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This research paper generates new insights into the challenges of implementation in women’s enterprise policy. It argues that organisations involved in policy implementation need to be understood as operating in a context of institutional pluralism and answers: How do organisations involved in the implementation of women’s enterprise policy manage the challenges of institutional pluralism?

Addressing the need for women’s enterprise policy to learn from the past, the research adopts a historical approach to the study of policy implementation through examination of the UK’s Phoenix Development Fund (1999–2008). It analyses a wide range of secondary sources to examine 34 projects funded and supported by the Phoenix Development Fund that targeted women entrepreneurs.

Potentially conflicting institutional logics associated with central government, mainstream business support and local communities were managed through four key processes: dominance; integration; constellation and bridging. The management of institutional pluralism was effective in delivering support to communities but not in providing an effective platform for learning in government or establishing sustainable, long-term mechanisms.

The paper develops an empirical contribution to practice through identification of processes to manage the challenges of institutional pluralism and lessons for community-engaged policy implementation. A theoretical contribution to academic debates is provided by the conceptualisation of these challenges in terms of institutional pluralism and the novel concept of institutional bridging. The study also demonstrates the value of historical methods for women’s enterprise policy to learn the lessons of the past.

Forcibly displaced refugee entrepreneurs face extra challenges that are beyond the barriers that face immigrants and hosts in their journey towards starting up, growing and developing their businesses. This study aims to critically examine the opportunity identification (OI) of forcibly displaced refugee minority women entrepreneurs in Glasgow.

Qualitative semi-structured face-to-face interviews with 10 participants were conducted, including 6 forcibly displaced women entrepreneurs and 4 stakeholders. A six-step thematic framework for data analysis with NVivo 11 was used.

Findings revealed that forcibly displaced refugee women’s entrepreneurial opportunities occur through a dynamic identification, discovery, recognition and exploitation of opportunities. Women-led businesses remain underdeveloped due to restrictions imposed by the Scottish Government, Westminster Government and local council authorities.

This study was only conducted in Glasgow areas, although this is where most of the forcibly displaced groups live. The research team suggests that further studies with a large sample cutting across more local authorities beyond Glasgow should be conducted.

The empirical findings serve practitioners, local authorities business managers, researchers and policymakers. The study reveals a gap and lack of support and specific training and programmes that could positively benefit forcibly displaced refugee women entrepreneurs within the host communities.

The novelty of this study lies in the research topic which is still understudied. This is together with the new empirical findings of entrepreneurial OI and the provision of insights related to challenges facing forcibly displaced refugee women entrepreneurs in Glasgow.

The study deploys Anthias' intersectional framework of social spaces and her concept of translocational positionality to explore the barriers to entrepreneurship for refugee entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom (UK). In particular, the study aims to assess how migrant identities require a specific form of business support.

A total of 32 semi-structured interviews with 14 refugee entrepreneurs and 18 business support agents were conducted between April and October 2022 and, together with field notes, were combined for thematic analysis in NVivo 12.

Organisational, representational, intersubjective and experiential barriers combined to create practical and psychological deterrents to entrepreneurship for refugees. However, an explicitly humanistic and de-centred approach to business support was (partially) able to counter such barriers.

Policymakers and business support agencies should consider intersectional characteristics and the importance of a compassionate and individual approach when designing business support programmes for refugee entrepreneurs.

Two intersectional concepts of social spaces and translocational positionality are brought into conversation with each other, creating a novel approach to framing the barriers to entrepreneurship for refugees.

This paper aims to explore the motivations behind women in a developing South Asian country – Sri Lanka – to embark on entrepreneurship in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, which is a doubly masculine hegemony operating within a culturally nuanced gendered context.

The study employs a qualitative research approach, conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 STEM women entrepreneurs, following the theoretical lenses of push and pull motivation theory and gender role theory.

Although the motivations of STEM women entrepreneurs cannot be exclusively categorized as either push or pull factors, the pull factors had a greater influence on the participants in motivating them to become entrepreneurs. The primary motivators for starting businesses in STEM were: inspiration from something or someone, inner calling, the identification of business opportunities, the need for flexibility, necessity and/or desire to help society. It was often difficult to identify one dominant motivator in many instances, as many factors were interlinked to motivate women to start a business. The study also revealed that gender ideologies could stifle the participants' motivation, while the inner need to break these gender ideologies implicitly stimulated their motivation.

The study contributes to and expands the knowledge of STEM women entrepreneurs in general and to the limited existing knowledge of STEM women entrepreneurs in developing countries specifically. The paper brings contextual novelty as Sri Lanka produces more female STEM graduates than men, which is unique compared to most other parts of the world.

This paper investigates how gender, ethnicity, and network membership interact to influence how small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) owner-managers become aware of finance support programmes developed by government policy and/or support schemes advanced by the banking industry.

Drawing on expectation states theory (EST), we develop eight sets of hypotheses and employ the UK SME Finance Monitor data to test them using bivariate probit regression analysis.

In general, network membership increases awareness, but more so for government programmes. We also find no differences between female and male owner-managers when in networks. However, we identify in-network and out-network differences by ethnicity, with minority females seemingly better off than minority males.

Business networks are better for disseminating government programmes than industry-led programmes. For native White women, network membership can enhance policy awareness advantage further, whilst for minorities, networks significantly offset the big policy awareness deficits minorities inherently face. However, policy and practice need to address intersectional inequalities that remain in access to networks themselves, information access within networks, and the significant out-network deficits in awareness of support programmes afflicting minorities.

This study provides one of the first large-scale empirical examinations of intersectional mechanisms in awareness of government and industry-led enterprise programmes. Our novel and nuanced findings advance our understanding of the ways in which gender and ethnicity interact with network dynamics in entrepreneurship.

This study aims to examine the scope and contribution of Forensic Clinical Psychology (FCP) advice from the National Crime Agency (NCA) to criminal investigations in the UK to address the gap in current knowledge and research.

The 36 FCP reports reviewed were written between 2017 and 2021. They were analysed using Toulmin’s (1958) application of pertinent arguments to the evaluation process. The potential utility of the reports was analysed in terms of the advice provided.

Most of the reports involved murder and equivocal death. The reports focused primarily on understanding the offender’s psychopathology, actions, motivation and risk to self and others using a practitioner model of case study methodology. Out of the 539 claims, grounds were provided for 99% of the claims, 91% had designated modality, 62% of the claims were potentially verifiable and 57% of the claims were supported by a warrant and/or backing. Most of the reports provided either moderate or high insight into the offence/offender (92%) and potential for new leads (64%).

The advice provided relied heavily on extensive forensic clinical and investigative experience of offenders, guided by theory and research and was often performed under considerable time pressure. Flexibility, impartiality, rigour and resilience are essential prerequisites for this type of work.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to systematically evaluate forensic clinical psychology reports from the NCA. It shows the pragmatic, dynamic and varied nature of FCP contributions to investigations and its potential utility.

This study aims to analyze the connection between institutional isomorphic pressures and both women serving on boards and women’s influence on boards within large American firms.

This study examines a longitudinal panel data set of all Standard and Poor’s (S&P) 500 organizations across a seven-year period from 2009 to 2015.

The analyses affirm that institutional isomorphic pressures impact the prevalence and influence of women on boards. Evidence suggests that coercive and normative pressures strongly impact the number of women serving as corporate directors, whereas the power of women directors is linked only to mimetic pressures.

The research suggests that to increase the number of women serving as directors, the industry must first increase the overall number of women serving in senior management roles. Once women directors gain a critical mass of three women on the board, the association with the total number of women directors, the number of boards upon which they concurrently serve, the power of women directors being selected to board leadership and the influence of women directors increase.

This paper extends existing board diversity work by examining institutional pressures at the international, national and firm levels. By examining the relationship between coercive, normative and mimetic pressures on both the prevalence of women on boards and the influence of women on boards, the authors illuminate certain mechanisms that shape the likelihood of board appointment and placement in more powerful positions.

Through bibliometric analysis, the study intends to reveal the evolution of the trends in the Scopus database, the scope of research and the connection between technology and entrepreneurship.

This study uses a comprehensive science mapping approach, integrating network visualisation to map research groups, bibliometric analysis to measure publication trends and thematic analysis to identify overarching themes. This study uses a thorough technique to examine the complex interaction between technology and entrepreneurship from 2000 to 2023. The collection includes information from various sources, creating a corpus of 2,207 documents. These sources include 698 scholarly journals, books and other publications.

According to the report, the interest in technology and entrepreneurship is expanding. The three nations conducting the most study on this subject is the USA, the UK and Italy. Some of the top writers in this area include James A. Cunningham, Alison N. Link and David B. Audretsch.

The study found possibilities and problems associated with the interaction between technology and entrepreneurship. Additionally, the study found several research holes in this area. The study also noted some research gaps in this field, including those related to the sustainability of society and the environment, the effects of entrepreneurship on inequality and the difficulties faced by entrepreneurs in underdeveloped nations.

This study thoroughly overviews the business and technology sectors. It outlines some of the difficulties that must be overcome whilst identifying the main research trends in this field. Researchers, decision-makers and businesspeople interested in using technology for entrepreneurial endeavours can all benefit from the study’s findings.

This study’s dataset’s scope, which might not include all pertinent publications, is one of its limitations. Nevertheless, the results add to a thorough picture of the state of the profession and recent developments. This study’s insights are valuable for researchers, policymakers and entrepreneurs interested in leveraging technology for entrepreneurial pursuits.

The research points to a number of directions that need more inquiry, such as in-depth studies into the social and environmental implications of technology-driven entrepreneurship and methods to combat inequality.

This study aims to understand the impact of underlying theme in the communication on social media on funding received by early-stage start-ups.

The study is based on empirical testing of data of 849 start-ups and more than 130K tweets. Machine learning (ML) model has been used for text classification of 130K+ tweets. Causal mediation analysis with bootstrapping is carried out for hypothesis testing.

Tweets addressing quality-related uncertainty are a predictor of amount of funds raised. Audience response acts as a mediator between tweets focusing on relational orientation and amount of funds raised.

The authors advance signaling theory by theorizing and investigating the importance of signal content. Endogenous signal of quality directly influences the start-ups outcomes, while exogenous signal helps disseminate information and influence the success.

Entrepreneurs should put in concerted effort to reduce uncertainty about the start-ups. Value creation is a central concept for start-ups; however, communicating value should be the dominant part of social media strategy.

Computer-based language processing techniques have amplified the research focused on content. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study that explores underlying themes of communication of start-ups and their impact on acquiring funds.

This study aims to address three research questions pertaining to climate neutrality within the supply chain of metal and mining industry: (1) How can an organization implement practices related to climate neutrality in the supply chain? (2) How do members of the supply chain adopt different measures and essential processes to assist an organization in responding to climate change-related concerns? (3) How can the SAP-LAP framework assist in analyzing and proposing solutions to attain climate neutrality?

To address the proposed research questions concerning climate neutrality, this study employs a case study approach utilizing the SAP-LAP (situation, actor, process–learning, action, performance) framework. Within the SAP-LAP framework, adopting a natural resource-based perspective, the study thoroughly examines the intricacies and interactions among existing situations, pertinent actors and processes that impact climate initiatives within a metal and mining company.

The study's findings suggest that organizations can achieve the objective of climate neutrality by prioritizing resources and capabilities that lead to reduced GHG emissions, lower energy consumption and optimal resource utilization. The study further proposes key elements that significantly influence the pursuit of climate neutrality within enterprises.

This study is one of the earliest contributions to the development of a holistic understanding of climate neutrality in the supply chain of the metal and mining industry.

The study will assist practitioners and policymakers in comprehending the present circumstances, actors and processes involved in enterprises' supply networks in order to attain climate neutrality in supply chains, as well as in taking the right steps to enhance performance.

This study presents a climate neutrality model and provides valuable insights into emission management, contributing to the achievement of the climate neutrality objective.