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This study demonstrates how businesses employ their advertising to socially control and thus censor viewpoints they do not like. In 1970-71, when the University of Iowa student newspaper the Daily Iowan (DI) started advocating anti-Vietnam Wan feminist and antigovernment positions, businesses withdrew a substantial amount of advertising, which caused the newspaper to lose money. This led to internal pressure within the paper to change content and staff. The newspaper's board refused to let these pressures affect the newspaper's staff The study analyzes the paper's content, board minutes, and financial data as well as interviews former DI staff and Iowa City businessmen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the reasons behind what has been termed the 'Oulu Phenomenon' in Northern Finland. Over the past two to three decades the city of Oulu has transformed its economy from dependency on timber, paper and pulp industries into one based on High Technology, notably, telecommunications, biotechnology, electronics, multimedia and environmental technologies. In particular the paper will explore the role played by the national government via regional policy, higher education and the subsequent interaction between these, the local authorities and entrepreneurs [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational life cycle research seeks to explain changes in firm characteristics as the firm grows and matures. Unlike most life cycle research this paper focuses on changes that occur during the firm's crucial early stages. Specifically, we examine differences in an entrepreneur's time allocation as the young firm moves to later stages. This Issue is important for two reasons. First, time is one of the entrepreneur's most valuable resources. Second, this approach fits with the growing popularity of behavioral research in entrepreneurship. Nine hypotheses are tested using data from a three-year, large-scale, nationwide survey of entrepreneurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Friedman's 2005 book The world is flat was meant as a wake-up call to those in the United States who direct its corporate boardrooms and govern its political/economic state, a warning that globalization has brought about a level economic 'playing field' in which the United States might be losing the game. As rhetoric, the title certainly works well to raise fears about North America's future economic role. It also works in concretizing a popular view of globalization, a view that obscures its uneven, discordant, and decidedly unflat processes and practices. In this paper I help deconstruct this view by fleshing out the everyday ways through which United States expanded economically in its early (1890-1927) global empire. Based on archival work in Argentina, Russia, Scotland, and the United States, I provide a historical look at encounters between North American business men and women and their foreign customers, students, and workers. Focusing on the diverse practices and personal encounters that were critical to the early global efforts of select United States-based corporations, I expose the uneven, contested, and messy ways in which economic expansion works. By analyzing early global encounters when the economic dominance of the United States was just becoming apparent, I am able to highlight the sheer complexity and truly relational nature of United States' expansion in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Small businesses have received limited attention from those researching corporate reputation. This paper addresses this gap by examining the development of corporate reputation within a small business in New Zealand. The longitudinal case study locates three distinct stages of corporate reputation building as Hubbard Foods Ltd. grew from small beginnings in 1988 to a firm that now employs 128 people and has a 21% share of the New Zealand cereal market. First, the values of Dick Hubbard, the company founder, were important at start-up as the entrepreneur and the company were viewed as one entity. Second, as the company began to grow, the creation of a family culture and socially responsible company behaviours were key to the reputation building process. In 2004, Dick Hubbard stepped into the political arena and placed the day-to-day running of the business in the hands of an experienced CEO. In this third stage, his and the company’s reputations parted. However, the corporate reputation of Hubbard Foods continued to thrive, even though the founder’s own reputation came under close media scrutiny and intense political pressure. The reasons for the persistence of the company’s good name appear to be related to the constant retelling of a corporate “story”, which captured the core values and competencies that resonated with staff, customers, and other stakeholders. The three-stage model introduced in this paper provides a useful framework for future research into the development of corporate reputation in small businesses. Implications for reputation management are also discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The paper analyses from an evolutionary perspective how retailers respond and adapt to business-to-customer e-commerce. As such, the paper explores the diverse behavior of retailers with respect to the adoption of e-commerce. In particular, it empirically examines the extent to which the adoption of Internet strategies is affected by firm-specific features (eg habit of entrepreneur, routines of firms), network relationships, and geographical proximity. Logistic regression analyses of 643 independent retailers in the Netherlands suggest that geography matters, when other factors are controlled for. That is, the probability of having an Internet strategy increases significantly (a) when more relevant knowledge is locally available; (b) the more demanding local customers are; and (c) the less rivalry is present locally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates the construction of CEO charisma within the US stock market. By metaphorically employing the myth of the Minotaur, we discuss three forces underlying the rise of heroic CEO images in the USA: Ariadne, or charismatic leadership theory and its formulation of charisma; Theseus, or the CEOs struggling to obtain power over stock market actors; and the Minotaur, or the stock market itself and the securities analyst profession. Building on the literature on organizational symbolism, we present a qualitative study of two CEO successions, focusing on the form and content of the persona and the vision projected by CEOs and elaborated by securities analysts. The results suggest that jointly constructing charisma through discourse, CEOs and analysts enact a form of power that does not lie in top-down coercion, but rather on the emergent, active involvement and contribution of its very subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do entrepreneurs become when they have a long-term personal relationship, get married, and/or have children? Their businesses mature into family firms. What do entrepreneurial study centers do when they realize the above? They see an opportunity to start a family business program. What do accounting and legal firms do to try to reach this market? They sponsor a program. What happens to a psychologist, turned entrepreneur professor, who becomes involved in a family business program? He is resurrected as a family business professional. The focus of this paper is the lessons learned during the journey towards developing a unique family business program as part of an entrepreneurial studies center in a major research university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurship is the creation of organizations. What differentiates entrepreneurs from non-entrepreneurs is that entrepreneurs create organizations, while non-entrepreneurs do not. In behavioral approaches to the study of entrepreneurship an entrepreneur is seen as a set of activities involved in organization creation, while in trait characteristic. This approaches an entrepreneur is a set of personality traits and paper argues that trait approaches have been unfruitful and that behavioral approaches will be a more productive perspective for future research in entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social and cultural contexts, as well as public policies, shape the experiences of women and men in demanding occupations. This article compares work-family themes in the conference papers to research outside of the United States, especially to a mid-1990s survey of twelve hundred women and men holding the highest positions in elected politics and business in twenty-seven capitalist democracies, the Comparative Leadership Study. Analyses show that most leaders in the comparative study have married and are parents. Family responsibilities fall disproportionately on the women in top leadership positions. Marriage and parenthood impinge on women's careers to a far larger extent than they do on similarly situated men's. An international perspective on work-family conflicts highlights ways in which the United States is similar to and different from comparable countries. In many ways, the United States differs little. Yet the Nordic countries appear more successful in lessening work-family conflicts, even for top leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Venture capitalists realize returns on their investments when their portfolio companies either go public (IPO) or are acquired by a publicly traded company. Finance theory implies that the sooner a particular return can be realized the higher the "real" return to the Investor. We use an ecosystem perspective to investigate speed to Initial Public Offering. Findings indicate that geography of the portfolio company matters, that non high-tech portfolio companies go public faster than do those in the computer-related sector, and that speed Is Increased with the recent favorable IPO market but not at the same rate for all regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the market process, economic incentives exist for individuals to exploit opportunities and earn profits. Individuals respond to such incentives, but their ability to recognize opportunities and redistribute resources in new and creative ways varies. Only those individuals with superior alertness toward possible changes and who are able to cope with disequilibrium move to reallocate resources and become entrepreneurs. Thus, the role of the entrepreneur is to discover and seize market opportunities by reorganizing economic resources in new and innovative ways. Yet, it remains to be explained how entrepreneurs choose whether or not to act upon a perceived profit opportunity. The goal of this paper is to provide a model describing the decision process followed by potential entrepreneurs who are faced with such opportunities. In other words, we build a model describing the decisional algorithm that causes some individuals to act upon the profit opportunities they perceive and others to discard them. Our claim is that individuals act rationally, process all available information, and decide to exploit or not to exploit a potential opportunity by comparing the subjective returns to becoming an entrepreneur with the subjective returns of performing any alternative income-producing activity. Individuals become entrepreneurs if, and only if, their subjective relative return to entrepreneurship is positive. In addition, we argue, subjective relative returns to entrepreneurship are influenced by the existing rate of entrepreneurial activity in the individual's vicinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A firm's marketing orientation and entrepreneurial orientation intuitively should relate to organizational performance. Considerable theory can be found concerning the causes and consequences of each orientation as well as their relationship, but little empirical evidence exists, especially for small-firm samples. This paper examines the relationship between the two concepts and how this relationship is moderated by the firm's external environment. In addition, the relationship of marketing orientation and entrepreneurial orientation to firm performance and the moderating effects of the environment on these two relationships are examined. The sample consists of entrepreneurs, defined as those individuals who have started or purchased a small business, and who are still leading the business they started or purchased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers from diverse disciplines have come to the conclusion that the self-employed should be more satisfied than the wage-or-salaried, but the samples used in these studies are largely inadequate for generalizations. Studies using representative samples have disagreed on this important point. Naughton's (1987a & b) results generally supported the higher job satisfaction of the self-employed, but these findings were at odds with the implications of a similar representative sample study by Eden (1975). The idea of secondary analysis in replication research is introduced and applied to entrepreneurship research. The process and problems encountered in replicating the two studies, and the decisions made to resolve conflicts between the studies are discussed as examples of the problems secondary analysts face. Explanations for the divergent findings and implications for fostering secondary analysis approaches in entrepreneurship are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A model of employment status (self-employed vs. wage-or-salary employed) choice based on psychological, sociological and cognitive variables resolves the traditional shortcomings of occupational tracking models (general applicability, black box treatment of individual processes, and tracking exceptions or "failures") by using the cognitive heuristics of availability, representativeness and adjustment from an anchor. The model is presented, its components and processes are described, it is partially operationalized in a small example, and implications for future use are briefly considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Determines whether banks treat female and male small business owners differently. Significant of bank-customer relationship; Studies in the United Kingdom focusing on the financing conditions between small businesses and the bank manager.

This paper provides an overview and evaluation of contemporary debates over the nature and significance of `expert power' within `late modernity'. It focuses on the changing relationship between expert power, organizational control and class formation within the wider context provided by the global shift towards more reflexive and flexible forms of capital accumulation. It concludes that the latter will have fateful consequences for the major forms of expertise, organizational design and class power taking shape in late modernity. In particular, it suggests that `the politics of expertise' has become more intensely contested in contemporary conditions, and that this produces a more fragmented division of labour within and between the professional and managerial middle classes. Thus, expert groups are seen to play a strategic role in the radical restructuring of professional work organization and control occurring within the much more fragmented middle-class formations emerging in advanced capitalist societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this articleis to describe and analyze the characteristics of decision makers in an American and an English city. it has been repeatedly asserted that business men exert predominant influence in community decision making. This is the central hypothesis under test. Two cities with similar economic, demographic, and educational characteristics were selected for research, namely Pacific City in the Pacific Northwest, U.S., and English City in Southwestern England. Business men do exert a predominant influence in community decision making in Pacific City and Southern City. However, in English City the hypothesis is rejected. The key influentials come from a broad representation of the institutional sectors of community life. Two major factors seem to explain much of this difference. The first is the difference in occupational prestige values between the U. S. and England. In contrast to the U. S. the social status of industry in England, and so of its captains is low by comparison with the law, medicine, and the universities.

Since the collapse of the Somali state in the early 1990s, the country has been one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists. Many have been killed with impunity and the majority of those that have been killed where the perpetrator is known have been connected to political groups, including a range of actors such as government forces, parastatals including the Islamist group, Al-Shabaab and businessmen. The lines between such authorities are often blurred. While the targeting and assassination of journalists is certainly one key aspect of potential transitional justice process, it is not the only one. This article explores the variety of ways that journalists contribute and participate in violence and how transitional justice processes must grapple with these nuances and complexities. Drawing on examples from other countries, including South Africa and the former Yugoslavia, the article reflects on the different ways that media intersects with transitional justice processes in Somalia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We advocate for the relevance of taking Brazilian past experience and theorization of populism into account to understand present-day challenges. We depart from Weffort's conceptualization of populism to discuss the role of businesspeople movements in supporting and taking control of the political agenda through think tanks. According to Weffort, populism is built over precarious alliances that tend to favor policy or politics in different moments. During times of divergence among political elites, a populist leader emerges as a mediator in orchestrating an unstable hegemony among asymmetric classes. At the same time, the classes included in the populist alliance give legitimacy to the populist leader; they hinder his capacity of imposing decisions. However, treason of the weakest within the alliance is certain. We suggest that the political role played by the think tank IPES, in 1960s Brazil, in reframing middle-class demands is akin to contemporary populist events in Brazil—represented by the election of Jair Bolsonaro—and in the Anglo-Saxon world. Trumpism and Brexit are examples of a still-powerful free-market ideology project wrapped up under a populist discourse (re)framed with the support of businessmen and think tanks. A corporate takeover of government and the imposition of a free-market agenda are certain, as it is the treason of the weakest in the populist coalition. CMS academics should engage with the demands that give birth to populist movements as a way to dispute the neoliberal hegemony and anti-democratic populist solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban renewal was not just a city phenomenon: it also unfolded on the beaches of coastal metropolises, most spectacularly in Los Angeles where a "beach lobby" made up of public officials, businessmen, and engineers coalesced in the 1930s. In the postwar, they implemented their vision by buying beaches for the public and turning the polluted and eroded strands of the early-twentieth century into modern playgrounds. While they effectively prevented a "white flight" from the beach and successfully reshaped the coastal environment, their efforts also resulted in the erasure of alternative beach communities. By the 1960s, the lobby could rejoice in the enduring popularity of the city's beaches. Yet new beach advocates used the California public beach tradition as a rallying cry to stop further development. "Beach renewal" in Los Angeles thus challenges both narratives of postwar urban decline and the binary opposition between 1930s conservationists and 1960s environmental activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior studies have documented that the earnings response coefficient is positively related to persistence and growth and negatively related to beta and the risk-free rate. Although these studies provide interesting tests of economic theories, they do not provide a current measure of persistence. A current measure of persistence is useful for investors to assess the information content in current earnings innovations. We provide evidence that indicates a statistically significant positive relation between the earnings response coefficient and Tobin's q, thus suggesting that a firm's q ratio is a current proxy for persistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1962, New York City enacted a minimum wage law (subsequently held by the courts to be beyond the city's legislative authority) which would have provided for minima higher than those established by similar state and federal legislation. The authors, in this article, report their attempt to quantify, by means of establishing Cobb-Douglas functions, the theoretical impact of the New York City ordinance on employment. Within the limiting assumptions of that technique, the authors found an estimated job loss of approximately 100,000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the closed shop problem in the U.S. as of 1949. A survey of 50 businessmen in plants, stores and offices from Boston, Massachusetts to San Diego, California on their views about closed loop showed an attitude on the part of some businessmen that has not been widely publicized. An opinion by the American Federation of Labor on the closed shop is provided. For the union to survive it is felt to be necessary that the shop be closed and that the hiring be done through the union office so that the union can develop its apprenticeship training system to ensure competence.

Existing studies have been inconclusive on whether and the extent to which gendered social networks contribute to the gender gap in business performance. Drawing on a random sample of Chinese Canadian entrepreneurs, this research examines the nexus of social networks, Internet use, and the gender gap in business performance. Results reveal a marked gender difference in firm size, which becomes narrowed after social networks, voluntary association participation, Internet use, and business characteristics are controlled. More important, network composition and structural position have different implications for men and women entrepreneurs. Men are more effective in converting relational advantages into business advantages. Interaction effects suggest that kin homophily hurts women’s business performance but not men’s. Yet, women gain more from participating in transnational entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents the problem of illicit collusion between states, organized criminals and white-collar criminals in the post-Soviet region, showing the blurring of these phenomena. It charts the development of political corruption and argues that this is a particular problem in the region due to the way state resources were sold off during the 1990s. The article however shows that the countries of the region now diverge significantly in terms of the extent and form that collusion takes. The goal of the article is to understand this variation. The article suggests that roughly two broad categories of state now exist in the post-Soviet region, excluding the Baltic States. These are broadly politically competitive states such as Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia and broadly politically non-competitive ones such as Russia, Belarus or Kazakhstan. I show that collusion takes differing forms across these categories due to the effect that the presence or absence of political competition has. In conclusion I argue that the post-Soviet region provides little evidence to believe that political competition actually reduces corruption and collusion. However, some cases from the region show that successful anti-corruption campaigns are more likely where there is more political contestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides new insight into the local institutional embeddedness of entrepreneurial behaviour. By introducing a sociological institutional framework for place-based entrepreneurship, it adds to the knowledge of the role of regulative, normative and cognitive institutions in local entrepreneurial practices in rural Central Europe. Based on extensive case studies in regions located across five countries, the analysis suggests that the influence of regulative institutions on local entrepreneurship is tempered, if not superseded, by specific place-dependent normative and cognitive institutions, and that the fit between the different institutions is decisive for the emergence of entrepreneurial practices in a specific location. The article provides explanations of why and under which conditions entrepreneurs show different change practices in rural transition and non-transition contexts. The study concludes that institutional mechanisms are place-bound, and that a place-sensitive institutional approach can serve as a fruitful way forward for developing our contextualised knowledge of entrepreneurial behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many business markets, manufacturers seek service-led growth to secure their existing positions and continue to grow in increasingly competitive environments. Using longitudinal data from 513 German mechanical engineering companies and latent growth curve modeling, this study offers a fine-grained view of the financial performance implications of industrial service strategies. By disentangling the revenue and profit implications of industrial service strategies, findings reveal that such strategies increase both the level and the growth of manufacturing firms’ revenue streams. In contrast, they reduce the level but improve the growth of manufacturers’ profits. Results further suggest that services supporting the clients’ actions (SSC) and services supporting the supplier’s product (SSP) affect performance outcomes in different ways. SSCs directly affect revenue and profit streams. In turn, SSPs display only indirect effects on financial performance mediated through SSCs. A moderator analysis identifies two organizational contingencies that facilitate service business success: Only companies with decentralized decision-making processes and a high share of loyal customers can expect favorable financial results from industrial service strategies. In summary, this research provides significant insights and managerial guidance for turning service strategies into financial successes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a conceptual framework for addressing the relationship between over-optimism and entry into, and survival in, self-employed business ownership. Previous research has rarely examined over-optimism and the dynamics of business ownership. Using a large-scale British longitudinal survey, the relationship between over-optimism and self-employment transitions is investigated. The results show that over-optimism is associated with higher transition into business ownership. However, over-optimism at the point of entry is also associated with lower rates of subsequent duration in business ownership, despite the possibility that exits may be slowed by threshold inertia and non-financial motives for remaining self-employed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Entrepreneurial persistence occurs when the entrepreneur chooses to continue with an entrepreneurial opportunity regardless of counterinfluences or enticing alternatives. The decision to persist is influenced by personal characteristics and by feedback from the environment relative to thresholds. Using a conjoint experiment, we investigate how adversity and values influence the weight placed on the decision attributes for the persistence decisions of 100 entrepreneurs. The findings suggest that the persistence decision policies are heterogeneous depending on the level of adversity experienced and the individual values held by the entrepreneurs. The results provide interesting insights into why and how entrepreneurs choose to persist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We collected longitudinal data from 160 high-tech small-business owners to analyze if the planned behavior constructs are related to their decision to innovate, as evidenced by their behavior (rather than their intentions to do so). Subjective norms and perceived behavioral control are directly related with innovation exploitation. Attitude towards the opportunity is significant only when respondents perceive both positive subjective norms and being in high control. This multiplicative effect suggests that the planned behavior constructs can be thought of as necessary conditions beneath which business owners are much less likely to exploit identified opportunities. Implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study had two primary objectives. First, to determine whether there are any systematic networking diffesrences between male and female SME owners. Second, to determine if there is an association between networking and firm performance, for both male- and female-controlled SMEs. The results of examining 2,919 male- and 181 female-controlled SMEs (with at least one employee) over a three-year period suggest little difference in the networks accessed by male and female SME owners after controlling for education, experience, industry, age and size. The results also indicate that several formal and informal networks are positively associated with firm survival but only formal networks appear to be associated with growth. In particular, accessing an external accountant is associated with survival and growth for both male- and female-controlled SMEs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article makes a contribution to critical entrepreneurship studies through exploring ‘barefoot’ entrepreneur[ing], i.e. the entrepreneurial practices and narratives of individuals who live primarily in marginal, poor and excluded places and contexts. Drawing on Max-Neef’s barefoot economics and a methodology based on the authoring and sharing of microstorias, the article asks how agents in deprived areas of Chile, Argentina, Zimbabwe and Ghana undertake entrepreneur[ing] from the margins or ‘periphery’. The article challenges us to seek better explanations for how these individuals apply their entrepreneurial practices, discourses, (social) creativity and novel organizational skills to maintain communal, organizational, familial and personal wellbeing. We conclude that their imaginary, their narratives and their overcoming of very real challenges as we encounter them through these microstorias, question the predominant conceptualization of entrepreneurship. We are emboldened to think again about ‘who is the entrepreneur?’ (Gartner, 1988) and what really are the principles and values that should be associated with the concept, the organization and the identities of agents involved. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes employer labor tax evasion and the impact on this evasion of tax inspections by a labor inspectorate. The analysis is based on a unique data set built by linking two sources of information: a data set of individual artisan firms and an individual audit data set. Our data describe the universe of artisan firms in Piedmont (Italy) in 2000 to 2005. Using information on firm characteristics and tax evasion observed directly from the audit exercise, we estimate undeclared work in the artisan sector, and we then evaluate the impact of tax inspections on employer labor tax declarations. We find that inspections could actually be counterproductive, decreasing both tax compliance and tax revenues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tax reporting compliance by small business owners is modeled in an agent-based framework using concepts and methods based on evolutionary dynamics. A business owner’s ‘‘fitness’’ is a function of net after tax (and post-audit) income. Business owners exhibit heterogeneous tax morale and compliance propensity following four stochastically assigned behavioral ‘‘archetypes’’: Honest, Strategic, Defiant, and Random. The model is calibrated to observations from laboratory experiments and taxpayer random audits. The calibrated model is used to simulate evolutionary changes in a static population of 10,000 small business owners. A simulation using realistic parameters for the probability of audit and penalty rate finds that after fifteen time periods, the initial number of Honest business owners declines by approximately one-third and are displaced by proprietors having either Defiant or Strategic compliance behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on theories about the internationalization process of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and feminist arguments to explain gender differences in export propensity. Findings are based on a large-scale survey of Canadian SMEs. After controlling for sector, firm, and owner attributes, female majority-owned firms were significantly less likely to export than firms owned by men. The implications for entrepreneurship and feminist theory, export policy, and research are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a conceptual and empirical synthesis of 'critical action learning' (CAL) and 'policy learning' (PL). We pursue this undertaking by reflecting upon a five-year inquiry into an initiative that aimed to provide business support to an action learning set comprising eight African-Caribbean entrepreneurs. CAL and PL share commitments that are riven with tensions, which we explore in our inquiry in relation to three themes that arose during the course of the investigation. The findings demonstrate how a synthesis of CAL and PL can: enrich CAL by recognizing the centrality of emotional and power relations; provide a vehicle to examine the tensions and dynamics that attend policy implementation; illustrate the merits of an experiential approach to evaluation. We contribute to debates on criticality in action learning and the need for more grounded approaches to the evaluation of initiatives directed at small firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now recognized that to broaden our understanding about networks more qualitative and longitudinal work is required that examines transformation and the change processes of networks; how they emerge and develop over time. The case study reported here deals with these issues. It considers the development of a network for new entrepreneurs first established by a local enterprise support agency in North East Scotland. This forum provided a near 'natural experiment' to chart network emergence, change and evolution. Employing participant observation, interviews and surveys, data were collected over a six-year period. This allowed the network to be mapped, and provided information about structural characteristics and in-depth detail about network dynamics and change processes over time. Findings show how network structure shifts from calculative to affective ties and demonstrate the importance of social ties for the operation of a network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the use of consumer cash mail-in rebates offered by a manufacturer in a Stackelberg game where the manufacturer is the leader and the retailer is the follower. Our analysis indicates that rebates are profitable for manufacturers if consumers are inconsistent in the sense that their rebate valuation when they make purchase decisions is independent of their redemption probabilities when they make redemption decisions. If the manufacturer keeps the wholesale price unchanged, then the rebate increases the retailer's profit by a larger amount than the increase in the manufacturer's profit. If the manufacturer jointly optimizes the wholesale price and rebate, then the increase in the manufacturer's profit is twice the increase in the retailer's profit. The retailer responds to rebates by increasing the retail price, which increases the margin paid by consumers who do not redeem the rebate. On average, consumer surplus decreases when it is optimal for manufacturers to offer rebates. We suggest incentive schemes that make it worthwhile for retailers to limit the price increase. In these incentive schemes, the manufacturer imposes a negative relationship between the rebate value and the retail price. We show that such incentives increase supply chain profits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large numbers of new products introduced annually by manufacturers may strain the relationship between retailers and manufacturers regarding assortments carried by retailers. For example, many retailers in the grocery industry will agree to broaden their assortments only if the manufacturer agrees to pay slotting fees for the new products. We investigate the role played by slotting fees in coordinating the assortment decisions in a supply chain. To do so, we study a single-retailer, single-manufacturer supply chain, where the retailer decides what assortment to offer to end customers. Double marginalization results in a discrepancy between the retailer's optimal assortment and the assortment that maximizes total supply chain profits. We consider a payment scheme that is analogous to slotting fees used in the grocery industry: the manufacturer pays the retailer a per-product fee for every product offered by the retailer in excess of a certain target level. We show that, if the wholesale price is below some threshold level, this payment scheme induces the retailer to offer the supply-chain-optimal assortment and makes both parties better off. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Bourdieu's social theory, we theorize two facets of legitimacy bestowed upon newcomers entering a field: institutional legitimacy, which represents the extent to which newcomers conform with the field's current power arrangements ('fit in') and innovative legitimacy, which pertains to the extent to which newcomers challenge these arrangements ('stand out'). We conceptualize newcomers' ability to be endowed with these two facets of legitimacy by field incumbents as a necessary condition to be legitimized as 'entrepreneurs' and highlight the forces of domination inherent in this process. We further discuss the intricate and possibly conflicting relationship between incumbents' expectations about the need for newcomers to fit in and stand out and how newcomers can artfully navigate between these two demands by artfully managing the meaning associated with their and others' activities. Finally, we discuss the relationship between newcomers' endowment with legitimacy and the reproduction or transformation of the field's power arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role of lay people during the period called 1859 Revival. It mentions that the transatlantic spiritual revival which occurred from 1857 to 1859 and recalls that the spiritual life in several churches in the U.S. had declined in the mid-1850s. Several lay leaders during the revival are cited which include lay city missioner Jeremiah Lanphier and mass evangelist Dwight L. Moody. It also examines the contributions made by women during the period including Phoebe Palmer of Scotland and Geraldine Hooper of England.

This article portrays the changing status and use of a traditional Norwegian meal, Smalahove, in designing tourist experiences. Against all odds, this peculiar relic of Nordic gastronomy (salted, smoked and cooked sheep's head) has become a part of the destination brand of Voss, a small West Norwegian township, renowned for its topographic qualities related to extreme sports. In order to understand the recent success of Smalahove, we studied various culinary experience concepts offered to visitors. Based on data from a mixed-method case study approach, we found that entrepreneurs in the Voss region had developed a new commodification approach to a culinary heritage. Smalahove is marketed not only as a nostalgic and authentic rural dish, but also as a challenging culinary trophy appealing to thrill-seeking consumers. The implications of the Sheep's head case are twofold. First, it represents new commercial potentials for marketing 'extreme' culinary specialties. Second, it is an example of innovative rural destination branding, by which local dishes are not mere idyllic expressions of an agricultural past, but an opportunity to open up potential new avenues for the co-branding of rural destinations and regional food products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Make-to-order (MTO) manufacturers face a common problem of maintaining a desired service level for delivery at a reasonable cost while dealing with irregular customer orders. This research considers a MTO manufacturer who produces a product consisting of several custom parts to be ordered from multiple suppliers. We develop procedures to allocate orders to each supplier for each custom part and calculate the associated replenishment cost as well as the probability of meeting the delivery date, based on the suppliers' jobs on hand, availability, process speed, and defective rate. For a given delivery due date, a frontier of service level and a replenishment cost frontier are created to provide a range of options to meet customer requirements. This method can be further extended to the case when the delivery due date is not fixed and the manufacturer must 'crash' its delivery time to compete for customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay aims to explore the interfaces between Habermas' theory of communicative action (in particular his notion of the 'colonisation of the lifeworld'); Duff's penal communication theory and Rex's recent work on reconstructing community penalties. Its central argument is that a critical reading of the desistance research provides empirical support for the need to reconceptualise penal practices as communicative enterprises which can engage with their stakeholders in supporting desistance—both at the level of the individual and in the community. Particular attention is paid to the need to reconsider the relationship between 'offender management' services and the communities which they purport to serve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article assesses the underlying connection between social capital and communication media and discusses the learning styles used by emerging entrepreneurs to access additional resources. It states that the nascent entrepreneurs were compared based on two different training courses namely, Science Enterprise Challenge (SEC) and the New Entrepreneur Scholarship (NES). It discusses the three dimensions of social capital and the exploratory approach utilized in the study. A comparison between face-to-face and electronic communication and the electronic categories in the coding scheme is also provided.

With the purpose of advancing our understanding of portfolio entrepreneurship, we separate the act of entrepreneurship (new entry) from its mode or organizing (internal vs. independent organization). Analyzing a cohort of 2,253 novice and habitual business founders, we find that portfolio entrepreneurship is a common phenomenon and that the majority of portfolio entrepreneurs use the internal mode of organizing. Whether or not business founders subsequently pursue portfolio entrepreneurship is explained by their human capital (education and start-up experience) and social capital (business networks and links with government support agencies). Further, novice entrepreneurs are more likely to organize portfolio entrepreneurship within their existing firms while habitual entrepreneurs more often organize subsequent acts of portfolio entrepreneurship by creating another new independent organization. Implications for entrepreneurship research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When courts engage in educational policy making through what is called "public law litigation," they set foot in unsettled territory. Framing the authors' work in legal studies literature, this article relays how one court engaged in a sweeping reform of special education in Chicago and teacher certification in the entire state of Illinois. Based on an extensive document analysis from primary and secondary sources, three specific ways in which public law litigation differs from policy making in the legislative branch and from traditional court behavior are examined: (a) the fit between problem and solution, (b) the issue of participation and representation, and (c) the tension between finality and flexibility. The conclusion is that policy entrepreneurs, government officials, and courts need to be aware of the issues and tensions in the process of judicial policy making to enhance the effectiveness and legitimacy of public law litigation remedies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops theory relating to how differences in the human capital of academic entrepreneurs influence their ability to develop social capital that can address the barriers to venture development. We examine the development of social capital by three types of academic entrepreneurs with differing levels of entrepreneurship experience: nascent, novice, and habitual entrepreneurs. Using a longitudinal study, critical differences are observed between the structure, content, and governance of their social networks. We propose that entrepreneurs with prior business ownership experience have broader social networks and are more effective in developing network ties. Less experienced entrepreneurs likely encounter structural holes between their scientific research networks and industry networks. Support initiatives help attract industry partners for novice entrepreneurs from engineering and the material sciences but academics based within biological sciences encounter greater difficulties building such ties. Regardless of academic discipline, business ownership experience appears essential to learn to build relationships with experienced managers and potential equity investors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]