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The aim of this paper is to identify how the diaspora consciousness of Syrian entrepreneurs in Egypt might affect their business practices. The research sample comprises semi‐structured interviews with Syrian refugee owners of small and medium‐sized businesses in Egypt. Thematic analysis was subsequently used to determine the main ideas in the transcripts from the interviews. The findings showed that diaspora consciousness stimulates Syrian refugees to actively engage in three categories of business‐related practices: contextual (expanding entrepreneurial activities outside their host country, desire to constitute a Western country‐based business venture), functional (reliance on a value chain within the same nationality, tending to adopt shadow economy practices), and procedural practices (preferring to develop family businesses, establishing only small and medium‐sized enterprises). This paper contributes by filling a gap in the literature on refugee entrepreneurship in which empirical studies on the effect of diaspora consciousness on the business practices of refugee entrepreneurs have been limited so far. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper interprets informal networks as investments made by citizens and business people to cope with the public sphere. Informal networks often orchestrate corruption, connecting public and private actors. The paper aims to understand their key characteristics, scopes, and functional roles. Ten mini case studies from Tanzania and Uganda are studied. The research applies narrative analysis to explore the experiences of citizens, entrepreneurs, and low‐level public officials, who built informal networks as a problem‐solving mechanism. It uses a grounded theory approach. The findings serve as working hypotheses about variables and patterns emerging from the bottom‐up analysis. The paper outlines: (a) whether there are distinct types of informal networks associated with particular types of corruption; (b) how, why and by whom these networks are built; (c) whether different individuals play specific roles; (d) the unwritten expectations and norms that govern such networks. The results highlight critical implications for anti‐corruption practice, showing, for example, how this can be strengthened by shifting the intervention unit from individuals to networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the Eurocentric entrepreneurship narrative from postcolonial and pan‐African feminist perspectives. Based on interview research conducted with 24 Zimbabwean women entrepreneurs, we narrate their microstorias in order to expose the legacy of entrepreneurial colonialism and patriarchy in Africa. The microstorias reveal the colonial past as well as the patriarchal norms that disenfranchise women entrepreneurs in Zimbabwe. Yet, they also reveal their struggle, resilience, resistance and their ongoing fight to construct their own identities as entrepreneurs. The paper contributes to enhance and advance further postcolonial, decolonial and critical voices in entrepreneurship and organization studies by challenging the prevailing western discourse of entrepreneurship from the introduction of necroentrepreneurism; giving support to intersectional postcolonial and Pan‐African feminist perspectives that voice global South women entrepreneurship and, by decolonizing and decentring the theoretical debates on entrepreneurship and organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concepts "circular business models" and "transitions towards a circular economy" have become modern-day buzzwords. Yet, an understanding of the interplay between these two concepts remains unclear. This paper proposes a conceptual framework that illustrates the innovation mechanisms enhancing circular business models emerging within the context of transitions towards a circular economy. The paper follows a twostep methodology. First, a theoretical framing is proposed by adopting insights from transitions studies. Second, a systematic literature review is employed. The review synthesizes the selected literature tracing the proposed framing in the previously published research. Finally, a transitions framework for circular business models is proposed. This framework suggests future lines of research to support its plausibility. Moreover, it offers prescriptive help to managers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and other social actors enabling them to make informed decisions about and take innovative actions for circular business models in specific contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper dealt with the regulatory and policy variables influencing Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in South Africa. Since the advent of democracy 26 years ago, South Africa had its own share of benefits from democratic rule. This was the period of great success, and three free and fair elections were held without violence and intimidation. The South African government started using the "inflation targeting monetary policy framework" to have an environment where inflation will stabilise. Although in literature it is stated that many governments have adopted this policy in order to lure investors in through their attractive risk‐free returns in their investment portfolios. The paper used unobtrusive techniques to analyse secondary data. The South African investment climate remains faced with challenges, which curtail the full attainment of conditions conducive for quality FDI. When regulations are made less cumbersome, it becomes simpler for investment to flow into the country, and international and local entrepreneurs prosper as the ease of doing business improves. South Africa does not have a complex regulatory framework, but its challenges stem from a lack of regulatory transparency, which impeded investment. TISA the agency, which DTI created to reduce obstacles encountered in FDI offers foreign investors clarification on the regulatory and legal environment. Many countries have also cancelled their BITs with South Africa, including Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela. South Africa's business environment and its investment climate are largely dependent on the events that occur in the political arena and the economic environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contextual entrepreneurship and mixed embeddedness approach alike emphasize the importance of the political‐institutional embeddedness next to social embeddedness along with further contexts for migrant entrepreneurship, yet the aspect of international migration policies as an important institutional framework has been somewhat neglected. This paper introduces the case of political‐institutional embeddedness of migrant entrepreneurship in Japan from an international migration policy perspective, discussing embeddedness of migrant entrepreneurs and their support institutions from a multi‐scalar perspective. By analysing the migration policy context of migrant entrepreneurship at different policy levels, that is, national, regional and urban scales, it demonstrates the analytical value of differentiating policies along these scales and also their inter‐connectedness, conceptually proposing the inter‐ and trans‐scalarity of these policy contexts. By bringing issues of migration regimes and particularly the East Asian developmental state as a lens to analyse migrant entrepreneurship, it brings further approaches in comparatively analysing different entrepreneurial contexts for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Cancer Institute's Small Business Innovation Research Development Center (NCI SBIR) supports the commercialization of novel cancer‐related technologies by providing resources to 300–400 small businesses each year. Whereas Federal funding is crucial for the translation of technologies to the clinic, the majority of these technologies will need to undergo regulatory review to reach clinical testing. Many small businesses find navigating their regulatory pathway challenging, largely due to lack of regulatory expertise on small startup teams with limited revenue. In collaboration with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), NCI SBIR launched a new regulatory assistance program called Connecting Awardees with Regulatory Experts (CARE). The goal of the CARE program is to connect NCI‐funded small businesses with the FDA to receive feedback on their regulatory questions during early‐stage product development. The program has a multipronged support approach and also educates companies about the FDA process and existing resources. To date, 141 companies have participated in the interagency program. Follow‐up surveys indicate that the program guided the companies in planning the next regulatory steps for their technology development (89%) and provided critical information that changed their future NCI small business grant project aims (81%). Overall, companies reported they would recommend the program to other companies (90%). This paper will discuss the CARE program outcomes as well as other NCI and FDA collaborations that support early‐stage small businesses, including the joint development of funding opportunities and online resources that focus on the oncology startup community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gay consumer market is often treated as a homogeneous entity, and Anglophone scholarship has given scant attention to lesbian consumers. This paper examines gendered distinctions within the Chinese gay market by asking how the lesbian consumer market is organized differently from its gay male counterpart and why some types of businesses thriving in the gay male market are likely to fail in the lesbian market. Based on interviews with entrepreneurs and business professionals, supplemented with ethnographic and media data, this study indicates that certain types of commerce existing in the gay male consumer market do not dovetail with lesbians' preferred ways of socializing associated with women's risk perception. Unlike previous scholarship that simply characterized the lesbian market as "underdeveloped," this research demonstrates that opportunities for the lesbian and gay male markets exist in different types of trade and business. Although the concept of the pink economy is theoretically grounded in sexual orientation, China's pink market demonstrates how gender plays a key role in shaping the lesbian consumer market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies two processes of civil service reform in Slovakia during the period of 2014–2015 in order to reflect on the involvement of an 'outsider‐academic' and her strategies to achieve policy impact. The context of such involvement are multi‐level processes permeated by political interests and poor on evidence, which favour strategic interests, bargaining and political pressure and contestation (the mode of 'powering') and a mode of legal‐based 'puzzling' as opposed to a conceptual, intellectual search for solutions friendly towards outside academics—and achieving only incremental results. We theorise on the success of these strategies (including helping serendipity, throwing ideas to see what sticks, mobilising allies, anchoring a non‐binding concept, and finding and developing long‐term connections) and sketch analogies and differences between the position of an outsider‐academic and a policy entrepreneur. We rely on auto‐ethnographic data and documentation of the work of the committees involved and their outputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurial higher education institutions (HEIs) have gained significant traction, both in theory and practice. The concept has evolved from academic entrepreneurship, which gained prominence in the 1990s, into a more comprehensive notion at institutional level and has been an influencing factor for governmental decisions and the region's economic development. This study seeks to present an overview of the evolution of entrepreneurial HEI research and provide a description of the structures characterizing it. This paper presents an in‐depth examination and analysis of the current state of research and published literature related to entrepreneurial HEIs. A descriptive bibliometric analysis coupled with content analysis is presented, incorporating citations included in Scopus' multi‐disciplinary database over the last 25 years. Two software packages—VOS viewer and Bibliometrix R were employed to probe the research questions and create visualizations of the bibliometric networks. Thematic mapping of the multifaceted research field is illustrated and emerging trends of are identified. Findings suggest that the research on entrepreneurial HEI has been pioneered by USA followed by UK and other European countries. Moreover, the research seems to be fragmented and more focused on only entrepreneurial universities. Future research needs to consider colleges and smaller institutions alongside larger universities. Also, further steps need to be undertaken to encourage and enable cross‐border international collaboration, so as to draw learning together from different national and regional contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the importance of visualization online and the gendering of entrepreneurship in contemporary neoliberal times. We investigate how understandings of entrepreneurship are shaped by online imagery. Applying visual critical methodology, we trace and analyze 248 commercial images. Our analytic work explicates the visual construction of male and female entrepreneurs, leading us to further examine appearance, (in)action, and interaction aesthetics. Through detailed visual analysis, we unpack masculinities and femininities to theorize the resulting gendering of entrepreneurial aesthetics. In doing so, we consider the role of image networks in the reproduction of neoliberal ideals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Income‐generating activities by women are an effective means of reducing gender‐based deprivation and disparities. In the constrained familial and community settings of developing economies, online platforms can be an appropriate means for women to carry out economic activities. In this context, important initiatives taken by the Government of India, such as the Common Service Centres scheme, are worth studying. This paper critically evaluates such revolutionary online platform–based entrepreneurial initiatives using the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen. We examine through case studies how women‐run businesses use online platforms and what determines their success, inputs, capabilities, and conversion factors. Further, national enterprise‐level data from Indiaʼs National Sample Survey Office are analysed to show that states with a higher level of gender inequality are also the regions with a lower level of information and communications technology usage by women‐run enterprises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social entrepreneurship is a rising field of academic and practical activity worldwide and social entrepreneurs become drivers of inclusive growth and sustainable development and also provide opportunities for new models of social business to bring changes in the lives of communities those who are living at the bottom of the pyramid. Recognizing the importance and diversity of social entrepreneurial organizations (not for profits, for profits, and hybrid), this study chooses to map the existing social enterprises that have a social, economic, and environment goals and also look at the existing social enterprise ecosystem in Central Gujarat. The main contribution of this paper is to evaluate the opportunities and challenges of social entrepreneurial activities in Central Gujarat, India. Moreover, analysis and discussion would help the researcher to draw reasonable conclusions, provide a number of insights on lessons and challenges with which a social enterprise sector can be expected to face in near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Probabilistic record linkage is the act of bringing together records that are believed to belong to the same unit (e.g., person or business) from two or more files. It is a common way to enhance dimensions such as time and breadth or depth of detail. Probabilistic record linkage is not an error‐free process and link records that do not belong to the same unit. Naively treating such a linked file as if it is linked without errors can lead to biased inferences. This paper develops a method of making inference with estimating equations when records are linked using algorithms that are widely used in practice. Previous methods for dealing with this problem cannot accommodate such linking algorithms. This paper develops a parametric bootstrap approach to inference in which each bootstrap replicate involves applying the said linking algorithm. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the method in simulations and in real applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Social judgments are evaluators' opinions about the social properties of a set of actors. Different types of judgments rendered by the evaluators and potential interactions between them may have major consequences for the actors who are evaluated. In this article, we distinguish between judgments of capability and conformity, and examine their concurrent and interdependent effects on evaluator impressions. Methods: We investigate these dynamics in the context of authors competing for the best paper award at the Academy of Management (AoM) conference. Results: Findings of our empirical analyses demonstrate interdependent effects of capability and conformity judgments on the committee members' decisions. We demonstrate that evaluators expect greater conformity to their ideal template from more capable actors who have greater potential to contribute to these ideals. Conclusion: Our study advances the literature on social judgments by showing that congruence (or incongruence) among distinct types of judgment shape evaluators' decisions, beyond their independent effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates the positive effect of immigrant entrepreneurs on manufacturing exports over and above that of diasporas. Using small‐scale regional administrative data, our instrumental variable estimates of export gravity models imply that ceteris paribus, that is, holding constant the total number of immigrants, the expected protrade effect of a migrant becoming an entrepreneur amounts to an average increase of US$5,946 in the export flows toward her country of origin. Besides these dyadic effects, immigrant entrepreneurs unlike nonentrepreneurial immigrants raise a region's overall competitiveness and export flows toward other destinations as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In urban geography research there is a small supply of articles which reflect upon the aims and motives of entrepreneurs when they enter neighbourhoods that are undergoing a process of gentrification. The aim of this paper is to better understand the explanatory factors behind the timing of entrepreneurial changes that take place during the commercial gentrification process in Tallinn's post‐industrial neighbourhoods. Based on thirty in‐depth interviews, we propose an explanation from the supply perspective that highlights the dynamics behind motivation‐based influences. By modifying the diffusion of the innovation theory developed by Rogers we are able to show how, during the different phases of the process, groups of pioneers, early adopters, the early and late majority, and laggards enter a neighbourhood that is being gentrified by varying objectives, and associate the dynamics behind the process with the follower effect that is being shaped by knowledge diffusion, a specific market niche, and physical co‐location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities are the drivers of economic growth and structural transformation in developing countries. Transport makes or mars a city. It connects people to opportunity and business to prosperity. Urban transport acts as a catalyst of growth through direct, indirect and induced effects, including those linked to agglomeration and networking externalities. Yet policy makers and planners in developing countries like India continue to neglect the economics of urban public transport. Hardly has there been any attempt to study relationships between city externalities, spatial planning, public transport infrastructure, economic growth and value capture financing. This paper delves into these aspects and presents lessons from theory for the strategies of development and financing of urban public transport in India. It is focused on the implications of urban externalities for transit‐oriented development, transport land use integration, strategic densification of growth nodes and public transport financing based on a value creation, capture and recycling paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Record linkage is the act of bringing together records from two files that are believed to belong to the same unit (e.g., a person or business). It is a low‐cost way of increasing the set of variables available for analysis. Errors may arise in the linking process if an error‐free unit identifier is not available. Two types of linking errors include an incorrect link (records belonging to two different units are linked) and a missed record (an unlinked record for which a correct link exists). Naively ignoring linkage errors may mean that analysis of the linked file is biased. This paper outlines a "weighting approach" to making correct inference about regression coefficients and population totals in the presence of such linkage errors. This approach is designed for analysts who do not have the expertise or time to use specialist software required by other approaches but who are comfortable using weights in inference. The performance of the estimator is demonstrated in a simulation study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People move from one region of a country to another not only for employment but also for business opportunities. Their earnings, relative to those of comparable local employees and local entrepreneurs, reflect the efficiency of internal migration policies. Investigating a large number of migrants and non‐migrants in Vietnam, we find that while migrant entrepreneurs earn more than local entrepreneurs, migrant employees earn less than their local counterparts. Moreover, regions with unalloyed socialist norms (North Vietnam) enhance migrants' advantages, leading to higher earnings, whereas migrants in regions with pro‐entrepreneurship norms (South Vietnam) find it difficult to compete with the locals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the performance of aid-funded livelihoods recovery efforts in Sri Lanka following the Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004, with special attention paid to the effects on the rural poor. It argues that successful livelihoods recovery was hampered by an excessive focus by aid agencies on entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, and by the lack of a politically informed understanding of the economy. Based on ethnographic and survey-based research, the study demonstrates that the category of 'entrepreneur' is misleading for large parts of the economy. Indeed, the desire to build an entrepreneurial economy actually hampered successful livelihoods recovery in Sri Lanka and, in some cases, reinforced inequitable relations of power. The paper concludes that for livelihoods recovery programmes to be effective, they must be founded on an understanding of the relations of power that constitute the economy; these relations operate across scales, and are historically and geographically specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a globalising era, there have been many attempts to explain the processes of globalisation in urban studies. Beyond a global/world city hypothesis which mainly deals with macro-actors and top-down processes, this paper explores a grounded globalisation with the emergence of ethnic entrepreneurs who are rarely considered in global city research. We analyse business activities of Nigerian and Pakistani entrepreneurs within the district of Itaewon in Seoul, South Korea by examining two specific points: first, the division of ethnic entrepreneurs into two types: export-oriented and import-oriented, and second, the local-based transnational connections between home and host countries. We argue that the spontaneous transnational connections by ethnic entrepreneurs are an example of globalisation 'from below'. In contrast to the homogenising Asian global cities, globalisation from below is crucial to understand the various forms of Asian global cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lacking a tradition of settling immigrants and the appropriate infrastructure to integrate them, small- and medium-sized cities often face the challenge of attracting and retaining immigrants. Using a mixed methods approach, this study compares the experiences of immigrant and non-immigrant entrepreneurs in a mid-sized Canadian city, Kelowna, British Columbia. A survey reveals different experiences between these two groups, with immigrants facing more challenges. In the absence of institutionally complete communities or strong ethnic economies, immigrants do not rely extensively on their own community resources, an element considered instrumental for immigrant business development in large cities. Compared to non-immigrants, immigrant entrepreneurs have a more optimistic outlook on doing business in Kelowna; this is encouraging for a city trying hard to attract immigrant investment. Key informants recommended transforming the city into a more welcoming community, establishing appropriate support infrastructure, and removing potential institutional offsets. This paper adds new theoretical insights to the literature on immigrant entrepreneurship; all socio-cultural, political-institutional, and economic-structural considerations are embedded in geography. The findings also have implications for growth strategies in small- and medium-sized cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a rapid transformation afoot in the rice value chain in Asia. The upstream is changing quickly-farmers are undertaking capital-led intensification and participating in burgeoning markets for land rental, fertilizer and pesticides, irrigation water, and seed, and shifting from subsistence to small commercialized farms; in some areas landholdings are concentrating. Midstream, in wholesale and milling, there is a quiet revolution underway, with thousands of entrepreneurs investing in equipment, increasing scale, diversifying into higher quality, and the segments are undergoing consolidation and vertical coordination and integration. Mills, especially in China, are packaging and branding, and building agent networks in wholesale markets, and large mills are building direct relationships with supermarkets. The downstream retail segment is undergoing a 'supermarket revolution,' again with the lead in change in China. In most cases the government is not playing a direct role in the market, but enabling this transformation through infrastructural investment. The transformation appears to be improving food security for cities by reducing margins, offering lower consumer rice prices, and increasing quality and diversity of rice. This paper discusses findings derived from unique stacked surveys of all value chain segments in seven zones, more and less developed, around Bangladesh, China, India, and Vietnam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]