Social entrepreneurship as an essentially contested concept: Opening a new avenue for systematic future research

Social entrepreneurship has emerged as an active area of practice and research within the last three decades. Nevertheless, in spite of its growing popularity, scholars and practitioners are far from reaching a consensus as to what social entrepreneurship actually means. This has resulted in a number of different definitions and approaches within the field of social entrepreneurship. The purpose of this article is to shed light on the ongoing contestation of social entrepreneurship and to offer a novel conceptual understanding of the concept that can facilitate the development of systematic and structured future research. To this end, we analyze social entrepreneurship on the basis of the theory of essentially contested concepts, which was proposed by Walter Bryce Gallie in 1956. Building upon this theory, this article shows that social entrepreneurship can be regarded as an essentially contested concept and that a universal definition that would be accepted among contestant parties is hardly possible. Responding to this recognition, the article proposes the conceptualization of social entrepreneurship as a cluster concept, which can serve as a conceptual tool to help advancing social entrepreneurship as a coherent field of research despite its contested nature.     

On the utilization of resources: perspectives from the U.S. telecommunications industry

The issue of resource utilization is important in the resource-based stream of work, since the ability of firms to utilize resources is a key indicator of their competitive abilities. This paper specifies why some firms might be better at utilizing resources than others. Thereafter, it demonstrates how to empirically ascertain differences in resource utilization patterns between firms using the U.S. telecommunications industry as a context. The data envelopment analysis procedure (DEA), which is a firm-level resource utilization measure, is used. This procedure can be useful for the resource-based approach research agenda since performance is measured in resource terms. DEA is applied to measure variations in different dimensions of resource utilization for the firms making up the local operating sector of the telecommunications industry. The use of DEA to guide empirical research and address theoretical issues within the resource-based paradigm is illustrated, using the resource utilization index for the telecommunications firms as the measure of strategic performance. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘How do they plan for growth in auto component business?’ – A study on small foundries of western India

Entrepreneurs of small organisations describe growth differently. Growth strategy of these organisations is a function of industry structure and performance, entrepreneurial motivation, attitude, and competence of the entrepreneurs in strategy planning. The article based on Grounded Theory approach is an attempt in developing a theoretical framework on growth strategy planning in small entrepreneurial organisations. Two major patterns are emerging. In ‘relationship based strategy’ entrepreneurial vision towards strengthening relationship is the basis for growth planning. Trust, cooperation, community and society benefit are important dimensions. In ‘technology based strategy’ the entrepreneurs choose technology to achieve excellence in product and process performance, and need investment and risk bearing capability.     

Periodic and chaotic programs of optimal intertemporal allocation in an aggregative model with wealth effects

Summary We examine a discrete-time aggregative model of discounted dynamic optimization where the felicity function depends on both consumption and capital stock. The need for studying such models has been stressed in the theory of optimal growth and also in the economics of natural resources. We identify conditions under which the optimal program is monotone. In our framework, the optimal program can exhibit cyclic behavior for all discount factors close to one. We also present an example to show that our model can exhibit optimal behavior which is chaotic in both topological and ergodic senses.We would like to thank V. Bala, J. Benhabib, P. Dasgupta, R. Day, L. W. McKenzie, K. Nishimura, S. Roy, and a referee of this journal for comments on earlier versions of this paper. Research support from the National Science Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.     

Mergers and synergy: Lessons from contemporary telecommunications history

Using contemporary historical data, the analysis reported in this article has evaluated the impact of the various mergers of the local exchange companies that took place between 1988 and 2001 on financial performance. Performance was measured using an important metric normally used to measure synergies of firms undergoing mergers. The analysis has revealed that the relative cash flow variable for firms worsened after mergers. If the synergy motive had been primary in influencing merger decisions, and also approvals, then the past mergers approved led to decreased performance levels and corresponding welfare losses for American consumers; thus, the mergers of communications common carriers were not in the interest of the public, the shareholders and customers. On the other hand, given the negative outcomes, views that the quiet life, hubris or a quest for possible market power motivated the mergers could be discarded. The lessons of such contemporary historical analysis have suggested that antitrust oppositions to contemporary telecommunications sector mergers may have basis in fact and salient evidence.     

Trade under temporary equilibrium: Evolution in a loglinear world

The paper develops a model of a competitive world in which several countries are engaged in the production, consumption, and exchange of many commodities over time. Each agent produces a single good, and trades it for the required inputs and consumption goods. The plans of the agents are based on an optimization exercise involving a constrained maximization of a discounted sum of one period utilities. All the relevant functional relationships are assumed to be loglinear. The principal results deal with the existence and characterization of the sequence of temporary equilibria.     

Random iterates of monotone maps

In this paper we prove the existence, uniqueness and stability of the invariant distribution of a random dynamical system in which the admissible family of laws of motion consists of monotone maps from a closed subset of a finite dimensional Euclidean space into itself.