Search results

This article argues that existing research poorly specifies the link between planning and performance because of omitted variable bias. Researchers agree planning is a critical part of creating any new venture. Many researchers assess planning by whether a small firm has a written business plan. Unfortunately, efforts empirically to validate this relationship have been inconclusive. This article proposes that researchers should assess business plans both on the quality of the plan (and the planning process that produced it), and on the quality of the underlying business opportunity. Failure to account for both aspects of a business plan amounts to omitted variable bias, frustrating attempts to accurately estimate the true relationship.

Using the family business succession, resourcebased view of firms, familiness, and organizational clan literatures, this article develops a model based on the ability of the family business to use familiness, a specific bundle of attributes deriving from a family’s culture, as a competitive advantage for the family firm. In particular, this resource-based framework of family business shows how familiness can distinguish between family firms that succeed beyond the second generation and those that do not. Implications for future research are discussed.

Entrepreneurship has been widely recognized as having greatly influenced the United States. Its influence has especially been documented over the past 20 years. Paralleling our societal interest in entrepreneurship has been increasing interest in entrepreneurship education. While our interest in entrepreneurship education has grown considerably over the past two decades, this field of study continues to have critics both within and outside of schools and colleges of business (Kuratko 2004). In spite of these criticisms, some researchers suggest that the United States is still far ahead of other regions of the world in terms of entrepreneurial education (Solomon et al. 1998).

Using entrepreneurship education in the United States as a point of departure, this article uses a case study to analyze the efforts of a private university in Bogota, Colombia, to create a new program in entrepreneurship. The Colombian Legislature passed Law 590 in July 2000 as a means to promote and develop entrepreneurship in the nation. Shortly thereafter a private university in Bogota started a new program in entrepreneurship. At the university's invitation, a small number of faculty from U.S. universities participated in the school's “kick-off” efforts. The paper offers analysis and recommendations based on five criteria: 1) What is taught, 2) Why it is taught, 3) How it is taught, 4) How well it works, and 5) Leadership support. In addition, rather than simply adopting a U.S. or European model of entrepreneurship education, the authors propose that they should develop a center that integrates lessons from other models with elements that are relevant to the local situation.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the implications of the 2013 Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) Accreditation Standards for both business faculty and their deans who are responsible for implementing these changes.

This paper is a speculative viewpoint on the implications of the 2013 AACSB standards by a set of a co-authors that include AACSB deans who are active in accreditation reviews and serve as mentors to schools in the accreditation process and senior faculty who have written self-studies for AACSB and served as consultants for schools seeking AACSB accreditation internationally.

The implications of the 2013 AACSB business accreditation standards are arguably positive for active scholars holding a relevant doctoral degree. For example, active and engaged scholarly faculty should appreciate the ability to use additional indicators of the impact of their career’s intellectual contributions (IC) including, but not limited to, citations, editor ships, professional leadership positions and other measures of professional esteem.

The implications of the 2013 AACSB accreditation standards for deans are potentially less positive. The new standards codify one of the deans’ major duties – that of ensuring that the faculty have resources adequate to support the school’s mission.

This paper represents a starting point for understanding the implications of the 2013 AACSB accreditation standards, and that as the standards are operationalized over the subsequent years that these standards, like the previous changes in AACSB standards, will stimulate additional research on business school accreditation. The implications for both faculty and deans are speculative, but are grounded both by the literature and experience of the authors. The paper uses a set of tables to illustrate the impact of the new AACSB standards with examples for each guiding principle and standard.

The paper aims to clarify a debate about the legitimacy of entrepreneurship as a field of study. Katz and Kuratko continued this discussion by evaluating the legitimacy as an academic discipline. Their work extends the earlier contributions of Stephenson, Meyer, Finkle et al., and Fiet. Their research focused on the use of secondary data to consider this research question. This study uses an empirical evaluation of the actors that form the basis of this field of study, the faculty that teach entrepreneurship.

This study used an online survey to ascertain the academic background, dissertation subject, doctoral course work, teaching assignments, and research output of individuals that described themselves as entrepreneurship faculty.

The results show that a significant percentage of the sample of college instructors did not have a doctorate in entrepreneurship, nor did they study entrepreneurship in their curriculum thereby potentially undermining perceptions of legitimacy.

This study was based upon feedback from 112 faculty. A test using a χ2 goodness-of-fit showed there was no significant difference between the geographic location of respondents to non-respondents. The findings paint a distressing picture of the academic qualifications of the faculty assigned to teach entrepreneurship. In addition, the results were disappointing for the research productivity of faculty in the field. The fact that so many of them view themselves as entrepreneurship and small business faculty reinforces the significance of the findings. In general, the authors find empirical evidence in the sample that entrepreneurship and small business may not be viewed as a legitimate field due to the lack of academic credentials and the extensive professional credentials of their instructors.

The findings demonstrate that entrepreneurship is likely not considered legitimate, in part, due to a lack of academic preparation or research productivity of instructors within the field of entrepreneurship. The lack of doctoral preparation is a critical problem. This issue would not be paramount where faculty publishing solely in the field. However, the findings demonstrate self-described entrepreneurship instructors publish in other fields of study. Thus, the fact that faculty do not solely teach in the field is also testimony to the challenges of legitimacy faced by individuals that teach entrepreneurship.

The authors are not aware of any studies that specifically evaluate the academic background, dissertation subject, doctoral course work, teaching assignments, and research output of individuals that teach entrepreneurship.

This chapter offers a description and analysis of teacher preparation in Scotland from the period after World War 1 to the end of the twentieth century. It traces the development of the sector from Training Centres responsible to Provincial and National Committees, through monotechnic Colleges of Education, to Faculties of Education within Universities. Among the topics covered are: political and economic pressures affecting the policy context; the drive to improve standards and raise the professional status of teachers; the influence of key policy documents, such as the 1965 Primary Memorandum; the degree of control exercised by the Scottish Education Department; the significance of shifts in language (e.g. training/education/professional learning). The 1960s are seen as a particularly important period when major structural changes were introduced in Scottish education (e.g. the establishment of the General Teaching Council and Central Committees reviewing particular aspects of the school curriculum): these impacted on the aims and content of courses designed to prepare trainee teachers for work in schools. Similarly, later reforms of curriculum and assessment (Standard Grade, 5–14, Higher Still) necessitated responses by the teacher education community. Throughout the chapter certain key themes recur: the relationship between colleges and universities; the variable scope for innovation at different points in the twentieth century; the differential provision for primary and secondary teachers, graduates and non-graduates, men and women; the relative importance of academic knowledge and pedagogic skills.

The purpose of the chapter is to elaborate the theory of academic capitalism by focusing on rarely examined forerunners of academic capitalism: namely, business schools.

A research-based essay.

The findings emphasize that there are different forms of academic capitalism. Our example from Dubai context shows how more extreme form of academic capitalism, which we label Acamanic Capitalism, developed as a result of free educational markets.

The chapter provides scholarly value through novel conceptualization. The phenomenon of acamanic capitalism should also be acknowledged in academia and in critical management education.

The purpose of this article is to explore preference for privacy among people with different demographic and cultural backgrounds. In particular the study aims to investigate the effect of age, gender, previous experience of space and cultural background on people's chosen spatial location for privacy in multi‐bed wards.

A group of 79 subjects were asked to complete a questionnaire on privacy and to select preferred and disliked locations on plans of hospital wards. Spatial data were provided by space syntax analysis (VGA). Possible subgroups in the data were investigated by tests of difference and latent class analysis applied to those spatial attributes which appeared to be relevant to people's preferences on locations for privacy.

The results show that privacy regulation encompasses universal and specific aspects across cultures, age, gender and previous experience of space. Specifically, the results suggest a universal preference for spatial location of privacy across culture, age and gender and a specific significant difference for spatial location of privacy as a result of previous spatial experience. In addition, the VGA integration measure was found to be a highly significant discriminator between preferred and disliked locations for privacy.

There are two particular limitations requiring further study. First, the study investigated only one facet of privacy, i.e. spatial location. More investigation is required to explore the inter‐relationships between spatial location and other facets of privacy, primarily that of intervisibility. Second, only two broader cultures (European and Arabic) were considered.

Ideally it would have been of benefit if a greater number of the people sampled had had direct experience of hospital wards.

At a general level the study supports the notion that there are universal and specific aspects to privacy. At a specific level the research links physical aspects of spatial location (i.e. visibility graph analysis measures) into this discussion.

“Concurrent sourcing” is a term used by Parmigiani to describe the phenomenon where a firm simultaneously buys and makes the same good or service. The purpose of this paper is to develop propositions that suggest how concurrent sourcing affects performance.

Based on transaction cost, agency, neoclassical economic, knowledge‐based, and resource‐based theory, it is proposed to show how concurrent sourcing affects performance.

The paper argues that concurrent sourcing improves performance when firms face a combination of volume uncertainty, technological uncertainty, performance uncertainty, non‐decomposability, transaction‐specific investments, and strong internal and external capabilities.

The paper maps the relationships between concurrent sourcing and performance and discusses how these relationships can be modelled. The propositions and discussion offer researchers a starting‐point for further research.

The propositions that are developed suggest that managers should consider using concurrent sourcing when they face problems caused by volume uncertainty, technological uncertainty, performance uncertainty, non‐decomposability, and asset specificity. Concurrent sourcing can also be a way to exploit both strong internal capabilities and external suppliers' strong capabilities.

The main contribution is a number of propositions, explanations, and discussions regarding how concurrent sourcing affects performance of the market and the hierarchy.