Journal of Enterprising Culture

This paper seeks to increase understanding of the role the environment in the emergence of business opportunities, and how opportunities change as industries evolves. It explores the dynamics of entrepreneurial opportunity in the British steamship industry. It suggests niches are created when environmental thresholds are reached. Entrepreneurs who act before thresholds are reached fail. A complex relationship between inventors, innovators/entrepreneurs and higher order opportunities is revealed illustrating the difficulty of identifying 'higher order opportunities. Over time, variations in environmental forces changed niche size and carrying capacity. Causes of new niche formation were both exogenous and endogenous supporting both Kirzner and Schumpeter. Inertial forces inhibited the ability of existing players to seize opening niches and expanded opportunities for new comers.

This study investigates whether family businesses (FBs) differ from non-family businesses (NFBs) regarding the institutionalisation of management accounting. Furthermore, it analyses whether FB-specific contextual factors such as the existence of non-family management and the level of family influence affect the establishment of discrete management accounting departments. Six hypotheses are formulated and tested based on survey results from 479 firms from Austria and 418 firms from Germany. Our results indicate that FBs establish fewer management accounting departments than NFBs do and that the heads of management accounting in FBs are less likely to hold a university degree compared with their counterparts in NFBs. Moreover, within FBs, larger firm size and the existence of non-family management are positively correlated with the establishment of management accounting departments, where firm size acts as the strongest predictor. As firm type (FB vs. NFB) emerged as a significant contextual factor for the institutionalisation of management accounting, this factor should be included in future studies of the organisation and set-up of the corporate management accounting function. Moreover, deeper investigation into the drivers and outcomes of FB-specific management accounting institutionalisation is needed.

Outsourcing strategies reveal trends in strategic business administration. Over the past 80 years, outsourcing has become one of the most important concepts in business management and operation. In Taiwan, optoelectronics, semiconductors, and information technology (IT) are the major industries engaging in engineering manpower outsourcing (EMO) due to their capital intensity and their requirements for a large quantity of high-quality engineers. This study analyzes the EMO competence of Taiwan's enterprises using expert interviews, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) analysis, and a fuzzy logic inference system (FLIS). This study shows that EMO competence can be divided into three influential variables: cost, resources, and strategy. The results of this research indicate that the cost variable has the greatest influence on EMO. The results of fuzzy analysis demonstrate that if enterprises intend to improve their EMO, they must consider the combination of the direct cost and talents sub-variables within the resource variable to be more important than the various sub-variable combinations of cost and strategy. Moreover, empirical results also show that the internal operation (IO) sub-variable has a significant impact on the strategy variable and that the internal training (IT) and external alliance (EA) sub-variables have little influence on the strategy variable with respect to EMO.

Until recently, human resource management has been considered inappropriate and too costly for small businesses and consequently research in this direction has been at a relatively minimum level. It is also evident that the effectiveness and competitiveness of SMEs can be increased through the application of sound HRM practices. In order to establish how SMEs can successfully apply HRM, the objective of this study is to establish, in an exploratory manner, the applicability of HRM in a small business in order to ensure its effective operation and consequent competitiveness. The research method applied is an interpretive and qualitative approach by means of a single case study of a photographic equipment store. The owner-manager perceives that personnel problems pose a major barrier to the success of the business; however, he also believes that outside aid in HRM would not resolve the problems. The HRM process of the SME growth model adds value in the sense that it also illustrates the relationship between the owner-manager's personal characteristics, external market conditions, nature of the work environment, and the business structure. Given the small business-specific problems that were identified, the information obtained in this study paves the way for a quantitative study of a number of SMEs and comparative research.

This paper examines the legitimating process of a French higher education institution entirely dedicated to entrepreneurship. Management and entrepreneurship education strive both for academic and market legitimacies. We think entrepreneurship education is confronted with an additional challenge: building political legitimacy. We analyze the "extreme case" study of Advancia, a Paris business school. We examined the business school's legitimation process over a period of six years, from 2004 to 2010. This "extreme case" may be informative for other business schools willing to reach academic, market and political legitimacies while at the same time trying to develop a coherent and stable global strategy in a competitive higher education landscape. This is the first article dealing with the topic of legitimacy acquisition processes, with the aim of emphasizing the institutionalization of entrepreneurial mindset in French entrepreneurship higher education.