Journal of Enterprising Culture

Entrepreneurial legitimacy has been described as a trigger of entrepreneurial career choice and motivation, meaning that the propensity of an individual to engage in an entrepreneurial career increases with the social legitimacy of the career. However, more than a predictor of entrepreneurial success, entrepreneurial legitimacy is a complex social construct that determines the diffusion of entrepreneurial culture in different countries. This article aims to contribute to contextualizing entrepreneurial legitimacy by acknowledging its social genesis and dynamics, and by showing the variety of social interactions that it encompasses. The article examines the discursive strategies that entrepreneurs use to gain legitimacy among their audiences, and studies the representations and expectations attached to the figure of the entrepreneur by current and aspiring students in a Master’s program in Entrepreneurship. We gather the views of three social groups that actively engage in the social construction of entrepreneurial legitimacy in order to identify their convergent and divergent social representations of what it means to “be an entrepreneur.” Based on a questionnaire survey of 529 French participants and on 30 qualitative interviews, we present and compare the social representations of French entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship held by SME entrepreneurs and current and potential students in a Master’s in entrepreneurship program. We found that entrepreneurial legitimacy is a collective outcome of various social representations circulating in the public space that affects entrepreneurs’ ability to develop their businesses and their identities, along with their willingness and capacity to promote the entrepreneurial spirit in society.

This explorative study examines the performance, socio-demographics and sustainability orientation of owners of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises’ (MSMEs) in Tanzania, a Least Developed Country (LDC). Based on a literature review, a pre-study conducted with experts, and a main study of 168 MSMEs-owners in Morogoro, the analyses show that sustainability orientation is made up of four factors of which clearly one social factor and one environmental factor. Furthermore, in light of the literature, performance and socio-demographic factors are regressed on sustainability orientation and appear not to have a significant influence. However, at a granular level, there are certain effects observed from performance and socio-demographics on sustainability orientation. In contrast to previous research, this study presents fine-grained insights into how performance and sustainability orientation are developed and how the former determines the latter. In doing so, this study sheds light on entrepreneurship in the informal economy of an LDC, refines the understanding of the sustainability orientation of MSME-owners, and endorses the position that “one size does not fit all” regarding the applicability of Western constructs to LDC settings.

While trustworthiness is seen as an important factor in success of cluster development agents (CDAs), its antecedent competencies were not identified. Against this gap, the current study seeks to explore the scope and sequence of CDAs’ trustworthiness competencies, highlighting the importance of paying attention to cultivating those competencies. Conducting a number of semi-structured interviews as well as one Interactive Management (IM) session which was empowered by using Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) software, 6 trustworthiness competencies seem to be important for CDAs were identified, including: Proficiency, Altruism, Acceptability, Ability to alert stakeholders, Expectation identification ability, and Ability to make cooperation. More importantly, the interdependencies amongst those 6 competencies were identified and modelled, shedding light on the priority and weight of each of those competencies as antecedents of CDAs’ trustworthiness. As the theoretical implementation, this study expressed the importance of trustworthiness for CDAs and modelled the antecedent competencies which need to be obtained by CDAs if they are to be trusted by their clients. If a cluster clients do now trust their agent, they should not be blamed. The trustee need to cultivate those pre-requirement competencies if s/he wants to be trustworthy. As the practical implementation, the findings of this study provide a coherent curriculum for enhancing CDAs’ trustworthiness competencies. This curriculum should be implemented by the economic and development organisations who are dealing with training and preparing agents to take role in activating and extending industrial clusters in different countries.

This paper explores different Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions that may be adopted by SMEs in Mauritius. The Mauritian government has the ambition of increasing the contribution of SMEs to the overall GDP of Mauritius from 40 to 65% by year 2025. CRM is about building and enhancing relationships so as to increase long term profitability of the company. The aim of the research is to consider different Social CRM strategies that may be adopted by SMEs to achieve the national exports strategy. This research shows that SMEs consider websites and social media marketing more important as compared to other digital tools. In addition, SMEs are careful about some negative aspects of social media marketing such as negative comments and lack of social metrics. However, most SMEs believe that Social CRM is of great importance for being successful. The research ontology that has been adopted is that the use of CRM may be of great use for SMEs to improve their overall marketing capability.