Search results

This study investigates the optimum size for manufacturing firms and the impact of subcontracting on firms' likelihood of achieving their optimal scale in Vietnam.

Using data from the enterprise census in 2017 and 2021, the paper first estimates the production function to identify the optimum firm size for manufacturing firms and then, applies the logit model to investigate factors associated with the optimal firm size.

The study reveals that medium-sized firms exhibit the highest level of productivity. Nevertheless, a consistent trend emerges, indicating that nearly 90% of manufacturing firms in Vietnam operated below their optimal scale in both 2017 and 2021. An analysis of the impact of subcontracting on firms' likelihood to achieve their optimal scale emphasizes its crucial role, especially for foreign firms, exerting an influence nearly five times greater than that of the judiciary system.

The paper's findings offer crucial policy implications, suggesting that initiatives aimed at enhancing the overall productivity of the manufacturing sector should prioritise facilitating contract arrangements to encourage firms to reach their optimal size. These insights are also valuable for other countries with comparable firm size distributions.

This paper provides the first empirical evidence on the relationship between firm size and productivity as well as the role of subcontracting in firms' ability to reach their optimal scale in a country with a right-skewed distribution of firm sizes.

This study aims to investigate the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) investment on the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) profitability in the Indian context.

This study used a framework based on the ICT investment and firm size, measuring the impact on profit before depreciation, interest, tax and amortisation of MSME by taking a random sampling of 300 Indian MSME manufacturing firm’s secondary data from the Prowess database. This framework was analysed using the design of experiment (DoE) technique.

The study showed that ICT investment has a significant positive relationship with profitability. This study examines the different ICT investment levels to predict investment strategies and fine-tune profit targets. The critical finding is that ICT investment maximises profit at one million rupees. This discovery aids MSME leaders’ sustainable business decision-making.

This study has an explicit limit to the Indian context, where the firm requirements of countries are different, and these findings need to be validated with many operating variables and applied to more firms with more data. Even so, as a theoretical implication, this study took a novel approach to ICT adoption (through ICT investment) in the Indian MSME sector with guiding levels of ICT investment for each type of firm (i.e. micro, small and medium). This study opens new avenues for investigating researchers and stakeholders by exploring other factors responsible for ICT adoption.

This study uniquely provides practitioners with the functional level of ICT investment for MSMEs in the Indian context. These finding guides top management to make strategic ICT adoption decisions with information symmetry. At the same time, these findings suggest financial institutions astern their credit programme to provide credit for ICT investment in MSMEs.

This study highlights the value of ICT as a practical resource for business owners that significantly makes MSMEs more informed and profitable, thus creating more jobs and incrementing the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

This study offers unique empirical findings on how decision makers in MSMEs maximise profits through optimal ICT investment levels depending upon the firm size in an emerging economy like India. There is evidence in the study to conclude that ICT is a need of MSME and has implications for firm performance.

As a consequence of the proposal of the Carbon Neutral and Carbon Peak policy in 2020, the Chinese Government is paying more attention to developing sustainability performance. This study aims to assess the direct influence of country-level and corporate anti-corruption measures on environmental, social and governance (ESG) and its three dimensions, besides ascertaining the moderating role of firm size.

This study used the system generalized method of moments on a sample of 820 Chinese listed firms from 2012 to 2021.

The findings show that country-level and corporate corruption negatively affect ESG performance. Corporate anti-corruption measures have a more pronounced positive influence on the sustainability performance of small firms than large firms due to the limited resources, lower political position and weaker refusal power of small firms.

The study has great implications for governments, corporate boards and ESG rating agencies. Government and corporate boards should mitigate the risks of country-level and corporate corruption to attain sustainable development goals. Rating agencies should add country-level and corporate corruption into the ESG evaluation system.

Some empirical results have proven that anti-corruption measures help reduce the emission of carbon dioxide, but few evidence shows how country-level and corporate corruption affect ESG and its three dimensions.

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.

This study aims to investigate whether social reputation via corporate social responsibility (CSR) awarding facilitates access to debt and decreases the cost of debt and whether governance mechanisms moderate this relationship.

The sample covers the period between 2002 and 2021, during which CSR award data were available in the Thomson Reuters Eikon/Refinitiv database. The empirical models are based on country, industry and year fixed-effects regression.

While the main findings produced an insignificant result for access to debt, they indicated strong evidence for the positive relationship between CSR awarding and the cost of debt. Moreover, the moderating effect highlights that while the sustainability committee helps CSR-awarded companies access debt more easily, independent directors help firms decrease the cost of debt via CSR awarding. Furthermore, the results differ between the US and the non-US samples, earlier and recent periods, high- and low-leverage firms and large and small firms.

For the first time, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the authors assess whether social reputation via CSR awarding facilitates access to debt and decreases the cost of debt in an international and cross-industry sample. Little is known about the effect of social reputation on loan contracting, although social reputation conveys broader information that goes beyond the firm’s internal (performance) and external (reporting) CSR practices. The authors also draw attention to the differing roles of distinct governance mechanisms in leveraging social reputation for loan contracting.

The importance of financial dependence of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) on their performance is a relatively unaddressed area of research. Relatedly, whether and to what extent foreign bank penetration exerts an impact in the presence of financial dependence also remains an open question. The purpose of the paper in this regard is to exploit unit-level data on Indian SMEs and assess the independent and interactive effects of financial dependence on SME behaviour, in the presence of foreign banks.

This study uses fixed effects specification to address the issue. In subsequent analysis, this study also uses an instrumental variable approach for robustness.

The results indicate that financial dependence improves investment and employment, although there is a decline in productivity. These findings differ across size classes of SMEs. Similar is the evidence in the presence of foreign banks. In particular, foreign bank penetration leads to a decline in investment for micro and medium SMEs, although for small SMEs, the impact is found to be the opposite.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is one of the early within-country studies to examine the interface between SMEs and financial dependence and the role played by foreign banks in this regard.

Exploration and exploitation have long been documented as prominent approaches to business management and organizational adaptation to external environment. Maintaining balance between these activities is a key to survival and prosperity. However, there is little direct evidence of the effect of such combined usage of both approaches on firm performance in times of crisis, especially within small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The purpose of this paper is to reveal the role of balanced ambidexterity in shaping firm performance during COVID-19 recession.

Based on a survey of 333 Russian SMEs, the authors test the proposed theoretical framework linking innovative ambidexterity to firm performance level and variability taking into account technological uncertainty.

The results show that innovative ambidexterity tends to increase level and decrease variability of performance outcomes, whereas technological uncertainty acts as a positive contingency for this impact.

The results provide an improved understanding of ambidexterity and organizational literatures by clarifying the contingent nature of the ambidexterity–firm performance relationship during COVID-19 recession.

This paper aims to explore how the owners of less competitive micro-firms (MFs) perceive the “crisis–innovation–change management” triangle. It examines whether their understanding of these overarching entrepreneurship theory principles is inadequate compared to the relevant scientific literature.

This qualitative analysis follows principles based on the inductive method and grounded theory, thickly describing the results from research conducted in a sample of 38 tertiary-sector MFs in the Eastern Macedonia and Thrace region – one of the least developed and competitive areas across Europe. It triangulates the data with 11 respective small firms.

MF owners perceive the crisis as an ostensibly exogenous phenomenon, innovation as something quasi-unattainable – although vaguely significant – and change management as a relatively unknown process. This understanding lies somewhat distant from the extant literature that examines the structural nature of crises, the innovational power to exit profound restructurings and the rebalancing requisite for building new overall organizational methods to survive this internal–external transformation. In essence, the triangle crisis–innovation–change management is a blind spot for the examined MF owners as they ignore its significance as an adaptation mechanism – contrary to several direct competitors.

Based on the reluctance of these individuals to cultivate their systematic business knowledge, it seems unrealistic that they would seek to pay the necessary high price for business consulting in the future. An ideal solution would be to build public entrepreneurship clinics to provide these less dynamic and adaptable organizations with free preliminary or in-depth counseling. The Institute of Local Development-Innovation could aim to provide free consulting services to reinforce organizational physiology by coordinating different socioeconomic actors.

To the best of our knowledge, this empirical research is one of the first to test the comprehension of weaker MFs – less competitive and developed in organizational terms – to the triangle crisis–innovation–change management.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of communities of practice (CoP) as knowledge-sharing tools in family small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In this context, CoPs that jointly involve family and non-family members are expected to act as knowledge-sharing tools.

This paper employs a multiple case study methodology, analysing the cases of six small companies in different sectors and countries over a period of 8 years. Both primary and secondary data are used.

The results show the role CoPs play in involving family and non-family members in empowering knowledge-sharing initiatives. A CoP's role in knowledge sharing depends on the presence (or lack) of a family leader, the leadership approach, the degree of cohesion around shared approaches and values within the CoP, and the presence of multiple generations at work.

This paper contributes to the literature on knowledge sharing in family businesses, by exploring for the first time the role of the CoP as a knowledge-sharing tool, depending on families' involvement in the CoP.

Recognizing novel entrepreneurial opportunities arising from a crisis is of paramount importance for firms. Hence, understanding the pivotal factors that facilitate firms in this endeavor holds significant value. This study delves into such factors within a representative empirical context impacted by a crisis, drawing insights from existing literature on opportunity recognition during such tumultuous periods.

The authors conducted a qualitative inspection of 14 Italian firms during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The authors collected a rich body of multi-source qualitative data, including 34 interviews (with senior managers and entrepreneurs) and secondary data (press releases, videos, web interviews, newspapers, reports and academic articles) in two phases (March–August 2020 and September–December 2020).

The results suggest the existence of a process model of opportunity recognition during crises based on five entrepreneurial influencing factors (entrepreneurial knowledge, entrepreneurial alertness, entrepreneurial proclivity, entrepreneurial personality and entrepreneurial purpose).

Various scholars have highlighted that, in times of crises, it is not easy and indeed very challenging for entrepreneurs to identify novel entrepreneurial opportunities. However, recent research has shown that crises can also positively impact entrepreneurs and their capacity to identify new entrepreneurial opportunities. Given these findings, not much research has analyzed the process by which entrepreneurs identify novel entrepreneurial opportunities during crises. This study shows that some entrepreneurial influencing factors are very important to identify new entrepreneurial opportunities during crises.