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The purpose of this paper is to examine identity formation and networking practices relevant for high-technology entrepreneuring or the enactment of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley by Turkish business people.

Guided by postcolonial feminist frameworks, the author conducted a combination of ethnographic and auto-ethnographic fieldwork at high-technology conferences in Silicon Valley by focussing on talk and text as relevant for understanding entrepreneuring. Through a reflexive stance, the author analyzed observations, conversations, and experiences inclusive of her own positionality during the research process as they related to entrepreneurial identity formation and networking.

During business networking conferences taking place among Turkish business people in Silicon Valley, women and older males became marginalized through the emergence of a hegemonic masculinity associated with young Turkish male entrepreneurs. In addition, local context impacted whether and how actors engaged in practices that produced marginalization and resistance simultaneously.

The research is of value for scholars interested in understanding how identity formation and networking in high-technology entrepreneuring take place through gendered practices and ideas. Scholars interested in deploying postcolonial feminist perspectives will also benefit by understanding how key analytic tools and research methods from these lenses can be used for conducting fieldwork in other contexts.

The purpose of this study is to test an adaptation of the servant leadership survey to Turkey for the first time and to explore the relationship between perceptions of servant leadership and paternalistic leadership styles in the Turkish business context to contribute to the complex process of contextual dynamics of leadership.

Data were collected from 305 self‐administered surveys completed by white‐collar mid‐level managers in Istanbul, Turkey. These white collar employees conveyed their perceptions about the leadership styles of their immediate supervisors.

The results revealed that Turkish employees perceived a high correlation between paternalistic and servant leadership styles, demonstrating that leadership practices held by employees are strongly culture‐specific. In particular, all dimensions of servant leadership construct – i.e. altruism, relationship, empowerment and participation – showed a significant positive correlation with the paternalistic leadership construct. Servant leadership attributes as perceived by Turkish employees reflect a higher degree of “people orientation”.

Although this is a cross‐sectional study, its findings have implications for contemporary leadership research and practice, particularly with regard to understanding of leadership in the cultural context.

The study findings may assist human resources practitioners in multinational corporations and in Eastern and Western countries to unravel the confusion and misunderstandings created when different cultures perceive leadership in disparate ways.

This paper is among the first to establish empirically a possible link between servant leadership and paternalistic leadership perception as shown in the understanding of the Turkish employees. Turkish mid‐level managers did not consider servant leadership and paternalistic leadership styles as inconsistent, while the Western populace thinks of them as mutually exclusive. This study is a step in the complex process of theorizing about the contextual dynamics of leadership.

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to explore differences in managerial values in Turkey by relating them to the changing business context. Design/methodology/approach – The research delineates individual value differences between upper‐level managers and a group of MBA students who were approached through a questionnaire and in‐depth interviews. Findings – The basic findings support the view that workplace socialisation may affect individual values and practices. Research limitations/implications – The limitation of this paper is its exploratory nature based on the small sample size of research. Practical implications – In the context of internationalization and rising competition within the economic space, change should be high on the agenda of the Turkish private sector in adapting to the shifts in business environment. This should incorporate professional training as well as strategic HR projects aiming to transform the existing structures biased toward paternalism. Originality/value – The paper contributes to the existing management literature by identifying critical value dilemmas facing Turkish businesses in today's turbulent and internationalized business environment.

Considerable research efforts have been made to investigate the relative importance of firm‐specific vs industry structure factors in relation to performance variation among firms in the past. However, the vast majority of the research comes from the USA and very little is known about results outside of this domain. The aim of this study was to investigate industry and firm factors producing performance differences among Turkish firms. In order to explore the contributions of firm‐level factors and structural characteristics of industries, the study decomposes the relative impact of industry and firm effects on overall performance which includes the performance items such as sales turnover, market share and profitability.

A quantitative, positivistic approach was adopted with respect to the methodological choice for this study. In order to measure the relative impact of industry and firm effects on performance, the questionnaire developed by Galbreath and Galvin was sent to the e‐mail addresses of the general managers or the other executives at the top level as a web‐link with a covering letter. Because unit of analysis is at the firm level, a single informant is used in the study and the questionnaire was mailed to only one executive from each firm. Having collected the data, the effects of firm‐level factors (resources and capabilities) and industry structure on performance variation were analyzed by hierarchical regression method.

A total of 259 firms from different industries were analyzed and the findings revealed that firm‐level resources had a greater effect in explaining performance variation than industry structure in the Turkish business context. The results of this study confirm that in the resource‐based view of the firm, the firms in Turkey “demonstrated a quite developed form of organizational learning” just like the other emerging economies (i.e. Taiwan, Brazil, Poland and South Korea). Within this framework, Turkish firms especially in automotive, textile, food, tourism and construction industries became important players in the global arena.

This study contributes to the strategic management literature, particularly, in terms of providing comparable data from an emerging country, which is significant in verifying resource‐based theory and generalizing results in a global context. The findings also suggest that the firms need to focus on their unique resources rather than try to control and manipulate structural forces in their industries since “the economies today might best be viewed as resource‐based economies”. It should be noted that, in this business era, the key challenge for the managers is the optimal deployment of existing strategic resources in order to make their organizations achieve sustainable competitive advantage and superior firm performance.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the challenges and complexities in conducting research faced by scholars utilizing postcolonial feminist frameworks. The paper discusses postcolonial feminist key concepts, namely representation, subalternity, and reflexivity and the challenges scholars face when deploying these concepts in fieldwork settings. The paper then outlines the implications of these concepts for feminist praxis related to international management theory, research, and writing as well as entrepreneurship programs.

This paper discusses the experiences of the author in conducting fieldwork on Turkish high‐technology entrepreneurs in the USA and Turkey by focusing explicitly on the challenges and complexities postcolonial feminist frameworks bring to ethnography and auto‐ethnography.

The paper suggests that conducting fieldwork guided by postcolonial feminist frameworks faces challenges related to representation inclusive of the author and the participants in the study. It offers subalternity as a relational understanding of subjects in contrast to comparative approaches to the study of business people. The paper also discusses how positionality impacts reflexivity through gender, ethnicity, and class relations.

This paper offers a critical perspective on conducting research related to non‐Western subjects by addressing issues arising from feminist and postcolonial intersections. It is a valuable contribution to those researchers who are interested in conducting feminist research particularly with non‐Western people and cultures.

This paper aims to explore the effect of government support (short work allowances – SWA) on SME employees' job performance and employee motivation perceptions, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey.

Survey data were collected from 2,781 employees working in SMEs registered to Small and Medium Enterprises Development Organization (SMEDO) in Turkey. The relationships were assessed through structural equation modeling with bootstrap estimation.

The results support the proposed framework illustrating the positive effect of government support on employees' perceived motivation and job performance. Findings indicate that employee motivation has exhibited a mediating effect between government support and job performance. Another important finding is that, contrary to the classical understanding of Herzberg's two-factor theory, SWA system was able to perform as a motivating factor during the pandemic by meeting the hygiene needs.

Since this is a cross-sectional research study, causal inferences cannot be derived from the research results.

There is a lack of empirical study on SME employees' perceptions on the government support during the pandemic, especially on the perspectives of emerging economies are infrequent. Turkey's case is unique in terms of providing insights on how perceived employee motivation is increased by the government supports (SWA) in Turkey, and how this motivation mediates the job performance perceptions. Besides, the impacts of government support are mostly studied at the firm or macro-levels, this study's unit of analysis is at individual level. Regarding the criticism from the motivation perspective of two-factor theory, COVID-19 context and its impact on the motivation needs have not been elaborated before. This article starts new discussions on how crisis contexts influence individual motivator factors.

This paper aims to understand the determinants of board structure of listed firms at institutional, industry and firm levels within an emerging economy. At the institutional level, the paper explores laws, managerial culture and the role of state in instituting and endorsing corporate governance practices. At the firm level, ownership patterns (family and non-family), experience in the capital markets, age and size of the firms are studied to find out the relation between these variables and the board structure.

The research domain of the study is listed firms operating on the Istanbul Stock Exchange. The data for the study are collected at two phases; at the first phase, compliance reports, annual reports, articles of association and annual shareholders’ meeting reports of each firm in the sample are analyzed. At the second stage, secondary data are used for understanding the dynamics of Turkish institutional context.

The results of this study reveal that boards of directors of listed Turkish firms comply with the governance practices instituted by state agencies, except on issues as independent members and committees that will influence the majority owners’ control domain and private benefits.

This paper draws attention on institutional context and argues that “good governance” instruments developed for Anglo-Saxon stock market-controlled business systems provide limited explanation for an emerging economy that is characterized by close cooperation between the state, family-owned businesses and financial markets. The study offers insight to policy makers at a national level, interested in developing corporate governance principles regarding boards of directors of listed firms.

This study aims to investigate the complex interaction of different resource sets and capabilities in the process of performance creation within the context of resource-based theory.

An inductive case study approach that included multiple data collection methods such as in-depth interviews, observation and documentation was utilized.

Organizational culture, reputational assets, human capital, business processes and networking capabilities were found as the most important determinants of firm performance within the context of Ülker case study.

Although large-scale empirical studies can be used to explore the direct resource–performance relationship, these quantitative methods bypass the complex and embedded nature of intangibles and provide only a limited understanding of why some resources are identified as strategic but others are not, what their roles are, and how these resources are converted into positions of competitive advantage. However, understanding of complex nature of resources that are embedded in organizations designates the need for more fieldwork-based qualitative studies. This study aims to address this gap by providing a thorough understanding about the managerial and organizational processes through which the resources become valuable.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the links among different forms of religiosity, family cohesion and ethical leadership in family firms operating in Turkey.

The study was conducted with 210 respondents working in 51 family firms operating in Istanbul. Data regarding ethical leadership perceptions were collected separately from employees (non-family member) and managers (family member), and responses were matched in firm level to investigate the relations between variables calculated separately as perceptions of managers and employees. Confirmatory factor analysis and reliability statistics were used for ascertaining the dimensionality and factor structures of the constructs. Correlation analysis, structural equation modeling and bootstrapping method were used for investigating the relationships among variables.

Results of the study demonstrated that family cohesion, intrinsic religiosity and spiritual well-being-oriented religiosity were positively, while secular religiosity was negatively related with ethical leadership levels rated by family member managers. Although none of these variables showed significant correlations with ethical leadership perceptions of non-family member employees, ethical leadership perceptions of the family managers and ethical leadership perceptions of employees were positively correlated, and intrinsic religiosity and spiritual well-being-oriented religiosity had significant indirect effects on ethical leadership perceptions of employees.

Given the lack of studies addressing the links between different forms of religiosity with ethical leadership especially in the Turkish context and the gap regarding research designs analyzing these relationships from the perspectives of managers and employees, the study provides important contributions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relative contribution of tangible resource (TR) and intangible resource (IR), and capabilities on firm performance based on the measures of market share, sales turnover and profitability.

A cross-sectional survey research design was used in the study. The modified version of Galbreath and Galvin’s (2008) resource-performance questionnaire which included a total number of 45 questions was applied on 243 Turkish firms operating in different industries. The data collected were analysed by hierarchical regression analysis.

The findings revealed that IRs and capabilities contributed more greatly to firm performance compared to TRs. However, in contrast to the proposition of resource-based theory that views capabilities as the most important skills that underpin the development and deployment of both TR and IR, capabilities offered rather limited additional explanatory power to the prediction of firm performance only with respect to profitability against the combined effects of TR and IR.

The vast majority of the empirical resource-based view (RBV) research concentrates on developed countries and very little is known about results outside of this domain. This study employs Turkish business databases to assess the relative importance of TR and IR and capabilities on performance differences among firms in Turkey which was the 17th largest economy in the world trade in 2016. Second, in the RBV literature, limited research tests the contribution of capabilities to firm success after simultaneously accounting for the effects of other resources (namely, TR and IR) available to the firm. Finally, this research offers practical contributions to executives and managers who have to make adequate decisions for firm survival and growth in the competitive business arena.