Market Cultures,the Middle Classes and Islam: Consuming the Market?

In discussions of Islam and consumer practices, there is a tendency to focus exclusively on the “clash of cultures”, particularly that between Islam and the “west”. In Islamic societies, consumer culture is often portrayed as a threat, harmful to religion as it privileges hedonism, pleasure, individualism and an expressive lifestyle. To counter the influences of the market and “deislamisation”, Islamic fundamentalists and revivalists have posited Islam as an innoculative pill against decadent western values. Such analyses, however, do not add very much to our knowledge of contemporary modernist Islamic societies undergoing rapid social and economic transformation. In examining the case of Malaysia, the paper seeks to shed some light on how the various interpretations of Islam impacts on modern Malaysian Muslims.

The paper starts with an examination of the central concept of Islam as a discursive tradition and its continuing legacy in the Malaysian social and political formation. The paper next examines the role of the state and how its ability to affect a national vision of high‐modernist development and growing affluence has created a new Malay middle class. Increasing wealth and a growing middle class have seen an intensification of new consumption patterns and practices. At the same time, there is a growing Islamisation, and culturally and politically the urban Malay middle classes are split as they are both sympathetic to the Islamic revivalist tradition and are active consumers of middle‐class lifestyle. These contradictions played themselves out in the public sphere and percolate down into everyday life and practice, affecting power structures and discourses. Classes, identities, entrepreneurship, the nature of capitalism, civil society and dissent are consequently all affected. The paper therefore argues that the differing interpretations in Islam enable different understandings of consumption and identity formation and that such analysis can engender richer and greater analytical insights in the context of Islamisation, modernity and consumption.     

Islamic business scorecard and the screening of Islamic businesses in a cross‐country setting

Screening of shari'ah compliant firms is incomplete without the inclusion of ethical and social responsibilities. The existing “activity screen” does not directly capture the ethical and social footprints of firms. The purpose of this study is to create and test an Islamic business scorecard that combines activity, ethical, and social responsibilities that Islamic businesses must comply with. This new Islamic business scorecard replaces the existing activity screens and is added to the financial screens to create an integrated business screening mechanism to identify shari'ah compliant firms. This study utilizes data from a sample of 410 shari'ah compliant companies listed with stock exchanges in Malaysia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Out of the five newly developed constructs of the Islamic business scorecard, the results indicate Islamic firms are less committed to social responsibilities and tend to push forward economic responsibilities that focus on profitability and growth. Of the three countries, this study reports Malaysian firms have the highest compliance scores, while Bangladesh displays characteristics of the “next‐big shari'ah destination”. Financial screens are more important than the Islamic business scorecard for firms in the construction, industrial, technology, and trading/services sectors. Because of its connection with the economic, ethical, and social dimensions, the scorecard helps to identify the true nature of shari'ah compliance as a useful decision tool for investors and policymakers.     

The emergence of new Islamic economic and business moralities

This article aims to explore the sources of the observed transformation in the embeddedness of economic, business, and financial practices of Muslim individuals in comparison to premodern period Muslims. It argues that the predomination of instrumental reasoning in modern times, as opposed to substantive morality in everyday practice, is one of the main reasons behind the transformation of embeddedness of Muslim individuals. Instrumental reasoning, being the dominant methodology, leads to diminished submergence in social relations; that is not limited to interpersonal relationships, but further extended to the core religious acts. How such an emergent economic and business morality is reconciled with the Islamic substantive morality is examined. It is argued that “transformation of exception into norm” is the main method used to reconcile instrumental reasoning with Islamic law in fulfilling religious obligations, at least in terms of fulfilling the form and in complying with the necessities of modern life. This has led to the emergence of new economic and business moralities.     

Waqf,perpetual charity,in a general system theory of tawhidi metascience

This article is premised on the intercausal socioeconomic embedded model of ethical design of perpetual charity in Islam called waqf. Such a model is formalized according to the theory of unity of knowledge in the light of the Primal Ontology of Divine Oneness called Tawhid in the Qur'an. Tawhid is argued to be the only foundational Law of Islam respecting “everything.” The implications of such an epistemic treatment in respect of waqf as an example of the whole class of charities in Islam is shown to be unlike the dissociative and human opinionated nature of what has now come to be known as “shari'ah‐compliance.” The Islamic shortfall of “shari'ah‐compliance” and its segmentation as opposed to organically unified synergy between the socioeconomic and moral/ethical variables of the objective criterion called the Well‐being Function have deprived the entire study of the present days' Islamic economics, finance, and banking from its true epistemological core of Tawhid as Law. To restore this true foundation in Islamic thought, a theory of metascience of Tawhid is presented. Waqf in Malaysia is studied as an example from the perspective of Tawhidi unity of knowledge, contrary to its existing dissociative presence in the ethically exogenous socioeconomic treatment under “shari'ah‐compliance.”     

The Influence of Funding Approaches,Growth Expectations,and Industry Gender Distribution on High‐Growth Women Entrepreneurs

This study examines three key aspects of entrepreneurship associated with women business owners and their ability to achieve high growth: debt versus equity financing, growth expectations, and industry gender distribution. We present a number of theoretical lenses spanning disciplines such as gender studies, entrepreneurship, social psychology, and finance. Using longitudinal data from U.S. startups over an eight‐year period, our research reveals a number of interesting findings. We find that, proportionally, high‐growth women entrepreneurs are more likely to finance their growth with personal and business equity funding. Additionally, women‐owned firms in “feminine industries” are more likely to achieve high growth than women‐owned firms in “non‐feminine industries.”     

The Improvisational Entrepreneur: Improvisation Training in Entrepreneurship Education

Entrepreneurs constantly face unexpected and unanticipated situations; those that thrive are ones that are identified by the literature as “improvisational.” Yet extant entrepreneurship research has not distinguished what improvisation is from how to do it. I propose training in the principles developed from the theory of performing improvisation promotes the entrepreneurship mindset through pedagogy. Qualitative studies reveal entrepreneurial self‐efficacy themes related to interpersonal/team considerations for entrepreneurs, and introduce “improvisational alertness” as a critical entrepreneurship consideration. Entrepreneurs can learn to keenly pay attention to interpersonal conditions of the present and the future in order to adapt potential limitations for venture success.     

How Islamic banks deal with problem business situations: Islamic banking as a potential model for emerging markets

Models of emerging markets often ignore corporate crises and business failure and are based on research in western economic situations, assuming western institutional patterns and attitudes. This study is based on an empirical analysis of companies in the GCC region of companies within the Islamic Banking System. A “sharp‐bending” orientation model is used to review the role of banks and their methods of managing difficult client situations, triggering early problem‐recognition, and the sequence of recovery. As many emerging markets have large Moslem populations and as Islamic banking continues to be a vibrant growth sector, these findings have wider implications. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Entrepreneurship,institutional economics,and economic growth: an ecosystem perspective

We analyze conceptually and in an empirical counterpart the relationship between economic growth, factor inputs, institutions, and entrepreneurship. In particular, we investigate whether entrepreneurship and institutions, in combination in an ecosystem, can be viewed as a “missing link” in an aggregate production function analysis of cross-country differences in economic growth. To do this, we build on the concept of National Systems of Entrepreneurship (NSE) as resource allocation systems that combine institutions and human agency into an interdependent system of complementarities. We explore the empirical relevance of these ideas using data from a representative global survey and institutional sources for 46 countries over the period 2002–2011. We find support for the role of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in economic growth.     

Dynamic Embeddedness in Chinese Firm Internationalization

This article presents a multilevel framework to analyze the motivations and location choices of Chinese OFDIs. We contribute to theory‐integration on Chinese OFDI flows and patterns by suggesting a framework that combines country‐, industry‐ and firm‐level analyses and by reflecting aspects from the resource‐based view (firm‐specific advantages), institutional‐based view (push/pull home‐ and host‐­country factors), and network‐based view (network relations). We also explicitly incorporate “time” as a variable into our framework by introducing and explaining the concept of dynamic embeddedness as an interaction dimension to reflect the inherent dynamics on all levels and actors. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

How On‐the‐Job Embeddedness Influences New Venture Creation and Growth

This study aims to answer why some employees choose to start their own ventures, whereas others choose to seek jobs in other organizations after leaving their current employment. Drawing insights from knowledge‐based view and social capital theory, we examine the impact of on‐the‐job embeddedness on the decision of employee entrepreneurship, industry choice, and new venture growth. We argue that on‐the‐job embeddedness provides key resources for employees to start new ventures and grow them. We test our hypotheses with Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED) data. Our results show that on‐the‐job embeddedness increases the probability of employees becoming entrepreneurs. Once they decide to become entrepreneurs, those employees with high on‐the‐job embeddedness are more likely to start new ventures in the industry in which they worked before. Moreover, employees' on‐the‐job embeddedness has a positive impact on new venture growth.     

National culture,entrepreneurship and economic development: different patterns across the European Union

The aim of this paper is double. Firstly, it contributes to identifying the specific role of national culture as a variable that helps explain the level of economic development and reinforces the effect of entrepreneurship on the income level. Secondly, a deeper understanding of these relations in the case of the European Union is sought. In this study, data from two different sources have been used. The Schwartz Value Survey measures seven cultural orientations that are then grouped into three bipolar dimensions (embeddedness vs. autonomy, hierarchy vs. egalitarianism and mastery vs. harmony). The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor provides information regarding entrepreneurial activity. Using linear regression analysis, cultural and entrepreneurial variables are able to classify countries according to their development level, explaining over 60 % of the variance in Gross Domestic Product per capita. The role of culture is complex, with geographical elements being significantly relevant. In the case of Europe, some common elements conform what could be called “a European culture”: autonomy and egalitarianism clearly predominate over embeddedness and hierarchy, while harmony tends to prevail over mastery. Nevertheless, four well-defined groups of countries within the European Union emerge. Central and Northern Europe is closer to this European stereotypical culture, while English-speaking countries, Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean area exhibit their own differentiating elements each. These differences also exist with regard to entrepreneurial activity (overall Total Entrepreneurial Activity, necessity and opportunity-driven activity). Each of the four regional entrepreneurial cultures is characterized by a different entrepreneurial dynamics that may be plausibly explained by culture and income.     

Exploring the Ethical Dimension of Hawala

The aim of this paper is to explore the ethical dimension of hawala, an ancient informal financial practice rooted in Islamic moral traditions. Widely used in countries with an Islamic background and their diasporas, hawala is considered an important vehicle for the financial and economic development of some less developed countries. Nevertheless, in Western countries, hawala is regarded with suspicion due its controversial ethical nature. Unlike other Islamic financial institutions, the controversial questions are not the legitimacy of profit sources or the interest charged, but rather the lack of transparency that surrounds hawala transactions. Yet, the literature on hawala has neglected its ethical perspective. Our study delves into this dimension with a critical approach, using the Triple Font Theory, grounded on virtue ethics. We conclude that if hawala transactions are carried out with honesty, and fairness, this practice deserves a positive ethical appraisal. However, it is necessary to implement efficient regulatory measures to guarantee that the system is not abused by money launders and criminals. In practice, it becomes imperative to bring over a change in the regulatory approach to hawala toward a more ethically, culturally, and economically sensitive strategy. Thus, future research should focus on how “hyper-norms” or fundamental principles inherent to humanity, which are common to both “formal” and “informal,” “Western” and “non-Western” financial practices, could run the new AML/CTF regulation agenda.     

Social entrepreneurship research: A source of explanation,prediction, and delight

Social entrepreneurship, as a practice and a field for scholarly investigation, provides a unique opportunity to challenge, question, and rethink concepts and assumptions from different fields of management and business research. This article puts forward a view of social entrepreneurship as a process that catalyzes social change and addresses important social needs in a way that is not dominated by direct financial benefits for the entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurship is seen as differing from other forms of entrepreneurship in the relatively higher priority given to promoting social value and development versus capturing economic value. To stimulate future research the authors introduce the concept of embeddedness as a nexus between theoretical perspectives for the study of social entrepreneurship.     

High‐Growth Women’s Entrepreneurship: Fueling Social and Economic Development

High‐growth firms, often referred to as “gazelles,” are equated with entrepreneurial success and celebrated as the key to growing economies, and women’s entrepreneurship is a vehicle of economic and social development. This special issue publishes papers that address the general lack of research on high‐growth women’s entrepreneurship. In this introduction paper, we offer an adapted framework for the factors driving high growth across multiple levels: individual (entrepreneur and entrepreneurial team characteristics), venture (strategy, organizational structures, and systems), resources, location, and environment. We also introduce the papers in this special issue and present an overview of the contributions to this issue.     

Ethical decision‐making in Islamic financial institutions in light of Maqasid Al‐Sharia: A conceptual framework

This article develops a conceptual framework for ethical decision‐making in Islamic financial institution based on the Islamic methodological approaches on ethics. While making use of the similarities between the scientific method and the Islamic jurisprudence method, a framework is developed by means of argumentation and reasoning to integrate Sharia doctrines with the “plan, do, check and act” (PDCA) cycle as a managerial tool. Using Al‐Raysuni's analysis of Al‐Shatibi's work on maqasid al‐sharia, this article develops a framework to assess the ethical aspects of Islamic financial operations, which is then applied to hypothetical cases. This approach can help overcome the methodological deficiencies in measuring ethical performance in Islamic finance by focusing on the process of ethical decision‐making that leads to the outcomes of organizational behavior beyond legality of contracts. The framework outlines the conditions under which an activity that is considered legal and permissible contractually could lead to outcomes that can make it ethical or unethical.     

Organizational Music the Role of Listening in Interaction Processes

The paper focuses on consumer cynicism in online environments, using the anti‐Christmas sites of the Internet as an empirical case. Drawing on the discursive power model of consumer resistance, critical management studies on organizational cynicism, and Foucauldian ideas of political struggle as “politics of self,” it is argued that consumer cynicism, in online environments, may represent a form of resistance against markets and the marketing institution, which is brought about through the problematization and partial rejection of the normalized forms of consumer subjectivity that are offered in the marketplace. The paper illustrates how consumers employ a cynical rhetoric and discursive strategy, creatively drawing from the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, to problematize the received, highly commercialized ways of celebrating Christmas and to work on a cynical identity project, the scrooge, which represents an alternative form of consumer subjectivity, disillusioned and critical toward the market and the marketing institution.     

Forgotten or not? Home country embeddedness and returnee entrepreneurship

Building on the social network and strategic entrepreneurship literature, we investigate the overall relationship between returnee entrepreneurs’ networks in different periods and locations, domestic resource acquisitions and firm performance. While the labor mobility literature emphasizes the “gone but not forgotten” networks in the prior location of migrants, other studies argue that returnees suffer from a lack of local networks. Our findings show that returnee entrepreneurs are different in the extent of their home country embeddedness while they are overseas, which indicates different degrees of enduring networks in the home countries. The effect of home country embeddedness improves the performance of returnee entrepreneurship via domestic resource acquisition, and this effect could be substituted by pre-overseas local ties and the presence of local top management team (TMT) members. This study extends returnee research by shedding light on the importance of network maintenance in determining whether the home country’s network endures or decays and by highlighting the interactions of ties in the different periods of pre-overseas, during overseas, and after return.     

Patterns of social reporting from an Islamic framework and the moral legitimacy factors that influence them

The objective of this study is twofold: to examine the patterns that govern social reporting with reference to an Islamic framework and to identify the moral legitimacy factors that influence them. We select 146 publicly listed Sharia‐compliant companies and classify the disclosures in their annual reports according to an Islamic framework that categorises items as either Required, Expected or Desired to indicate the degree of importance each item carries from an Islamic perspective. Based on this framework, we then analyse moral legitimacy factors, specifically the type of Sharia screening body and the proportion of Muslims in the population, that may influence the prioritisation of the different categories of social reporting. We find that disclosures that fall into the Required category of our framework—especially those that relate to companies’ involvement in “haram” activities (activities not permissible in Islam)—are still few among the companies studied. Our research also reveals that both moral legitimacy factors under investigation influence the three categories of social reporting, although in different ways. This research contributes to the existing literature by empirically examining how organisations prioritise their disclosure of virtues and the moral legitimacy factors that influence that prioritisation.     

A structural model of the effects of entrepreneurial characteristics on venture performance

Venture capitalists, “angel” investors, and experienced, successful entrepreneurs, when asked to identify the most important determinant of new venture performance, will undoubtedly answer “the entrepreneur.” Likewise, prominent academic scholars responsible for the accelerating development of entrepreneurship theory and research would almost always agree. Unfortunately, empirical and theoretical understanding of the influence of the entrepreneur on new venture performance (NVP) has long been stymied. Studies of entrepreneurial characteristics have failed to demonstrate convincing links with entrepreneurial states of being or with NVP, though studies of the former have shown more promise than have those of the latter. In an attempt to explain the failure to link entrepreneurial characteristics with performance and thus to stimulate and modify research agendas, this paper derives a structural, causal model of the relationships between entrepreneurial characteristics and performance. This derivation draws upon current psychological, management, economic, and entrepreneurship theory.Though there is considerable controversy in the field of psychology concerning the ability of personality traits to explain behavior, it is accepted by many that such traits do exist, that they are stable over time, and that they explain behaviors if the level of aggregation is wide enough. In 1988, Hollenbeck and Whitener noted that one of the problems in using personality traits to explain job performance was that such traits are mediated by motivation and moderated by abilities in their causal connection to performance. Thus personality traits are somewhat removed from performance in the causal chain of events. Applied to the study of the entrepreneur, this research suggests that an initial model of the “entrepreneurial characteristics → NVP” relationship must include the mediating role of motivation and the moderating role of entrepreneurial management abilities.This paper further redefines this emerging model of “entrepreneurial characteristics → NVP” by drawing upon other literature from the field of psychology. This literature suggests that “entrepreneurial behavior” and the context in which it is performed both intervene between motivation and ability in their relation to NVP. The paper concludes this section with a psychology-based model of the “characteristics → NVP” relationship that is more comprehensive and realistic than prior models in the entrepreneurship literature.The paper next draws from strategic management, entrepreneurship, and economics literature along with Sandberg's (1986) model of NVP [NVP = f(E,IS,S)] to show that any model of the connection between entrepreneurial characteristics and NVP must further recognize the relationship between strategy and NVP as well as industry structure and NVP. The resultant model suggests strategy and industry structure are “context” variables that interdependently interact with entrepreneurial behaviors to influence NVP. This adaptation of the model is reinforced and expanded by reviewing the management literature on matching managers to situations which in turn implies that the effects of entrepreneurial behaviors on NVP are contingent upon strategy and industry structure. Thus strategy and industry structure, though ultimately determined by entrepreneurial behavior, are themselves important inputs to the behavioral context of entrepreneurship.The last part of the paper examines decision-making, skills, aptitudes, and training as components helping to refine our understanding of the role of motivation as a mediator and ability as a moderator in a model of the “entrepreneurial characteristics → NVP” relationship. The intent here is to identify specific variables that can be studied or acted upon [in an applied sense] to improve the NVP impact of entrepreneurial behaviors.It is hoped that explication of this model will encourage future entrepreneurship research that seeks to examine causes of NVP to reintroduce “the entrepreneur” as the focus or a focus of the research. Hopefully a more fully developed model that includes motivations, abilities, skills, aptitudes, and training as elements in “modeling” entrepreneurial behavior along with the need for strategy and industry structure contexts provides a more compelling and risk-worthy starting point for such research. This should provide an impetus to put the entrepreneur back. into a central position in entrepreneurship research, where both theory and practitioners say he/she belongs.     

Variations in University entrepreneurship education: An empirical study of an evolving field

University entrepreneurship education is in the embryonic stage, still a new venture in itself. Recent years have shown unabated growth in the number of universities offering entrepreneurship courses, but the subject is still considered suspect by many faculty and administrators.Effectively meeting university resistance to entrepreneurship course-work first requires an appreciation of the perceptions and misperceptions of the faculty and administration. Once the viewpoints are understood, counteractive communication strategies can be developed. Perceptions may include the following: (a) “small business” (vs. entrepreneurship) is a low-status realm associated with poor-quality research, and small is by connotation less worthwhile than large; (b) sophisticated management practices reside in larger firms and these practices coincide well with the functional organization in business colleges; and (c) entrepreneurship is a fad. More important, however, is the perception that “non-industry, non-stage-of-the-business-life-cycle, non-size truths apply to all,” and that entrepreneurship is therefore too specialized an area for scholarly endeavor. Yet a hard sciences scholar recently pondered, “How could the business discipline ever hope to develop comprehensive theories of business behavior without the equivalent in biology of developmental biology? How do organisms grow and mature into Fortune 500 firms?”With this backdrop an in-depth survey of expert opinion is presented, based on the beliefs and experiences of 15 highly regarded university entrepreneurship educators. These peer-identified respondents reacted to a wide variety of factors that were hypothesized to affect the outcomes of entrepreneurship education efforts. They included (a) educational objectives, (b) administrative and program development issues, and (c) course attributes.Although there were a variety of educational objectives cited by the respondents, most important was to “increase awareness and understanding of the process involving in initiating and managing a new business enterprise.” Other important objectives included attention to entrepreneurship as a career option, contributing to understanding functional business interrelationships, and attention to the characteristics of the entrepreneur. Other objectives concerned building students' selfconfidence, opportunity sensitivity, and analytical skills. Attention to the role of new and smaller firms in the economy was not rated as important.Organizationally, it was viewed as critical to have the support of the college administration. It was not universally agreed that an entrepreneurship major is desirable, with a bimodal response distribution. For universities with multiple courses, there appear to be three conceptual bases, sometimes interspersed, including the business functions, the business plan, and the business life cycle. It was agreed that entrepreneurship coursework should be more experientally oriented than other business school coursework, that the involvement of adjunct faculty should not be minimized, and that faculty research is important to an entrepreneurship education program. There was lukewarm support for business outreach programs and disagreement over the desirability of a student entrepreneurship club.Entrepreneurship course features considered most important were development of a business plan project and entrepreneurs as speakers and role models. Cases ranked next in importance followed by lectures and assigned readings.The future will bring experimentation with various program and course attributes, more research on pedagogy with the measurement of learning outcomes, the increased entree of entrepreneurship Ph.D.'s, and the maturation of this early-stage venture into entrepreneurship education.