Conceptualizing the relationship between Spiritual and Entrepreneurial Orientation in developing sustainable enterprises

Entrepreneurship is considered a critical element that promotes the development of an economy and the society of a country. At the organizational level, the Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) of decision-makers is recognized as a key driver in the entrepreneurship literature that propels firms to act ‘autonomously’, ‘innovate’, ‘take risks’, and be ‘proactive’ relative to marketplace opportunities. However, the current EO literature is evolving and has not explored its impact on developing sustainable operations. This paper intends to bridge this gap by introducing a concept of Spiritual Orientation (SO) playing the role of a mediator to explain the association between EO and sustainable operations. We argue that spirituality fortifies entrepreneurs’ commitment to developing sustainable business entities, by empowering firms to be adaptable and creating a pro-social business model with a sense of interconnection with the community and natural ecosystem. Thus, it is important to understand the spiritual development of entrepreneurs, because it leads entrepreneurs to exhibit fairness, kindness, and improved awareness of other people’s needs and thereby be sensitive to the alterations in the natural ecosystem. This paper argues that Spiritual Orientation leads entrepreneurs to exercise greater ‘autonomy’ as a result of seeing the interconnectedness of their actions. A spiritually oriented entrepreneur would place emphasis on the ethics, principles, virtues, values, and be sensitive to emotions, which will lead to taking proactive actions. As such, spirituality elucidates how business visionaries continue despite challenging situations by expanding their ideas of future-oriented sensemaking. This paper theorizes how a spiritually driven EO will lead to sustainable business ventures that focus on people, profit, and the planet. We assert that entrepreneurs must develop the spiritual maturity to create the right balance of EO dimensions, thus leading to creating sustainable organizations. Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Entrepreneurial Orientation; Spirituality; Spiritual Orientation; Sustainability; Triple Bottom lin

Service-Learning, Spiritual Orientation, and Social Entrepreneurship: A Case Study of the Vikings Club of the University of Sri Jayewardenepura

The primary purpose of this study was to understand the effects of a student’s service-learning experience gained by working on social entrepreneurship projects or engaging in corporate social responsibility activities on a student’s change towards social and community development and to understand their spiritual orientation. This study investigated 20 transformational stories of the students of Viking Club attached to the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, which is a student-led club initiated from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura that supports social entrepreneurship in Sri Lanka. Using a qualitative research approach, in-depth interviews were conducted along with one of the author’s personal experiences- autoethnography, to understand and capture the authentic experiences of transformative change of the participants. The results of the study indicated that active engagement in the social entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility activities of the Viking Club increased the empathetic behaviour and created a more empathic mindset, socially responsible, happy, and sustainable. The students were motivated to work interconnected and appeared to exert more effort in sharing love with others which reflects the development in the spiritual orientation and how it has linked with social entrepreneurial to reach the steering vision of the Club. As the Club provides opportunities in social entrepreneurship and CSR to use their newly acquired skills and knowledge in real-life situations with the active participation in the social entrepreneurship and CSR projects, they can effectively solve social problems in Sri Lanka through social entrepreneurship and the transformations will inspire ethical decision-making at both individual and organisational levels. Keywords: Service-Learning, Spiritual Orientation, Social Entrepreneurship, Student Club

Planck 2018 results. X. Constraints on inflation

We report on the implications for cosmic inflation of the 2018 Release of the Planck CMB anisotropy measurements. The results are fully consistent with the two previous Planck cosmological releases, but have smaller uncertainties thanks to improvements in the characterization of polarization at low and high multipoles. Planck temperature, polarization, and lensing data determine the spectral index of scalar perturbations to be $n_\mathrm{s}=0.9649\pm 0.0042$ at 68% CL and show no evidence for a scale dependence of $n_\mathrm{s}.$ Spatial flatness is confirmed at a precision of 0.4% at 95% CL with the combination with BAO data. The Planck 95% CL upper limit on the tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r_{0.002}<0.10$, is further tightened by combining with the BICEP2/Keck Array BK15 data to obtain $r_{0.002}<0.056$. In the framework of single-field inflationary models with Einstein gravity, these results imply that: (a) slow-roll models with a concave potential, $V" (\phi) < 0,$ are increasingly favoured by the data; and (b) two different methods for reconstructing the inflaton potential find no evidence for dynamics beyond slow roll. Non-parametric reconstructions of the primordial power spectrum consistently confirm a pure power law. A complementary analysis also finds no evidence for theoretically motivated parameterized features in the Planck power spectrum, a result further strengthened for certain oscillatory models by a new combined analysis that includes Planck bispectrum data. The new Planck polarization data provide a stringent test of the adiabaticity of the initial conditions. The polarization data also provide improved constraints on inflationary models that predict a small statistically anisotropic quadrupolar modulation of the primordial fluctuations. However, the polarization data do not confirm physical models for a scale-dependent dipolar modulation