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This study aims to examine franchising from an entrepreneurial perspective. The study investigates the extent to which franchisees exhibit entrepreneurial characteristics and various aspects of franchise development.

The questionnaire was distributed to 430 franchisees operating in India and 409 responses were received. Descriptive and inferential statistics, such as correlation, analysis of variance and structural equation modeling were used to analyze the data.

The study’s findings indicate that franchisees also exhibit entrepreneurial characteristics and behavior. Additionally, as evidenced by their franchisee selection process, franchisors appear to value entrepreneurial personalities within their franchised outlets.

By generating sufficient business enterprises, the franchising system of entrepreneurship can be promoted as one of the solutions for developing countries. Additionally, the findings of this study suggest research implications for elucidating the entrepreneurial position of franchisees.

Considerable ambiguity exists when franchisees’ activities of operating and managing their outlets are considered entrepreneurial firms. The purpose of this study is to examine the role of franchising in the development of entrepreneurship. It provides empirical evidence for the extent of franchisees’ entrepreneurial tendencies and elaborates on key arguments in the franchising and entrepreneurship kinds of literature.

This study aims to develop an instrument that examines the franchisor as an entrepreneurial form. Although examining the entrepreneurial tendencies of the franchisors has been a central goal of the present research, the study also uncovers the factors that lead firms to offer franchises and promote franchisor growth.

Data was collected from the population of franchisor organizations in India by following a survey approach. Statistical techniques including descriptive and inferential statistics like correlation and structural equation modeling were used to analyze the data.

The study results show that franchisors possess entrepreneurship traits and reveal entrepreneurial behavior. The study also provides empirical evidence toward various dimensions that contribute to franchisor growth.

The results of the present study propose research implications toward clarification of the entrepreneurial position of the franchisors in the extensively unclear research area.

Considerable ambiguity surrounds franchisors’ activities running and managing their business as entrepreneurial firms. By indicating franchisors’ entrepreneurial traits, the study expatiates on major franchising and entrepreneurship literature arguments.

Although previous research has examined the role of franchising for the economic development of countries, no empirical study to date has investigated the importance of franchising for social, infrastructural, and institutional development. The authors address this research gap by applying research results from the field of sustainable entrepreneurship and highlight that franchising has a positive impact on economic, social, institutional and infrastructural development.

This study uses a fixed-effects model on a panel dataset for 2006–2015 from 49 countries to test the hypothesis that franchising positively influences various dimensions of country development such as economic social institutional and infrastructural development.

The findings highlight that franchising has a positive impact on the economic, social, infrastructural, and institutional development of a country. Specifically, the results show that the earlier and the more franchising systems enter a country, the stronger the positive impact of franchising on the country's economic, social, institutional, and infrastructural development.

This study has several limitations that provide directions for further research. First, the empirical investigation is limited by the characteristics of the data, which are composed of information from 49 countries (covering a period of 10 years). Because franchising is not recognized as a form of entrepreneurial governance in many emerging and developing countries, the available information is mainly provided by the franchise associations in the various countries. Hence, there is a need to collect additional data in each country and to include additional countries. Second, although the authors included developed and developing countries in the analysis, the authors could not differentiate between developed and developing countries when testing the hypotheses, because the database was not sufficiently complete. Third, future studies should analyze the causality issue between franchising and development more closely. The role of franchising in development may be changing depending on different unobserved country factors, economic sector characteristics, or development stages.

What are the practical implications of this study for the role of franchising in the development of emerging and developing economies? Because public policy in emerging and developing countries suffers from a lack of financial resources to improve the social, infrastructural and institutional environment, entrepreneurs, such as franchisors who expand into these countries, play an important role for these countries' development. In addition to their entrepreneurial role of exploring and exploiting profit opportunities, they are social, institutional, and political entrepreneurs who may positively influence country development (Schaltegger and Wagner, 2011; Shepard and Patzelt, 2011). Specifically, the findings highlight that countries with an older franchise sector (more years of franchise experience) may realize first-mover advantages and hence larger positive spillover effects on their economic, social, institutional and infrastructural development than countries with a younger franchise sector. Hence, governments of emerging and developing countries have the opportunity and responsibility to reduce potential market entry barriers and provide additional incentives for franchise systems in order to trigger these positive spillover effects. The authors expect that the spillover effects from the franchise sector on the economic, institutional, social and infrastructural development of a country are stronger in emerging and developing countries than in developed countries.

Previous research has focused on the impact of franchising on the economic development of a country, such as its growth of gross domestic product (GDP), employment, business skills, innovation and technology transfer. This study extends the existing literature by going beyond the impact of franchising on economic development: the results show that franchising as an entrepreneurial activity offers opportunities for economic, social, institutional, and infrastructural development, all of which are particularly important for emerging and developing economies. The findings of this study contribute to the international franchise and development economics literature by offering a better understanding of the impact of franchising on country development.

In spite of the important contributions of franchising to many economies, it remains unclear whether it truly provides a scope for entrepreneurial tendencies to flourish amongst franchisees. The purpose of this paper is to examine the debate surrounding the franchisee as an entrepreneur from the perspectives of the main contributors within the UK franchising sector, franchisors and franchisees, by analysing their entrepreneurial tendencies and the franchisee selection process.

The paper is based on an empirical study using a focus group and a survey approach.

The findings from this study demonstrate that franchisees have similar levels of entrepreneurial tendencies to franchisors. The results further indicate that franchisors appear to value entrepreneurial personalities within their franchised outlets, as demonstrated by their franchisee selection process.

By providing an indication of the extent of the franchisee’s entrepreneurial tendencies, this study expatiates on major arguments in the franchising and entrepreneurship literature, which are also profound amongst practitioners in the fields of franchising and entrepreneurship.

Drawing on an outside-in marketing perspective, this paper aims to outline the development, implementation, evaluation and reflection of a real-world entrepreneurship education (EE) intervention with cognitive, affective and ultimately behavioural objectives.

A specific and uniform EE program specifically targeted to current “would be” entrepreneurs who were investigating the franchising business model was developed, focusing on the behavioural outcomes. The effectiveness of the EE intervention was evaluated using a quasi-experimental research design, which involved franchisees who had not participated in the EE intervention (control group) and franchisees who had participated in the EE intervention (experimental group). The administration of the national on-line survey yielded a total of 520 responses (194 in the experimental group and 326 in the control group).

The planning process in the pre-intervention stage included situation analysis, objective setting and decisions in relation to the communication strategy, i.e. content and mode. The effectiveness of the EE intervention was evaluated in the post-intervention stage. The findings indicate that EE intervention resulted in participants’ positive cognitive, affective and behavioural outcomes such as performance and relationship management. Finally, following a reflection process, additional elements covering topics related to work-life balance were incorporated into the module pertaining to an individual’s suitability to become a franchisee.

This paper proposes a conceptual framework that represents an outside-in EE approach whereby problems, audiences, objectives and communication strategies (content and method) are strategically intertwined to produce relevant, measurable and diagnostic behavioural outcomes. The EE intervention can also improve the B2B relationship between actors in a business network.

This paper aims to demonstrate how franchising firms can manage system expansion by weathering the economic effects of a location (i.e. country-level economic cycles) by shifting their resources.

The authors use a comprehensive database of 151 US hybrid franchising organizations, including observations for the years between 2001 and 2008. Data analysis is conducted with count model panel data with a Poisson distribution.

The model reveals a curvilinear U-shaped relationship between location (i.e. economic cycles) and franchising expansion.

This study contributes to competitiveness literature by showing how franchising firms respond to changing local conditions.

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has emerged as a core concept in the field of entrepreneurship. Yet, there continue to be questions about the nature of EO and how best to conceptualize and measure it. This chapter makes the case that EO has grown beyond its roots as a firm-level unidimensional strategy construct and that a new multidimensional version of EO is needed to capture the diverse manifestations and venues for entrepreneurial activity that are now evident around the world – global entrepreneurial orientation (GEO). Building on the five-dimension multidimensional view of EO set forth when Lumpkin and Dess (1996) extended the work of Miller (1983) and Covin and Slevin (1989, 1991), the chapter offers an updated definition of EO and a fresh interpretation of why EO matters theoretically. Despite earnest efforts to reconcile the different approaches to EO, in order to move the study of EO and the theoretical conversation about it forward, we maintain that as a group of scholars and a field, we need to acknowledge that two different versions of EO have emerged. Given that, we consider original approaches to measuring EO, evaluate formative measurement models, consider multiple levels of analysis, call for renewed attention to EO configurations, and discuss whether there is a theory of EO.

This paper aims to evaluate the antecedents of franchise relationship development from the perspective of a sample of Chinese and Turkish franchisees.

This study explores relationship development through semi-structured interviews with Chinese and Turkish franchisees.

The findings of the study demonstrated that both the culturally adapted role performance of franchisors and communication geared towards knowledge transfer contribute to relationship development with franchisees.

This exploratory study evaluated the influence of role performance and communication as factors influencing relationship development. Further research could explore other factors in other countries and industries.

To build and develop long-term relationships with franchisees, franchisors need to invest in continuously improving their franchise infrastructures and enhancing their brand reputations. Communication and knowledge transfer between the franchisors and the franchisees are crucial for the management of dynamic relationships.

This paper advances franchising literature by offering a combined and complementary theoretical perspective to our understanding of the influence of power and social investments in relationship development between franchisees and franchisors. In particular, the study identifies role performance of franchisor and communication with franchisees as the key antecedents of relationship development.

To interpret and explain evolution in entrepreneurial thought, using the application of history to unify the extant and wide‐ranging concepts underlying the field to detect a conceptual foundation.

A conceptual approach is taken, the paper undertaking a delineation of how past theory has brought about the field's current state and an identification of some conceptual areas for future advancement.

The importance and impact of the entrepreneurship field is increasing in academic and practical settings. A historical view on the conceptual development of entrepreneurial thought provides a lens for scholars as well as practitioners to interpret and explain their own entrepreneurial activity or research and formulate new questions.

The paper aids scholars and researchers to interpret and explain entrepreneurial activity.