Entrepreneurship and social norms about thrift versus sharing: the Chinese-Tahitian experience

This article establishes a link between entrepreneurship and a new ‘cultural dimension’: thrift vs. sharing. This cultural dimension measures what is the overriding social norm in a group: thrift or sharing. Our first hypothesis states that long winters with annual harvests fostered thrift while foraging and tropical horticulture and continuous harvesting fostered sharing. Our second hypothesis states that thrift promotes entrepreneurship, while sharing hampers it. We find empirical support for both hypotheses when comparing indigenous Polynesians and the Hakka Chinese minority in Tahiti, French Polynesia.     

A Cross-Regional Exploration of Barriers to the Adoption and Use of Electronic Meeting Systems

Electronic Meeting Systems (EMS) are intended to support group collaboration in completing tasks. While there have been many case studies and laboratory experiments on how EMS can support group tasks, large scale macro investigations exploring EMS adoption and use have been practically non-existent. Furthermore, while several barriers to EMS adoption and use have been suggested, their validation across organizations remains unexplored. We undertook a global initiative to explore information technology support for task-oriented collaboration in the US, Australia, Hong Kong, and Norway. In this paper, we focus specifically on assessing the adoption and use of EMS, and barriers to their adoption and use in organizations across the four regions. Our results suggest that EMS currently have limited adoption and are used infrequently across all the four regions. A further investigation into barriers to EMS adoption and use suggests that significant numbers of respondents do agree with a list of fourteen suggested barriers. However, while there is significant agreement between two countries (US & Australia) over how these barriers are ranked, there is no significant agreement between the remaining pairs of countries. Implications of our findings are discussed for practitioners and researchers.     

Startup time,innovation and organizational emergence: A study of USA-based international technology ventures

The acceleration of new technology venture launch and growth is an important and rapidly growing field of practice for university-based accelerators, incubators, and technology transfer offices. Based on four comparative case studies of fast-launching clean tech startups in the USA (two of which were university-affiliated), this paper explains how some technology startups are able to develop innovative products, form organizations, internationalize, and release products into global markets very rapidly, and highlights implications for university-sourced ventures. Findings show that two processes, “product emergence” and “organization emergence,” have to be managed strategically, with time as a critical variable to be considered. This paper suggests that there are dynamic tensions between temporal, financial, and human resources in the technology startup process. To start up quickly, the new international technology venture compresses two parallel timelines: product launch and organization launch, which can also accelerate the internationalization process. This study identifies the organizational formation pivot as a risky but necessary transition from a lean, informal, fast-paced technology development project to a structured, legally compliant organization, in the case of a university-sourced venture fully independent from the university that spawned it, that can be trusted for transactions and investment.     

Firms and the global crisis: French exports in the turmoil

Global trade contracted quickly and severely during the global crisis. This paper uses a unique dataset of French firms to match export data to firm-level credit constraints and shows that most of the 2008–2009 trade collapse was due to the unprecedented demand shock and to product characteristics. While all firms have been affected by the crisis, the effect on large firms has been mainly at the intensive margin and has resulted in a smaller portfolio of products being offered to export destinations. The effect on smaller exporters has been to reduce the range of destinations served or to stop exporting altogether. Credit constraints have been an added aggravation for firms active in high financial dependence sectors. However, the share of credit constrained firms is small and their number has not increased hugely during the crisis, with the result that the overall impact of credit constraints on trade has been limited.     

Family-centered goals,family board representation,and debt financing

Small Business Economics - This study investigates the effect of both family-centered goals and family board representation (family member representation on the board of directors) on family firm...     

Fundamental Rights and the European Regulation of iConsumer Contracts

This paper addresses the question of how fundamental rights affect European legislation and adjudication on contracts regarding digital information services (iConsumer contracts). Fundamental rights may be seen as representing political choices for the protection of certain values in society, but at the same time, they are enacted rules of the legal system, which may be invoked to enforce the protection of the interests they represent. It is submitted that because of this double-faced nature, they can bring to the fore policy issues in contract legislation and case law. Fundamental rights can thus play a role in evaluating the policy choices that are being made in the review of the acquis communautaire in the field of consumer law. For iConsumer contracts, that means that the rights of consumers, authors, and suppliers of copyright-protected content affect the choice of rule-solutions on the European legislative level. Furthermore, these rights have an impact on the case law of the European Court of Justice in the field of e-commerce. Fundamental rights help define the various rule-solutions the Court can choose from and thus demarcate the law-making capacity of the judiciary.

French Firms' Exports During Downturns: Evidence from Past Crises

This paper makes use of detailed French firm‐level data on a quarterly basis to investigate the impact of past crises on exports and the margins of adjustment. We first detect crises periods using quantitative criteria and classify them into banking crises, currency crises, simultaneous banking and currency crises, and other crises. Our results underline the prevalence of the intensive margin of adjustment to large shocks, that is, firms reducing their average sales per product while staying on the market. The extensive margin of trade is, however, dominant in currency crises. On average, a crisis reduces the growth rate of exports over six quarters. Finally, we show that exports overreact to demand variations during crises, and that the extensive margin is more responsive to demand. Other factors, not directly related to demand, mostly affect the intensive margin.     

Understanding consumer services buyers based upon their purchase channel

Consumer services such as airlines and hotels include a proliferation of bookings through Internet-proprietary and Internet-third party sites. The other dominant channel for making airline and hotel purchases is via telephone. This research investigates differences in how buyers utilize the three channels in terms of internal and external price search, number of alternatives searched, brand loyalty, purchase frequency, risk of unavailability at the time of purchase, and Internet experience and usage. Results indicate that telephone buyers employ the least external search, consider the fewest number of alternatives during search, are the most brand loyal, are the most frequent buyers, and perceive the lowest level of risk of unavailability at the time of purchase. Conversely, Internet-third party buyers utilize the most external search, consider the largest number of alternatives, are the least brand loyal, are the least frequent buyers, and perceive the highest level of risk of unavailability. Managerial implications and suggestions for future research are provided.     

Firm Turnarounds: an Integrative Two-Stage Model*

This paper presents a model proposing that turnaround firms exhibit two classes of response to decline: (a) decline-stemming strategies that reverse the dysfunctional consequences of decline, and (b) recovery strategies that position the firm to better compete in its industry. We further propose that effective top management actions supporting both of these strategies are vital to recovering from decline. Our model of the turnaround process questions some existing assumptions about turnarounds and extends theory in several key areas. First, we argue that success in initially stemming decline requires managers to go beyond retrenchment or focusing on financial issues to include effective management of a firm's external stakeholders and internal climate and decision processes. Second, we outline important contingencies impacting each class or stage of response to decline and discuss the interaction between stages. Finally, we demonstrate how our model provides explanations for several unresolved issues regarding turnarounds and has implications for management practice.