Entrepreneurial Elite Research Articles

The Situation of Innovative Entrepreneurship Courses Promoted by Technological Colleges and Universities in Taiwan and Recommendations

Babson College has become a model for the advancement of entrepreneurship education in the United States. Its personalized entrepreneurship education programs foster entrepreneurial elites, making it a model for Taiwan’s entrepreneurship education development. Its personalized entrepreneurship education programs foster entrepreneurial elites, making it a model for Taiwan’s entrepreneurship education development.Additionally, Taiwan has incorporated and adapted a series of entrepreneurship education courses. In recent years, the government has promoted practical projects and simulation entrepreneurial competitions aggressively. The entrepreneurial theories and practical experiences are combined to provide more comprehensive and structured learning courses for entrepreneurial students. In the contemporary social environment, innovation and entrepreneurship have become vital economic engines. Consequently, it is crucial to cultivate entrepreneurialism and entrepreneurial skills in students. Students and faculty in Taiwan’s higher education system have access to a plethora of excellent learning platforms where they can acquire a vast array of practical knowledge and skills. In entrepreneurship education, schools therefore adopt Babson College’s methodology and planning. In Taiwanese courses, the current situation is reviewed and related feedback opinions are collected in order to strengthen the prior knowledge of students and increase their employment competitiveness, thereby serving as the link between the self-awareness of students and their understanding of themselves.

Ways of adapting the scandinavian experience of entrepreneurial education in secondary and vocational educational organization of Ukraine

Ways of adapting the scandinavian experience of entrepreneurial education in secondary and vocational educational organization of Ukraine

Conventional versus grassroots innovation outcomes in developing country makerspaces: governance and its determinants in the Philippines

ABSTRACT Makerspaces (MS) are widely considered to be sites for democratizing innovation outcomes away from conventional commercial and educational agenda of the entrepreneurial and scientific elite towards a grassroots and inclusive agenda. However, MS can reproduce elite-driven innovation outcomes as much as it can transform such towards a grassroots agenda, as is most evident in developing country contexts. Based on comparative case research of 10 selected MS in the Philippines, this study examines the variation of innovation outcomes among MS. Cases selected represent the heterogeneity of MS innovation outcomes in both material and cultural terms. The study finds three types of innovation outcomes that are research-based projects and elite culture, commercial-oriented projects and service culture, and creative and grassroots projects and maker culture. It further finds that MS governance, as determined by variation in host organizations, MS capabilities, and cluster dynamics, shape innovation outcomes. It highlights that grassroots innovation outcomes are most effectively facilitated by MS independence, design capabilities, and diverse and high-skilled clusters. The study’s main contribution lies in its empirical exploration of the factors and dynamics that shape diverse innovation outcomes in MS. Policy implications for grassroots innovation are discussed.

Tech Workers Lie Flat

Tech Workers Lie Flat JS Tan (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Workers at the JD.com headquarters in 2016 (Visual China Group/Getty Images) [End Page 32] The term 996 has come to denote a culture of overwork in China’s tech sector. The numbers refer to a work schedule that runs from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week, though they represent less a fixed schedule than an expectation that tech workers will consistently put in grueling hours. Even with a seventy-two-hour workweek, jobs in the country’s fast-growing internet industry are among the most sought after by young professionals. Skilled tech jobs are on average among the highest paid in the country, with university graduates at top firms able to earn salaries of up to 600,000 renminbi (roughly $70,000) out of college, and more than twice this amount with just a few years of experience. But not all tech workers are treated equally. Contract workers, non-technical workers, and workers with niche technical skills, such as front-end web development, earn only a fraction of that income but are still expected to work 996. Although 996 has been practiced by internet companies for more than a decade, the term itself was only popularized in 2019 by a viral worker-led protest campaign known as the 996.ICU movement. (The idea is that working 996 will put workers in the ICU.) The campaign, which demanded that tech firms obey laws against excessive overtime, took shape as a project on the code-sharing platform GitHub and quickly gained traction on social media. The movement ignited a nationwide discussion about punishing work schedules, but most tech firms continued to practice 996. In 2021, however, Chinese tech workers finally began to catch a break. Over the past year, Meituan, Tencent, Kuaishou, JD.com, ByteDance, and many other Chinese internet giants, which had alternated between five- and six-day workweeks (known as the “big-small week”), announced that they were bringing back the two-day weekend. Last year, a Tencent-owned gaming studio rolled out a policy that would require employees to clock out by 6 p.m. on Wednesdays, and by 9 p.m. other days of the week. Another Ten-cent division, which runs WeChat, is piloting a “1065” schedule (10 a.m. to 6 p.m., five days a week) this year. Staying at the office beyond those hours requires submitting a formal request. [End Page 33] Why is China’s booming internet industry putting an end to a practice that has fueled so much of its growth? One reason might be because workers have mobilized to push for humane working conditions. But it is also important to recognize how ending 996 might align with the Chinese government’s broader goals for national development—and how the new regulation might even serve the interests of the industry’s leaders. Worker Pressure and Public Outcry Just months before the viral 996.ICU campaign, the Chinese economy began to slow down, partly as a result of a trade war between the United States and China. Venture capital dried up in what is now remembered in China as tech’s “capital winter.” Many internet companies started to lay off employees en masse, slash bonuses, and skimp on office perks. After years of industry expansion, the myth of limitless growth was crumbling, and programmers—once regarded as a professional class—began to shed their allegiance to the entrepreneurial elite. A post on social media written by a seasoned programmer in 2020 summed up the new mood: “The real winners [of 996] are the bosses. They pay the same sum of money to buy more hours of labor. The losers, on the other hand, are workers because they have to work many more hours for the same salary.” After the viral campaign, tech workers have remained vocal about the hardships of working in the industry. Many have taken to Maimai, a LinkedIn-like service that allows employees to post anonymously, and Zhihu, a forum website similar to Quora, to vent their frustrations. Tech workers’ grievances have led to the use of new self...

Observing legitimacy building in the reproduction and promotion of an entrepreneurial elite: the Scottish 'entrepreneurial exchange', 1995-2015

Seldom are entrepreneurs considered as a collective phenomenon, although they form a privileged socio-economic elite with material resources and clout. From an organisational perspective, we know little about how successful entrepreneurs organise themselves to leverage collective legitimacy, nor the societal mechanisms used to achieve this. To operationalise this we examine the Scottish 'entrepreneurial exchange', a networking organisation for high net-worth entrepreneurs. Using close reading and observational techniques we interrogate the website to uncover legitimacy building mechanisms such as alignment, association and fraternity used by exchange members. Enacting collective mechanisms including fraternising, legitimates both the individual and the collective. We highlight the importance of collective elements of entrepreneurial identity and legitimacy building pointing to underlying social implications in further studying fraternal aspects of collective entrepreneurship.

Observing legitimacy building in the reproduction and promotion of an entrepreneurial elite: the Scottish 'entrepreneurial exchange', 1995-2015

Observing legitimacy building in the reproduction and promotion of an entrepreneurial elite: the Scottish 'entrepreneurial exchange', 1995-2015

Cadre parents and their entrepreneur children? The dual-track intergenerational reproduction of elites in China: 1978\u20132010

This article documents and conceptualizes a mode of reproduction of elites in a society in transition from state domination to market orientation. By focusing on China’ marketization, we explore how parents’ advantageous backgrounds have influenced the chance of their children’s attainment of certain elite positions (administrative, technocratic, or market) and whether these patterns have varied across three periods (1978–1992, 1993–2002, and 2003–2010). Using data obtained from the 2011 China Social Survey, we find that although parents’ advantageous status has a persistent effect on children’s status attainment, the reproduction of the state elite and market elite still follows two separate tracks: the children of cadres do not show significant advantage in the process of becoming entrepreneurs and managerial elites, and the children of entrepreneurial and managerial elites are less likely to join cadres. We also find that the effects of the reproduction model are still enhanced and shaped by state power in different periods. These findings demonstrate the important interplay between family background and contextual inequality and give a deeper understanding of the different trajectories of elites in contemporary China.

The Growth Paths and Mechanisms of Chinese Private Enterprise

During the past forty years of reform and opening up, China’s private economy has made remarkable strides. This paper introduces start-up organizational processes into the study of elite mobility in emerging markets, exploring the relationship between the social origins of entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial outcomes. Our research finds that the initial scale, growth rate and current size of enterprises established by elite entrepreneurs are larger than those of grassroots entrepreneurs. With the deepening of economic reform and the growth of the private economy, the social origins of large business owners generally tend to be elitist and the scale advantage of the enterprises set up by elite entrepreneurs, especially endogenous or inside-track entrepreneurs, is ever more striking. The expansion of such enterprises’ superior position is mainly due to their initial advantages of scale; after the start-up period, the advantage conferred by their pace of growth does not increase synchronously. In order to promote the further development of the private economy and release its innovative potential, it is necessary to give full play to the government’s function of regulating market operations and correcting market failure, and thus actively creating a good business environment.

Introduction: Mobilising Resources for the Army and Navy in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire: Comparative, Transnational and Imperial Dimensions

The subject of this special issue is the relationship between the material demands of warfare and the political and administrative development of the Spanish imperial system during the long eighteenth century. Its purpose is to provide a transnational and comparative perspective on the methods employed by the Spanish monarchy to mobilise resources for war, emphasising the international, imperial and inter-regional connections that underpinned Spain’s military and naval efforts. These methods implied specific types of involvement between the crown and the regional productive elites and were directly related to the capacity of the latter to mobilise resources and administer production processes. They were varied, ranging from total state administration of capital, labour and productive processes to an almost complete and relatively independent involvement of the empire’s entrepreneurial elites, in Europe, America and Asia. The introduction by the guest editors positions the four contributions to this special issue within the wider context of the historiography on the mobilisation of resources for war. In recent years, scholars in this field have started to shift their attention from a primary focus on the development of ‘fiscal-military’ and ‘fiscal-naval’ arrangements that provided the financial backbone of states’ warring activities, to the wider economic and social networks involved in supplying, recruiting, building and maintaining armies and navies. As the introduction argues, these networks, underpinning the emergence of European national states, were always inherently transnational.

Farmland Transaction, Resource Reallocation, and the Rise of Land-Seizing Rural Elites

It is widely assumed among economists that farmland transaction, as a means of optimizing the reallocation of resources, contributes to farmers’ income. Unfortunately, farmers received little protection in farmland transaction and the restructuring of resources. Investors, bureaucrats, and social elites were all involved in the reallocation of agricultural resources and competed for the newly available resources injected from the top down, thus becoming new types of entrepreneurial rural elites that controlled farmland-related interests. As farmland, a basic form of social security for decades, was gradually transformed into a transactable commodity, the principles of equity and subsistence intrinsic to the original equal distribution of farmland also yielded to the realities of seizure by force and possession by capital, hence leading to the restructuring of social relations embedded in the farmland. Rural elites of various backgrounds (profiteering investors, rent-seeking bureaucrats, or market manipulators) all sought to seize the resources newly allocated by the state, hence the new phenomena of “the scramble for farmland by the elites” and “profit-sharing” among them.

The Middle-Class Entrepreneurial Elite in Šibenik and Split (15th Century)

The paper explores the entrepreneurial elite of late medieval Šibenik and Split, based on the examples of prominent businessmen in the historical records preserved in the notarial records of the two cities

Wealth Elite Moralities: Wealthy Entrepreneurs’ Moral Boundaries

This article examines the moral boundary work of wealthy Finnish entrepreneurs belonging to the country’s top 0.1 per cent of earners. Through 28 semi-structured interviews, we show how these members of the wealth elite construct moral boundaries to legitimise their growing distance from other income groups in a Nordic welfare society. The super-rich entrepreneurs construct self-identities based on hard work, persistence and normality, draw moral boundaries between lazy and hard-working people and create moral distance between themselves and wage earners, the unemployed and public-sector workers. At the same time, these wealthy elite entrepreneurs challenge the moralities of Nordic welfare society. We thus posit that moral boundaries and boundary work should be explored as legitimising discourses embedded in the relations of economic and political power.

Ascetic entrepreneurs: an elite prosopography

Asceticism has been advanced as a contributing factor to successful entrepreneurship. This paper reflects the testing of this construct with a prosopographical case study of six elite entrepreneurs. Bridging three centuries of new entry creation of sustained growth, this study verifies that asceticism is an appropriate explanatory mechanism and ethical standard for start-up viability and entrepreneurial success.

Privatisation and corruption in historical perspective: The case of secularisation in Bavaria and Prussia in the early nineteenth century

The article deals with privatisation and the valuation of such processes in Germany around 1800. Therefore, it focuses on a topic that has rarely been studied by historians for any time period, although the phenomenon was widespread in the past. The author argues that secularisation in 1803–1810 can be seen as an important privatisation process, because it included large transfers of former church property into private hands. Furthermore, he shows that a new generation of officials benefited from this process, although they had denounced comparable practices as corruption in the previous decades. They could easily justify such advantageous transfers publicly with their self-perception as an administrative and entrepreneurial elite. However, contemporaries publicly accused their actions and the secularisation itself of being corrupt. The author shows that privatisation was already a publicly discussed issue in the nineteenth century and needed to be justified. A history of privatisation, as the author finally states, allows insights into contemporaneous concepts of markets, state and welfare, and their effect in the respective time period.

State and Social Regulation of Informal Sector Labour: Silkreeling Industry of Ramanagaram, Karnataka

This paper presents analysis of the relationship between state and social regulation in the silk-reeling cluster in the town of Ramanagaram in Karnataka. This cluster has been a site for silk-reeling since its birth and it currently contains over a thousand home-based reeling and subsidiary units and they, together, employ a majority of the population. The discussion we present here draws from in depth conversations with various stakeholders in the sector – reeling unit owners, the workers in this sector, the various agents involved in this trade, officials managing state-run markets, and the bureaucrats involved in the development and implementation of policy. Production units in the silk reeling industry come under the category of the informal: exempt from systematic enforcement of labour legislation pertaining to factory work because of their location within entrepreneur's homes. However, the state is certainly not absent from the sector as a whole and in fact plays a crucial role in key activities located outside the site of production. We argue that in the context of an economy where owners of production units often run units with their own labour and that of their families or work alongside hired labour, state policy for the sector and the process of its implementation as a whole is a form of regulation of work. Our work analyses the complex relationship between socio-economic hierarchy of production units and the ability of firms to accumulate a surplus, in order to understand both why (i) the silk-reeling industry has seen lags in technological advancement and very little expansion despite the growing demand for silk yarn and why (ii) state support for the sector is becoming even more concentrated towards elite entrepreneurs than it was in the past.

Failure Is an Option: Institutional Change, Entrepreneurial Risk, and New Firm Growth

Does an institutional change that lowers failure barriers improve new firm growth? We take advantage of a quasi-natural experiment in Japan that drastically reduced the stringency of bankruptcy regulations to examine this question. Using longitudinal data over a 10-year period, we find that bankruptcy reform increases the rates of bankruptcy and founding—and, more importantly, the likelihood of high-growth ventures—by disproportionately encouraging elite individuals (i.e., those with superior human and social capital) to start firms. In turn, these firms are more likely than others to achieve high growth. Broadly put, we contribute to research at the nexus of institutional theory and entrepreneurship by emphasizing the connectedness of barriers to failure, venture growth, and elite entrepreneurs. We also highlight how institutional change that eases bankruptcy change can foster a regenerative cycle of failure, founding, and growth by attracting more capable entrepreneurs. Overall, we conclude that lowering barriers to failure via lenient bankruptcy laws encourages more capable—and not just more—entrepreneurs to start firms. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1110 .

Indian Software Capital: Sociography of a New Entrepreneurial Elite

The aim of this article is to study Indian software capital considered as the nexus of IT companies and their top managers. For this purpose, we have conducted a Multi Correspondence Analysis of a set of data collected for the first hundred IT firms listed on the National Stock Exchange in Mumbai in 2012. We address three main research questions. Firstly, what is the socio-demographic profile of these entrepreneurs, secondly, what is the shareholding pattern of these companies and their position on the IT market and, lastly, what are the differences between these IT companies and traditional business groups? Although the managers are highly educated and share the same technical culture, the results show a clear division of software capital in 3 clusters. First, the Multinational companies, which are the oldest firms and the biggest in terms of manpower and global revenue, are opposed to a second group of IT companies founded or managed by executives who are mainly graduates, and whose activities are oriented towards the domestic market; lastly, a third group of companies run by highly-qualified managers (with MBAs) combined characters of clusters 1 and 2, but are smaller companies more dependent on the stock-market. In the software industry, the family-business model, which is not specifically related to the merchant high castes, is well represented, except for the Indian MNCs, but with some qualifications.

Large firm dominance on country\u2019s entrepreneurship potentials

This paper aims to determine whether countries where large firms are very dominant have less entrepreneurial activities. There is anecdotal evidence that the continued decline in the business dynamism or the number of start-ups in the United States is said to be partly attributed to large firms. One key explanation is that the regulatory environment tends to favor existing large firms – an environment that allows near monopolies and a protection of tiny entrepreneurial elite. Using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data together with the World Bank – International Finance Corporation’s MSME country indicators, I empirically test whether large firm dominance influences entrepreneurial activities as well as intentions. Using fixed effects regression analysis on unbalanced panel of 40 countries over the period 2002–2007, I found that the entrepreneurship potential of a country is potentially at risk if the growth of large firms’ stake in the economy is left unchallenged. In particular, a one percentage point increase in the share of large firms to total employment is associated with 0.35 percentage point lower total early-stage entrepreneurial activity rate, holding other factors constant. Also, worth noting is the sensitivity of entrepreneurial intentions to large firm dominance. A one percentage point increase in the share of large firms to total employment dampens (i.e., by 0.56 percentage point) intentions of latent entrepreneurs to start a business within the next 3 years, other factors remaining constant. This second-order effect of large firm dominance depends heavily on the country’s institutions. Thus, it is critical for governments to foster a dynamic system that guarantees free competition and rewards creativity. Likewise, it is necessary to review and amend policies that seem to favor large firms that compromise the establishment as well as growth of smaller enterprises.

Neoliberalism, Moralism, and Critique in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

ABSTRACTSalman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1989) diagnoses Margaret Thatcher’s brand of capitalism as self-ironizing, cynical, and postmodern. This article focuses on a largely ignored portion of Rushdie’s novel—its satire of Britain’s shift from Keynes’s “dependency culture” to Thatcher’s “enterprise culture.” Citing Slavoj Zizek’s (1989) claim that cynicism is a dominant form of ideology today, the article discusses why moralistic discourses such as identity politics fail to effectively critique those cynical figures who, like Thatcher’s elite entrepreneurs, trumpet multiculturalism and satirize themselves in advance. Rushdie confronts this critical impasse by doubling down on the power of satire, exchanging the politics of blame and victimization for a form of mutually implicating humor. Rushdie’s text often blames everyone—including itself—by insisting that we are all, to different degrees, risible, mutually implicated subjects, especially in our postcolonial, neoliberal age.

College education and attitudes toward democracy in China: an empirical study

The modernization theory contends that there is a link between education and democracy. Yet few empirical studies have been done to investigate the role of higher education on promoting democratic values in the Chinese context. Using China General Social Survey 2006, this paper generates several findings which are not completely consistent with the existing theoretical explanations on political development. Specifically, the college-educated Chinese citizens not only agree that there is need to improve democracy, but support various types of political participation and resist the government-oriented petitioning. However, though entrepreneurial elites (private business owners) and political elites (Chinese communist party members) demonstrate preference to democracy in principle, empirical evidence suggests that they are much less likely to support political participation that challenges the authoritarian regime in China compared to knowledge-based elites (college-educated adults).