Search results

The study aims to understand why women-owned microenterprises (WOMEs) in India experience a lower growth rate, where growth can be represented in increments in the venture’s size or scope. There is no conclusive understanding of the factors that affect the sustained growth of WOMEs in India.

What personal, social and economic factors support or hinder the choice, growth and sustainability of women-owned ventures? What role do institutional factors (government, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), self-help groups and microfinance institutions) play toward the sustainability of WOMEs? The answers to these questions were obtained through a qualitative design by interviewing 30 micro women entrepreneurs from Tamil Nadu, a Southern state of India and one of the largest hubs for WOMEs and their responses were content analyzed using NVivo 12 software.

The findings capture and apply the fundamentals of two key theoretical perspectives, resource-based view (RBV) and self-determination theory (SDT), in identifying the links between the individual, social and economic factors and their combined effect on the sustained growth of women-owned micro businesses. The findings add value in identifying the ingrained cultural norms and traditions and several internal and external factors that support or challenge the growth of WOMEs. This study highlights that the interventions by the government need to be strengthened for the growth and sustainability of WOMEs.

The study’s findings provide suggestions to policymakers, banks, funding agencies, financial institutions and NGOs to design applicable policies and schemes toward the sustained growth of WOMEs.

This study contributes toward a better understanding of the trends in the context of WOMEs from an Indian context. This topic has received little attention in the academic literature. Second, the study’s conceptual contribution is an application of SDT and RBV to understand and categorize the enablers and deterrents in the path of growth of WOMEs, which is a novel pursuit.

This paper describes the results of research into the characteristics of high and low growth small and medium sized businesses in Scotland.

This study aims to investigate the dynamic influences of clustered barriers that hinder electronic procurement technology (EPT) implementation in construction procurement, using the neuro-fuzzy system.

A comprehensive literature review was conducted and 21 barriers to EPT implementation within construction projects were identified. Based on an expert survey, 121 datasets were gathered for this study. Using mean and normalization analysis for the datasets, 15 out of the 21 barriers were deemed to have critical influences in EPT barriers phenomenon. Subsequently, the critical barriers were classified into five groups: human-related; technological risk-related; government-related; industry growth-related; and financial-related. The relationships and influence patterns between the groups of barriers to EPT implementation were analyzed using the neuro-fuzzy system. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis was performed to examine the dynamic influence levels of the barriers within the hindrance level composition.

The results reveal that addressing one barrier group does not reduce the high levels of hindrances experienced in EPT implementation. However, addressing at least two barrier groups mostly tends to reduce the hindrance levels for EPT implementation. Further, this study revealed that addressing some barrier group pairings, such as technological risk-related and government-related barriers, while other barrier groups remained at a high level, still resulted in high levels of hindrances to EPT implementation in construction procurement.

This study provides insights for researchers to help them contribute to the development of theory with contemporary approaches based on the influence patterns of barrier interrelationships.

This study provides a model that would help practitioners and decision makers in construction procurement to understand and effectively determine the complex and dynamic influences of barrier groups to EPT uptake, for the development of suitable mitigation strategies.

This study provides novel insights into the complex influence patterns among grouped barriers concerning EPT adoption in the construction industry. Researchers and practitioners are equipped with knowledge on the influence patterns of barriers. This knowledge aids the development of effective strategies that mitigate the combined groups of barriers, and promote the wider implementation of EPT in the construction industry.

High-growth firms have recently received considerable attention in the firm growth literature. These firms might have grown despite the existence of growth barriers, and evidence also suggests that, having already grown exponentially, they may not be in the best position to grow further. Policies targeting high-growth firms may therefore be misdirected. We argue that entrepreneurship researchers should concentrate more on firms that are not hiring, despite having high profits. We call these firms “sleeping gazelles,” and demonstrate that they represented almost 10% of all limited liability firms in Sweden from 1997 to 2010. Nearly half of these firms continued to earn high or moderate profits in subsequent three-year periods, while still displaying no growth. Regression analyses indicate that these firms were significantly smaller, older, more likely to be active in industries with high profit uncertainty, and more likely to be located in less densely populated municipalities than were corresponding growing firms.

The purpose of the research is to identify the major constraints to the growth of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in a less-developed region of an emerging economy and how these constraints are affected by owner/manager's attributes and firm-specific characteristics.

To fulfill the objectives, a structured questionnaire is used to gather data from 200 randomly selected MSMEs located in Cachar district of Assam, India. The study applies factor analysis to categorize various perceived constraints into resolute sets of problem variables or factors. Then, the summated scales are regressed on the predictors related to owner-manager's attributes and firm characteristics to validate the hypotheses.

The results demonstrate that the broad factors constraining the development of MSMEs in Cachar district are as follows: (1) financial issues, (2) infrastructure problems, (3) labor and management issues, (4) market problems and (5) input problems. Furthermore, the findings confirm that firm growth, size, age, sector, location, innovation activity, owner-manager's gender, age and level of education significantly affect the identified constraints.

Although the research is limited to the Cachar district of India, the findings are relevant for other similar districts of India and less-developed regions of emerging economies. However, the study needs to be replicated in other regions of India as well as in other emerging economies for cross-validation and to determine the generalizability of the results.

To the authors' knowledge, no studies linking the constraints faced by MSMEs to owner/manager's attributes and firm-specific characteristics are carried out in the north-eastern region of India. The study also extends the limited researches on the influence of owner-manager's attributes and firm characteristics on the constraints to the growth of MSMEs by incorporating additional predictors.

This paper reviews the literature on internationalization barriers of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from developing countries. The purposes of the study are: (1) to explicitly point out specific factors influencing the growth and internationalization of SMEs from developing countries and (2) to identify the research gaps to provide lucid and succinct directions for future research in this area.

The authors selected relevant papers from journals listed on Web of Science and Scopus databases.

It was found that there are large number of questions remain unanswered regarding the internationalization of SMEs from developing countries regarding the factors determining their growth and internationalization.

This review distinctively accentuates previous studies on such barriers influencing the growth of SMEs from developing countries and systematically synthesize the issues faced by those SMEs. Thus, the authors seek to provide a comprehensible platform for researchers working in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions of barriers to career progression among female university students. While significant literature has examined career enhancement in the context of employed women, little work has explored the perceptions of future career challenges of females about to enter the workforce and embark on their careers. This study derives its motivation from research findings that confirm that women need additional focused preparation for career advancement opportunities.

The study used a sample of 484 Indian female university students located in the United Arab Emirates and India. The study uses the established Career Pathways Survey scale (Smith et al., 2012a) to measure the four dimensions Denial, Acceptance, Resignation and Resilience to career progression. Structural equation modeling was used to model the four constructs as indicators of perceived barriers to progress.

The study finds that among the female students about to embark on their career journey, there is a strong desire toward achieving career success. The model is validated by the use of a structural equation model, and findings indicate that there is a strong sense of Resilience and an element of uncertainty about whether perceived career progression will be satisfying overall. No significant differences were observed in the perceptions across the two geographical locations. The findings suggest that continued efforts in preparing female graduates for career success are warranted.

The Career Pathways Survey may be a useful method to assist young women in identifying their career goals prior to entering the workforce. Interventions through training programs during their higher education may be beneficial in addressing perceptions that might hinder their later career growth.

This paper contributes to the understanding of the perceived barriers to career progression for women. Prior research has concentrated on career progression in the context of employed women. This study extends that work to understand the perceptions of women about to embark on their career journey.

The purpose of the paper is to review and analyse different glass ceiling studies conducted in different Asian countries during the three decades after the introduction of the metaphor. It also describes the antecedents and the consequences of the glass ceiling.

The method chosen for the study was a computerised search of available materials using the keywords relating to glass ceiling in Asia and latest reports from international organisations.

The perception of glass ceiling existence in Asian countries has been sorted out region-wise. Different factors for glass ceiling have been categorised under different theories.

The study includes a multiregional aspect of glass ceiling, which will be useful for further studies in this area. The limitation of the study is that it did not assess the awareness and influence of glass ceiling in each industry.

Since the study showed glass ceiling practices in different countries in Asia, it might help policy makers for making proper decisions for breaking of glass ceiling.

The study may be a part of empowering women as it analyses areas of inequality and finds out antecedents.

This paper is the first to shed light on glass ceiling on a multicultural and multiregional aspect.

The open objective of liberalization or globalization for the developed nations is the expansion of market or the creation of opportunities to produce and sale more and more goods and/or services beyond the domestic market which ultimately lead the nation in the right path of development. On the other hand, this economic environment is a challenge for the developing or less developed or small nations with respect to share of world trade to compete with the developed or large nations with respect to the quality of the product, technology, skill of human resources, etc. There arise tariff impositions to protect the domestic economies to defend against the challenges. Under these circumstances, this chapter tries to investigate the impact of such tariff war measured by trade as a percentage of GDP on the per capita GDP of the nations. It finds that all the variables are cointegrated. The effect depends on how we measure world tariff, for example, the effect of tariff on trade is positive and significant when we measure the world tariff as simple mean of all products but the effect of tariff on trade is negative and statistically significant when we take tariff as weighted mean of all products. Similarly, the effect of tariff on per capita income is positive if tariff is measured with simple average of all products but this effect is negative and significant when it is measured with weighted mean of all products. In this case, imposition of world tariff (weighted mean of all products) declines world per capita income especially in short run.