made possible by these social networks. It also examines the potential for team cohesion to moderate the …

An Analysis Of The Sport Fan You Don’T Want To Encounter: Willpower And Fan Dysfunction, Anna M. Minor, Daniel L. Wann

Findings in Sport, Hospitality, Entertainment, and Event Management

Dysfunctional sport fans are classified as fans who have impaired function as it relates to socialization and social groups in the sport context, leading them to be highly confrontational and frequently complain within sporting environments (Wakefield & Wann, 2006). These fans are frequently loud, obsessive and even violent (Wann & James, 2019). The current research attempts to provide insight into this degree of excessive fandom behavior. Although previous work has examined demographics, alcohol, media consumption, and game attendance among dysfunctional fans, research has yet to examine the level of willpower (i.e., self-control) among these persons. With consideration that dysfunctional sport …

Participation Motivation Of Diverse Pickleball Participants: With A Marketing Implication, Mark Lifang Zhang, Steve S. Chen, Scott Thorton, Eric Street

Findings in Sport, Hospitality, Entertainment, and Event Management

Pickleball has been widely reported as one of the fastest-growing sports in the United States. Prior research has largely attributed this growth to the psychosocial benefits that pickleball provides to older adults, including increased social interaction and enhanced overall well-being. However, limited attention has been given to participation motivations and perceived benefits among other participant groups. The purpose of this study was to examine pickleball participants’ motivations, interests, and intentions for continued involvement across diverse demographic groups.

Participants included 431 individuals (54% male, 46% female) representing four age groups, with 67% aged 55 and older. Participants were recruited from two …

Coaching One's Own Child: An Ethnographic Study Of Parent-Coach Experiences In Youth Sport, Dr. Sandra Alspach, Dr. Jon Coles

Findings in Sport, Hospitality, Entertainment, and Event Management

Over 27 million children in the United States are playing youth sports.  Many of those youth are being coached by their own parent. Although this phenomenon is commonplace, little research has been done to study how parent-coaches balance their dual roles.  To better understand communication, roles, and relationship dynamics in youth sports environments, this study examined the experiences of parent-coaches and their athlete children. There were two ethnographic investigations. In the first, 76 participants (34 parent-coaches and 42 child-athletes) ranging from age 8 to age 80 participated in semi-structured Zoom interviews. Personal networks and snowball sampling were used to invite …

Provocable Forgiveness In Noisy Brand--Consumer Systems:An Agent-Based Study Of Repeated Interaction, Tahere Ahmadiyan, Hamidreza Navidi, Behbod Keshavarzi

Northeast Journal of Complex Systems (NEJCS)

Repeated brand--consumer exchange is often treated as a managerial problem of loyalty, recovery, and trust. It can also be read as a small complex system: many local decisions about cooperation, retaliation, and forgiveness accumulate into market-level selection. This study uses that perspective to examine which relational rules survive when communication is imperfect. Eight canonical Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma strategies are translated into marketing archetypes and evaluated through round-robin tournaments, a six-level noise sweep, proportional-fitness ecological dynamics, and finite-population Moran invasion tests. The tournament leaderboard is calculated without same-strategy self-play, so that reported payoffs reflect inter-archetype competition rather than homogeneous self-coordination. At …

Designing Menus That Welcome Everyone: How Inclusive Menu Cues Drive Customer Behavior For Diners With Dietary Restrictions, Cortney Norris, Lisa Slevitch, Matthew Bauman, Soyoung Park, Seung Hyun Lee

ICHRIE Research Reports

Millions of consumers navigate dietary restrictions every time they eat out, whether due to food allergies, religious practices, or lifestyle choices such as veganism. Yet most restaurant menus do little to acknowledge these needs. This report summarizes findings from a three-phase study that explored which menu design features most effectively communicate inclusivity to diners with dietary restrictions and how those features influence emotions, attitudes, and likelihood of choosing a restaurant. The results offer restaurant operators concrete, evidence-based strategies for making their menus more welcoming and, in doing so, expanding their customer base.

Are Extension Agriculture Programs Hitting Their Target With Military Veterans?, Adam Ingrao, Craig W Carpenter, Michael Lotspeich-Yadao, Charles M. Tolbert

Journal of Extension

The desire to support military veterans has led to a variety of targeted Extension programs, but the types and availability of these programs vary substantially. After reviewing the size and diversity of the U.S. veteran population, we examine one of the main USDA programs targeting veterans: the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development program. We then use matrix analysis to categorize veteran support programs across other program areas. Finally, we compare these programs with veterans' needs, as described in recently conducted veteran focus groups, and conclude by highlighting gaps and opportunities for improving Extension programming for veterans, including substantially improving program …

Case Study: Feasibility Of Creating A Simulated Mobile Data Center For Cross-Disciplinary Academic Programs, Stanley Mierzwa, Christoper J. Schultz, Iassen Christov, Michael Fagioli, Thomas Ikeda, Reinaldo Jaramillo, Giolian Sanagustin

Center for Cybersecurity

This case study examines the potential to envision, create, and deploy a simulated mobile micro data center solution that can be easily replicated and transported between locations and educational settings. The coined term for this solution is the Mobile AI-Centered Data Center (Mobile ACDC), which provides students with a platform to construct, in a hands-on fashion, such a solution and navigate the product to gain greater competencies and understanding of the components found in a data center. Instructor and student feedback assessments from the pilot classroom modules and laboratory experiential learning activities indicate that such a solution helps to improve …

How Does An Advanced Educator Utilize Digital Language Teaching And Learning By Integrating Linguistic, Cultural, And Business Life Perspectives?, Hely Westerholm, Pirjo Takanen-Körperich, Ph.D.

International Journal for Business Education

This paper explores advanced educators’ digital working capabilities in online language teaching, with a particular focus on sharing Finnish language and culture in a foreign context. Cultural and linguistic knowledge play a significant role in enhancing students’ motivation to study foreign languages. In today’s educational environment, digitalisation and globalisation exert an increasing influence on foreign language teaching and learning.

The digital learning environment has brought about a paradigm shift in foreign language didactics. Digital language learning is both challenging and holistic in nature. Continued foreign language learning is simultaneously an individual and a social process, as digital learning cultures impose …

Are Hotels Ready For Flooding? Improving Employee Preparedness, Ahmin Kwon, Marketa Kubickova, Swechchha Subedi

ICHRIE Research Reports

Focusing on the experiences of 500 current hotel employees in the United States, this report evaluates current levels of flood preparedness and the role of organizational support in shaping employee proactive response. Findings indicate that most employees have experience with flooding and rely on multiple information sources, yet trust in government response remains moderate. Clear disparities emerge across hotel segments, with significantly higher preparedness commitment and proactive behavior among employees in luxury hotels and those with longer tenure. Importantly, prior experience does not necessarily translate into effective preparedness. Although many respondents perceive existing information as sufficient, there is a continued …

Exploring Hotel Sustainability Through A Service Design Lens: An Espoused Theory Vs. Theory-In-Use Perspective, Cindy Yoonjoung Heo, Jaehyun Park, Sanqi Yang, Chen Ni, Lei Tang, Lei Yu, Julneth Rogenhofer, Geraldine Assen

ICHRIE Research Reports

Sustainability is now widely embedded in hotel strategies, but it is often assessed through what hotels communicate rather than what guests actually experience. This study examines that disconnect by drawing on Argyris and Schön’s distinction between espoused theory and theory-in-use, combined with a service design perspective. Using document analysis alongside in-situ observations at the front desk and in guest rooms, the study looks at how sustainability appears across service touchpoints and whether it is likely to be noticed and understood by guests. The findings suggest that many initiatives are operationally in place but remain largely out of sight during the …

Robot Ready, Deploying Semi-Autonomous Food Delivery Robots, Betsy Bender Stringam, Somang Min, Jennifer Martinez

ICHRIE Research Reports

Semiautonomous food delivery robots are expanding rapidly across college campuses, healthcare facilities, office complexes, and other food delivery settings. The semiautonomous food delivery robot market grew to about $800 million in 2025 and is expected to exceed $3.24 billion by 2030.

This report draws on research studies conducted at a university contract foodservice beta deployment site, involving in-depth interviews with employees and managers who worked directly with semiautonomous food delivery robots during and after implementation, triangulated with field notes and observations by the research team. The report highlights key findings and develops an original practitioner framework around these findings, called …

Cybersecurity Governance Of Industrial Iot In Sub-Saharan Africa: Policy Gaps, Threat Landscape, And Lessons From Comparative African Contexts, Faztudo Languisse Eng.

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The rapid deployment of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems across Sub-Saharan Africa's extractive, energy, logistics, and agro-industrial sectors has introduced a cybersecurity challenge of growing urgency: industrial networks that were designed for operational efficiency are increasingly exposed to cyber threats for which neither the organizations nor the regulatory frameworks are adequately prepared. This article examines the cybersecurity governance of IIoT systems in a developing African economy, using Mozambique as a primary case study and drawing comparative lessons from South Africa, Rwanda, and Kenya. Through an integrative literature review and documentary analysis of national digital, cybersecurity, and industrial policies, the …

Fred Luthans, Unl Business Management, Positive Organizational Behavior, Mark Griep, Fred Luthans

UNL ORCA Interview Series

Fred Luthans was awarded the ORCA in 2008. He was born in Clinton, Iowa in 1939. He earned three degrees from the University of Iowa in Iowa City, located only a few miles from Clinton. His bachelor's was in mathematics in 1961, a Master’s of Business Administration in ‘62, PhD in Management and Psychology in 1965. After serving two years as a captain in the Army at West Point, where he taught psychology and leadership, he joined the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as an Associate Professor of Management. He's had a remarkable career, but I'll only mention three major distinctions. His …

Building The Next Cybersecurity Workforce: A Grades 7–12 Curriculum To Close The Cyber Talent Gap, Mohammed A. Salam, Iqbal Shareef, Rich P. Manprisio

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, cyberattacks pose increasing threats, yet a global shortage of cybersecurity and digital forensics professionals leaves industries vulnerable, similar to having too few law enforcement officers in a densely populated city. The judicial system faces rising digital crimes and fraud cases, further strained by the lack of experts to analyze and extract digital evidence. Despite high demand, millions of positions remain unfilled. This paper identifies the root causes of the cybersecurity workforce shortage and proposes a targeted solution: a curriculum for Grades 7–12 designed to foster cybersecurity awareness and interest. The methodology included a comprehensive …

Human-Driven, Autonomous, Or Hybrid? The Optimal Fleet Configurations For Ride-Hailing Platforms, Wenjing Li, Yali Zhang, Jun Sun, Zhaojun Yang

Information Systems Faculty Publications

The growing commercialization of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is reshaping consumer service preferences and prompting ride-hailing platforms to redesign fleet structures that accommodate the coexistence of human-driven vehicles (HVs) and AVs. This article develops a queueing game framework that incorporates vehicle heterogeneity and consumer preference differences to systematically compare three fleet configuration strategies: the pure HV (PHV) strategy (HVs only), the pure AV (PAV) strategy (AVs only), and the hybrid strategy (both HVs and AVs). The analysis highlights how consumer mismatch losses, AV operating costs, and service rates jointly shape equilibrium outcomes. Results show that when consumer mismatch losses are moderate, …

Firms In The Flood: Is Fema Failing Small Businesses?, Lauryn Charles

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

When faced with a natural disaster, small businesses remain largely outside the direct reach of federal assistance. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimates that up to 65% of small businesses close within two years of direct impact by a hazard event. Despite this vulnerability, existing research has focused primarily on infrastructure and household recovery, leaving the small business sector underexamined. This study is the first to link county-level IRS income data, FEMA mitigation grants, and SBA disaster records to empirically evaluate whether federal pre-disaster mitigation spending and community social resilience moderate the relationship between disasters and small business recovery …

Contemporary Cybersecurity Challenges In Emerging Technologies: A Systematic Literature Analysis, Faztudo Languisse Prof

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The accelerating convergence of artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, blockchain, and quantum computing has fundamentally transformed the global threat landscape, introducing cybersecurity challenges of unprecedented complexity and scale. This systematic literature review synthesizes findings from peer-reviewed publications, institutional reports, and regulatory documents published primarily between 2020 and 2025 to provide an integrated analysis of contemporary cybersecurity challenges across five key emerging technology domains. The review identifies critical vulnerabilities inherent to each domain, documents the evolution of threat actors and attack methodologies — including AI-powered ransomware, adversarial machine learning, and harvest-now-decrypt-later quantum attacks — and evaluates …

Signal And Substance: Why Methodological Sophistication Fails To Guarantee Inference, Aamir Rashid, Rizwana Rasheed

Publications and Research

Despite increasing analytical sophistication, empirical research in organization studies continues to suffer from fragile inference, uneven theoretical accumulation, and contested credibility. This paper seeks to explain why these problems persist by shifting attention from authors’ methodological choices to the evaluative dynamics of peer review. Adopting a conceptual and theory-analytic approach, the paper theorizes peer review as an inferential gatekeeping system. Drawing on research design, theory evaluation, and philosophy-of-science literatures, this study develops an analytical framework to examine how evaluative routines shape what constitutes empirical rigor during the review process. The analysis identifies five recurring reviewer blind spots: inferential scope inflation, …

Auditor Trust In Artificial Intelligence, Michael L. Decker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

Accounting firms are investing in, and advocating for, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in audit procedures. This dissertation attempts to determine what factors may lead to auditors trusting an AI system. Established models of trust show that traits of the individual user, the system, and the situation all have effects on trust. Prior accounting research also indicates that professional skepticism is an important trait in auditors. This dissertation adds professional skepticism into an established trust model and uses Structural Equation Modeling to investigate auditor trust in audit evidence prepared by an AI system. My results indicate that the most …

Can Ungrading Make Sport Management Education More Practical And Engaging?, Michael A. Odio

The COSMA Journal

In this essay I take on the subject of grades in sport management education. While grades are used as a measure of success across higher education, they are an imperfect measure of achievement and learning and have major limitations in terms of student employability. The ungrading movement brings attention to the ways grades can harm learning by shifting attention away from students’ development, and instructor or peer feedback, and intrinsic motivation, while incentivizing compliance and risk-aversion. These harms directly affect what are arguably some of the most important aspects of sport management education, as when grades are the main incentive, …

Marketing Strategies To Increase Student Enrollment To Generate Revenue, Jermaine R. Mccain

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Declining student enrollment can reduce district revenue and limit a public school’s ability to sustain educational programs, staffing, and overall organizational effectiveness. Public school business leaders who lack effective marketing strategies to increase student enrollment may experience financial instability, limiting their organization’s capacity to maintain long-term operational sustainability. Grounded in consumer choice theory, the purpose of this qualitative pragmatic inquiry was to identify and explore effective marketing strategies public school business leaders use to increase student enrollment to generate district revenue. Participants were six public school business leaders in the southeastern United States. Data were collected through semistructured interviews and …

Security Architecture Decision Framework For Endpoint Protection In Resource-Constrained K-12 Environments, Jason Folker

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

K-12 educational institutions face an ongoing challenge in protecting endpoints when budgets and staffing prevent the implementation of standard security best practices. Technology directors routinely make difficult decisions about administrative rights, software controls, and security tooling, but they lack frameworks designed for the constraints and priorities specific to educational environments. This paper develops a security architecture decision framework tailored for K-12 endpoint protection. The framework integrates five weighting dimensions to help technology directors evaluate competing architectural choices. These dimensions include educational impact, security risk reduction, resource requirements, compliance obligations, and operational feasibility. The framework creates structured documentation that helps decision-makers …

Sustaining Purpose In Organizations: Leadership Insights From The Psalms, Hershey H. Friedman, Xianfang Zeng

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

This conceptual paper examines how the Book of Psalms offers an integrative moral framework that enriches contemporary purpose-driven leadership theory. Although modern management scholarship increasingly emphasizes purpose, stakeholder orientation, and meaningful work, it often focuses on strategic articulation rather than the ethical and relational practices that sustain purpose over time. Drawing on selected Psalms as a historically influential corpus of leadership reflection, this study identifies key leadership principles and situates them within established management literature. Purpose-driven leadership rooted in ancient values builds psychologically safe environments. In these spaces, employees view their work as a meaningful calling instead of a simple …

Irish-Americans Audie Murphy And William Donovan: A Celebrity And A Statesman, Ritch Eich

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

In the long annals of Irish history, many leaders have distinguished themselves as warriors in battle or as civilian heroes, or both. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Blain “Paddy” Mayne, a founding member of the Special Air Service and a highly decorated World War II British Army officer from Northern Ireland, is one. Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish Catholic priest whose rescue network helped over 6,500, escaped Allied POWs, Jews, and other fugitives at risk of Nazi persecution evade capture by the Germans during World War II, is another.1 But, not all heroes of Irish descent are remembered equally. Take, for example, …

A Person For All Seasons: The Remarkable Leadership Of Mother Cabrini And Why It Matters Today, Emilio F. Iodice

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

The history of organizational management is often written in the bold, sweeping strokes of industrial barons or the calculated maneuvers of political statesmen. Yet at the turn of the twentieth century, one of the most sophisticated examples of global institutional scaling was orchestrated by a woman who stood barely five feet tall, held no formal political title, and suffered from debilitating physical frailty. Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850–1917) did not merely practice charity; she engineered a global revolution of care. Over a twenty-eight-year executive career, she founded sixty-seven schools, orphanages, and hospitals across three continents, thereby transforming the social landscape of …

The Philosophical Aspect Of Spirituality And Entrepreneurial Leadership In The Indian Knowledge System, Nidhi Kaushal

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

Entrepreneurs have an obligation to conserve their literature, art, and culture in any format because it helps to fortify their cultural heritage and memories. In the context of entrepreneurship, a useful and insightful examination of the ancient Indian knowledge framework has proposed the growth of culture-based enterprises, which reflects the magnificent integration of human values with traditional wisdom-based work ethics. The nature of today's modern entrepreneurship is an adjusted specification based on innovative context, which is different from the ancient fundamental policies and practices. This study introduces cultural entrepreneurship and its originality through the traditional and indigenous art and skill …

Moral Identity, Joseph P. Hester

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

Foundationally, our communal awareness offers a complexity of meaning, but don’t be deterred, it also provides an avenue for understanding ethics, suggesting a definition of “humanity” as “community.”

The Character Fractal: A Theory Of Virtue Replication In Organizations, Kevin Davis, Scott Kozlak, Matthew M. Orlowsky, David Levy

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

Organizational ethics has long been treated as an individual problem requiring individual solutions: the right traits, the right training, the right people in the right roles. This paper argues that framing is fundamentally insufficient. While character and virtue ultimately reside in persons, character development within organizations emerges through recursive ethical interactions shaped by incentives, narratives, feedback loops, and habituation structures cultivated by systems leaders. It replicates, or fails to, across every scale of human interaction, from the unobserved micro-decision of a single employee to the macro-level architecture of executive leadership. Drawing on Mandelbrot's fractal geometry, Lorenz's chaos theory, Kauffman's complexity …

From Betrayal To Blessing: Leadership Lessons From The Joseph Narrative, Hershey H. Friedman, Nakato Hirakubo

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

This paper examines the enduring relevance of the biblical Joseph narrative as a study of human nature and leadership. Key themes include the transformative power of forgiveness and the intricate interplay between family dynamics and divine providence. While Joseph's moral integrity remains a central focus, the narrative also offers a sobering lesson in governance: his consolidation of land and wealth under Pharaoh created the very centralized power structure that eventually enabled the enslavement of his descendants. The narrative demonstrates how emotional vulnerability and tears serve as catalysts for healing, while Judah's transformation from complicity in betrayal to courageous advocacy exemplifies …