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The purpose of this paper is to identify the potential business opportunities for Middle Eastern entrepreneurs by understanding the Malaysian Muslim’s ways of experiencing and realising value of products originating from Middle Eastern countries.

Phenomenography approach has been used to identify the variations among the Muslim consumers’ ways of experiencing Middle Eastern products.

The authors reported that Muslim consumers considered the country of origin as an important cue that affects their knowing, understanding, judging and acting on products originating from Middle Eastern countries.

Understanding developed from the Malaysian Muslim consumers enabled authors to suggest business opportunities for Middle Eastern entrepreneurs to enter and expand their operations in other leading Islamic countries.

The purpose of this study is to analyze crowdfunding (CF) as new entrepreneurial finance (EF) tool and to predict the success of CF projects in the Middle East region.

This study was conducted in seven Middle Eastern countries (i.e. Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and UAE) in addition to serval CF platforms that are commonly used by crowd funders in this region (such as Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Beehive and Zoomal) with total members (195,193). A pilot sample of 20 units was used to validate and verify the research instrument of the study. The research sample consists of 1,910 respondents from the seven countries included in the study. The study emphasizes the partners, micro-structures, administrative conditions and CF advancement in the Middle East.

The findings reveal that CF’s presence positively impacts fundraising success and that CF platforms are an effective financial technology (Fintech) tool for financing entrepreneurs in the Middle East. The study shows that the success of CF projects in the Middle East can be anticipated by estimating and breaking down enormous information of web-based and social media movement, human resources of funders and online venture introduction. The authors conclude with recommendations for future EF and CF research.

This study aims to analyze the CF and EF principles in the Middle East region as the CF experience and practice in this part of the world tend to be unexplored in terms of research. Presently a very few numbers published research on CF exists. Moreover, to the best of the knowledge, there is no single study investigating CF as an alternative financing source in the Middle East. In particular, the study.

Using the resource-focused view of the firm as a theoretical backdrop, this study aims to examine the relationships between entrepreneurial perceptions and two dependent measures (i.e. customer satisfaction outcomes and firm performance). Specifically, the study tests the boundary conditions of the resource-based view (RBV) performance relationship in a Middle Eastern context.

The data from 171 female Saudi entrepreneurs are analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The research results revealed that marketing capability and financial capability (i.e. financial capital access) have a positive significant effect on both dependent measures. Labor shortage also has a negative significant effect on both dependent variables, whereas operations capability does not show a significant effect on the two dependent measures. To a large extent, the results show that the RBV holds true in the Saudi context.

The study contributes to the knowledge about the effects of specific human and financial capital, as well as illuminates how marketing capability, financial capital access and labor shortage impact these dependent variables in the unique context of Saudi Arabia among female entrepreneurs, thereby extending the knowledge of the RBV in different contexts. Furthermore, it extends knowledge of the entrepreneurship literature, especially in the area of gender-based entrepreneurship research in developing countries.

Much research claims that immigrant women's entrepreneurship in Western capitalist societies is embedded in the structural and cultural attributes of receiving societies. Other studies maintain that the structural and cultural traits of immigrant groups explain women's entrance into this type of business activity. Together, this body of research underestimates those individual attributes embedded in human agency, in the personalities of immigrant women, that encourage them to engage in this type of business enterprise.

This paper aims to offer a wider examination of the research concerning entrepreneurship characteristics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region via a review of recent studies relevant to this topic. Research publications concerning entrepreneurship within the MENA region evidence growing interest in this field of study, with the potential to boost and drive future economic development and growth. This focus within entrepreneurship research is because of the economic development in the region, which is becoming increasingly important for policymakers and businesses.

The author performed a systematic literature review to produce robust information about entrepreneurship in the MENA region, followed by a thematic analysis to identify key research themes within each category.

Despite the growth in entrepreneurship research in the MENA region, research on certain factors is lacking. An analysis of 271 studies published between 2009 and 2019 identifies 9 main research categories, within which 30 themes have attracted significant academic attention. Female entrepreneurship and gender, youth entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship behaviour and orientation are the three key categories influencing perspectives on entrepreneurship in the MENA region. This study highlights research gaps and provides recommendations to guide future research on the sustainable development of entrepreneurship in the MENA region.

This paper highlights trends in entrepreneurship research amongst scholars within the MENA region and suggests paths for future research efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the history of poor corporate transparency in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and show how one company, Zawya LLC, has succeeded in turning this persistent problem into a business opportunity by creating a successful information collection and dissemination business or “infomediary”.

Through interviews with knowledgeable individuals, the author examines the techniques the Company has used to develop its corporate database in Lebanon, where much of its operations are now based, and elsewhere in the region.

While government control and influence represents a major challenge to entrepreneurs throughout the Middle East, its nature varies considerably. The fundamental key to breaking down traditions of secrecy in both the private and public sector is to promote a virtuous circle of information provision and use. The success of “infomediaries” who do this is consistent with the concept of “self‐regulating sub‐systems” suggested in the literature.

Being a single case study, the conclusions have to be treated with appropriate caution. Examples of other successful “infomediaries” are given and avenues for future survey research among their clients are suggested.

Entrepreneurs looking for opportunities to develop “infomediaries” in other contexts will benefit from the discussion of factors that led to Zawya's success. The conclusion that the private sector can provide valuable help in breaking down corporate secrecy without the need for direct government intervention has important social implications.

This is the first case study of an “infomediary” in the MENA region.

Recent discussions of how members of the middle classes define themselves have focused on cultural patterns, following Bourdieu's (1984) influential work on how occupational, educational, and cultural fields combine to configure classes. Researchers have extended this approach to studies of the emerging middle classes in the global South, adapting these concepts to the specific circumstances of postcolonial settings in a globalizing world. This chapter explores these processes among urban middle-class Chileans. I show how members of the middle classes seek meaningful identities while engaging in symbolic combat with other groups in a society historically marked by an aristocratic elite, a recent military dictatorship, and free market policies that have reconfigured the possibilities for upward and downward mobility while integrating Chile more firmly within global commodity and image circuits. The principal foci of conflict are cultural consumption, childrearing and education, as well as electronic media use. Members of Chile's middle classes are locked in an unresolved conflict over who they are, who they should be, and where they fit in the global cultural economy.

This study aims to investigate the entrepreneurial actions of successful Iranian women entrepreneurs. It is an attempt to find the roots, motivations, challenges and strategies of successful actions of these women, despite the unequal and masculine structure of the society.

This research was conducted through the theoretical framework of poststructuralist feminism and the qualitative method. By purposive sampling, the researchers selected 10 women entrepreneurs living in Khorasan Razavi province for in-depth interviews. These women have created many jobs based on local potential and become recognized as top entrepreneurs. The narratives of these women were analyzed phenomenologically.

The actions of these women are fertilized under the influence of family background and early socialization and in the combination of internal motivations and external stimuli. These women resist social barriers such as widespread patriarchy, gender division of labor in society and complex bureaucratic processes through the “strategic cycle” resulting from the interaction of “reliance on intertwined social networks,” “social entrepreneurship,” “gradual formation of social capital” and “reliance on local potentials.”

The strategies to overcome gender inequalities at the micro (family) and macro (society) levels introduced in this research can inspire women entrepreneurs who seek success in their businesses.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first qualitative research that, by studying the actions of successful Iranian women entrepreneurs, describes how they overcome structural inequalities and their success strategies.

Having Middle Eastern tourism industry as the context, this study aims to examine the impact of the four main dimensions within service innovation (i.e. product, process, organizational and marketing innovations) on tourist satisfaction; subsequently, towards the development of destination loyalty. Realized that religiosity prevails as an important social force that shapes individual behaviours, this study, hence, placed further assessment upon its moderating role, specifically in the relationships between tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty.

With adopting the approach of self-structured questionnaire, 214 usable responses had been collected for this study. Obtained data was then analyzed by conducting exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and multiple linear regression analysis through the usage of structural equation modelling.

Analysis of obtained data has revealed all the investigated dimensions within service innovation as active predictors to tourist satisfaction, with the exception of product innovation, while having marketing innovation being of highest significance. In turn, tourist satisfaction is found to greatly influence the formation of destination loyalty. Findings then provide notable indication on religiosity as a moderating factor to the proposed relationships within the investigated framework, between service innovation and tourist satisfaction, as well as tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty.

This study, thus, revealed the level of religiosity, particularly from the standpoint of Islamic perspectives, in playing a critical role towards predicting capability of service innovation on tourist satisfaction, and further, destination loyalty. Contributions hereby lie on theoretical and pragmatic insights concerning aspects of service and Islamic marketing within today’s tourism front.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct an inductive case study to understand how the opportunity creation process leads to integration.

It examines four cases of immigrant entrepreneurs of Cameroonian, Lebanese, Mexican and Assyrian origins who founded their businesses in Sweden. The study relies on process-oriented theory building and develops an inductive model of integration as an opportunity creation process.

The suggested model shows immigrants’ acculturation into the host society via three successive phases: breaking-ice, breaking-in and breaking-out. In the breaking-ice phase, immigrants trigger entrepreneurial ideas to overcome the disadvantages that they face as immigrants in the host country. In the breaking-in phase, immigrants articulate their entrepreneurial ideas by bonding with the ethnic community. In the breaking-out phase, the immigrants reorient their entrepreneurial ideas by desegregating them locally. The paper concludes by elaborating theoretical and practical implications of the research.

Immigrants act when they are socially excluded and discriminated in the labor market by developing business ideas and becoming entrepreneurs. By practicing the new language and accommodating native customers’ preferences, immigrants reorient their entrepreneurial ideas. The immigrants tailor their ideas to suit their new customers by strengthening their sense of belonging to the local community.