The interplay of entrepreneurship education and national cultures in entrepreneurial activity: a social cognitive perspective

Does entrepreneurship education result in entrepreneurial activities across national cultures? For the most part, prior research has examined the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial activity, using country-specific samples. However, many of these results are inconsistent. One reason for such inconsistent results may be a limitation of country-specific samples, given that they are valid in a domestic context but not generalizable. Our study addresses this limitation by using a cross-national sample of 24,457 respondents from 38 countries to examine the role of diverse national cultures. Building on the social cognitive theory, our results show that entrepreneurship education is more seminal for entrepreneurial activities that take place in countries with greater individualism, less uncertainty avoidance, and a high level of masculinity. This research presents a more complete picture of how entrepreneurship education may affect international entrepreneurship contingent upon national culture, and has implications for researchers, educators, and policy makers.     

The dual nature of innovative activity: How entrepreneurial orientation influences innovation generation and adoption

This paper analyzes two modes of innovation that differ in their scope of newness — innovation generation and adoption. Building a theoretical model based on the Entrepreneurial Orientation literature and utilizing a unique sample of innovating firms, we find that 54% adopt innovations of other firms, 7% generate innovations internally whereas 39% combine the two. We also find that proactivity and risk taking influence the number of innovations generated and the extent to which firms favor generation over adoption and that environmental dynamism moderates one of these relationships. These findings add to the innovation and Entrepreneurial Orientation literatures.     

Gender differences in entrepreneurial propensity: Evidence from matrilineal and patriarchal societies

We examine whether men and women in patriarchal and matrilineal societies differ in their propensity to engage in entrepreneurship. We conduct two studies. Study 1 involves face-to-face interviews to identify individuals who are in the process of starting a new business. We find that men in patriarchal societies are more likely than women to initiate action to start a new business. This result, however, is reversed in matrilineal societies, where women are more likely than men to do so. The results of causal mediation tests suggest that entrepreneurial self-efficacy and fear of business failure explain the gender gap in both societies. Study 2 involves a controlled experiment in the lab that captures individuals' willingness to invest in the creation of a new venture. The results of the experiments are consistent with the survey data: men in patriarchal societies and women in matrilineal societies invest more in new venture creation in a simulated environment. We therefore rule out the simplistic view that women are inherently less likely to enter into entrepreneurship due to innate differences across genders. Rather, gender differences in entrepreneurial propensity are outcome of socialization.     

Business education and entrepreneurial skills: Evidence from Arab universities

The authors aimed to investigate business undergraduates’ cognition toward entrepreneurship; in particular, they examined four entrepreneurship skills. Data consist of questionnaire responses obtained from 668 undergraduates attending universities in two different Arab countries. The study used a logistic regression to gauge the effect of delivering four entrepreneurial skills on entrepreneurship cognition. The results reveal that business students perceive the four entrepreneurial skills as key elements for starting their own business.     

Becoming a founder: How founder role identity affects entrepreneurial transitions and persistence in founding

We develop a new theory that views organizational founding as involving a role transition. Through the construct of founder role identity, we delineate how identity centrality and complexity affect individuals' ability to exit a work role in order to undertake founding activities. We argue that individuals are challenged to adjust to the founder role requirements and incorporate the new role into an overall self-concept. We then delineate how configurations of founder role identities influence persistence, and the longer-term outcomes of dormancy and successful founding.     

Innovation, entrepreneurial activity and competitiveness at a sub-national level

The capability to generate new knowledge and to create new firms differs across regions. Our study is an attempt to test the extent to which differences in such capabilities are associated with regional competitiveness. Using data from Spanish NUTS2 regions for the period 2000?C2004, our results show that a higher capacity of a region to simultaneously generate new knowledge and start-up firms is positively linked to its level of competitiveness. This finding supports the belief that innovation per se is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for regional economic development.     

Key institutions in business and management education research

The authors investigate institutional productivity in business and management education (BME) research based on the analysis of 4,464 articles published by 7,210 authors across 17 BME journals over a 10-year period, involving approximately 1,900 schools worldwide. Departing from traditional disciplinary silos, they examine the BME research field as a whole by including all traditional business disciplinary areas and producing two top 100 rankings, one based on raw number of author publications and the other based on weighted scores reflecting journal quality and coauthorship.     

Subnational institutions,political capital,and the internationalization of entrepreneurial firms in emerging economies

This study advances the institution-based view of strategy by integrating it with firm-specific capability considerations. In particular, we investigate the integrative influence of subnational-level home country institutional environments and firm-level political capital, as an important way to seek resources, on emerging economy entrepreneurial firms’ internationalization. With data from Chinese entrepreneurial firms, we find that the development of subnational institutional environments in the home country is related to firms’ degree of internationalization. Furthermore, while political capital with low-level governments enhances the effect of subnational institutions on internationalization, political capital with high levels of government has no such moderation effect. Theoretical and empirical contributions and implications are discussed.     

Liabilities and benefits: Examining the two sides of the foreignness coin from entrepreneurial perspective

This paper provides an in-depth examination of foreignness at the individual level by studying it in the context of entrepreneurs. Based on data collected from 470 domestic and foreign entrepreneurs operating in the U.S., it was concluded that foreignness has a curvilinear relationship with entrepreneurial performance. There was also evidence of moderating effects of entrepreneurial orientation on the relationship between foreignness and performance. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

A new perspective on entrepreneurial regions: linking cultural identity with latent and manifest entrepreneurship

What are the entrepreneurial places in the USA? Although seminal theorizing on the determinants of entrepreneurship gives culture a unique and important role, systematic empirical evidence linking the distinct cultural identity of regions to their local entrepreneurial spirit and vitality is still scarce. This study offers a first, systematic overview on the nexus between regional cultural identity and latent and manifest entrepreneurship across the USA. To directly assess regional cultural identity, we apply the American Nations and Patchwork Community Types approaches and explore in which way these distinct spatially based cultural regions are reflected by significant differences in entrepreneurial activity and underlying biologically based propensities. We combine annual entrepreneurship rates at the county level with personality data collected in a large-scale, Internet-based study of 3,457,270 US residents. The findings suggest that entrepreneurship culture reflects the dynamic interplay between the region’s cultural identity and its latent and manifest entrepreneurship.     

Moving on from nascent entrepreneurship: measuring cross-national differences in the transition to new business ownership

Nascent entrepreneurship and new business ownership are subsequent stages in the entrepreneurial process. We illustrate how information from the largest internationally harmonized database on entrepreneurship, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor project, can be used to approximate the entrepreneurial process. We make a methodological contribution by computing the ratio of new business ownership to nascent entrepreneurship in a way that reflects the transition from nascent to new business ownership and provides cross-nationally comparable information on the efficiency of the entrepreneurial process for 48 countries. We report evidence for the validity of the transition ratio by benchmarking it against transition rates obtained from longitudinal studies and by correlating it with commonly used entrepreneurship indicators and macro-level economic indices. The transition ratio enables future cross-national research on the entrepreneurial process by providing a reliable and valid indicator for one key transition in this process.     

Introductory nutrition students' attitudes towards obesity: ethnic and gender differences

Abstract The objectives of this study were to discover whether a multicultural sample of college students enrolled in an introductory nutrition class held negative attitudes towards personal obesity and obesity in others, whether these attitudes differed between men and women and whether personal obesity and attitudes towards obesity were related to ethnicity. Introductory nutrition students (n=390) from five ethnic groups completed an anonymous questionnaire containing various measures of opinions relevant to obesity. Attitudes towards obesity in others and oneself were somewhat negative. Women had higher restraint scales than men, were more dissatisfied with their weight and preferred a thinner figure than the one they considered healthiest. Similar gender differences were found for all ethnic groups. The results imply that education about the stereotyping of obesity should be included in nutrition education courses.     

Knowledge and entrepreneurial employees: a country-level analysis

According to the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship, knowledge created endogenously results in knowledge spillovers, which allow independent entrepreneurs to identify and exploit opportunities (Acs et al. in Small Bus Econ 32(1):15–30, 2009). The knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship ignores entrepreneurial activities of employees within established organizations. This ignorance is largely empirical, because there has been no large-scale study on the prevalence and nature of entrepreneurial employee activities. This article presents the outcomes of the first large-scale international study of entrepreneurial employee activities. In multiple advanced capitalist economies, entrepreneurial employee activity is more prevalent than independent entrepreneurial activity. Innovation indicators are positively correlated with the prevalence of entrepreneurial employee activities, but are not or even negatively correlated with the prevalence of independent entrepreneurial activities.     

Gender differences in executive compensation: Variation with board gender composition and time

This paper uses EXECUCOMP, COMPUSTAT and Investor's Responsibility Resource Center data to examine gender differences in executive salaries and total compensation from 1996 to 2004. We find that the salaries of female executives are about 5 percent lower than those of male executives, controlling for executive, firm, and board characteristics, and that the gap exists primarily in the lower officer ranks, where women are relatively highly concentrated. The gender difference in salary is larger in firms with more male-dominated boards; perhaps not coincidentally, such firms are also found to have fewer female executives in top managerial positions as well as lower probabilities of having any top female executives at all. The results of Oaxaca wage decompositions suggest that, although the magnitude of the gender difference decreases slightly over the sample period, the share of the gender difference that is due to unobserved factors remains basically steady or even increases. Thus, although women have become better represented in top executive jobs in recent decades, their relative salaries remain below those of men, possibly due in part to governance structures that remain male-dominated.     

Entrepreneurial ecosystem conditions and gendered national-level entrepreneurial activity: a 14-year panel study of GEM

Small Business Economics - Scholars note the importance of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in promoting new venture activity. Yet to date, limited focus has been given to its impact on female...     

The role of local embeddedness and non-local knowledge in entrepreneurial activity

The article investigates whether the history of individuals’ spatial relocation has an impact on their propensity to perform an entrepreneurial entry and post-entry performance of firms they start. By looking at entrepreneurs in the IT services sector in Swedish non-core regions between 1991 and 2010, the article investigates the interaction between individuals’ embeddedness in local networks and their exposure to external knowledge accumulation opportunities across different geographical settings, as well as its impact on their entrepreneurial activities. The results of the analysis suggest that individuals with broad spatial relocation histories are more likely to start IT firms in non-core regions, which, in turn, may be expected to survive longer. It is, therefore, claimed that non-local knowledge accumulated through spatial relocation is an important complement to embeddedness in local networks in non-core regions. This complementarity is further related to the evolution of the IT services sector over time.     

Foreign direct investment and entrepreneurship: gender differences across international economic freedom and taxation

Using recent cross-national data, this paper examines the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on entrepreneurship activity. The impact of FDI on entrepreneurship is not clear a priori, with possibilities of both a negative effect (crowding out) and a positive effect (synergy or complementarity via spillovers). Results find support for the crowding out effect; however, this effect varies across nations with different prevalence of entrepreneurship. Another focus of this work is on gender differences. The crowding out effect is stronger for the full sample rather than the subsample of female entrepreneurship. This finding stands up to a battery of robustness checks. Policy implications are discussed.     

Female nudity in print advertising: An analysis of gender differences in arousal and Ad response

Previous research on the dimensionality of arousal indicates tension arousal is associated with negative feelings and energy arousal is associated with positive feelings. Women were found to generate more tension and negative feelings towards explicit female nudity in print ads than men. Men were more energized and positive in their feelings about such ads. The results have substantial strategic implications.     

High-growth entrepreneurial firms in Africa: a quantile regression approach

This article analyses the growth performance of a large set of entrepreneurial firms in ten manufacturing sectors of 11 Sub-Saharan African countries. The focus of the article is on identifying those entrepreneurs’ attributes and firm characteristics that tend to generate a significant number of high-growth firms in these countries. To this end, we use a quantile regression, which provides a more complete estimation of the growth distribution of firms conditional on different attributes. The results indicate that firms that engage in product innovation, have their own transport means and are connected to the internet through their own website are especially characterized by higher growth rates and also display a distribution of growth rates skewed to the right, hosting a higher number of high-growth firms. The effect of the last two variables, which relate to distance-bridging modes of infrastructure, points to the self-reinforcing growth effects they generate in creating wider input and output markets. Education raises growth opportunities by affecting the lower quantiles, but it does not appear to influence the upper quantiles. The estimated conditional growth distributions for the technology-intensive machinery and electronics sectors show more extreme tails and a lower mean in comparison to the traditional industries, indicating the more risky nature of doing business in these industries.     

The effect of sub-national institutions and international entrepreneurial capability on international performance of export-focused SMEs: Evidence from China and South Korea

A number of recent studies have taken notice of the differences among sub-national institutions within the convoluted structures of Asian economies. The influence that the institutional environment exerts upon the performance of larger multi-national enterprises (MNEs) in Asian markets is well-documented; however, the relationship between sub-national institutions, international entrepreneurial capability (IEC), and international performance (IP) is a realm that has been less closely explored. This paper seeks to address that gap by assessing the effect of relevant sub-national institutions, namely, local government support, legal rules, government transparency, and government efficiency on the IEC of export-focused small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in two leading Asian economies. The researchers have devised and assessed a model that links sub-national institutions, their IEC and IP. To this end, data was collected from export-focused SMEs in two important emerging markets, China and South Korea. Three rounds of data collection resulted in 217 complete surveys. This paper discusses the analyzed data as well as the theoretical and managerial contributions of those findings.