FROM PREDATOR TO PREY: THE EDIFICATION OF STIGMA MANAGEMENT IN THE SMALL-DOLLAR LOAN INDUSTRY

In this dissertation, I focus on how entrepreneurs in a stigmatized industry – the Small-Dollar, or “Payday” Loan industry – manage industry stigma and evaluate the extent to which they employ strategies to mitigate this stigma. This dissertation is an ethnographic, participatory observation study, where I engage with lenders as a customer, borrowing and paying back loans from different small-dollar establishments. I find that, in response to being subject to multiple elements of stigma, industry representatives, entrepreneurs, and employees used a variety of strategies, in part, based on the policies initiated against their industry that resulted in different strategies employed to reduce industry stigma. My findings also focus attention on the cross-level nature of stigma management in organizational research, and its enactment between organizations and its effects on a key audience, customers, who also experience the industry’s stigma. The combination of these findings expands theoretical understanding of entrepreneurship in highly contested and uncertain domains, by integrating research from the stigma literature to offer a nuanced perspective of the process and outcomes of industry stigma

Prospective cohort study reveals unexpected aetiologies of livestock abortion in northern Tanzania

Livestock abortion is an important cause of productivity losses worldwide and many infectious causes of abortion are zoonotic pathogens that impact on human health. Little is known about the relative importance of infectious causes of livestock abortion in Africa, including in subsistence farming communities that are critically dependent on livestock for food, income, and wellbeing. We conducted a prospective cohort study of livestock abortion, supported by cross-sectional serosurveillance, to determine aetiologies of livestock abortions in livestock in Tanzania. This approach generated several important findings including detection of a Rift Valley fever virus outbreak in cattle; high prevalence of C. burnetii infection in livestock; and the first report of Neospora caninum, Toxoplasma gondii, and pestiviruses associated with livestock abortion in Tanzania. Our approach provides a model for abortion surveillance in resource-limited settings. Our findings add substantially to current knowledge in sub-Saharan Africa, providing important evidence from which to prioritise disease interventions

Juggling Act: Waged time investments and the health–wealth trade-off

Research on hybrid entrepreneurship—the process of founding and operating a business while retaining a primary “day job” in an established organization—has burgeoned in recent years, indicating its importance for entrepreneurial effectiveness. This study investigates how an entrepreneur\u27s waged time investments, or the number of hours hybrid entrepreneurs commit to a job that provides compensations outside their entrepreneurial role, as a percentage of their total working hours, affects work tension and venture performance. We find mixed support for our theoretical model by applying and testing the tenets of conservation of resource theory on a sample of entrepreneurs. Specifically, we find evidence that increases in waged time investments accelerate work tension but not venture performance. Further, we find that the effect of waged time investments on these outcomes differs across entrepreneurs’ experience. This study offers implications for researchers and practitioners interested in multiple jobholding and time management strategies in underexplored entrepreneurial contexts

Quantifying farmers’ preferences for antimicrobial use for livestock diseases in northern Tanzania

No abstract available