Entrepreneurship Research Today and Beyond: Hidden in Plain Sight!

The field of entrepreneurship and its research has reached an critical and invigorating juncture. Researchers are challenged to be comprehensive, varied, and innovative in their approaches to the study of entrepreneurship. New and emerging future research must met this challenge to impact and sustain our complex world in which entrepreneurship plays such a vital role. The Entrepreneurship Research Journal provides a new and exciting venue for researchers to share and interact among their respective disciplines in new and different ways and to meet the research challenges now and in the future.     

How Leadership Characteristics Affect Organizational Decline and Downsizing

While studies have investigated the moral issue associated with downsizing, little research attention has been directed to leaders’ behaviors that result in organizational decline and eventually lead them to make a downsizing decision. This study tests a sequence-based model to assess (1) the impact of leaders’ risk-aversion and self-centeredness on organizational decline and downsizing and (2) the impact of organizational and industry decline on organizational downsizing. We address a gap in the decline literature that has only implicitly alluded to leadership characteristics as forerunners of decline. Data collected from 85 firms indicate that both leadership risk-aversion and self-centeredness are significantly related to organizational decline. This results in intensified organizational downsizing. However, industry decline affects downsizing more significantly.     

Assessing ocean temperature’s role in fishery production

Journal of Bioeconomics - Ocean temperatures are increasing. Little work has been done to examine the effects that these changes will have on fishery production. The study at hand seeks to...     

Understanding Managers’ Reactions to Blockchain Technologies in the Supply Chain: The Reliable and Unbiased Software Agent

Organizations investing in supply chain information systems struggle to ensure successful adoption and implementation. Projects fail because of technical caveats, inability to meet business needs, and poor management of implementation. Implementation of blockchain technologies across a network of supply chain partners is more complex than internally focused technologies. It is necessary for partner firms to implement, contribute, and share information, and employees to actively use the capabilities of the technology to realize potential. Blockchain technologies can substitute for traditional interfirm intermediaries acting as an unbiased software agent embedded in the supply chain network. Understanding managers’ perceptions of and willingness to use blockchain technologies is crucial for successful implementation. Integrating design theory with classic diffusion processes, we conducted a scenario‐based role‐playing experiment with industry professionals to examine managers’ perceptions of blockchain technologies and willingness to use. We find that trustworthiness with regard to competence and perceived distributive justice is the focal drivers of managers’ willingness to use the technology. Additionally, both risk and interactional justice are not drivers of willingness to use blockchain technology despite significant claims to that effect. We provide implications for how managers can leverage these drivers to influence supply chain partners’ willingness to use the technology.     

“Such elements do not belong in an ordered society”: Managing rural–urban resettlement in democratic South Africa

In South Africa, the scale of rural–urban resettlement after apartheid continues to overwhelm the capacity of the government to house city dwellers in need of shelter. But the legitimacy of the postapartheid government rests on its ability to secure the rights of citizens who enjoy constitutional guarantees, including the right to housing. Because the government cannot simply repress this unhoused surplus population, it seeks instead to delegitimize some portion of it. It does so by developing a number of moralizing discourses, the subject of this paper, which distinguish between patient, deserving citizens, and unruly queue jumpers perceived to threaten the democratic project itself. Housing officials misrecognize squatters as a cause, rather than a consequence, of the state's failure to deliver, policing new land occupations with a draconian severity. They justify such repression in the name of protecting the democratic order, which is assumed to require waiting instead of improvisation.     

The duality of decisions and the case for impulsiveness metrics

Customer metrics help firms manage their performance and predict financial outcomes. While many firms focus on customer satisfaction metrics for this purpose, dual-process theories in psychology and neuroscience show that customer decisions are based on two processes. This suggests that metrics which measure the impulsiveness of purchase decisions might effectively complement customer satisfaction metrics. In a series of experiments we demonstrate that satisfaction and impulsiveness metrics make distinct but strong predictions of consumer choices. Satisfaction and impulsiveness influence choice in different ways. While impulsiveness relates to choice directly, the satisfaction-choice path is mediated by loyalty intention. Moreover this relationship is moderated by product involvement such that impulsiveness metrics provide a better prediction for low-involvement than for high-involvement situations. Finally, a field study of 750 customers of 101 firms demonstrates these relationships at a firm level, indicating that satisfaction and impulsiveness metrics have equally strong but distinct relationships with shareholder value. Therefore firms may be able to benefit from complementing customer satisfaction metrics with customer impulsiveness metrics.     

Franchise branding: an organizational identity perspective

Despite the call for increased theoretical diversity in franchising research, the incorporation of organizational theory into this literature has been minimal. In response, we examine how aspects of organizational identity are represented in franchisee recruitment Web sites. We develop the concept of franchise branding to understand how franchisors position franchise opportunities to attract potential franchisees. We find that firms in the Franchise 500 use more language associated with market orientation, entrepreneurial orientation, and charismatic rhetoric when compared to a sample of lower-performing franchises. We also examine the impact of franchisor size and age to examine how liabilities of size and newness impact language use. We find that larger firms tend to use more rhetoric but detect no significant differences based on age. We conclude by discussing future possibilities for incorporating additional theoretical perspectives into the franchising literature.     

Web-based service of a visualization package “Amira” for the geosciences

Amira is a powerful three-dimensional visualization package that has been employed recently by the science and engineering communities to gain insight into their data. We discuss a new paradigm for the use of Amira in the Earth sciences that relies on the client-server paradigm. We have developed a module called WEB-IS2, which provides web-based access to Amira. This tool allows Earth scientists to manipulate Amira controls remotely and to analyze, render and view large datasets through the Internet without regard for time or location. This could have important ramifications for GRID computing.     

Interactive Statistical Analysis of Complex Mantle Flows with the Web

Up to now, all of the figures in mantle convection literature have been presented in a static manner, where the fields at one scale are shown on a printed page . This is no longer possible with the spatial resolution increasing at an ever rising clip and the appearance of the issue of multi-scale structures. Because of the onslaught of data-flooding and the growing complexity of strongly time-varying physical fields from compressible mantle convection, such as the adiabaticity, and other thermo dynamical heating functions, we can no longer afford to display and look at the results in the same static way as in a book. We have developed a new approach for interrogating data coming out from numerical simulations. This is based on an interactive two-dimensional map which is used over the WEB with a client-server paradigm. We have applied this to investigate mantle convection flows in both two-and three-dimensional situations. The distributions of thermal anomalies found are no longer Gaussian but sometimes have long tails, especially near the edges of plume heads. The same is also found for the distribution of mechanical heating, which can be quite skewed. Our experiences with this new interactive mode of data-query have shown both the educational and scientific importance of using the world wide web media to quiz handily the data taken from large-scale numerical simulations.