This research explores the link between contemporary marketing practices, market orientation (MO), and business performance in Uruguay, an emergent country that has recovered from an economic crisis. These approaches seem to be related but there is no existing evidence to confirm this impression. Lessons can be learned from understanding how effective the adoption of marketing practices is under a crisis scenario. Using data from interviews with 143 micro and small firms' managers, we identify three clusters dependant on the combination of marketing practices: a multimarketing cluster, a medium-level relationship marketing cluster, and a transactional cluster. A model relating MO components and various performance measures is tested for the three clusters, showing that the multimarketing and transactional clusters are more effective in translating efforts and resources into business outcomes.

This study focuses on drivers of franchise network internationalization, namely, intangible resources and plural form. Intangible resources refer to those that the franchisor acquires over time and are deemed instrumental to firm success, namely, brand name, monitoring, and know-how transfer abilities. Plural form refers to the coexistence of franchised outlets and company-owned outlets within the same network. The empirical study involves 853 U.S. and French networks. Findings indicate that the percentage of company-owned outlets in international networks is lower than that in purely domestic networks, and this holds for both the combined data sample (United States and France) and the U.S. sample on its own. Moreover, U.S. franchisors are shown to be much more internationalized, with a smaller percentage of company-owned outlets than their French counterparts. The intangible resource that most strongly affects franchise internationalization is brand-name recognition, whereas there is partial support for the impact of two other intangible resources, namely, monitoring and know-how transfer ability. The results of the logistic regression models underscore the importance of intangible resources in franchise network internationalization as well as the significant and negative impact of percentage of company-owned outlets. Finally, the drivers of internationalization are not found to be statistically different between both countries.

This research contributes to the entrepreneurial orientation (EO)–performance literature by offering a wider picture that includes two intermediate steps: organizational learning capability (OLC) and innovation performance. This study also provides an explanation of intra-industry firm performance differences by focusing on EO. We use structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses on a data set from Italian and Spanish ceramic tile producers. The results support our conceptual model and demonstrate its usefulness in explaining differences in intra-industry firm performance. Findings suggest that OLC and innovation performance should be enhanced by managers in order to boost the positive EO–performance link.

This study investigates product, process, and management innovation among a sample of Spanish manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) during the current economic downturn and a period of economic growth. Tobit analyses examined whether the level of process, product, and management innovation changed during the recessionary period relative to the expansionary period; and MCO estimations were used to show whether the recession affected the relationship between SME innovation and performance. Three main findings are: (1) innovation among Spanish manufacturing SMEs declined during the recent economic crisis; (2) the type of innovation at Spanish manufacturing SMEs changed during different economic conditions; and (3) innovation was positively associated with firm performance during the economic expansion and recession years. The results demonstrate the importance of adopting innovation into SME strategy over the business cycle. The findings have relevance to SMEs, government policymakers, and providers of consulting services.

Entrepreneurs' engagement in ethically suspect behaviors (ESBs) can have seriously negative business and social consequences. Yet what defines entrepreneurs' ESBs remains unclear. Further, little is known about what factors contribute to such behaviors. This study provides conceptual clarification of entrepreneurs' ESBs and examines environmental, firm, and individual factors in relation to them. Results, based on data from 158 Chinese entrepreneurs, indicate that dynamism, firm performance, and relational social capital are all negatively related to ESBs. Firm performance partially mediates the relationship between dynamism and ESBs, and albeit with marginal support, the relationship between entrepreneurs' relational social capital and their ESBs.

The present study unravels how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) learn and determines the role that entrepreneurial orientation (EO) plays in how they learn. Adopting a multilevel perspective on learning and the unique role of the management team in SMEs, the study empirically examines the “feed-forward” learning process initiated by the intuition and interpretation of individual managers, advanced by integration on the management team level, and brought to the organizational level by institutionalization. It also identifies firm-level EO as an antecedent to this process on all three organizational levels, highlighting the relevance of innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking with respect to learning in SMEs.

This study examined three factors that influence information technology (IT) success in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs): internal IT support, external IT support, and IT management. Using survey data gathered from 289 small and medium-sized Chartered Accounting firms in New Zealand, the results suggest that IT management in SMEs is best understood as a multidimensional concept consisting of practices related to: IT planning, IT organizing, IT controlling, and IT leading. This view clarifies and improves our understanding of the nature and character of IT management in SMEs. The results show that some SMEs are significantly more sophisticated than others in terms of their IT management practices. Both IT planning and IT leading were found to influence IT success.

This study aims to answer why some employees choose to start their own ventures, whereas others choose to seek jobs in other organizations after leaving their current employment. Drawing insights from knowledge-based view and social capital theory, we examine the impact of on-the-job embeddedness on the decision of employee entrepreneurship, industry choice, and new venture growth. We argue that on-the-job embeddedness provides key resources for employees to start new ventures and grow them. We test our hypotheses with Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED) data. Our results show that on-the-job embeddedness increases the probability of employees becoming entrepreneurs. Once they decide to become entrepreneurs, those employees with high on-the-job embeddedness are more likely to start new ventures in the industry in which they worked before. Moreover, employees' on-the-job embeddedness has a positive impact on new venture growth.

A cold war exists in faculties of business and economics. It is fought between the neo-Marshellians that advocate the elegant simplifying assumption of equilibrium and the Schumpeterians that believe that economic growth is driven by the recognition of new opportunities and the capture of associated benefits through innovation. This fundamental disagreement is referred to as a cold war because the battles are fought indirectly with discussions of wealth transfer (instead of wealth creation), big firms versus small firms (instead of innovative firms versus noninnovative), and stability and managed earnings versus Sarbanes–Oxley and full disclosure. This note points out that this conflict does in fact exist and then provides a review of the literature and support for the Schumpeterian position as it relates to small business and associated economic policy. The literature is provided by one of the pioneers in this field, Professor Bruce Kirchhoff, as his last direct contribution to the field that he championed for decades.

By drawing on the resource-based view and on elements from social network theory, we use a sample of southern Brazilian small and medium-sized furniture manufacturers to find evidence for the hypothesis that access to local network resources, facilitated by a firm's membership in an industry association, strongly predicts the propensity to export. Likewise, we find that a firm's local collaborative intensity is positively related to its export intensity and that both relations are moderated by the firm's distance from the local network's center. This study contributes to the literature on how local collaboration may facilitate overcoming export barriers.

Rural entrepreneurs are of extreme importance in China's progress toward a more market-oriented economy as the vast majority of Chinese live in rural areas. From an institutional perspective and based on content analysis of 91 publicly published stories about rural Chinese entrepreneurs broadcast by China Central Television, this paper addresses several key aspects of rural entrepreneurship in China and specifically probes into how different institutional elements (i.e., regulative, normative, and cognitive components) affect the strategic behaviors of rural Chinese entrepreneurs. We found that due to weak regulatory protection of intellectual rights, rural entrepreneurs in China tend to work on innovations on their own or with close family members instead of collaborating with external sources; these entrepreneurs use guanxi strategically to deal with constraints from the institutional environment; it is important to build legitimacy by either building alliances with large, established firms, or acquiring approval from people of authority.

Women become business owners for a variety of reasons; however, the impact of motivations for ownership on the culture and policies of the business is unclear. Extending the small business, entrepreneurship, and work–family (WF) conflict literatures, we examined whether woman owners shape the culture and policies of the organization to be consistent with their personal motivations, challenges, and family status. Results show that being a full-time manager, marital status, and motivation for becoming a business owner were related to the WF culture of the business. Business size and parental status predicted family-friendly policies. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

This study examines the links among perceived environmental uncertainty, generic strategy, strategic clarity, and performance in small and medium-sized enterprises in the retail industry in Argentina, Peru, and the United States. Moderate support was found for links between the defender strategy and competitive uncertainty, the prospector strategy and technology uncertainty, and the analyzer strategy and market uncertainty. In all three nations, businesses with high and low strategic clarity—the extent to which a single generic strategy reflects the organization's strategic intent—outperformed those with moderate strategic clarity. Differences across nations are addressed, and future research opportunities are elaborated.

This study analyzes the role of personal guarantees and collateral in the context of two different lending structures: one transaction and the other relationship based. The Finnish bank data, which were uniquely accessible for the study, enabled an exploration of credit files with specific details of the characteristics of the lending relationship during the period 1995–2001. According to the empirical results, the use of personal guarantees is an indication of transaction-based lending. Personal guarantees seem to increase the loan premium in transaction-based loans more than in relationship-based loans. Close ties between a bank and a firm seem to be a desirable basis for small and medium-sized enterprise bank lending.

This study investigated the influence of dealers' expert, referent, and legitimate sources of power on small-to-medium enterprise manufacturers' relationship commitment in distribution channel systems. A theoretical model drawing on the relational cohesion theory and the extant marketing literature is developed and tested empirically using a sample data set of 452 from Zimbabwe. In this model, expert, referent, and legitimate powers are the predictors, whereas trust, cooperation, and relationship satisfaction are the mediators, and relationship commitment is the outcome variable. Analysis reveals that these three powers positively influence the mediators and outcome variable in a significant way, except for legitimate power to cooperation relationship. Managerial implications and future studies are suggested.

A comparative case study analysis has been undertaken on Australian Aboriginal, native Hawaiians, and Māori entrepreneurs. This work investigates the networking activities by these groups of indigenous entrepreneurs situated within a mixed minority (indigenous) and dominant (settler majority) urban cultural setting. The way in which indigenous entrepreneurs network to achieve their business aspirations suggests that the underlying social capital dimensions are unique to their cultural context. Five comparative characteristics also emerged from the data that assist the analysis. The research reveals how indigenous and potentially other minority ethnic entrepreneurs draw upon internal and external network ties that are related to the historical and cultural influence on social capital.

The purpose of this study is to explore how lean–agile operations and supplier–firm partnership can improve garment small and medium enterprise (SME) supply chain performance. This study is based on cross-sectional survey research that provides longitudinal evidence to show how lean–agile operations and partnership strategy influence supply chain and garment SME performance. To clarify the relationships among these constructs, structural equation model (SEM) is conducted to examine the model fit and the five hypotheses. The result shows that agile supply chain and partnership strategy are critical for garment SMEs because these strategies influence their supply chain performance. However, the leanness strategy does not necessarily influence their supply chain performance. The supply chain performance and partnership strategy have a positive influence on the SME performance.