Sustainable development and entrepreneurship: Past contributions and future directions

This article discusses the emerging research concerned with sustainable development and entrepreneurship, which is the focus of this special issue of the Journal of Business Venturing. Entrepreneurship has been recognized as a major conduit for sustainable products and processes, and new ventures are being held up as a panacea for many social and environmental concerns. However, there remains considerable uncertainty regarding the nature of entrepreneurship's role and how it may unfold. We begin with an overview of sustainable development and the role of entrepreneurship and outline recent contributions exploring this role. We then summarize the papers presented in this special issue and conclude with suggestions for further research.     

The resilience of formal and informal tourism enterprises to disasters: reef tourism in Phuket,Thailand

This paper explores the resilience of vulnerable tourism sectors to disasters in a period of global change and interdependence. The coral reef tourism industry is highly vulnerable to natural disasters and economic and political shocks. The paper also explains why enterprise resilience is central to sustainable tourism management, for economic, socio-cultural and environmental reasons. It extends the concepts of ecological and social resilience to that of enterprise resilience. Using scenarios and interviews with key enterprise staff, the study contrasts the levels of resilience of formal and informal reef tourism enterprises, and the factors associated with the enterprise resilience in Phuket, Thailand, following the 2004 tsunami and the 2008 political crisis. Informal enterprises reported better financial condition in a crisis scenario and higher levels of social capital in the form of government, family and community support than formal enterprises. Formal and informal enterprises both enjoy high lifestyle benefits from reef tourism, which supports resilience. Most formal enterprises had part foreign ownership/management (61%); no informal enterprise had any foreign ownership or management. Management policies supporting reef tourism should consider local nuances and the importance of lifestyle benefits for both formal and informal enterprises, and take steps to enable enterprise flexibility and cost-cutting during crises.     

Job preferences of students and new graduates in nursing

This article investigates the preferences of student and newly graduated nurses for pecuniary and nonpecuniary aspects of nursing jobs. It is the first study applying methods based on discrete choice experiments to a developed country nursing workforce. It is also the first to focus on the transition through university training and into work. This is particularly important as junior nurses have the lowest retention levels in the profession. We sample 526 individuals from nursing programmes in two Australian universities. Flexible and newly developed models combining heteroscedasticity with unobserved heterogeneity in scale and preference weights are estimated. Overall, salary remains the most important feature in increasing the probability that a job will be selected. ‘Supportive management/staff’ and ‘quality of care’ follow as the most important attributes from a list of 11 nonpecuniary characteristics. However, the subset of new graduates rank ‘supportive management/staff’ above salary increases, emphasizing the importance of a supportive workplace in the transition from university to the workplace. We find substantial preference heterogeneity and some attributes, such as the opportunity for clinical rotations, are found to be attractive to some nurses while seen as negative by others. Nursing retention could be improved by designing different employment packages to appeal to these different tastes.     

New development: Spin-outs and social enterprise: the ‘right to request’ programme for health and social care services

The ‘right to request’ policy encouraged and supported National Health Service (NHS) community health staff in England to ‘spin out’ services into independent social enterprises. This article considers the processes and outputs of the initiative and reflects on the likelihood of positive outcomes for patients being achieved. It highlights lessons for future programmes seeking to transfer services out of public ownership.     

Inference regarding multiple structural changes in linear models with endogenous regressors

This paper considers the linear model with endogenous regressors and multiple changes in the parameters at unknown times. It is shown that minimization of a Generalized Method of Moments criterion yields inconsistent estimators of the break fractions, but minimization of the Two Stage Least Squares (2SLS) criterion yields consistent estimators of these parameters. We develop a methodology for estimation and inference of the parameters of the model based on 2SLS. The analysis covers the cases where the reduced form is either stable or unstable. The methodology is illustrated via an application to the New Keynesian Phillips Curve for the US.     

Social Return on Investment (SROI) and Performance Measurement

Abstract

Social enterprises are being promoted as responsive and innovative way to deliver public services. As part of this promotion, these organizations are being required to demonstrate the social and economic value they generate. Social return on investment (SROI) is a performance measurement tool currently being encouraged to capture this impact. This paper draws on survey and interview data to analyse how SROI is used and understood in health and social care settings. It indicates that despite being accepted as an internationally recognized measurement tool for social enterprise, SROI is underused and undervalued due to practical and ideological barriers.     

An examination of ex-ante factors and their influence on equity carve-out long-term performance

This study examines the influence of several ex-ante factors on three-year market-adjusted returns of two-stage carve-out combinations from 1988 to 2006. We observe that several factors maintain their significance over a three-year period after equity carve-out ex-dates. Also, we report that, contrary to Vijh (J Bus 75(1):153–190, 1999), negative three-year carve-out returns are statistically significant. In addition, we note that negative combination carve-out/spin-off three-year returns are higher than those of carve-outs acquired by third parties or reacquired by their parents. Moreover, we observe that our independent variables explain 14.56% of the multiple regression three-year returns for carve-outs. Also, our negative correlation of three-year returns with initial period returns supports the “leaning against the wind” hypothesis of Loughran and Ritter (Rev Financ Stud 15(2):413–443, 2002). In addition, our results for the post-bubble period (2001–2006) provide an extension of the changing issuer objective function noted by Loughran and Ritter (Financ Manage 35(3):23–51, 2004) for IPOs and Hogan and Olson (J Financ Res 27(4):521–537, 2004) for equity carve-outs.     

The impact of stakeholder heterogeneity on risk perceptions in technological innovation

Managing risk has been widely acknowledged as a crucial managerial task in the development of new technology. More recently, the acceptance of new technologies has increasingly been influenced by secondary stakeholders, some of which are difficult to identify, or whose concerns are not easily reconciled. This paper develops a conceptual framework based on the management of technology and research & development literature, stakeholder theory, risk and social judgment to describe how traditional approaches based on reducing uncertainties through estimating probabilities may not work for social uncertainties; different heuristics are needed to understand and resolve such heterogeneous stakeholder perspectives. We contribute to the discourse by describing how risk perceptions among stakeholders vary, and how this may change over time. The framework suggests that the perception of primary stakeholder towards a specific innovation is ‘Standard’ when information is well known, but becomes riskier when information is unclear. For secondary stakeholders, when there is a low degree of imperfect information, the stakeholder relationship is an ‘Irritant’ but becomes increasingly ‘Dangerous’ when information becomes ambiguous. We conclude with implications for management and future research.     

Developing a framework for the analysis of power through depotentia

Stakeholder participation in tourism policy-making is usually perceived as providing a means of empowerment. However, participatory processes drawing upon stakeholders from traditionally empowered backgrounds may provide the means of removing empowerment from stakeholders. Such an outcome would be in contradiction to the claims that participatory processes improve both inclusivity and sustainability. In order to form an understanding of the sources through which empowerment may be removed, an analytical perspective has been developed deriving from Lukes' views of power dating from 1974. This perspective considers the concept of depotentia as the removal of ‘power to’ without speculating upon the underlying intent, and also provides for the multidimensionality of power to be examined within a single study. The application of this analytical perspective has been tested upon findings of the government-commissioned report of the Countryside and Community Research Unit in 2005. The survey and report investigated the progress of Local Access Forums in England created in response to the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. Consideration of the data from this perspective permits the classification of individual sources of depotentia which can each be addressed and potentially enable stakeholder groups to reverse loss of empowerment where it has occurred.