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Rural entrepreneurship is an emergent field of study, with these start-ups becoming one of the most noticeable ways to promote rural development, but the few studies concerning innovation among artisans have thus far only been exploratory. The purpose of this paper is to examine the entrepreneurial artisan initiatives of young innovators in a peripheral northern area of Portugal where black pottery is produced.

Qualitative data analysis was carried out on in-depth semi-structured interviews with three young artisan innovators and entrepreneurs and one individual who functions as a cultural booster. The content analysis was done using QSR International’s NVivo Version 11 software.

These young entrepreneurs have developed commercial activities and introduced innovations (i.e. design and process) into black pottery production, while taking advantage of endogenous materials, local culture and traditional knowledge. These individuals have sought not only to generate their own innovations but also to keep their culture and local traditions alive, thereby contributing to rural development by establishing networks with local young artisans.

Some limitations are linked to the sample’s size and basis in a specific geographic reality.

The findings provide a fuller understanding of why some rural artisan firms grow, suggesting that artisans’ networks and innovative and entrepreneurial behaviours play a key role.

This research’s results contribute to the literature on the role that innovation can play as a booster of rural artisanship through networks and entrepreneurship. This paper is among the first to discuss black pottery as a form of artisan entrepreneurship. The results underline the value of innovations and networks, which were found to be the core ingredients in rural artisan entrepreneurship.

Businesses in Mexico, particularly small and mid-sized companies, are faced with numerous challenges: a lack of competition, difficulty in positioning and maintaining oneself in the market, irrational use of natural resources, and poverty in the environment in which they develop. In spite of these problems, many are able to succeed; however, there is limited knowledge about how these businesses could implement organizational changes that would positively impact their results.

Using dynamic capabilities theory and survey data obtained from pottery businesses in several artisan communities in Mexico through the application of face-to-face interviews, this paper analyzes the relationship between organizational capability for change (OCC) and economic and environmental performance.

This research proves that OCC positively and significantly impacts economic and environmental performance. Results contribute to the existing literature on OCC in the context of poverty.

This study offers empirical research that illustrates the relationship between OCC and the environmental and economic performance of pottery businesses. Additionally it contributes to a field of knowledge in progress; that is, OCC in contexts of subsistence where poverty is a constant issue. Artisans living in this context can also develop business capabilities that contribute to the permanence of their business in the market.

This paper aims to contribute to the existing literature on social enterprises and business model innovation. Particularly, it sheds some light on those factors that turn a social innovation initiative into a success, both in terms of meeting social needs and achieving economic sustainability.

By using a grounded theory approach, an inductive comparative case study is conducted. Two work integration social enterprises in the hospitality and tourism sector are selected. Both companies are located in Barcelona (Spain) under the same legal regulation and economic situation and initially run a manufacturing business. Due to the economic crisis they were forced to reinvent themselves to survive. Data were collected from different sources and coded using content analysis procedures.

Results indicate that three factors, namely, value proposition, appropriate market research and stakeholder involvement, heavily contributed to firm’s success, corroborating previous studies. Furthermore, our study reveals that social need pressures and managerial trust on employees are additional factors that drive social business model innovation.

Changes in the demand, the rules governing the market or economic downturns are external drivers for demand-pull innovations. In such context, firms need to reformulate their business models if they wish to survive. Acknowledging the factors that help firms overcome these obstacles is of great interest for both academics and entrepreneurs.

Social innovation in business models is a topic still poorly defined in the literature, yet, its boundaries to other fields are still fuzzy. This paper aims to fulfill this gap by presenting the theoretical domain in which this topic fits in and evidencing those successful factors that should be considered when designing and implementing a business model innovation which may help other firms facing a similar process.

The purpose of the paper is to shed light on the particular organizing design practices behind making items exchangeable into commodities. It is a constructive contribution to establish more critical studies of merchandizing.

The study included several longitudinal projects in retail chains in Scandinavia. The research was based on anthropological and participatory research methods. We introduce the term “waremaking” as a term for the work to make items exchangeable and expand on a distinction between silent and seen design (Gorb and Dumas, 1987).

Waremaking is business, but includes giving form to relations between business and society to make exchanges at all possible. We found considerable silent design work that is not commonly acknowledged in economic and social theory.

There is a need for comparative and aggregate studies. We deconstruct the conventional categories “commodities” and “merchandizing” and a study of the contingent effects on the meaning of other constructs is needed.

Introducing the notion of waremaking yields important insights for organizations and managers. We offer a new framework of waremaking that crosses existing boundaries and helps construct new interfaces between designers, traders and consumers in society.

The papers reveal merchandizing as a culturally complex and nuanced form of work and a crucial field of practice.

Scholars have denoted little attention to the cultural work of merchandizing. By delineating a new practice-based framework encompassing both ordinary and extraordinary work, we can address the cultural production of commodities.

Drawing from resource-based theorising, the concept of network embeddedness and a process perspective on entrepreneurship, this paper establishes a conceptual framework to explain a multi-level and multi-locational network embeddedness of creative entrepreneurs in non-urban places. It challenges stylised facts about creative entrepreneurship as a predominantly urban phenomenon.

Based upon the conceptual framework for creative entrepreneurship in a non-urban place, an illustrative case study of small-scale creative-design entrepreneurs on the Lofoten Islands in Norway (2019) is utilised to discuss the framework.

The conceptual paper derives a fine-grained understanding about how creative entrepreneurship emerges and develops in non-urban places and contributes to a better understanding of how such places can nurture such entrepreneurship through multiple network embeddedness and resource-exchange configurations.

The article will enable further empirical research that tests, validates and, if necessary, refines the framework established.

Creative entrepreneurs should use various resource-exchange combinations with diverse networks to become locally embedded in non-urban places. Public-policy managers need to be aware of this variety that may exist with the network embeddedness of such entrepreneurs to support them and develop the location through resource provisions.

The paper uses an original conceptual framework.

Researchers studying festivals have overlooked exhibitors as a population within tourism research. Instead, researchers focus primarily on examining festival visitors' economic impacts and motivations for attending. Festival exhibitors have been overlooked because they are considered a part of the overall festival product. The purpose of this paper is to propose a research agenda for festival exhibitors by analyzing embedded relationships created from their festival participation.

A literature review was conducted to explore why exhibitors have not been studied in festival research. A search of publications in other relevant fields was also conducted in order to review how exhibitors have been studied. An analytical framework was developed to analyze embedded relationships within festival exhibitors.

The analytical framework developed revealed that the exhibitor relationship with the festival can be divided into three dimensions: the festival, the market place and the business. In total, nine major lines of research topics were suggested to understand the relationships uncovered within festival exhibitors.

The academic researcher is introduced to the potential research opportunities in examining festival exhibitors and is pointed in the direction of relevant research questions and disciplines that would equip them with the practical tools of investigation.

This paper makes an original contribution to knowledge in the study of events and festivals because festival exhibitors are not studied. By alerting the reader to the applicability and value of exhibitors to understanding festivals, this paper aims to encourage scholars to empirically investigate exhibitors. This will thereby lead to a more diverse literature on festivals and will provide a further understanding of the contribution festivals make to local and regional economies.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of Women in Management Review is split into five sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Leadership Styles and Personality; Recruitment and Career Management; Dependant Care and Health/Family Issues; Job Evaluation, Appraisal and Equal Pay; Discrimination and Equal Opportunities.

There is a general consensus among public policy makers, academics and researchers that entrepreneurship is a vital route to economic advancement for both developed and developing economies. As a result, a host of small business assistance programs are conducted by public, private and nonprofit organizations. Although the need for integrating these programs has always been a high priority on the national agenda for public policy and research in entrepreneurship, their implementation particularly in developing economies is characterized by fragmentation and lack of coordination. Small business assistance will be meaningful if they are designed in a holistic and systematic way and implemented with a view to achieve long term sustainable development. This paper offers a conceptual framework for designing an integrated model of small business assistance. The paper identifies the major characteristics of small firms and potential small business assistance programs, and presents a decision tree model that matches the characteristics of firms with appropriate assistance program(s). A case study of small business assistance programs in the Republic of Botswana was conducted to provide an empirical evidence of the need for an integrated design or model. Finally, conclusions, discussions and the implications of the model for policy makers, practitioners and further research are presented.

The strategic orientation of Portuguese firms in the porcelain industry is examined empirically. In the process, the effective use of traditional generic strategies as opposed to emerging strategies is compared. Special attention is devoted to the utility of classical Porter’s generic strategies in comparison to time‐based differentiation strategy. The study concludes that different variations of the classical differentiation strategy, which includes time‐based differentiation, appear to be more effective than cost leadership or mixed generic strategies.

Artisan entrepreneurship is a new and emerging area of entrepreneurship study. This means literature on the topic is still relatively sparse, so more attention is required on addressing issues of content, context and method. This chapter focuses on future research trajectories on artisan entrepreneurship that will help to refine the field. This includes analyzing the way artisan entrepreneurship can be researched from an organization, team and individual level. Specific ideas related to new research tracks are stated that help to direct researchers to new and novel topics.