A gender perspective on entrepreneurial leadership:female leaders in Kazakhstan

The paper proposes a conceptual model to understand female entrepreneurial leadership through an exploration of the perceptions and experiences of women entrepreneurs within their leadership roles. The paper addresses an existing knowledge gap on entrepreneurial leadership by bringing together three key constructs of gender, leadership and entrepreneurship. We apply Stewart's model of role demands-constraints-choices (DCC) to women entrepreneurs in Kazakhstan in order to understand their perceptions of the demands, constraints and choices they experience within their leadership roles. The results of in-depth interviews with women entrepreneurs present deeper conceptualization of their leadership enactment as a co-developing, co-constructed relational activity between leaders and others in their wider business environments and context

Developing strong social enterprises : a documentary approach

Social enterprises are diverse in their mission, business structures and industry orientations. Like all businesses, social enterprises face a range of strategic and operational challenges and utilize a range of strategies to access resources in support of their venture. This exploratory study examined the strategic management issues faced by Australian social enterprises and the ways in which they respond to these. The research was based on a comprehensive literature review and semi-structured interviews with 11 representatives of eight social enterprises based in Victoria and Queensland. The sample included mature social enterprises and those within two years of start-up. In addition to the research report, the outputs of the project include a series of six short documentaries, which are available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/SocialEnterpriseQUT#p/u. The research reported on here suggests that social enterprises are sophisticated in utilizing processes of network bricolage (Baker et al. 2003) to mobilize resources in support of their goals. Access to network resources can be both enabling and constraining as social enterprises mature. In terms of the use of formal business planning strategies, all participating social enterprises had utilized these either at the outset or the point of maturation of their business operations. These planning activities were used to support internal operations, to provide a mechanism for managing collective entrepreneurship, and to communicate to external stakeholders about the legitimacy and performance of the social enterprises. Further research is required to assess the impacts of such planning activities, and the ways in which they are used over time. Business structures and governance arrangements varied amongst participating enterprises according to: mission and values; capital needs; and the experiences and culture of founding organizations and individuals. In different ways, participants indicated that business structures and governance arrangements are important ways of conferring legitimacy on social enterprise, by signifying responsible business practice and strong social purpose to both external and internal stakeholders. Almost all participants in the study described ongoing tensions in balancing social purpose and business objectives. It is not clear, however, whether these tensions were problematic (in the sense of eroding mission or business opportunities) or productive (in the sense of strengthening mission and business practices through iterative processes of reflection and action). Longitudinal research on the ways in which social enterprises negotiate mission fulfillment and business sustainability would enhance our knowledge in this area. Finally, despite growing emphasis on measuring social impact amongst institutions, including governments and philanthropy, that influence the operating environment of social enterprise, relatively little priority was placed on this activity. The participants in our study noted the complexities of effectively measuring social impact, as well as the operational difficulties of undertaking such measurement within the day to day realities of running small to medium businesses. It is clear that impact measurement remains a vexed issue for a number of our respondents. This study suggests that both the value and practicality of social impact measurement require further debate and critically informed evidence, if impact measurement is to benefit social enterprises and the communities they serve

An agile business process and practice meta-model

Business Process Management (BPM) encompasses the discovery, modelling, monitoring, analysis and improvement of business processes. Limitations of traditional BPM approaches in addressing changes in business requirements have resulted in a number of agile BPM approaches that seek to accelerate the redesign of business process models. Meta-models are a key BPM feature that reduce the ambiguity of business process models. This paper describes a meta-model supporting the agile version of the Business Process and Practice Alignment Methodology (BPPAM) for business process improvement, which captures process information from actual work practices. The ability of the meta-model to achieve business process agility is discussed and compared with other agile meta-models, based on definitions of business process flexibility and agility found in the literature. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V

What are the barriers to investing in social enterprises? An investigation into the attitudes and experiences of social entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom

The ongoing global economic crisis and the restrictions that this is having on government expenditure has meant that current UK policy is being directed at trying to end the grant dependency that currently exists in the third sector. One of the key focuses of this policy initiative has been to try to increase the third sector’s access to both debt finance from lending institutions and equity finance from venture capital investors. However, this policy intervention presupposes that the lack of private sector investment in the third sector is a ‘supply-side’ problem caused by limited funds. This ignores the structural problems in the social enterprise sector related to governance and a lack of organisational capacity. Indeed, as of 2011 the ethical investment sector in the UK was worth approximately £9 billion and was spread across 90 ethical investment funds responsible to 700,000 investors. Additionally, social investment (i.e. those funds targeted specifically at third sector organisations) was worth £165 million as of 2011. This suggests that the lack of private sector investment in social enterprises in the UK is not a ‘supply’ side problem but is instead related to the ‘investment readiness’ of social enterprise