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The aim of this chapter is to investigate the immigrant women entrepreneurship phenomenon by analysing management academic literature on the issue. Stemming from the most current data on immigration and from the awareness that entrepreneurship is a viable instrument of immigrant (women) integration and inclusion, this chapter analyses the most updated management results on the issue. The analysis is mainly centred on works published after 2019, and some interesting insights emerge. Among them, we can refer to the awareness that research on immigrant women entrepreneurship is still in its infancy. Although, indeed, immigrant entrepreneurs and women entrepreneurs have been analysed considerably by researchers, it has been mainly in isolation. Therefore, room for investigating still exists, and this chapter uncovers some possible future research avenues. Moreover, by reviewing the selected papers, it clearly emerges that not all immigrant women entrepreneurs are alike; different targets (that is, different ethnicities) must be addressed differently by policy makers when policy measurements are identified. In other words, generic programmes aimed at increasing entrepreneurship among immigrant women cannot necessarily be successful.

Entrepreneurship and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a pivotal role in the socio-economic development worldwide. They are, indeed, recognised as important economic drivers as their activities can boost economic growth in various ways, such as being source of employment, promoting equality among socio-economic groups, and fostering the development of new products. In line with this, SMEs contribution to innovation has been extensively investigated by researchers and policymakers. European Union, for example, has developed numerous programmes to foster innovation in and by SMEs, even identifying, categorizing, and periodically analysing the so-called ‘innovative SMEs’.

However, very scant is the attention, at the international level, devoted to the analysis of the role of gender in innovation per se and in innovative SMEs. This chapter fits into this underinvestigated stream of research by specifically analysing the impact, if any, of gender on Italian innovative SMEs’ performance.

Over the years, at the international level, the social construction assumption according to which women would be less innovative than men and, consequently, also less prone to be involved in innovative fields, since their educational path decisions to career path decisions, has long prevailed. This has resulted in a widespread lack of representation of women in more innovative sectors, in comparison to their male counterparts. In recent years then, if the pandemic has had an impact, at least for some specific socio-economic contexts, especially on those that can be typically considered as ‘necessity entrepreneurs’, it has to be said that it has been able also to generate some virtuous dynamics crosswise related to innovative issues. In particular, this chapter aims to go in depth into these issues from the perspective of innovative women entrepreneurs in the attempt to answer to the following questions: how does the socio-economic environment affect innovative women entrepreneurs? And, what are the unique experiences, achievements and contributions of innovative women entrepreneurs in Italy? In order to answer to these specific research questions, an analysis based on direct interviews with a sample of Italian innovative women entrepreneurs has been conducted.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the immigrant women entrepreneurship phenomenon in Italy by focusing on the Polish experience. Stemming from the most current data on immigration in Italy and on immigrant women entrepreneurs and women-led firms, by analysing the regions in which these firms are grounded and the economic sectors in which they are mostly involved, this chapter presents the research programme the two authors of this book have been involved in over the last year and the first preliminary results. Specifically, the two authors engaged to compare the experiences, difficulties and opportunities of immigrant women entrepreneurs of different ethnicities/communities located in Italy. The final goal is to analyse if and how the socio-cultural background of these women counts, if and how it affects their way of doing business and what is the influence of the socio-cultural Italian context. The first group of immigrant women entrepreneurs that the authors decided to analyse are the Polish. Accordingly, this chapter presents data on Polish women entrepreneurs based in Italy and the results of an interview with an expert on this community.

The attention of scholars and policy makers towards the topic of innovation has consistently increased, especially in recent years. This is justified by the fact that innovation undoubtedly plays, today, a crucial role in driving a country’s economic growth, improving productivity and, more generally, enhancing overall societal well-being.

When the discourse around innovation focuses on its economic dimension, the strong intertwinement with entrepreneurship emerges. In line with this, focusing on research on innovation in organisations and, especially, innovation in relation to the figure of the entrepreneur is considered, plenty of studies have been carried on, over time, in many disciplines, analysing the role of the entrepreneur in relation to innovation from various different angles. However, especially when management studies are considered, we can notice a poor consideration of the role played by the gender of the entrepreneur. In line with this consideration, by means of a systematic literature review, this chapter aims to fill this literature gap focusing on the intertwinement that can be envisaged, in management studies, among the issues of entrepreneurship and innovation in the case of women-owned firms.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the family context may affect female firms’ performance by contextualising the study within Italy and empirically analysing 307 Italian women-owned firms.

By using ordinal regressions, this paper empirically investigates the influence of three dimensions of the family context on female firms’ performance, namely: the motivations to start a business; the support from the family once the business is established; and the mechanisms to achieve a suitable balance between work and family life.

Overall, the results offer substantial support for the assumption that female business owners benefit from being pulled into the endeavour, from specific linkages with family and also from selected mechanisms to balance work and family life, thus contributing to show how strong the relationship between a firm’s performance and the family context is for women.

Today female entrepreneurship represents an important economic driver worldwide, leading scholars to strongly advocate the need to shift the female entrepreneurship research focus from the analysis of women business owners’ characteristics to the investigation of those specific factors able to directly affect female firms’ activities. In this vein, this paper aims at pushing further into the still less studied domain of work/family intertwinement as, surprisingly, the impact that family-related factors exert on women-owned businesses’ performance is still under-researched.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of product and geographic diversification on the performance of Italian manufacturing firms and evaluate the moderating role of family involvement.

The hypotheses have been tested by using a fixed-effects panel data regression model.

Results show a linear relationship between product diversification and firm performance and an inverted U-shaped relationship between geographic diversification and firm performance. Moreover, when considering the status of the family firm, family ties have a negative moderating role on the performance of companies that are product and internationally diversified.

By providing theoretical explanations and empirical evidence, the study extends the diversification-performance research by testing this relationship in an unexplored context (i.e. Italy), and by identifying a still not well explored contingency factor (i.e. family involvement). In doing so, diversification and family involvement literatures are brought together and the results show the importance of the type of owner regarding the impact of product and international diversification on firm performance.

This conceptual paper aims at providing the readers of the Journal of Management History with an evaluation of the overall impact of Arthur Stinchcombe's liability of newness construct on the management literature about organizational evolution over time.

The paper adopts an historical approach for discussing the development of those theoretical and empirical trajectories which, drawing on Stinchcombe's seminal underpinnings, have been developed by scholars over the second half of the twentieth century. The most recent enhancements on this topic are also discussed.

The analysis demonstrates that the impact of the liability of newness on the related literature is great and twofold. On the one hand, it emerges that this concept has directly inspired a number of subsequently formulated constructs, such as the liabilities of smallness, adolescence and aging. On the other hand, it is evidenced that Stinchcombe's seminal insights still constitute one of the most fascinating bases for directing and positioning scholarly efforts within the organizational evolution research domain to date.

The value of this paper is that it adopts a unique way for examining the development of a number of theoretical frameworks and empirical inquiries variously associated with the liability of newness over time. Three time decades are historically identified and the links among them are deepened.