Journal of Enterprising Culture

Diverse demographic components internationally have resulted in an emerging awareness of ethnic minority entrepreneurship. In New Zealand, Indians are an ethnic minority who form approximately 1.7% of the population. Based on qualitative research methodology and grounded in feminine epistemology, the entrepreneurial journey of Indian women entrepreneurs in New Zealand is explored. The findings reveal multiple layers of meaning and the recoding of connections as the women seek to both confront and co-exist with their Indian past and their New Zealand present - a border zone, where entrepreneurship serves as a focal point for making a difference in the host country New Zealand.

The paper investigates the effects of the Zimbabwean national culture on enterprise development. In-depth interviews were carried out with fifteen (15) entrepreneurs and seven (7) members of the community whose role was to support entrepreneurs. It was established that the national culture impeded enterprise development and the factors identified are: bad debt culture, let's-pull-him-down syndrome, dependency syndrome, high living, and absence of role models, refusal to accept entrepreneurship, employing relatives and poor quality goods and services. To promote enterprise development, countries need to identify factors that make up the national culture. The paper also identifies the desired enterprise culture.

In presenting two perspectives through which SME networking can be discussed, namely a system view and a view that considers networks as entities, this paper aims to contribute to the current discourse on SME network resources. A network-level performance measurement system emphasizes win-win situations in a network between the leader company and the other members of the network. The main objective of the present paper is to develop a measurement system for analyzing the value of resources and competencies in a production network, which can be used to complement existing network-level performance measurement systems. By taking into account the resources in a network environment in this way, the value of the whole network and its resources comes to represent the sum of the resources fit with customer needs, the co-operation ability and willingness of the network, and the entrepreneurial capability of the network to create new business opportunities.

Several factors have been identified in the literature as affecting SME performance, in particular ability to access finance. Access to finance is in turn influenced by variables in both the enterprise's internal and external environment. It is held that SMEs are unable to access external finance because they are not investment ready. They lack the necessary information and knowledge of their businesses to approach finance providers or to be successful in accessing funds if they do. Face-to-face interviews using structured questionnaire were conducted to collect primary data from 407 SMEs operating in the trading sector in 3 provinces- Bangkok, Chiang-Mai and Khon-Kan. Results of the structural equation modelling (SEM) reveal that quality of financial information has significant positive effect on performance and on owner-managers' perception of their ability to access external capital. A significant positive effect of their perception of ability to access capital on performance was also found.