Search results

This chapter explores the importance of place in the creation of new enterprise and wealth.

The chapter deploys a case study of the Liverpool city-region and provides a critical review of the conditions for small enterprise in the locality, with attention paid to enterprise in low income communities.

The argument here suggests that place and public investment are important contributory factors to help understand how enterprise can contribute to wealth creation.

Further work is required to comprehend the wider aspects of enterprise in the context of place and particularly its relevance to low income communities.

Policy makers may acknowledge how enterprise as a tool of wealth creation can reinforce local dynamics of social and economic exclusion and that the nuance of place needs to be taken into account.

Small enterprises have a wider potential beyond their economic role to impact local communities.

There are some studies in entrepreneurship that consider the propinquity between enterprise, place and wealth creation although placing this in the context of local economic decline and low income communities is a relatively under researched and misunderstood domain.

In recent years, the number of small independent tourism social enterprises has soared globally due to the rise of the Internet and tourists’ search for unique local experiences. These organizations are driven by a social purpose and have emerged as a reaction to conventional tourism development. They adopt a social justice approach with the aim to enhance community well-being. Importantly, they now exist as an accompaniment to the experiences provided by mainstream tourism that may not adequately satisfy the tourists’ quests for local, authentic, and high involvement experiences. This chapter reviews this independent operator context in Mauritius and examines the factors which contribute to meaningful local experiences.

Accompanying the development of economy, multinational enterprises (MNEs), as a role of promoting economic development, may also lead to environmental pollution of host countries. China has become one of the most significant countries in terms of introducing foreign direct investment (FDI), along with which the pollution problem has become serious. Whether the MNEs affect the environment and whether the MNEs in China perform worse than local enterprises attracts more attention. To understand more about it, we creatively build a model of vertical product differentiation, and the result indicates that the environmental performance of MNEs is better than that of local enterprises.

Flows of transnational popular culture into Egypt are not so much cases of foreign imperialism imposing itself on helpless Egyptians as they are processes managed by Cairene entrepreneurs whose accomplishments present them as successful agents of modernization, locating the cosmopolitan balance between global brands and goods and local markets and infrastructures. This chapter explores the links between these entrepreneurs, the state's “culture of development,” and class reproduction. Egyptian transnational entrepreneurialism – speculative, profit-oriented enterprises engaged with transnational flows of brands, commodities, and capital – has become yoked to the state's goal of national development through economic liberalization. Upper-class cosmopolitan entrepreneurs are increasingly positioned as agents of hybridity, culture brokers who can creatively forge links between supposedly rational and universal economic practices of market capital, and local cultural beliefs and values. Successful entrepreneurs are construed as possessing an “entrepreneurial imagination” by means of which they can overcome structural and cultural obstacles and contribute to the development of an Egyptian “enterprise culture.”

Russia's size – both in terms of population and geography, spanning 11 time zones, 89 oblasts (states or regions) and autonomous republics and its privatization program, encompassing some 100,000 small-scale enterprises, 25,000 medium to large firms, and 300 or so of its largest firms, made its privatization program the largest sale/transfer of assets conducted among the transition economies, with the possible exception of China. Comparisons by many of the program's critics, and there are many, to Poland, Hungary, or the Czech republic are invidious, especially the latter two countries whose populations are similar to just that of greater Moscow.

This chapter develops a community perspective on entrepreneurialization and demonstrates the epistemic value of community-based analysis. It focuses on the particularities of socio-economic settings that shape the emergence of social enterprises and allows for a consideration of diverse groups of actors beyond entrepreneurs.

The chapter draws from a literature review on UK policies around social enterprise and an ethnographic study of a deprived community in North-West England. It provides an in-depth account of how competition for scarce funds and the new hope around entrepreneurialism are negotiated and translated into action by policy actors in one local community.

The review contextualizes the evolution of social enterprise in the United Kingdom and highlights the need for grounded analysis of the effects of policies. A range of themes emerge from the ethnographic case: a misalignment between social workers’ and beneficiaries’ expectations and interests; a tendency to shift from holistic welfare to narrow, time-limited interventions; the importance of spatiality for issues of deprivation; and imbalances in the flows of money and attention between different communities.

The chapter questions the emphasis placed upon social enterprise as a source of innovation. The suggested focus on community redirects scholarly debate to the most important group of actors: the socially, politically, or economically excluded target groups of social innovations.

This chapter contributes to our understanding of the roles being played by social enterprises in a community and raises questions about their value as a vehicle of policy and of innovation.

This chapter aims to explore the means by which rural food business networks can contribute to sustainable rural development.

This chapter explores the role of rural food business networks in sustainable rural development. This is conducted initially through a literature review. This is followed by presentation of case studies of two Irish rural food business networks; a discussion of the evident rural development brought about by the actions and activities of these networks; and an exploration of some of the factors that influence the capacity of the networks to bring about rural development.

This chapter presents evidence that demonstrates the important contribution rural business networks can make to rural development. It also finds that factors such as autonomy, embeddedness and place can influence the effectiveness of a network in bringing about and sustaining rural development.

Despite several interesting findings emerging from this research, the level to which these findings can be generalised is limited. Future research of aspects of network operation such as access to infrastructure and services would assist in ascertaining the importance of place for rural business networks and their ability to bring about rural development.

Given the significant role that networks now play in the rural development strategies of place-based organisations, this chapter has important implications for how those organisations initiate and structure those networks.

This chapter can serve as an encouragement to rural entrepreneurs to engage in networking activities to reduce rural isolation, create stronger links with their consumers and to sustain their businesses.

The focus of this chapter on factors such as embeddedness, autonomy and place and their impact on rural business networks, provides a rare opportunity to the reader to appreciate the influence of these factors on networks and their capacity to bring about and sustain rural development.

This chapter uses a historical lens to analyse the role of governance institutions in shaping enterprising places using the context of the English city of Coventry in the early to late Middle Ages. Using historical documentation as an empirical method, this chapter examines the formation, evolution, growth, maturation, decline of institutional structures, related governance mechanisms and their interactions with other institutional influences that shaped the entrepreneurial nature of the city and its economy. The chapter discusses aspects of success, failures and discontinuities that beset the entrepreneurial landscape of the city and draws parallels to some contemporary developments in UK’s entrepreneurial governance.

The chapter is underpinned by a research methodological approach that is historical and processual in nature and relies on historical documentation including archival sources of empirical material and other published data which have not previously been studied in the context of entrepreneurship and public governance. The research method and approach addresses a methodological and conceptual void in extant entrepreneurship literature.

The empirical findings from archival sources of data and their analysis sheds a new interpretive light on the nature of enterprising places as a combination of continual historical synergies in the specific context of Coventry. The chapter specifically focuses on the role of merchant and craft guilds as a unique presence in the entrepreneurial landscape of Coventry in the early to late Middle Ages and their contribution as powerful institutional and governance forces in shaping the city’s economic history. The guilds and associated governance institutions exercised and enacted multiple economic, legislative, regulatory, civic, municipal, socio-cultural and religious roles and left a strong imprint on the city’s economic destiny that endured for several centuries. Through the interpenetrative influences of these guilds with other political, royal and religious institutional structures of their day, the economic history of the city and its enterprise was woven together in a fabric of cooperation, discord and power struggles. The historical analysis provides a powerful narrative in charting this story and draws parallels to ongoing struggles in contemporary developments in Coventry’s entrepreneurial governance and leadership.

The chapter contributes a historic and contextually enriched sensibility in understanding the entrepreneurial and economic history of Coventry as viewed through the lens of institutional interactions and provides a valuable study that draws parallels between the past and the present. It provides a historically informed approach in understanding the current context of the nation’s local and regional economic policies and attempts to understand how enterprise and enterprising places thrive and sometimes struggle to survive within such a landscape.

The chapter is a unique take on the analysis of entrepreneurship and institutional governance of a city’s local economy in that it takes a historical perspective of issues that animate current public discourse. A historical approach to studying entrepreneurship provides a longitudinal and macro perspective to studying ideological debates that shade contemporary economic, political and socio-cultural governance. The analysis draws interesting parallels to the power discourses and dynamics and ideological conflicts that shaped institutional influences across centuries that impacted upon the city’s economy and use that as a backdrop to comment upon contemporary developments in the policy landscape viewed as an articulation of a political-ideological agenda. The analysis provides and calls for a greater application of historical sensibilities in governance and entrepreneurship scholarship in order to glean valuable lessons.