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The aim of this chapter is to evidence the requirements for successfully facilitating female entrepreneurship in rural areas.

Using a case study approach based on WiRE, the chapter outlines the practical support that has evolved from research into the complexities of supporting women’s rural business activity. It provides a brief history of the WiRE organisation and presents the findings of a UK West Midlands European Social Fund sponsored project.

Female rural entrepreneurs contribute to the regional economy; however, practical business support needs often become blurred with personal demands, such as caring roles, particularly with respect to farm-based enterprises.

Findings are concentrated around one regional case study. Further research could make comparisons across a range of similar projects.

The case study highlights the importance of location and circumstance in the development of FREs. It provides a clear research-based template for both rural policy makers and support agencies that should be used to inform the design of future supports for FREs.

FREs are important to the rural economy and have a valuable contribution to make to economic development, both in terms of wealth creation and employment. However, the complexity of circumstantial, community and family factors affects the success of support offerings, highlighting the need for plaiting support.

WiRE is the only ongoing support organisation for FREs. There is a paucity of research around support to FREs, which this chapter aims to rectify.

This paper seeks to investigate the role of social capital in facilitating the entry of new business ventures into service networks.

The empirical work is undertaken via case study‐based research, featuring three service businesses, each entering and operating in a different marketplace.

Results show that new service businesses are not necessarily able to draw on existing social capital in order to enter a business network and build relationships with potential customers and suppliers.

Future empirical work should re‐examine the distinctions between the role and nature of social capital for new service businesses.

The paper suggests how the new service entrepreneur might invest personal resources in networking to initiate relationships and build a network of customers and suppliers.

The paper presents the little researched area of networking and relationship initiation as a means of developing social capital for new service businesses.

In this chapter, the authors explore entrepreneurial change in Stanton, a rural small town in New Zealand. This once-prosperous place has suffered economically and socially as its past core industries have vanished, and it can now be considered as a depleted community. Yet in recent years, the town has seen a rejuvenation, in part due to the endeavours of Sue, a high-profile entrepreneur from outside the town who has set up several businesses in the town and indeed in other small towns in the region. Theoretically, the authors take an entrepreneurial identity perspective in examining how Sue’s arrival has changed the town; the authors examine how her entrepreneurship was perceived as legitimate. The authors use a qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews. The authors contribute in demonstrating how an ascribed entrepreneurial identity can not only enable but also hinder change in this community, generating confidence and emotional contagion around entrepreneurship, and also uncertainty and resentment. In doing so, the authors challenge the universality of entrepreneurship benefits.

This paper is an exploratory quantitative study aimed at providing the first overview of the incidence of female directors in UK companies, mapped against types of firms. It provides a unique quantitative perspective on the types of companies with boards on which female directors serve.

A quantitative analysis of a newly constructed database based on data for all UK companies (using Companies House Financial Analysis Made Easy data) was carried out to explore overall data for board membership related to gender, resulting in a new typology to describe firms with female directors.

The data supports earlier partial studies suggesting male dominance continues at senior levels. Although female directors represented one in four directors in UK firms, most companies remain male dominated. Women directors are generally found in smaller firms and only one in 226 of larger firms have a majority of female directors. The service sector remains the main focus for female firms, both business services and other services.

The study suggests that at the rate of progress achieved over the 2003‐2005 period, it will be the year 2225 before gender balance in company directorships is achieved in the UK. The study was based on Companies House data, where gender is a self‐reported variable; therefore, considerable work had to be done to identify the gender of directors in order to build the database. This is a limitation for others trying to assess female board membership. The study did not attempt to explain why these levels of female participation are observed – this is a necessary second step following this first analysis of the incidence of women on boards.

The data provides the first comprehensive picture of the senior positions of women across UK businesses as it relates to their positions on the boards of companies.

UK higher education has faced an unprecedented period of change due to multiple UK governmental policies over a short period – coupled with demographic change and the vote to leave the European Union. This pressures universities to meet third mission aims by engaging effectively with society and business, generating income in the process to address reduced funding. Support from the UK Government includes over 20 years of funding for universities to develop entrepreneurial structures and processes, termed entrepreneurial architecture (EA). While the government regularly collects data on funds generated through third mission activities, less is known about how EA is perceived by those inside the university. The purpose of this paper is to meet that gap by exploring the perspectives of those employed specifically as part of EA implementation, as knowledge exchange intermediaries.

The study takes a phenomenological approach to achieve deeper insights into those routines and norms resulting from the application of EA. This is a purposeful sample with what is reported to be an under-researched group (Hayter, 2016); those employed as internal knowledge intermediaries across 15 universities (two from each). These university employees are specifically charged with business engagement, knowledge exchange and research commercialization; their contracts are funded and designed as a part of the EA rather than for research or teaching. An initial pilot comprising four semi-structured interviews indicated suitable themes. This was followed up through a set of three interviews over 18 months with each participant and a mapping of EA components at each institution.

Despite EA strategies, the picture emerging was that universities had embedded physical components to a greater or lesser degree without effective social architecture, shown by conflicts between stated and actual routines and norms and by consistent barriers to third mission work. Power and perceived power were critical as participants felt their own worth and status was embedded in their senior manager’s status and power, with practical difficulties for them when he or she lost ground due to internal politics.

The benefits of this study method and sample include deep insights into the perspectives of an under-reported group. The purposeful sample might be usefully expanded to include other countries, other staff or to look in depth at one institution. It is a qualitative study so brings with it the richness, insights and the potential lack of easy generalizability such an approach provides.

In designing organizations to achieve third mission aims, EA is important. Even where the structures, strategies, systems, leadership and culture appear to be in place; however, the resulting routines and norms may act against organizational aims. Those designing and redesigning their institutions might look at the experience suggested here to understand how important it is to embed social architecture to ensure effective actions. Measuring cultures and having this as part of institutional targets might also support better results.

Governments in the UK have invested resources and funding and produced policy documents related to the third mission for over 20 years. However, the persistent gap in universities delivering on policy third mission aims is well documented. For this to change, universities will need to ensure their EA is founded on strong underlying supportive cultures. Knowledge sharing with business and community is unlikely when it does not happen in-house.

The study adds new knowledge about how EA is expressed at individual university level. The findings show the need for more research to understand those routines and norms which shape third mission progress in UK universities and how power relations impact in this context, given the pivotal role of the power exerted by the senior manager.

This paper aims to use (in)visibility as a lens to understand the lived experience of six women managers in the headquarters of a large multinational organization in the UK to identify how “gender” is expressed in the context of organizational learning.

The researchers take a phenomenological approach via qualitative data collection with a purposeful sample – the six female managers in a group of 24. Data were collected through quarterly semi-structured interviews over 12 months with the themes – knowledge, interaction and gender.

Organizations seek to build advantage to gain and retain competitive leadership. Their resilience in a changing task environment depends on their ability to recognize, gain and use knowledge likely to deliver these capabilities. Here, gender was a barrier to effective organizational learning with women’s knowledge and experience often unseen and unheard.

This is a piece of research limited to exploration of gender as other, but ethnicity, age, social class, disability and sexual preference, alone or in combination, may be equally subject to invisibility in knowledge terms; further research would be needed to test this however.

Practical applications relate to the need for organizations to examine and address their operations for exclusion based on perceived “otherness”. Gendered organizations cause problems for their female members, but they also exclude the experience and knowledge of key individuals as seen here, where gender impacted on effective knowledge sharing and cocreation of knowledge.

The study offers further evidence of gendered organizations and their impacts on organizational effectiveness, but it also offers insights into the continues social acceptance of a masculinized normative model for socio-economic practice.

This exploration of gender and organizational learning offers new insights to help explain the way in which organizational learning occurs – or fails to occur – with visibility/invisibility of one group shaped by gendered attitudes and processes. It shows that organizational learning is not gender neutral (as it appears in mainstream organizational learning research) and calls for researchers to include this as a factor in future research.

Purpose: Although there has been increasing scholarly attention regarding the unethical concerns of prosocial behavior at work, scarce research has been done to conceptualize this type of compassionate behavior. To address this research gap, we identify the unethical concerns of a supervisor's compassion and address how this compassion, when combined with unethical implications, impacts subordinates' unethical behavior. Study Design/Methodology/Approach: We drew on sensemaking theory to develop a theoretical model and a four-quadrant taxonomy explaining how subordinate's interpretation of the context and supervisors' actions affected their unethical behavior through emotional responses and shared moral identity with supervisors. Findings: Our propositions suggest that subordinates' different roles in supervisors' compassionate process – the sufferer (receiver) or bystander (witness), and supervisors' unethical behavior at the domain of private or public activities impact their interpretations of meaning and shape their corresponding emotional responses, moral identity, and unethical behavior. Originality/Value: Our theoretical model contributes to a wholistic understanding of compassion at work by identifying the unethical implications of compassion appraisal. It depicts the complex process of how leaders' contradictory information shapes employees' unethical behavior. Research Limitations: The theoretical model and propositions lack the support of empirical data.

Biology and Politics (or Biopolitics) has been a part of the political science firmament since the 1960s. Over time, it has become less an odd outlier in the discipline and more a tolerated (and sometimes respected) part of the enterprise. After about 50 years of existence, this is a proper time to reflect on where biopolitics has been, where it is now, and where it might go as an academic endeavor. Indeed, some have said that the best step would for biopolitics to no longer be seen as a special, narrow part of political science – but a part of every field in the discipline, integrated into the larger world of the study of politics.

The central suggestion of this paper is that innovation in the concept of entrepreneurship is overdue and that the concept of entrepreneurship needs to be extended to accommodate its often neglected collective or pluralistic dimension, a concept termed “associative entrepreneurship”. It has also been argued that there may be a natural link between sustainability and the co‐operative form. In this paper these themes are drawn together by considering the entrepreneurial potential expressed by the recent creation of mutual businesses in a range of renewable energy sectors in Wales. It is suggested that, at least in the renewable energy sector and perhaps in other sectors too, innovation in the direction of sustainability may require a development of the concept of entrepreneurship in the direction of mutualism.

The paper takes the form of a theoretical discussion focusing around seven preliminary case studies.

As yet only a cluster of community‐based enterprises have been discovered in the renewable energy sector in Wales. The authors propose to study them in detail in the next stage of the research.

This is a developmental paper and many of its suggestions require rigorous testing. The authors would suggest that detailed case studies of the seven examples of associative enterprise in the renewable energy field outlined here, and others which may emerge during the research, would greatly enhance our understanding of what drives entrepreneurs in this field. Further research might also compare these examples with others organised according to more traditional business models.

In view of the urgent need to move towards a low‐carbon economy and the expansion of the renewable energy sector this would require, understanding of the motivations of entrepreneurs in this sector is of great value.

Innovation in the renewable energy sector may be being held back by the limitations of the concept of entrepreneurship.