In the 1960s and '70s, a diverse range of storefronts-including head shops, African American bookstores, feminist businesses, and organic grocers-brought the work of the New Left, Black Power, ...feminism, environmentalism, and other movements into the marketplace. Through shared ownership, limited growth, and democratic workplaces, these activist entrepreneurs offered alternatives to conventional profit-driven corporate business models. By the middle of the 1970s, thousands of these enterprises operated across the United States-but only a handful survive today. Some, such as Whole Foods Market, have abandoned their quest for collective political change in favor of maximizing profits.Vividly portraying the struggles, successes, and sacrifices of these unlikely entrepreneurs,From Head Shops to Whole Foodswrites a new history of social movements and capitalism by showing how activists embraced small businesses in a way few historians have considered. The book challenges the widespread but mistaken idea that activism and political dissent are inherently antithetical to participation in the marketplace. Joshua Clark Davis uncovers the historical roots of contemporary interest in ethical consumption, social enterprise, buying local, and mission-driven business, while also showing how today's companies have adopted the language-but not often the mission-of liberation and social change.
Thirteen million people in the United States--roughly one in ten workers--own a business. And yet rates of business ownership among African Americans are much lower and have been so throughout the ...twentieth century. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, businesses owned by African Americans tend to have lower sales, fewer employees and smaller payrolls, lower profits, and higher closure rates. In contrast, Asian American-owned businesses tend to be more successful. In Race and Entrepreneurial Success, minority entrepreneurship authorities Robert Fairlie and Alicia Robb examine racial disparities in business performance. Drawing on the rarely used, restricted-access Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO) dataset compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, Fairlie and Robb examine in particular why Asian-owned firms perform well in comparison to white-owned businesses and black-owned firms typically do not. They also explore the broader question of why some entrepreneurs are successful and others are not.. After providing new comprehensive estimates of recent trends in minority business ownership and performance, the authors examine the importance of human capital, financial capital, and family business background in successful business ownership. They find that a high level of startup capital is the most important factor contributing to the success of Asian-owned businesses, and that the lack of startup money for black businesses (attributable to the fact that nearly half of all black families have less than $6,000 in total wealth) contributes to their relative lack of success. In addition, higher education levels among Asian business owners explain much of their success relative to both white- and African American-owned businesses. Finally, Fairlie and Robb find that black entrepreneurs have fewer opportunities than white entrepreneurs to acquire valuable pre-business work experience through working in family businesses.
Is management a profession? Should it be? Can it be? This major work of social and intellectual history reveals how such questions have driven business education and shaped American management and ...society for more than a century. The book is also a call for reform. Rakesh Khurana shows that university-based business schools were founded to train a professional class of managers in the mold of doctors and lawyers but have effectively retreated from that goal, leaving a gaping moral hole at the center of business education and perhaps in management itself. Khurana begins in the late nineteenth century, when members of an emerging managerial elite, seeking social status to match the wealth and power they had accrued, began working with major universities to establish graduate business education programs paralleling those for medicine and law. Constituting business as a profession, however, required codifying the knowledge relevant for practitioners and developing enforceable standards of conduct. Khurana, drawing on a rich set of archival material from business schools, foundations, and academic associations, traces how business educators confronted these challenges with varying strategies during the Progressive era and the Depression, the postwar boom years, and recent decades of freewheeling capitalism.
Industry 4.0 for SMEs Matt, Dominik T; Modrak, Vladimir; Zsifkovits, Helmut
2020, 2020-01-03
eBook
Open access
This open access book explores the concept of Industry 4.0, which presents a considerable challenge for the production and service sectors. While digitization initiatives are usually integrated into ...the central corporate strategy of larger companies, smaller firms often have problems putting Industry 4.0 paradigms into practice. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) possess neither the human nor financial resources to systematically investigate the potential and risks of introducing Industry 4.0. Addressing this obstacle, the international team of authors focuses on the development of smart manufacturing concepts, logistics solutions and managerial models specifically for SMEs. Aiming to provide methodological frameworks and pilot solutions for SMEs during their digital transformation, this innovative and timely book will be of great use to scholars researching technology management, digitization and small business, as well as practitioners within manufacturing companies.
This open access book brings together narratives of inbound and outbound expatriate entrepreneurship in Japan to provide a comprehensive overview of international entrepreneurship in the region. ...Through in-depth interviews with expatriate entrepreneurs, policymakers, and additional stakeholders it provides the reader with a solid understanding of the current landscape of international entrepreneurship as it relates to Japan and the challenges for policymakers. The topics addressed in this book include definitions of expatriate entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship policy development and implementation, concepts of mindset, cultural brokerage, community, and identity as they relate to Japanese self-initiated expatriate entrepreneurs working in South East Asia and to non-Japanese self-initiated expatriate entrepreneurs working in Japan. Additionally, the book provides an overview of issues connected to regional development and economic growth in Asia. Illustrated through carefully chosen cases from Japan, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia and developed by connecting these cases to policy and interdisciplinary studies, this book is highly recommended to scholars, policymakers and practitioners who seek an in-depth and up-to-date integrated overview of the field of expatriate entrepreneurship in Asia.
The central task of contemporary strategic management is to look for sources of value and to achieve above- average firm performance. The effective implementation of a value creation strategy ...requires a comprehensive approach, including the creation of a systemic management structure aimed at increasing company value. The concept of value- based management involves consciously inspiring, undertaking, and implementing value- oriented actions. Value creation takes place at all levels of management and in all organisational units of the company; therefore, the implementation of all management functions should be assigned to this goal. Thus, the role of managers is gaining importance, especially those who are capital- linked to companies, who set goals and verify them by means of informed decisions aimed at maximising value in the long term. The book presents a multidimensional analysis of shareholders’ impact on company value creation. The authors chose the IT sector as the area of study; this sector, being one in which modern technologies are essential, acquires special significance for the global economy. The book features a review of notions and concepts related to the management of company value and methods of measuring it, the shareholder’s impact on the creation of company value, and factors affecting long- term value creation; an analysis of the places of occurrence, power and direction of a shareholder’s impact on building the long- term capacity of an IT sector company for creating the value thereof, as well as the conceptualisation and operationalisation of such impact; an analysis of the role of shareholders in IT sector companies, a profile of shareholder competence which makes the role of a shareholder unique to the company and fulfils the “value- creating owner” postulate; an analysis of the role of hired managers cooperating with the shareholders with an indication of the significance of mutual development and the supplementation of one’s own skills. The book is dedicated to scientists in the field of strategic management, valuebased management, and leadership; shareholders; students of EMBA and MBA programmes; practitioners in strategic management; and current shareholders of modern technology companies (in particular from the IT sector) and future investors, for all of whom it may offer a valuable outlook on the management principles and practices in the sectors, particularly with respect to the long- term creation of company value.
This open access book presents a comprehensive and up-to-date collection of knowledge on the state of crowdfunding research and practice. It considers crowdfunding models and their different ...manifestations across a variety of geographies and sectors, and explores the perspectives of fundraisers, backers, platforms, and regulators. Gathering insights from a wide range of influential researchers in the field, the book balances concepts, theory, and case studies. Going beyond previous research on crowdfunding, the contributors also investigate issues of community, sustainability, education, and ethics. A vital resource for anyone researching crowdfunding, this book offers readers a deep understanding of the characteristics, business models, user-relations, and behavioural patterns of crowdfunding.
The world’s people and their leaders face a complex and multifaceted set of ‘eco-social questions’. As the productivity of humanity increases, the negative external environmental effects of ...production and consumption patterns become increasingly problematic and threaten the human welfare. As the regulating power of national and international governments is limited, this challenge has generated a strong interest in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of companies. Firms find it increasingly important to meet the expectations of stakeholders with respect to the company’s contribution to profit, planet, and people. The primary aim of this book is to introduce the reader to the impacts and drivers of CSR, with a special focus on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Research into the social and environmental impacts of CSR is rare. This is a serious gap because if CSR were to fail to have favourable social and environmental impacts on society, the whole concept may become redundant. If societal impacts of CSR are substantial, it is important to know the drivers of CSR. This book considers (1) factors internal to the company, (2) the competitive environment of the company, (3) institutions external to the company, and (4) how the impacts of institutions are mediated or moderated by company internal factors. This book will fill this gap by estimating various types of models that integrate external and internal factors driving CSR and its impacts on environment, innovation, and reputation, making it a valuable resource for researchers, academics, and students in the fields of business management and CSR.
The Uppsala internationalization process model is revisited in the light of changes in business practices and theoretical advances that have been made since 1977. Now the business environment is ...viewed as a web of relationships, a network, rather than as a neoclassical market with many independent suppliers and customers. Outsidership, in relation to the relevant network, more than psychic distance, is the root of uncertainty. The change mechanisms in the revised model are essentially the same as those in the original version, although we add trust-building and knowledge creation, the latter to recognize the fact that new knowledge is developed in relationships.
As the breadth and empirical diversity of entrepreneurship research have increased rapidly during the last decade, the quest to find a "one-size-fits-all" general theory of entrepreneurship has given ...way to a growing appreciation for the importance of contexts. This promises to improve both the practical relevance and the theoretical rigor of research in this field. Entrepreneurship means different things to different people at different times and in different places and both its causes and its consequences likewise vary. For example, for some people entrepreneurship can be a glorious path to emancipation, while for others it can represent the yoke tethering them to the burdens of overwork and drudgery. For some communities it can drive renaissance and vibrancy while for others it allows only bare survival. In this book, we assess and attempt to push forward contemporary conceptualizations of contexts that matter for entrepreneurship, pointing in particular to opportunities generating new insights by attending to contexts in novel or underexplored ways.
This book shows that the ongoing contextualization of entrepreneurship research should not simply generate a proliferation of unique theories – one for every context – but can instead result in better theory construction, testing and understanding of boundary conditions, thereby leading us to richer and more profound understanding of entrepreneurship across its many forms.
Contextualizing Entrepreneurship Theory will critically review the current debate and existing literature on contexts and entrepreneurship and use this to synthesize new theoretical and methodological frameworks that point to important directions for future research.
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