Unfolding the role of marketplace resources in forming entrepreneurial narratives

The narrative perspective has discussed the role of entrepreneurs as mindful actors who contextualise innovation through their relational, temporal, and performative efforts. Although the agency of material elements is recognised in the narrative perspective, the materials’ role is reduced to be controlled and mobilised by entrepreneurs with some existing possibilities of showing resistance. This reductionist approach toward materials has restricted our understanding of the ways materials actively impose their agency, form narratives, and contextualise innovations along with entrepreneurs. This study adopts ANT (Actor-Network Theory) as a lens and explores the role of materials in entrepreneurship process. Specifically, it explores how materials (non-human actors) interact with entrepreneurs, impose their agency, challenge the efforts of entrepreneurs in contextualising innovation, and in turn shape the emerging entrepreneurial narratives

Small business sport sponsorship: A case study

Within a reasonably short timeframe sponsorship has morphed from a passive form of marketing that was often philanthropic in nature (Morgan et al., 2014), to a legitimate element of the promotional mix (Segium & O’Reilly, 2007), and a key strategic business partnership initiative (O’Reilly & Horning, 2013). Sport sponsorship has been defined as the provision of assistance by commercial organisations (sponsors), in cash or kind, to a sports property (sponsee), in exchange for the rights to be associated with the sports property for the purpose of gaining a commercial and economic advantage (Triodi, 2001). While substantial research has been directed towards large organisations and corporate sponsorship, little interest has been focussed on the relationship between small businesses and sport sponsorship (Mack, 1999, Jing 2010). Small businesses are extensively involved in the sponsorship of sports organisations, teams, individuals and events (Slack & Bentz, 2010). As more and more local and regional sport organisations look towards sponsorship as a means to financially support their organisations this relationship will continue to grow. Given that 97% of all enterprises in New Zealand are defined as “small” this research aims to address the gap in the literature and to contribute to the advancement of the ‘philanthropic-sponsorship’ continuum. The Waikato Rugby Union (WRU) was selected as the case study due to the nature of the sporting code, its established history, and its strong brand. The research applied a qualitative, exploratory approach in order to explore small business perceptions and experiences with sport sponsorship. A series of in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with relevant personnel from selected WRU small business sponsors. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and then analysed using grounded theory coding techniques, allowing for key themes to emerge. The study examined the objectives, practices and perceptions of small businesses related to sponsorship decision making. For the purpose of this study, a small business was defined as any enterprise with less than 20 employees. The research findings contradicted previous small business – sport sponsorship literature. The findings highlighted that there was long-term strategic planning, with 75% of the businesses initiated the first contact with the WRU. While decisions were still predominantly made by one individual, they were clearly based on ‘corporate’ objectives rather than personal preferences and/or a sense of “giving back” to the community. The three top objectives were hospitality, brand awareness and networking. The strength of the WRU brand was also a factor in the decision-making. However, there were little or no formalised internal policies to guide the small business sport sponsorship screening and selection processes in terms of sponsorship opportunities, and limited sponsorship evaluation. As sponsors become more and more a part of the social context that shapes and sustains local and regional sport it is important that both sport organisations and small businesses understand better what motivates, attracts and sustains small business sponsorship. It is unclear is this stage if the findings are a result of the status that Rugby holds in the New Zealand psyche and the professionalisation of the sport, or if this is an evolving trend. Further research into other sporting codes would contribute to the understanding of the small business – sport sponsorship dynamics

Board diversity and performance of microfinance institutions (MFIS): Evidence from an emerging economy

Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) are important service providers of finance for unbanked people and have experienced a high growth over the past decades. Alongside the staggering growth of microfinance around the world, there have been some serious complaints of unfair practices and low transparency in their affairs. Therefore, it is questionable whether microfinance contributes to a true reduction in worldwide poverty in the short or long terms. This study examines the corporate governance practices of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in India and their relationship with both financial performance and outreach for the period 2007 to 2012. Using unbalanced panel data for 575 firm-year observations, we report that the financial performance and outreach of Indian MFIs improves when they have international/donor representation on their board. Independent directors and client representatives on board perform favourably on financial performance but no impact on outreach. However, female directors on the board increases outreach to the poor people but decrease the financial performance. This study significantly contribute to a better understanding of board diversity of microfinance sector by providing empirical evidence from one of the dominant countries in South Asian region

Sustainability and corporate governance: A comparative evaluation of approach for Dangote Group and Gallagher Group

Sustainability has been resonating within the business community and the academia. Indeed, sustainability has moved from being an ideology to a technique that guarantees business profitability. As corporate social responsibility (CSR) is expanding its frontiers to respond to continued agitation for business to treat the planet and its people with respect, sustainability is no longer optional. This research paper aims to demonstrate the curiosity of the author to develop a project in the area of sustainability and corporate governance; in particular, the correlation between sustainability and corporate governance, with the main objective of embarking on a comparative study of the sustainability approach of two companies from two continents. For this work, the author has in mind to evaluate the sustainability approaches of these companies in their supply chain management. Unlike the conventional approach, an intercontinental perspective on sustainability is rare. Therefore, the primary focus of the research will be to investigate the sustainability practices in the supply chain management of two indigenous companies (Gallagher and Dangote) from two continents. The research will adopt a qualitative method for collecting data and other relevant materials from involved parties and triangulation will be used for the analysis. This investigation could potentially identify similarities and difference in approach to sustainability, which could improve best practices for both companies. The report will highlight areas of advantage for both parties in line with current demand for business to be part of the solution to the problems surrounding people, planet, and profits. The work will conclude with a benchmark document for sustainability

Relationship dynamics in logistics

In recent years, a growing number of organisations have outsourced logistics services to logistics services providers (LSPs). To account for greater interconnection between organisations, supply chain relationship is crucial for achieving successful logistics outsourcing. Because organisations need to continuously change their decision-making in outsourcing, relationships among organisations in outsourcing are dynamic. Further, because logistics outsourcing has created more supply chain relationships (SCRs) among suppliers, LSPs, and customers, managers need to use a network perspective to manage multiple relationships in the process of outsourcing. The triadic relationship is recognised as the smallest network structure. As a result, the primary goal of this research is to study dynamics of supply chain relationships in logistics outsourcing from a view of triadic relationship. This relationship is called a logistics triad and consists of a supplier, a logistics service provider (LSP), and their common customer. The present research was carried out in two stages. The first stage collected triadic cases from LSPs. To improve validity and reliability, the second stage used a deductive process to test findings of the first stage by collecting triadic cases from suppliers and customers. Results of the comparison between the two stages provided verified research findings because the two stages exhibited close similarity. The research outcomes led to the identification of factors that influenced the relationship dynamics in logistics triads. Among these factors, the combined effects of purchasing volumes, resource capability, and focal firm can override influences from other factors to determine stability and dynamics of logistics triads. Overall, this research makes several major contributions to the knowledge of supply chain relationships: developing an integrative model of triadic relationship dynamics, identifying control approaches used by organisations to dominate triads, and demonstrating organisations' mediating effects on dyadic relationships within triads

Mining for Culture: Reaching Out of Range

The goal of this paper is to present a tool that will sustain the development of culturally relevant computing artifacts by providing an effective means of detecting culture identities and cultures of participation. Culturally relevant designs rely heavily on how culture impacts design and though the guidelines for producing culturally relevant objects provide a mechanism for incorporating culture in the design, there still requires an effective method for garnering and identifying said cultures that reflects a holistic view of the target audience. This tool presents culturally relevant designs as a process of communicating with key audiences and thus bridging people and technology in a way that once seemed out of range

Exploratory Analysis of Highly Heterogeneous Document Collections

We present an effective multifaceted system for exploratory analysis of highly heterogeneous document collections. Our system is based on intelligently tagging individual documents in a purely automated fashion and exploiting these tags in a powerful faceted browsing framework. Tagging strategies employed include both unsupervised and supervised approaches based on machine learning and natural language processing. As one of our key tagging strategies, we introduce the KERA algorithm (Keyword Extraction for Reports and Articles). KERA extracts topic-representative terms from individual documents in a purely unsupervised fashion and is revealed to be significantly more effective than state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we evaluate our system in its ability to help users locate documents pertaining to military critical technologies buried deep in a large heterogeneous sea of information.Comment: 9 pages; KDD 2013: 19th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Minin