Interviews were conducted with 15 entrepreneurial feminists to explore how feminist values are enacted in opportunity recognition and organizational structures within the venture-creation process. Results suggest that opportunity recognition aligned with the needs and values of the entrepreneurial feminists. Opportunity construction was defined as ‘I am the market’, ‘building community with women like me’, ‘enabling others’, ‘do more with my life’, and ‘opportunity knocked’. Organizational structures and governance reflected cooperative, collaborative and ethical principles. Implications to feminist theory are discussed.

During the past twenty years, there has been an explosion of new interest in entrepreneurs and their activities. Yet only recently has serious research attention been devoted to the ethical problems encountered by entrepreneurs and their organizations. Entrepreneurs face uniquely complex moral problems related to basic fairness, personnel and customer relationships, distribution dilemmas, and other challenges. This essay surveys contemporary research in entrepreneurial ethics, examines the kinds of ethical dilemmas entrepreneurs confront, identifies major research topics and methodological approaches, and discusses (...) possible directions for future research. (shrink)

Entrepreneurship education has a lot of research on influencing factors of entrepreneurial intention but rarely studies the influence mechanism of emotional competences on entrepreneurial intention from the perspective of social entrepreneurship. This article takes college students’ social entrepreneurs as research objects, drawing on Krueger’s model, theory of planned behavior, social cognitive theory, and triadic reciprocal determinism theory. This paper constructs a conceptual model with emotional ability, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial intention, to further study their relationship. The 312 students from China (...) College Students’ Social Entrepreneurship Project engaged in early entrepreneurship practice, conducted a questionnaire survey and used the empirical test of the structural equation model to analyze the relationship between college students’ emotional competences, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial intention. The result show: First, social–emotional competence had a positive effect on entrepreneurial intention, and the positive effect of personal affective competence on entrepreneurial intention was not supported or only partially supported. Second, all the dimensions of entrepreneurial self-efficacy were significantly and positively correlated with entrepreneurial intention. Third, emotional competence has a significant positive impact on entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Fourth, entrepreneurial self-efficacy mediated the relationship between emotional competence and entrepreneurial intention. (shrink)

Small family businesses have generally been shown to exhibit significant concern for social responsibility, especially at the community level. Despite the reported heterogeneity of family firms in their preferences for and participation in social responsibility, the drivers of such differences are not agreed upon in the literature. We draw from enlightened self-interest and social capital theories by exploring their complementary and competing implications for the effect of duration and community satisfaction on participation in community-oriented social responsibility. Additionally, drawing on the (...) association between gender and self-construal and evidence that gender shapes helping and giving behaviors, we assess the moderating role of the gender of the firm manager in these relationships. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 279 family businesses and find support that gender moderates the relationship between community duration and satisfaction and measures of CSR. (shrink)

Extant research notes a tendency to propound the idea that female managers are secondary to men. Gender differences constitute an ethical issue and the discursive constructions of gender management are central to research in business ethics. Drawing on evidence gathered from a time–space intersection that has been widely neglected by research in this area, we address whether female business leaders develop gender-stereotypic management styles as well as their propensity to adopt masculine management patterns such as making risky decisions and implementing (...) formal management systems. Our findings suggest that gender-stereotypic management styles are chosen strategically and target-driven, which implies a selective use of masculine and feminine management styles. Furthermore, as part of the masculine approach, female business owners adopt risk-taking decisions and implement formal management systems. Our results provide support for the argument that gender is context dependent and, hence, the findings of this study may be useful for contemporary jurisdictions featuring male-dominated societies and a strong intervention by the State in the economy. (shrink)

Currently, entrepreneurship is a priority for economic, social, and technological growth. Therefore, the interest in understanding entrepreneurship processes has increased significantly. Individual variables play a fundamental role, and academic research has pointed out the influence of emotional intelligence in entrepreneurial processes; however, its relationship with other interpersonal processes and individual variables, such as personality and self-efficacy, has not been extensively studied. The aim of this research was to analyze the relationship among emotional intelligence, self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial intention, controlling for the (...) effects of personality, gender, and age. Multiple hierarchical regression analyses were applied through a questionnaire survey of 1,593 college students to test the relationship between the constructs in the model. The results show that the personality traits are associated with entrepreneurial self-efficacy, emotional intelligence positively influences entrepreneurial intention, and self-efficacy mediates the relationship between emotional intelligence and entrepreneurial intention. Practical implications for training programs are examined, and future lines of research were discussed. (shrink)