Building virtual bridges: how rural micro-enterprises develop social capital in online and face-to-face settings

In rural UK, businesses are often isolated and have much to gain from healthy networks, yet studies show that many rural business owners fail to network effectively. Information communications technologies offer new ways to network that might benefit rural businesses by expanding their reach. This study looked at online and face-to-face networking behaviour among rural micro-enterprises in Scotland in relation to the development of bonding and bridging social capital. Given the challenges of remoteness faced by many rural businesses, online networking is particularly useful in developing bridging capital, but is an unsuitable context for building the trust needed to gain tangible benefits. The article therefore highlights the importance of face-to-face interactions in developing trust and bonding social capital. Rural business owners face distinctive challenges with respect to online communications, which are explored in this article

Entrepreneurial process and performance: the case of the Turkish female entrepreneurs in Amsterdam

Ethnic entrepreneurship has become a popular concept in the modern multi-cultural society; in a modern 'multi-color' city ethnic entrepreneurship tends to become an indigenous and significant part of the local economy. This concept refers to business activities undertaken by entrepreneurs with a distinct socio-cultural or ethnic background. Ethnic groups often have a backward position in society, because of difficulties with native behavior, language and diploma's attitudes. The participation rate of ethnic groups in the urban labor market stays often behind and, when they do participate, they are often situated within the secondary labor market segments. For ethnic groups who are unable to adapt to a new social system, their marginal social position is a driving force to become self-employed some special talents. One way for migrants to escape from their backward position is to become an entrepreneur. In this case, self-employment is not only a means for earning a living, it is also a way of obtaining recognition and social acceptance. On the other hand, in the last few decades the participation rate of women in the labour market has increased in most Western countries. An increase in the participation rate of women does not necessarily imply an increase in the number of female entrepreneurs. However, it does increase the likelihood of women to become self-employed. Moreover, women contribute to the diversity in the supply of entrepreneurship, because they may have a different approach towards entrepreneurship compared to men. Despite the scarcity of data, recent observations show the involvement of women in entrepreneurial activity and self-employment rates, which include women who own and operate their own businesses are increasing around the world. According to available data, between one-quarter and one-third of the formal sector businesses are owned and operated by women. The aim of this paper is to describe and understand the entrepreneurial processes of ethnic females. In which way and to which extent are these processes the result of: a) unemployment b) job level c) poor performance in terms of wages d) work experience e) educational level f) language g) discrimination h) socio-cultural and ethnic networks? Or in other words, what are the factors that stimulate females to find other income generating activities? What are the important factors for the motivation and performance of female entrepreneurship? Which factors contribute to the success or failure of ethnic female entrepreneurs? And how do these female entrepreneurs experience failure or survival? What is the satisfaction level of female entrepreneurs? This study aims to provide an answer to these questions on the basis of case study research on Turkish female entrepreneurs in Amsterdam.

Understanding Small Business Networking and ICTs: Exploring Face-to-Face and ICT-related opportunity creation mediated by Social Capital in East of England Micro-businesses

Small businesses that are sole traders or micro-businesses—with few, if any employees notoriously suffer from a ‘liability of smallness’ (Aldrich and Auster 1986), including poor access to various resources. However, many authors argue that the inherent problems of smallness can be overcome with networking and good network connections. Resources, the opportunities to access them and other benefits apparent from networks and networking are readily apparent in the literature. However, few articles, if any, have examined small business networking from the perspective of this study—using in-depth qualitative methods, the theoretical construct of social capital and exploring the increasing role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in networks and networking—as part of understanding a variety of entrepreneurial opportunities. This article provides much needed empirical insights on how and if ICTs support opportunity creation amongst small businesses within a spatial and social network perspective. Its ‘media ecology’ approach does not over-prioritise the role of ICTs, but instead examines their interrelationships with face-to-face contact—putting technology in its ‘place’. The article focuses on the notion of ‘opportunity creation’ from networks, since this is the outcome critical for the small businesses themselves in order to generate economic benefits for their business. It seeks to provide a higher level, outcomebased framework that helps specify the various sorts of opportunities created by networks for small businesses, based on original ethnographic material and findings from a case study of East of England micro-businesses

E-Business in Ukraine: Peculiarities, Tendencies, Prospects

Introduction. It is evident that the electronic business plays a central role in the economy development, facilitating the exchange of information, goods, services, and payments. We feel very strongly that entrepreneurs who understand the role and significance of e-business and are ready to meet the sharply expanding scale of cross-border e-commerce will be the winners of tomorrow in the world market. An initial point to underline in connection with these tendencies is that business which does not give some attention to e-business and e-marketing promotion could very easily loose its place on the market. This explains the hyper attention to the e-business nowadays and as a result the necessity of studying this question. The purpose of the article is to study the characteristic features of e-business in Ukraine, to determine the latest tendencies of its development and to propose the certain steps to increase its growth. Results. Recent researches support the view that organizations can have a significant benefit of using e-business tools in their everyday operations. The article examines the benefits, problems and limitations of e-business in Ukraine. It has been distinguished that Ukraine is an attractive market for the development of e-commerce. It has a large potential for e-business and its related activities. In 2018 Ukraine ranked the 2nd place in the turnover growth of online usage among European countries. A major factor stimulating Internet growth is the drastic improvement of the telecommunications infrastructure in the country. Advantages and risks of new electronic marketing techniques were considered in the article. The main strengths of online marketing system are high quality customer service, greater reach, time saving customer loyalty, easy access to information, 24 hours access and personal contact with the customer. Considering the risks, it was admitted that e-marketing requires considerable time investment to get the results and it takes a long time to generate meaningful interactions. Conditions that should be arranged for successful e-business model implementation were determined. It was pointed out that in order to increase the development of e-business in Ukraine that certain steps such as harmonizing of essential laws and standards to the European ones, enhancing the use of web analytics tools, providing an appropriate choice of communication channels and improving administrative regulations regarding e-business procedures should be taken. In this regard, Ukrainian businesses need all the support they can get from policymakers and regulators in order to be able to grow in an increasingly competitive global market. In conclusion, in order to stay effective, to improve operational efficiency, profitability, and to strengthen their competitive position business organizations should definitely adopt e-business model. It is not enough to have high quality products or services to operate successfully in the market; productive introduction of new e-business models is vital in a computerised electronic environment. In this regard, if Ukrainian government wants its companies to fully play their role in a globalized world, it needs to create a harmonized market and a favourable environment where domestic e-business companies can flourish. Prospects for further research can be seen in the analysis of the methods of measuring the effectiveness of different e-business models

Electric Telegraph to e-Scotland: Networking remote and rural communities

There are said to be parallels in the impact that the advent of the telegraph and the internet had on their respective societies. This chapter looks at two examples of state intervention and subsidy in the development of those two communications infrastructures in remote and rural areas of Scotland, at either end of the revolution in electric communications. Both applied the technology of the day to break down geographical barriers, to increase connectivity, to spread information, and to enhance social and business links. Both initiatives grew in part out of a government concern that Scotland should not fall behind the level of technological provision available in other European countries, thereby disadvantaging Scottish business as well as citizens (a comparison with the state-owned telegraph systems in Belgium, Switzerland and France informed the 1868 Telegraph Act, and the development of a broadband infrastructure across a range of European Union countries has been quoted by the Scottish Government). The emphasis in both cases was on affordable wide-ranging availability to benefit individuals as much as business, though with an understanding that business needs would be the driver and would provide the bulk of the finance to establish and maintain the infrastructure. The first was a product of nationalisation with the expansion of the telegraph network from 1870 to 1872 driven by demand. Following is an analysis of that demand and its impact, alongside a description of the development of the network across remote and rural areas over the two years of the scheme. The second examines the rationales behind Scottish Government initiatives since 2001 to extend broadband provision and outlines the technical solutions devised in partnership with commercial operators and funding bodies to reach non-commercially viable areas and to stimulate take up

MEASURING WEB 2.0 EFFICIENCY

Any potential investment assumes, from the investor’s point of view, answering alegitimate question: What is the value returned by the current investment? Investing in the newsemantic technologies in the area of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are no exception to this rule. Theresearch at hand combines a review of the relevant literature with action research, in order toidentify coherent and relevant methods for the measurement of the benefits arising from aninvestment in the new wave of knowledge management and organizational memory buildingtechnologies. The paper is based on the classic ROI computation, attempting to build a newcomputation model, well suited to measure the success of an implementation of the informationalmemory. The valuation model (enforced and explained by means of a case study) may be alsoregarded as a measurement model for the costs and benefits of building organizational memory atthe economic entity level.Organizational knowledge, ROI, computation model, Web 2.0, Semantic Web

Virtual Location-Based Services: Merging the Physical and Virtual World

Location-based services gained much popularity through providing users with helpful information with respect to their current location. The search and recommendation of nearby locations or places, and the navigation to a specific location are some of the most prominent location-based services. As a recent trend, virtual location-based services consider webpages or sites associated with a location as 'virtual locations' that online users can visit in spite of not being physically present at the location. The presence of links between virtual locations and the corresponding physical locations (e.g., geo-location information of a restaurant linked to its website), allows for novel types of services and applications which constitute virtual location-based services (VLBS). The quality and potential benefits of such services largely depends on the existence of websites referring to physical locations. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of linking virtual and physical locations. For this, we analyze the presence and distribution of virtual locations, i.e., websites referring to places, for two Irish cities. Using simulated tracks based on a user movement model, we investigate how mobile users move through the Web as virtual space. Our results show that virtual locations are omnipresent in urban areas, and that the situation that a user is close to even several such locations at any time is rather the normal case instead of the exception