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The behaviour of an enterprise (including ethical behaviour) strongly depends on the organization’s culture, values and beliefs. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that organizational culture differs according to enterprise life cycle stage. Also the importance of the knowledge and awareness of these differences to enterprises’ management in order to be able to ensure enterprises’ success is argued.

The case study research methodology was applied to explore the differences in the type of organizational culture as well as cultural strength depending on the enterprise’s life cycle stage. For the empirical testing, the author have selected Slovenia, one of the most developed European post-socialist transition countries.

The research revealed differences in the types and strengths of enterprises’ organizational cultures and showed their dependence on the enterprises’ life cycle stages.

Knowledge of differences in organizational culture in relation to an enterprise’s life cycle stage can significantly contribute to the behaviour of the enterprise’s key stakeholders by ensuring the long-term and sustainable success of the enterprise.

The available literature does not provide similar research of differences in organizational culture in relation to an enterprise’s life cycle stages.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the literature that has sought to deconstruct this ideologically driven depiction by demonstrating how the existent enterprise culture in post-Soviet spaces not only challenges the depiction of the entrepreneur as a heroic icon of the legitimate capitalist culture but also opens up the feasibility of alternative futures beyond legitimate profit-driven capitalism. The starting point of this paper is that the enterprise culture is often viewed as inextricably related to the legitimate capitalist economy.

To unravel the nature of the enterprise culture in lived practice, this paper reports a 2006 survey involving face-to-face interviews with 90 entrepreneurs in Moscow.

Only 7 per cent of the Muscovite entrepreneurs surveyed pursue profit-driven legitimate entrepreneurship. The vast majority adopts social goals to varying degrees and operates wholly or partially in the informal economy. The outcome is to challenge the depiction of an enterprise culture and capitalism as inextricably inter-related and to open up entrepreneurship and enterprise culture in this post-Soviet space to re-signification as demonstrative of the feasibility of imagining and enacting alternative futures beyond capitalism.

These findings are tentative, as they are based on a small-scale study of just one post-socialist city. Further research is now required to analyse whether the lived practices of entrepreneurship and enterprise cultures are similarly diverse in other post-Soviet spaces as well as beyond.

This is the first paper to evaluate critically the assumption that enterprise culture is a part of the legitimate capitalist economy in post-Soviet spaces.

This paper explores the impact of affirmative action on the culture of small business enterprises in South Africa. The functions of organizational culture are explored and utilized to reach a deeper understanding of the desired impact of affirmative action. Managers are identified as holding key roles as change agents. Recommendations include managing change from a culture perspective directed at creating participative management processes and shifting the enterprise’s essential values.

In recent years, China is exerting effort to improve the performance effectiveness of its construction industry. This paper aims to report a preliminary study on organisational culture of five selected construction enterprises from different geographical locations in China and to discuss a framework for developing effectiveness measurement criteria for Chinese construction enterprises.

The research approach focuses on the culture profiles of the selected enterprises which have similar size, number of employees, general reputation (in terms of quality of construction), business type (building works) and tax bracket. The measuring instrument of organisational culture is adopted from previous tested research.

It is found that the hierarchy culture is dominant in four cases; Shantou in the Special Economic Zone is the exception. The Shantou enterprise has a market culture and Shantou was one of the first regions to embark on economic reform. Further analysis is required of the spread of the culture profiles in terms of geopraphcial regions and developmental stages of the construction enterprises in China.

The result of the five case studies is indicative of the presence of the dichotomy in hierarchy – market culture dominance. Evaluation of operational effectiveness of such organisations must depend on their developmental stages in line with their stated objectives, and a framework for effectiveness measurement is proposed.

Enterprise education (EE) is a growing educational phenomenon. Despite its proliferation globally, there is little critical research on the field. In particular, the ideological potential of EE has been ignored by education scholars. This paper is the first to review the history of the Enterprise New Zealand Trust (ENZT) (known as the Young Enterprise Trust from 2009), as the largest and oldest organisation for the delivery of EE in New Zealand. It examines the activities of the ENZT and its networks in the context of the ascent of neoliberalism including its cultural manifestation in the form of a national “enterprise culture”. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the precise nature of the proximity between the ENZT and neoliberal ideology.

This paper uses document analysis, internet searches and interviews to reconstruct aspects of the history of the ENZT. Historical examination of the ENZT is in part obstructed by a lack of access to direct source material prior to the 1990s, as publications and materials of the ENZT are only available in archives from the early 1990s. The ENZT was, however, important to broader historical networks and actors, such as employer associations and think tanks, who left behind more robust records. Unlike the ENZT itself, these actors are given significant attention in literature which can be drawn upon to further enhance understandings of the ENZT and its relationship to neoliberalism.

This paper reveals that the ENZT has been a major conduit for enterprise culture and neoliberalism since its inception. It has been explicitly concerned with the development of enterprise culture through activities targeting both school students and the general public. Its educational activities, though presented in non-ideological terms, were designed to inculcate students in neoliberal or free market capitalist principles, including amenability towards private ownership of goods and services, private investment, private finance of public projects, free markets and free trade. These findings might serve to encourage critical attitudes among researchers and policy actors as to the broader ideological role of EE on a general scale.

EE on the whole requires closer examination by critical education researchers. The overwhelmingly majority of existing research is concerned with enhancing the practices of EE, while deeper questions regarding its ideological implications are ignored. Perhaps as a result, EE as a conceptual category lacks definitional clarity, as researchers and policy actors grapple with its meaning. If it can be established that EE schemes are not merely “neutral” or non-ideological educational projects, but rather are serious purveyors of ideology, this should have implications for future research and particularly for policy actors involved in the field. A review of the history of the ENZT may be illuminative in this respect, as it reveals the organisation’s record of deliberate political or ideological messaging.

This paper is the first to review the history of the ENZT as the largest provider of EE in New Zealand. EE has become a global phenomenon in recent decades. Non-existent in New Zealand before the 1970s, it is now a staple of the school system, its principles enshrined in the national curriculum document. Within a decade of the ENZT’s inauguration in 1986, eight out of ten secondary schools were using its services. Despite this, the ENZT is all but absent from existing historical literature. Analysing the history of the ENZT allows for enhanced understanding of an important actor within New Zealand education, whose history has been overlooked, as well as provides insight into the broader ideological implications of EE.

The purpose of the present study is to build a research model to study how the use of different enterprise social media platforms affects employees' relationship capital, and the moderating role of innovation culture is also examined.

Structural equation modeling was performed to test the research model and hypotheses. Surveys were conducted in an electronic commerce company in China that uses different social media platforms, generating 301 valid responses for analysis.

First, private social media used for work-related purposes can contribute to employees' relationship capital, and public social media QQ used for work-related purposes can contribute to employees' communication quality. WeChat used for social-related purposes has a positive effect on employees' information exchange. Second, innovation culture acts as a positive moderator between work-related media use and employees' information exchange, while innovation culture acts as a negative moderator between social-related WeChat use and employees' information exchange. Third, innovation culture acts as a positive moderator between work-related QQ use and employees' trust, while innovation culture acts as a negative moderator between social-related QQ use and employees' trust.

First, this paper contributes to the information system (IS) social media literature by studying the effect of the use of different enterprise social media platforms used for different purposes on employees' relationship capital. Second, the authors contribute to relationship capital theory by clarifying that use of public and private social media platforms for social- and work-related purposes is an important driver of the formation of employees' relational capital. Third, the present study also contributes to enterprise social media literature by confirming that innovation culture acts as a different moderator between use of different enterprise social media platforms and employees' relationship capital.

To explore the cultural context of Indigenous family entrepreneurs and to apply to them the concept of n-Culturals, thus contributing to validating the concept.

Interview data collected from Wayuu entrepreneurs in La Guajira region of Colombia and from Māori entrepreneurs in the Rotorua region of New Zealand were analyzed qualitatively. The analysis primarily focused on Wayuu entrepreneurs, with the results for Māori entrepreneurs used for comparison, to help to interpret the Wayuu data.

For Wayuu entrepreneurs, family members play a range of crucial roles in enterprise operations, with the family and the kin-centered local Indigenous community emerging as an informal organization surrounding the enterprise. Family is the source of Indigenous culture, while the mainstream culture is centered on global Western business culture, rather than the culture of the country. The Indigenous entrepreneurs integrate the values of the two cultures in managing their enterprises, thus acting as n-Cultural. Māori entrepreneurs who managed enterprises with a strong Indigenous character were similar in this respect to Wayuu entrepreneurs.

As n-Culturals integrating the values of Indigenous culture and the mainstream culture, Indigenous entrepreneurs develop valuable traits, becoming a valuable component of the human capital in their regions, even when their enterprises fail.

Existing research on multicultural individuals is largely limited to immigrants and expatriates. By characterizing Indigenous family entrepreneurs as n-Culturals, the present study contributes to validating the concept and opens the way for further research on how Indigenous entrepreneurs manage their multicultural identities.

This paper explores the role of religion in the formation and development of the enterprise culture. The approach is that of legitimisation leading to an increase in environmental munificence. It is argued that entrepreneurial activity was encouraged by the use of an entrepreneurial theology specifically articulated by Margaret Thatcher. Parallels are drawn to Max Weber’s work on the Protestant work ethic, particularly in the way that he argued that changes in the socio‐cultural framework of theology allowed, permitted and encouraged entrepreneurial action in what he called the new rational capitalism. Different aspects of the theological underpinnings of enterprise are discussed. The key findings are that religion played a significant role. It provided a Thatcherite rhetoric which became a moral crusade which was passionately pursued. Entrepreneurship was thus elevated to a new moral high ground; this was in spite of the strongly contested views of the Church. Interestingly, it appears that religious support for entrepreneurship, albeit in a modified form, continues with New Labour.

This study aims to assess the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and development culture and the role of willingness-to-change in this relationship and analyzes their effect on new product exploration in small enterprises.

A model based on structural equations with partial least squares (PLS) analysis is used to test the hypotheses. This model was tested on a sample of 250 respondents from 125 small enterprises, with less than 50 employees, located in all seven emirates of the UAE.

The results suggest that EO will induce organizational members’ willingness-to-change and will favor the advancement of a development culture in small enterprises; in addition, EO, willingness-to-change and development culture can lead to new product exploration in small enterprises.

The study findings are subject to potential limitations. First, the research design for the quantitative study was cross-sectional and self-reported, which could cause problems of common method and inflation bias. Second, the conceptual model may not be completely representative of the perspective the authors aim to elucidate. Third, as this study is country-specific, further research investigation in other developing economies is recommended to further understand the possible influences of cultural or socioeconomic contexts on the relationships presented in the model.

The article includes several practical implications about the relationships between willingness-to-change and development culture. It sheds light on the controversial link between EO and new product exploration in small enterprises.

The present study expands current knowledge on the EO–new product exploration relationship by investigating some key mediating variables such as willingness-to-change and development culture in an under-researched context such as UAE.

As a social construct, entrepreneurship is portrayed as an unashamedly masculine endeavour. This forms the basis for much feminist research in entrepreneurship. Despite a sustained research effort in the field of gendered entrepreneurship research this polarised viewpoint remains under researched from the perspective of masculinity. Rather than perpetuate the polarity this short article aims to consider the concept of gendered entrepreneurial regimes as an explanatory variable.

Using documentary analysis techniques this article seeks to document the existence of a particular gendered local regime in the form of “Essex‐Boy culture”.

The findings although tentative indicate that as a recognised gendered local regime Essex‐Boy identity manifests itself physically at a conceptual, gendered, geographic, community and cultural level. Semiotically it can be expressed as a legitimate business identity, a criminal identity, a celebrity status, a political identity, as parody, caricature and as metaphor. It can be expressed as an ideology, a doxa, class position, a culture or as an initiating dream. It also exists at a narrative level via memoires, biographies, jokes or scripted insult.

Given that this is a preliminary study based on secondary documents there is clearly scope for other studies to be conducted into this interesting phenomenon.

The study has implications for what can be legitimately studied under the rubric of gendered entrepreneurial research.

This study is original in its exclusive use of documentary research/analysis to uncover gendered aspects of an under studied entrepreneurial regime.