Ethnic minority entrepreneurship in Britain

Unlike the United States, most European countries have repeatedly refused to see themselves as countries of immigration. In the past half century however this has not prevented the arrival and settlement of large numbers from extra-European lands. Labour shortages and other economic factors have allowed the walls of "Fortress Europe" to be comprehensively breached. The majority of newcomers have found their initial employment in the low-wage and low-skill parts of manufacturing, and of service sectors such as office cleaning and restaurants. Just as in the United States however some migrants have begun to enter self-employment, often as a response to lack of progress as an employee. The United Kingdom is a relatively deregulated economy. There are few constraints on the economic activities of those who are legally resident (though asylum seekers are an exception). Immigrants are thus able to set up in any business for which they can raise sufficient capital or credit. With the exception of a few sectors such as pharmacy retailing, there are no regulatory constraints on the number of businesses, although all must comply with general rules relating to issues such as town planning and health and safety. Immigrants certainly do not need to obtain bureaucratic permission from government or chamber of commerce in order to start trading.entrepreneurship; ethnic entrepreneurship; ethnic minority self-employment

Marketing management capability:the construct and its dimensions: an examination of managers’ and entrepreneurs’ perceptions in a retail setting

Purpose: This paper aims to explore the relationship between corporate cultural/intangible assets and marketing capabilities by examining managers’ and entrepreneurs’ perceptions in a retail setting.Design/methodology/approach: Nineteen face-to-face interviews were conducted with UK small and medium sized enterprise (SMEs) managers and entrepreneurs to identify six sub-capabilities that form marketing capability. The authors further validated the relationship between marketing sub-capabilities and its antecedent tangible and intangible assets. The qualitative approach used provided a deeper insight into the motivations, perceptions and associations of the stakeholders behind these intangible concepts, and their relationships with their customers.Findings: The research identified that there is a strong relationship between tangible and intangible assets, their components and the following capabilities: corporate/brand identity management, market sensing, customer relationship, social media/communication, design/innovation management and performance management. In addition, companies need to understand clearly what tangible and intangible assets comprise these capabilities. Where performance management is one of the key internal capabilities, companies must highlight the importance of strong cultural assets that substantially contribute to a company’s performance.Originality/value: Previous work on dynamic capability analysis is too generic, predominantly relating to the manufacturing sector, and/or focussing on using a single case study example. This study extends the concept of marketing capability in a retail setting by identifying six sub-capabilities and describing the relationship of each with tangible and intangible assets. Through extensive qualitative analysis, the authors provide evidence that by fully exploiting their embedded culture and other intangible components, companies can more favourably engage with their customers to attain a sustainable competitive advantage.</p

An integrated core competence evaluation framework for portfolio management in the oil industry

Drawing upon resource-based theory, this paper presents a core competence evaluation framework for managing the competence portfolio of an oil company. It introduces a network typology to illustrate how to form different types of strategic alliance relations with partnering firms to manage and grow the competence portfolio. A framework is tested using a case study approach involving face-to-face structured interviews. We identified purchasing, refining and sales and marketing as strong candidates to be the core competencies. However, despite the company's core business of refining oil, the core competencies were identified to be their research and development and performance management (PM) capabilities. We further provide a procedure to determine different kinds of physical, intellectual and cultural resources making a dominant impact on company's competence portfolio. In addition, we provide a comprehensive set of guidelines on how to develop core competence further by forging a partnership alliance choosing an appropriate network topology

Keeping promises [Interview]

Jose Ruizalba and Khalid Hafeez introduce the reader to Christian Grönroos, from the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, and to his vision, as a Legend in Marketing, of the future of interactive marketing

How do entrepreneurs learn and engage in an online community-of-practice? A case study approach

This paper investigates the ways in which entrepreneurs use communities of practice (CoPs) to express themselves, using narrative theory and rhetorical analysis, to gain insight into an electronic social network medium, namely, YoungEntrepreneur.com. In particular, the study focuses on CoPs themes, including why entrepreneurs engage in CoPs, what role the moderators and resident entrepreneurs can play in managing online CoPs, on communication rituals of the knowledge sharing through interactivity, and on ‘how to develop an intervention’ to maintain and stimulate entrepreneurs for engaging in an online community. Findings reveal that the topic title plays a major role in attracting people. Successful topics with successful conclusions (in terms of the original query that was answered) will not necessarily get high responses and vice versa. It is observed that the domain expert does not play a big role in keeping the discussion going. Finally, the study also discovered that entrepreneurs like to communicate in a story telling genre. A comprehensive set of engagement measurement tools are introduced to effectively measure the engagement in a virtual CoP, along with a classification to define and categorise discourse of messages in terms of content and context, which allow practitioners to understand the effectiveness of a social networking site

Assessing partnership alternatives in an IT network employing analytical methods

One of the main critical success factors for the companies is their ability to build and maintain an effective collaborative network. This is more critical in the IT industry where the development of sustainable competitive advantage requires an integration of various resources, platforms, and capabilities provided by various actors. Employing such a collaborative network will dramatically change the operations management and promote flexibility and agility. Despite its importance, there is a lack of an analytical tool on collaborative network building process. In this paper, we propose an optimization model employing AHP and multiobjective programming for collaborative network building process based on two interorganizational relationships’ theories, namely, (i) transaction cost theory and (ii) resource-based view, which are representative of short-term and long-term considerations. The five different methods were employed to solve the formulation and their performances were compared. The model is implemented in an IT company who was in process of developing a large-scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The results show that the collaborative network formed through this selection process was more efficient in terms of cost, time, and development speed. The framework offers novel theoretical underpinning and analytical solutions and can be used as an effective tool in selecting network alternatives

A robust fuzzy possibilistic AHP approach for partner selection in international strategic alliance

The international strategic alliance is an inevitable solution for making competitive advantage and reducing the risk in today’s business environment. Partner selection is an important part in success of partnerships, and meanwhile it is a complicated decision because of various dimensions of the problem and inherent conflicts of stockholders. The purpose of this paper is to provide a practical approach to the problem of partner selection in international strategic alliances, which fulfills the gap between theories of inter-organizational relationships and quantitative models. Thus, a novel Robust Fuzzy Possibilistic AHP approach is proposed for combining the benefits of two complementary theories of inter-organizational relationships named, (1) Resource-based view, and (2) Transaction-cost theory and considering Fit theory as the perquisite of alliance success. The Robust Fuzzy Possibilistic AHP approach is a noveldevelopment of Interval-AHP technique employing robust formulation; aimed at handling the ambiguity of the problem and let the use of intervals as pairwise judgments. The proposed approach was compared with existing approaches, and the results show that it provides the best quality solutions in terms of minimum error degree. Moreover, the framework implemented in a case study and its applicability were discussed

Knowledge sharing by entrepreneurs in a virtual community of practice (VCoP)

PurposeThis paper examines how entrepreneurs engage in a Virtual Community of Practice (VCoP) to share knowledge. Intensity of engagement is taken as a proxy to measure the strength of knowledge sharing.Design/methodology/approachThe archival data spanning over a three-year period from ‘Start-up-Nation©’ (a VCoP purposefully setup for entrepreneurs) is used for analysis. A set of indices are introduced to measure participants’ intensity of engagement in terms of message length, message frequency and reciprocity in the knowledge sharing process. Content analysis is employed to test a sample of ‘highly engaged’, ‘moderately engaged’, ‘low engaged’ and ‘not engaged’ discussion topics as part of the on-line discourse.FindingsWe find that entrepreneurs normally use short (fewer than 100 words) or medium (fewer than 250 words) message size to contribute to the discussions. In addition, we find that senior members and discussion moderators play important roles in igniting the ‘reciprocity’ behaviour in stimulating the interest of the community with the topic discussion. We also findthat highly engaged topics usually lead to further discussion threads.Originality/valueThis is the first study of its kind to explore how entrepreneurs engage in a VCoP to share their knowledge and experiences. The set of measurement indices tested here provide a tool for the owner, designer and moderator of the VCoP to measure the utility of their website in terms of its members’ participation. In addition, the set of textual and subjective interventions identified here enable the moderator (administrator) of a VCoP to design effective interventions to facilitate on-line discourse and augment the knowledge sharing process amongst its community members

The effect of TQM on organisational performance:empirical evidence from the textile sector of a developing country using SEM

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a widely used management philosophy across many sectors. Organisations implement TQM in order to gain competitive advantage in terms of quality, productivity, customer satisfaction, and profitability. However, the literature seems inconclusive about the positive effect of TQM on organisational performance. Several studies argue that the effect of TQM practices on organisational performance need to be evaluated in different social, cultural, and economic settings. The effect of national culture on TQM implementation is also gaining importance. Therefore, this study provides empirical evidence from a developing country of South Asia. This study was conducted in the context of textile companies of Pakistan. The data was collected from the member companies of All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (APTMA) by using a questionnaire. The questionnaires were sent to 210 textile companies and the respondents were quality or production managers. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was used to investigate the relationship between TQM practices and organisational performance. The findings of this study indicate that TQM has a highly positive effect on organisational performance. These findings support the divergence argument which indicates that the positive effect of TQM on organisational performance is not limited only to the companies located in developed nations, but can also be equally achieved in the other parts of the world. All the TQM elements have positive relationship with financial and non-financial results. However, the element of people does not have significant relationship with financial and non-financial results

Exploring the Leadership Terrain: Reflections from Literature

This paper appraises the available literature on concept of leadership and proposes fresh imputes to the mainstream theory by highlighting five facets of leadership. First, leadership and management are interlinked yet distinctive set of knowledge and practice–which are not substitution to each other. Second, leadership gets instigated with making of leader’s self and its solicitation of authenticity by the followers. Third, an intimate relationship between leader and followers is deemed necessary for embarking on motivation and inspiration among followers to pursue established goals, even if they apparently seem unachievable. Fourth, contemporary organization study overwhelmingly posits leadership as individualistic domain, and thus fails to spot due diligence on the scope of co-leadership. Fifth, whilst talking high of leadership, we must not overlook the potential drawbacks that leadership might augment, because–like all other power corridors–leadership does have this tendency of fostering personal and sometimes ill-conceived agendas