Women's underrepresentation in business‑to‑business sales: Reasons, contingencies, and solutions

Sales faces the second-largest gender gap of any corporate function, with women’s underrepresentation even more pronounced in business-to-business (B2B) sales and at higher hierarchical levels. Concurrently, the call for a more gender-diverse sales force is gaining momentum for social and economic reasons, moving the question of how to attract and promote women in B2B sales to the top of sales managers’ agenda. Using an inductive approach, we uncover male-centricity of communication and job structures in B2B sales as the underlying reasons deterring women from entering and advancing in B2B sales. Specifically, male-centricity implies a misfit between B2B sales and women’s self-conception and needs. By deriving contingencies of these relationships, we offer solutions to women’s underrepresentation in B2B sales by showing, for example, which sales positions are less prone to signal or create a misfit to women and what gender-inclusive resources sales departments can provide and saleswomen can build

Tilting at Windmills Opportunistically: The Case of Georgian Far Right

Ethno-religious nationalism has been an integral part of the Georgian identity since the country regained independence. Since the early 2000s, Georgia has had a constitutionally enshrined pro-European foreign policy, which has been reflected in a strong identification with Europe, its culture, and values. Survey data show that Georgians prefer European and Christian ethnic outgroups to Asian and Muslim ones. These factors could have explained the rise of the far right in Georgia, had Georgia experienced a wave of refugees comparable to EU states in mid-2010s. However, only few people fled from the Syrian civil war to Georgia. Nevertheless, in and around 2016, various far-right groups with a strong anti-liberal ideology appeared in the Georgian public sphere. In 2017, a far-right rally was organized, demanding that the rights of Turkish, Iranian, and Arab business owners and citizens be restricted in Georgia. This was accompanied by violent incidents involving physical abuse and property damage of non-white foreigners. The sudden rise of the far-right political organizations in Georgia gives rise to various questions: Do the far-right ideas have grassroots origins, or was the activation of the far right a top-down process? Which domestic and external factors could have contributed to these developments

Narratives about fiscal policy: Are firm decision-makers’ tax preferences driven by redistribution or fiscal consolidation motives?

Motivated by the increasing frequency with which business leaders publicly express their views on policy issues and by recent findings on the role of narratives in shaping preferences and behaviors, we investigate ow narratives affect the tax preferences of firm decision-makers. Specifically, using a large-scale survey experiment (N=7,848), we examine how exposure to narratives of redistribution and fiscal consolidation affects firm decision-makers’ attitudes toward taxes and fiscal stimulus. We find that framing taxes as payments of due debts increases the preference to pay taxes, whereas framing taxes as funds required to cover undue losses is largely ineffective, except for a notable tendency to favor raising the capital gains tax. We also observe a greater preference to pay taxes when decision-makers agree with the stimulus. Our findings on narratives and the channels affecting tax preferences have implications for fiscal policy communicatio

How are NFDI consortia using Knowledge Graphs? An overview of common functions and challenges by the Working Group "Knowledge Graphs"

The NFDI Working Group "Knowledge Graphs" (WG KGs) operates within the cross-cutting Section Metadata to coordinate and facilitate exchange on best practices, use cases, and challenges in the creation and use of knowledge graphs (KGs) across different disciplines. In this poster, we follow up on previously published findings, such as the dataset of KGs and related metadata developed and used by different consortia [1]. Besides the successful proposal and initiation of a basic service for a KG infrastructure (KGI4NFDI) [2], members of the WG have continued to meet regularly to discuss the ways the basic service can best meet the requirements of individual disciplines, and the NFDI as a whole. Furthermore, the WG discusses concerns beyond the scope of the basic service, such as efforts within individual consortia focused on disciplinary tasks, or ongoing developments within related basic services, such as TS4NFDI [3] or PID4NFDI [4]. Based on agile requirements gathering, feedback, and practical exchange, the WG has coordinated the collection of functional use cases and ongoing challenges different consortia face, with the aim to identify commonalities and/or distinctions that can inform the development of current and future basic services. The core premise of KGs is to represent (meta)data and their relations in a machine-understandable format, which improves semantic interoperability and data integration by adopting standard ontologies and Linked Data principles (e.g., RDF, OWL). This drives the functional use cases observed in NFDI consortia. Following a literature review, the following core KG functionalities were categorised by members of the WG: a) Data integration; b) Data FAIRification; c) Metadata cataloguing; d) Data verification, enrichment and extension; e) Machine actionability and AI-readiness [5–9]. These core categories were specified further through an open call among the consortia represented in the WG KG. The call collected an extended dataset of use case examples from their KG projects, grouped according to functionality categories, and linked to the previously published KG overview dataset [10]. Examples include KGs established by individual consortia functioning as data and metadata catalogues for discipline-specific repositories and research data portals, while using dedicated semantic ontologies as in the case of NFDI4Culture, NFDI-MatWerk, NFDI4DataScience, MaRDI, and NFDI4Objects, among others. A more specific example of data integration is the capacity of the Semantic Kompakkt KG (NFDI4Culture) and the NFDI4Bioimage KG to semantically express the annotation of 3D models and Bioimaging file formats, respectively. Alongside the use cases that illustrate why different consortia adopt specific KG functionalities, common challenges were also identified and documented. These challenges include harmonizing diverse ontologies within or across consortia, ensuring data verification and quality, optimizing AI-ready tools to support KG (and data) (re)usage, as well as socio-technical challenges, such as data privacy, or managing access restrictions. By collecting concrete use case examples and identifying specific challenges, the WG KGs supports its mission to encourage broader adoption of KGs across the NFDI. This effort also contributes to building a "one-stop-shop" catalog of KG example implementations that the NFDI community can turn to when starting KG-driven projects