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This study aims to introduce and define the concept of phygital brand community (PBC). It discusses the potential conflicts that can arise from engaging in multiple PBCs and propose an enriched netnographic methodological approach to explore the role of PBC engagement overlap and its influence on the phygital experience.

Following a critical analysis of the inherent limitations of netnographic methodological approaches in the context of PBCs, this study develops an enriched netnographic research protocol that accounts for the challenges of engagement overlap among PBCs.

This study proposes two methods of analysis, namely, “participatory netnography” and “witness netnography,” which are derived from a mixed-methodology approach that integrates elements of netnography.

The findings of this study underscore the requisite methodological refinements imperative for enhancing netnographic analysis, particularly in its application for a better comprehension of individual behaviors within the realm of PBCs. In pursuit of this objective, the identified adjustments encompass ethical considerations, evaluation methods and their application in a digital milieu, where intricate mechanics and technologies frequently elude conventional methodologies.

In this study, the authors present a novel conceptualization of PBCs, highlighting their role and development, as well as the challenges they pose. To adequately capture the impact of PBC engagement overlap, the authors propose the need for an enriched mixed-methodological approach.

All entrepreneurs interact simultaneously with multiple entrepreneurial contexts throughout their entrepreneurial journey. This conceptual paper has two central aims: (1) it synthesises the current literature on gender and entrepreneurship, and (2) it increases our understanding of how gender norms, contextual embeddedness and (in)equality mechanisms interact within contexts. Illustrative contexts that are discussed include entrepreneurship education, business networks and finance.

This conceptual paper draws upon extant literature to develop its proposed conceptual framework. It provides suggestions for systemic policy interventions as well as pointing to promising paths for future research.

A literature-generated conceptual framework is developed to explain and address the systemic barriers faced by opportunity-driven women as they engage in entrepreneurial contexts. This conceptual framework visualises the interplay between gender norms, contextual embeddedness and inequality mechanisms to explain systemic disparities. An extra dimension is integrated in the framework to account for the power of agency within women and with others, whereby agency, either individually or collectively, may disrupt and subvert the current interplay with inequality mechanisms.

This work advances understanding of the underrepresentation of women entrepreneurs. The paper offers a conceptual framework that provides policymakers with a useful tool to understand how to intervene and increase contextual embeddedness for all entrepreneurs. Additionally, this paper suggests moving beyond “fixing” women entrepreneurs and points towards disrupting systemic disparities to accomplish this contextual embeddedness for all entrepreneurs. By doing so, this research adds to academic knowledge on the construction and reconstruction of gender in the field of entrepreneurship.

Previous studies on social influence and virtual product adoption have mainly taken users’ purchase behavior as a dichotomous variable (i.e. purchasing or not). Given the prevalence of competing versions (basic vs upgraded) of a virtual product in online communities, this paper investigated the differences in the effect of social influence on users’ adoption of basic and upgraded choices of a virtual product. It also examined how the effect varies with users’ social status and user-level network density.

A natural experiment was conducted in an online game community. Two competing versions (basic vs upgraded) of a virtual product were provided for in-game purchase while a random set of users selected from 897,765 players received the notification of their friends’ adoption information. A competing-risk model was used to test the hypotheses.

Social influence exerts a stronger positive effect on users’ adoption of the upgraded virtual product than of the basic virtual product. Middle-status users have the greatest (least) susceptibility to social influence in adopting the upgraded (basic) virtual product than low- and high-status users. User’s network density enhances the effect of social influence on adoption of both virtual products, even more for the upgraded one.

This research contributes to the social influence and product adoption literature by disentangling the different effects of social influence on basic and upgraded versions of a virtual product. It also identifies the boundary conditions that social influence works for each version of the virtual product.

This study explores the relationship between economic freedom and gender ideologies on the allocation of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries. Opportunity entrepreneurship is typically understood as one’s best option for work, whereas necessity entrepreneurship describes the choice as driven by no better option for work. Specifically, we examine how economic freedom (i.e. each country’s policies that facilitate voluntary exchange) and gender ideologies (i.e. each country’s propensity for gendered separate spheres) affect the distribution of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries.

We construct our sample by matching data from the following country-level sources: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s Adult Population Survey (APS), the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index (EFI), the European/World Value Survey’s Integrated Values Survey (IVS) gender equality index, and other covariates from the IVS, Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) World Bank (WB) databases. Our final sample consists of 729 observations from 109 countries between 2006 and 2018. Entrepreneurial activity motivations are measured by the ratio of the percentage of women’s opportunity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship to the percentage of female necessity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship at the country level. Due to a first-order autoregressive process and heteroskedastic cross-sectional dependence in our panel, we estimate a fixed-effect regression with robust standard errors clustered by country.

After controlling for multiple macro-level factors, we find two interesting findings. First, economic freedom positively affects the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship. We find that the size of government, sound money, and business and credit regulations play the most important role in shaping the distribution of contextual motivations over time and between countries. However, this effect appears to benefit efficiency and innovation economies more than factor economies in our sub-sample analysis. Second, gender ideologies of political equality positively affect the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship, and this effect is most pronounced for efficiency economies.

This study offers one critical contribution to the entrepreneurship literature by demonstrating how economic freedom and gender ideologies shape the distribution of contextual motivation for women’s entrepreneurship cross-culturally. We answer calls to better understand the variation within women’s entrepreneurship instead of comparing women’s and men’s entrepreneurial activity. As a result, our study sheds light on how structural aspects of societies shape the allocation of women’s entrepreneurial motivations through their institutional arrangements.

This paper aims to investigate associations between firm resources and reliance on entrepreneurial marketing (EM) channels among agrofood ventures. It accounts for agropreneur gender and racial/ethnic status in the context of marketing channel portfolio composition. The authors examine the established assumption that resource limitations drive EM and whether socially disadvantaged status of agropreneurs is associated with marketing strategy beyond standard resourcing measures.

Using 2015 Local Foods Marketing Practices Survey data, the authors apply linear regression to investigate differences in the use of EM channels, accounting for resources, social status and other factors.

Limited-resource ventures rely more on consumer-oriented channels that require EM practices. Socially disadvantaged entrepreneurs favor these channels, even when accounting for resources. Notably, ventures headed by men of color rely more on the most customer-centric local foods marketing channel.

Future research should investigate how social and human capital influences the use of EM.

Entrepreneurial support policy and practice for agropreneurs should be cautious about the “double-burden” folk theorem of intersectional disadvantage and review how to best direct resources on EM to groups most likely to benefit.

This paper uses a unique, restricted, nation-wide, federal data set to examine relationships between resource endowments, social status and the composition of agrofood enterprises’ marketing channel portfolios. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first to include racial- and ethnic-minority status of agropreneurs and to account for intersectionality with gender.

This paper aims to explore how sub-national or regional cultural differences influence backers’ willingness to crowdfund projects. The paper also explores how migrant transnationalism influences the impact of backer’s sub-national culture and crowdfunding relationships.

This paper is based on the experimental design technique using analysis of covariance methods. The authors tested the study hypotheses on a sample of 790 respondents.

The study results suggest that individuals differ in their intent to crowdfund product campaigns depending on value congruence between their cultural values derived from the region to which they belong and the nature of the product category, such as environmentally friendly or happiness-enhancing products.

This paper explores the role of regional cultural differences in determining the intention to crowdfund different campaigns based on the nature of the product. Value congruence, as driven by regional cultural differences with crowdfunding campaigns, has not been explored before.

This study aims to examine how the effect of gender on entrepreneurial growth aspirations is moderated differently by individual resources (human and financial capital) compared to those within the social environment (availability of entrepreneurial knowledge and role models).

A multilevel estimator is used to investigate the determinants of growth aspirations of owners-managers of nascent start-ups. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor database is employed, covering the period 2007–2019, with 99,000 useable cases drawn from 95 countries.

The results suggest that individual financial resources and human capital have positive effects on entrepreneurial growth aspirations; yet these effects are weaker for female entrepreneurs relative to males. In contrast, the impact of the availability of entrepreneurial social knowledge and role models on their growth aspirations is more positive than for male entrepreneurs.

This study offers a novel insight into entrepreneurial growth ambition, as it utilises a global perspective to scrutinise whether individual and social resources contribute differently to male versus female growth-aspirations, employing a multilevel approach. It also integrates insights from the resource-based view and from the relevant business literature on entrepreneurs’ gender to develop theoretical explanations.