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The direct selling model adopted in the beauty and cosmetics industry puts female consumer entrepreneurs at the heart of the business model. A neglected phenomenon in female entrepreneurship, this study aims to focus on female sales agents’ capabilities that are linked to sales performance and examine which capabilities might be shaped and enhanced through coaching and training in an emerging economy context.

Survey data were generated from a sample of 249 female sales agents who agreed to participate in a coaching and training programme run by a focal firm. Data were collected in two phases to investigate the capabilities linked to sales performance pre-intervention and the impact of coaching and training on the relationships between the capabilities and sales performance post-intervention. The time-lag data were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling.

For female sales agents, self-efficacy and sales experience have a significant positive effect on adaptive sales performance both before and after the coaching and training intervention. In contrast, intellectual capital and self-motivation had a non-significant relationship with sales performance before the intervention. However, after the intervention, the relationship between these variables became positive and significant.

The study demonstrates the effects of pre- and post-coaching and training on female consumer entrepreneurs’ capabilities and the links to sales performance. These findings add critical empirical knowledge on how female consumer entrepreneurship may be developed and the role of entrepreneurship for female empowerment in the Asian context. Collectively, the findings bring to the fore the female sphere in consumer entrepreneurship research in emerging economies.

The purpose of this study is to address a significant gap in the understanding of entrepreneurship at the microfoundation level. It focuses on how individual entrepreneurs, specifically Hongbang entrepreneurs in China from 1896 to 1949, shape and transform their contexts. The aim is to provide a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that facilitate entrepreneurial success.

The study adopts a microhistorical approach, investigating the case of Hongbang entrepreneurs in China during 1896-1949. It involves an in-depth examination of historical records to explore the strategic interactions between these entrepreneurs and core stakeholders such as consumers, financial intermediaries, government regulators, and human resources. The research methodology emphasizes a process-oriented view, examining the evolution of personalized networks into extensive connections.

The research reveals that Hongbang entrepreneurs successfully reshaped their unfavorable embedded contexts by strategically collaborating with key stakeholders. They influenced consumer tastes, allied with financial intermediaries, negotiated with governments on regulation policies, and developed human resource stocks. The transformation was facilitated by the evolution of their networks from personalized to extensive connections. These findings highlight the localized strategies such as cronyism in resource acquisition within China’s private property development industry.

This study contributes to the field by offering insights into entrepreneurial contextualization and networking. It sheds light on the complex interplay between entrepreneurs and their contexts, providing a nuanced understanding of localized strategies in the Chinese context. The findings add value to the discourse on entrepreneurship by elucidating the strategic and processual acts through which entrepreneurs engage with stakeholders and reshape their environments.

Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) has attracted considerable attention worldwide, and the challenges of managing employees’ entrepreneurial behaviours are increasingly recognised. However, the paucity of research on managers’ entrepreneurial behaviour in the United Arab Emirates multinational corporate environment creates a salient gap in the current understanding of how national and organisational cultures that not always align frame the critical problems of CE. This study aims to fill this research gap by examining multinationals’ CE antecedents drawing on an institutional perspective in Dubai.

The author conducts 54 in-depth interviews with middle managers in multinational enterprises. This study adopts a multiple case study research design to reveal whether an emergent discovery is exclusive to a particular case or is consistently replicated by multiple cases. The author has used abductive reasoning to systematically integrate analytical framework deduction with raw data induction.

This study’s findings indicate that CE in Dubai is ineffective and fragmented. Arguably, the cultural background of employees creates different circumstances and determinants of entrepreneurial behaviour. Hence, CE may not achieve epitome competencies without identifying multicultural nuances in an organisational context.

Existing research has placed relatively little emphasis on the role of individual national culture in multinational enterprises. This study’s results offer potentially valuable implications for theory, practice and future research addressing other emerging countries. This model presents a distinct CE architecture with compelling evidence for national culture (at the macro level), organisational culture, Corporate Entrepreneurship Assessment Instrument and emergent factors (at the meso level) and individual middle managers' real-life experience (at the micro level).

This study examines the relationship between strategic entrepreneurial behaviors (SEBs) and the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in an emerging market context. The authors expand upon prior work in this area by building and testing a model that assesses the moderating effect of CEOs’ narcissism and Machiavellianism on the relationship between SEBs and SME performance.

To test the authors’ theoretical model, the authors use the results of a larger data collection project in Russia to create a national random sample of 372 Russian SMEs that were approached between August and November 2019.

The authors found support for the positive relationship between SEBs and SME performance. Additionally, the authors found that CEO narcissism and Machiavellianism strengthen the relationship between SEBs and firm performance.

This study is an important step toward enriching the understanding of the role of CEO personality traits in shaping the efficiency of entrepreneurial behavior at the firm level. Extending previous research, the authors show that SEBs have a positive effect on firm performance in an emerging market context. Additionally, the authors contribute insight about how personality characteristics of CEOs, specifically narcissism and Machiavellianism, influence the relationship between entrepreneurial behavior and firm performance. Finally, the authors’ research contributes to the development of strategic leadership theory: the results offer insight to scholars regarding the potentially beneficial attributes of otherwise “dark” leaders.

This paper seeks to systematically review and synthesise existing research knowledge on African women entrepreneurship to identify gaps for future studies.

The paper conducted a systematic literature review of published studies from 1990 to 2020 on women entrepreneurship in Africa using a 5M gender aware framework of Brush et al. (2009).

The systematic literature review of published studies found the fragmentation, descriptive and prescriptive orientation of studies on Africa women entrepreneurship and devoid of theoretical focus. Further, women entrepreneurship studies tended to be underpinned from various disciplines, less from the entrepreneurship lens, mostly quantitative, and at its infancy stage of development. With a primary focus on development, enterprise performance and livelihood, studies rarely attended to issues of motherhood and the nuanced understanding of women entrepreneurship’s embeddedness in family and institutional contexts of Africa.

The paper questions the view that women entrepreneurship is a “panacea” and unravels how family context, customary practices, poverty and, rural-urban and formal/informal divide, significantly shape and interact with African women entrepreneurs’ enterprising experience and firm performance.

The findings and analyses indicate that any initiatives to support women empowerment via entrepreneurship should consider the socially constructed nature of women entrepreneurship and the subtle interplay of the African institutional contexts’ intricacies, spatial and locational differences which significantly influence women entrepreneurs’ choices, motivations and goals for enterprising.

The paper contributes to a holistic understanding of women entrepreneurship in Africa by using a 5M framework to review the research knowledge. In addition, the paper not only identifies unexplored/or less examined issues but also questions the taken-for-granted assumptions of existing knowledge and suggest adoption of context- and gender-sensitive theories and methods.

This study investigates the influence of organizational social capital (OSC) on the social and economic performance of social enterprises (SEs) in Greece and the mediating role of social entrepreneurship orientation (SEO) in these relationships.

A theoretical framework was developed integrating resource-based theory, OSC theory and behavioral entrepreneurship theory. The data were collected from 345 Greek SEs and structural equation modeling (SEM) with bootstrap analysis was employed to estimate path coefficients.

This study shows that OSC positively impacts SEs’ social and economic performance, while SEO mediates only the relationship between OSC and SEs’ social performance. This research offers insights for scholars, practitioners and policymakers in social entrepreneurship by highlighting the significance of OSC and SEO.

This study contributes to the literature on SEs by integrating resource-based theory, OSC theory and behavioral entrepreneurship theory, presenting a novel comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding SEs’ performances. Additionally, the study advances the understanding of SEO as a mediator in the relationship between OSC and SEs’ social and economic performance. The unique focus on the Greek context provides a valuable setting for examining the relationships among OSC, SEO and SEs’ performances.

This study aims to contribute to the academic disciplines of entrepreneurship and management by developing a new theory that explains Founder-CEOs’ succession in family and non-family firms. Many scholars failed to generate a specific theory to describe the succession of Founder-CEOs. Family firms remain complex enterprises comprising interconnectedness of cultural interests in which corporate governance occurs by families, Founder-CEOs and sometimes a board of directors.

This study’s design/methodology/approach reflects post-modernist epistemological and ontological perspectives for conducting systematic literature reviews. To identify relevant studies in the review, the several databases (Australian Business Dean’s Council Journal Quality List; EBSCO Database, including PsycINFO and Psych studies; Web of Science) and a mix of ranked journals from entrepreneurship, management and psychology were used.

The findings and results in this paper reflect the purpose, methodology and literature analysis culminating in 1,582 peer-reviewed studies. A total of 182 peer-reviewed studies met the criterion for review. Throughout the research process, a systematic literature review uncovered management literature gaps overlooked for decades during the theory-building process. Hence, developing a theory of Founder-CEOs succession used a combination of systematic, inductive, comparative and interactive approaches.

A Theory of Founder-CEOs Succession explains the strategic process of replacing a founder systematically. The promotion of, and incentives for, internal executives have been topics of great interest and deliberation among scholars and practitioners for a long time. This study contributes research implications for theory building in the academic disciplines of entrepreneurship and management by offering scholars and practitioners a theory that does not exist to describe Founder-CEOs’ succession encompassing both strategic successes and failures. By incorporating successes and failures, this study provides realistic reflections of Founder-CEOs.

The present study aims to examine which aspects of human resource management (HRM) practices and organizational learning capability (OLC) are crucial for corporate entrepreneurship (CE) of retail small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

A cross-sectional design was adopted, where data were collected from a sample of 271 managerial staff of retail SMEs, utilizing a survey questionnaire. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling.

The results reveal that both HRM practices and OLC are crucial in influencing CE, albeit partially.

The study advances knowledge on entrepreneurship of retail SMEs by proposing aspects of HRM practices and OLC that enhance each dimension of CE.

Growing attention has been paid to bricolage as a strategic means to overcome resource constraints in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In the industrial market, a bricolage strategy and ambidextrous action may help firms to remain competitive by responding quickly to the business-to-business marketing. Despite its paramount importance, questions as to how bricolage is strengthened and how bricolage improves innovation ambidexterity have remained unanswered. This study aims to develop an integrated model for the relationships among environmental turbulence, learning orientation, ambidexterity and performance, with a particular focus on the mediation of bricolage.

Building on the literature review regarding the key constructs, hypotheses were developed. Data were collected using questionnaires from 229 SMEs in South Korea. To test hypothesis, structural equation modeling and Monte Carlo method for assessing mediation were performed.

Results reveal that environmental turbulence and learning orientation are positively associated with bricolage, which sequentially affects ambidextrous action as a driver of performance. The findings also indicate that bricolage significantly mediates the relationship between its antecedents and ambidexterity.

This research contributes to advancing our understanding of the role of a bricolage strategy for innovation ambidexterity and performance in SMEs. This study is the first to examine the mediation of bricolage between environmental factors and ambidexterity for improved performance.

The purpose of this paper is to set forth a conceptual model describing the actors and roles in ecosystems created to enable productive black entrepreneurship in the USA.

This paper provides a systematic literature review of entrepreneurship ecosystems. It further leverages such literature review by using an autoethnographic approach recommended by Guyotte and Kochacka (2016), drawing on the authors’ practical experience in studying, owning, educating or consulting employer businesses owned by persons of color in the USA and abroad.

Each actor in the ecosystem has practical wisdom and assets that can be shared and leveraged through interacting with the other actors either as role model institutions or capacity development institutions, thus mitigating social inequalities and boosting economic progress by extending entrepreneurial opportunities beyond those that are greatly resourced.

Our literature review is based on selected samples of relevant articles on entrepreneurship ecosystem research and ethnic minority entrepreneurship, and thus, is not exhaustive. The selection was partly influenced by the authors’ opinion of whether a given study was relevant or not to a black entrepreneurship ecosystem. There is the possibility that some relevant studies were excluded. Thus, other actors are encouraged to revise or adapt this model to inform their distinct roles and goals.

The proposed model can help actors involved in the operation or support of a black-owned business make optimal business decisions, enabling each actor to be instrumental in another’s understanding of how to facilitate the success of black American entrepreneurs and business owners and thus, deploy marketing campaigns to boost the visibility and role of each actor. These campaigns play a role in their entrepreneurial marketing efforts.

Responding to Gines and Sampson’s (2020) call, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to explicitly provide a comprehensive black entrepreneurship ecosystem model that identifies the actors, roles and activities that can help black Americans address social inequalities that limit their ability to become a successful employer business. The proposed model may aid in deepening the theoretical discussion on entrepreneurial ecosystems and be of inspiration for the future works of scholars and practitioners interested in the entrepreneurship and marketing interface.