Opportunistic Entrepreneurs Research Articles

The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina's Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History

The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina's Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History

Holistic configural models for sustainable entrepreneurs

PurposeThis research explores causal combinations (personal traits, external factors and self-fulfillment) that could provide holistic views leading to sustainable start-ups via data collected from Taiwanese entrepreneurs.Design/methodology/approachThe authors employ five-point Likert scale measurements in the questionnaires and fuzzy-set/Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) for the investigation.FindingsThe study finds four types of sustainable entrepreneurs. Conservative resilient entrepreneurs have an absence of both openness and neuroticism. Conservative achieving entrepreneurs have an absence of openness and the presence of conscientiousness. Conservative-hired entrepreneurs have an absence of both openness and unemployment. Lastly, conservative opportunistic entrepreneurs exhibit an absence of openness and the presence of business opportunity.Originality/valueThe results add to the authors’ knowledge and understanding of the entrepreneurship literature and also offer implications for people who are interested in entrepreneurship as well as to policymakers wanting to promote new start-ups.

Social capital and the problem of opportunistic leadership: the example of Koreans in Japan

Through webs of cross-cutting ties, groups can build "social capital"—the information and informal collective punishment by which to mitigate collective action problems and enforce on each other norms of appropriate behavior. Yet not all minorities maintain such networks. And minority groups without these cross-cutting ties sometimes find themselves hijacked by opportunistic entrepreneurs who capture private benefits for themselves while generating statistical discrimination against the group as a whole. The problem becomes acute when migration from the minority to the majority group is possible (at a cost). Inevitably, the most talented members of the minority will find the migration easiest and most rewarding. Necessarily, the resulting selective out-migration will reduce the average ability of the minority members who remain and leave the group even more vulnerable to the opportunists. Consider the Korean residents of Japan. Koreans had begun to migrate to Japan in the 1910s. They were poor, single, male, young, uneducated, and did not intend to stay long. As one might expect given those demographics, they maintained low levels of social capital, and generated substantial (statistical) discrimination toward themselves. After the Second World War, most Koreans returned to their homeland. Among those who stayed, the low levels of social capital remained. Plagued by collective action problems, the group could not prevent the communists among them from taking control and manipulating the group toward their private ends. Lacking the dense networks that would let them constrain the opportunists, the resident Koreans could not stop them. Those with the most talent, sophistication, and education simply left the group and migrated into Japanese society.

Moderating role of service innovation on the relationship between corporate reputation and performance of hotels in Kenya

The study aims to evaluate the moderating role of service innovation on the relationship between corporate reputation and the performance of hotels in Kenya. The study design used was cross-sectional descriptive utilizing the mixed approach. The target that served as the study population, was General Managers of all the 4-star hotels in Kenya. Primary data was collected by the use of a self-administered semi-structured questionnaire and secondary data from hotel records, journals, and government publications. Data analysis involved qualitative and quantitative techniques, analyses of variance (ANOVA), and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) which tested the hypothesized relationship in this study. Statistical software such as Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 21, MS-Excel for Windows 8, Analysis of Moment Structures version 17, and SmartPLS version 2.0 was used for analysis. The theoretical models and hypotheses were tested based on empirical data gathered from 43 General Managers. The study findings indicate that corporate reputation positively and significantly influences performance (C.R = 5.907 at 5% ?-level) and service innovation moderates (R2 change = 0.054) the relationship between corporate reputation and performance. The study results are meant to benefit hotel industry policymakers, academicians, and other opportunistic entrepreneurs. The recommendation is that the hotel industry should invest seriously in corporate reputation so as to influence customer purchase behavior and improved performance.

Social Capital and the Problem of Opportunistic Leadership: The Example of Koreans in Japan

Through webs of cross-cutting ties, groups can build capital—the information and informal collective punishment by which to mitigate collective action problems and enforce on each other norms of appropriate behavior. Yet not all minorities maintain such networks. And minority groups without these cross-cutting ties sometimes find themselves hijacked by opportunistic entrepreneurs who capture private benefits for themselves while generating statistical discrimination against the group as a whole. The problem becomes acute when migration from the minority to the majority group is possible (at a cost). Inevitably, the most talented members of the minority will find the migration easiest and most rewarding. Necessarily, the resulting selective out-migration will reduce the average ability of the minority members who remain and leave the group even more vulnerable to the opportunists. Consider the Korean residents of Japan. Koreans had begun to migrate to Japan in the 1910s. They were poor, single, male, young, uneducated, and did not intend to stay long. As one might expect given those demographics, they maintained low levels of social capital, and generated substantial (statistical) discrimination toward themselves. After the Second World War, most Koreans returned to their homeland. Among those who stayed, the low levels of social capital remained. Plagued by collective action problems, the group could not prevent the communists among them from taking control and manipulating the group toward their private ends. Lacking the dense networks that would let them constrain the opportunists, the resident Koreans could not stop them. Those with the most talent, sophistication, and education simply left the group and migrated into Japanese society.

Corruption Exposure Mechanisms of the EU Assessing the European Anti-Fraud Office

Currently four out of five EU citizens assume corruption as a grave issue in their own member state (Special Eurobarometer 374, 2012, p. 4). Furthermore, it is estimated that 120 billion euros a year are lost to corruption, which amounts to one per cent of the EU’s GDP (ibid.). These numbers are quite worrying, and corruption is rightly assumed to be one of the most serious social problems facing the EU and Europe today. Corruption is such an important issue, because it distorts competition of the free market, negatively affects budgets and undermines political institutions as well as democratically elected politicians (Della Porta & Vannucci, 1999). The scope of corruption is very broad and therefore difficult to define. This is due to the fact that the financial and ethical impact varies greatly and already smaller criminal offences encounter as corruption. In the context of the financial crisis, the negative effect of financial crime have been noted to be of even bigger consequence on already tight budgets and thus influences individuals directly. Thus, it becomes of considerable importance that taxpayers’ money is spent to revitalizing the European economy and not lost in the realm of criminality. Sadly enough “the European budget attracts both organised economic criminals, and opportunistic entrepreneurs who resort to fraud as means of supporting a failing enterprise or helping a company or organisation in financial difficulties” (Quirke, 2009, p. 531). It is very important to recover as much as possible of the funds that have been lost to fraud, in order to build trust in the EU institutions.

Type of Entrepreneur and Growth of New Ventures: Testing and Validation of a Typology of Software Entrepreneurs in India

IntroductionWhile academics and practitioners agree that young and small firms suffer from a liability of newness (Stinchcombe, 1965), there are yet few satisfactory answers to the question of why some young firms become outstanding successes while the majority of startup companies sputter and die along the way. This is the fundamental question that gives rise to a further related question: If the role of the founder entrepreneur in the performance of startups is acknowledged to be important, what are those distinguishing factors that separate successful from unsuccessful founder-entrepreneurs?Research in the area of entrepreneurship has emphasized the critical role played by the entrepreneur in the performance of the new venture (Kets de Vries, 1977; Brockhaus, 1980; Mintzberg and Waters, 1982; Timmons, 1990). Early researchers in the area of entrepreneurship tried to study direct relationships between entrepreneurial characteristics and new venture performance. This yielded very few significant findings (Herron and Robinson, 1993). Recognizing that trait theories can make conclusions restricted only to the trait under study, and not the entrepreneur, and that a search for averages tends to ignore differences within the set of entrepreneurs that may be significant (Gartner, 1985), many researchers have tried to study the differences between entrepreneurs in a systematic way. Sarasvathy (2004: 707) suggests that we throw away our obsession with dividing the world into entrepreneurs and nonentrepreneurs and focus instead on categories within This leads to the stream of research, which tries to differentiate between types of entrepreneurs on the basis of some common, meaningful characteristics. Although policy makers and researchers agree on the importance of identifying different entrepreneurial types, no meaningful typology of entrepreneurs has emerged that has demonstrated a strong and consistent association with performance.One of the classifications most commonly studied in the '80s and '90s was the craftsmanmanagerial- opportunistic typology. Smith (1967) identified two types of entrepreneurs through detailed interviews with manufacturing entrepreneurs. Craftsman entrepreneurs were found to have a narrow education and training, and were less socially aware than opportunistic entrepreneurs, who exhibited greater breadth in education and training, and more confidence in their ability to deal with their immediate environment. Opportunistic entrepreneurs tended to be more flexible and better adapted to their environment and, consequently, had higher growth orientation. Moreover, firms founded and headed by craftsman entrepreneurs tended to be more rigid than those founded by opportunistic entrepreneurs. Although it was implicit in this categorization that the craftsman entrepreneur was technically skilled but relatively poor at skills, the concept of skills did not explicitly enter Smith's framework. Smith's (1967) original typology was developed to include an administrative type of entrepreneur, (Filley and Aldag, 1978), who are professional, rational builders, associated with skills and motivations that are normally referred to as managerial. Thus a three-way classification of craftsman-managerial-opportunistic entrepreneurs emerges from earlier literature, and later studies assume a priori a similar distinction (Lafuente and Salas, 1989; Cooper and Dunkelberg, 1986).However, careful reading of these studies revealed that they have operationalized the construct of the entrepreneurial type in different ways. It is suggested here and elsewhere (Agarwal and Chatterjee, 2007) that inconsistencies in operationalizing the basis for differences between entrepreneurs has been at least partly responsible for the inconsistent empirical findings in this area. For instance, Smith (1967) categorized entrepreneurs on the basis of their education, background and work experience. …

Detailed analysis of the phenomenon of political corruption in Algeria: causes, repercussions and reform

Corruption in present-day Algeria has become so rife that it has gone from what Algerians once sardonically termed the ‘sport of the elite’ to being the ‘national sport’. Not only has it reached epidemic proportions at all levels, it has become a culture unto itself, endemic to the country. Because most documented instances of major corruption and scandals have been linked to official branches, apparatuses and persons of the state, and because most have occurred and would not have been possible without some sort of official sanction, corruption in Algeria is ipso facto political. The mechanisms and networks of corruption are many and interlocking, revolving around and feeding on bribery, clientelism, tribalism, nepotism, webs of personal interest and loyalties. The crisis is multifaceted with international dimensions as well, given the collusion of multinational corporations and the intersection of power and vast revenues deriving from oil rent that has also permitted, through an overinflated and ineffectual state bureaucracy, a fertile environment for the pernicious phenomenon. Privatization; the opening of Algerian markets to direct foreign investment and liberalization of trade in response to structural reforms demanded by international monetary institutions during the 1990s; what was effectively a vicious and disastrous civil war in the wake of the suspension of the 1992 elections; as well as globalization have all factored in reinforcing old forms of corruption and promoting new ones. Elite coteries, crony capitalism, and a new generation of ambitious intermediaries and young opportunistic entrepreneurs, such as Rafiq ‘Abd al-Mu’min Khalifa (convicted head of the al-Khalifa Group), have become the new players in billion-dollar schemes of graft, theft and embezzlement of unprecedented proportions. Furthermore, court cases and judicial proceedings have often taken on the aspect of farce when arrests are made and charges brought against minor officials, leaving those higher-up and known to have been party to illicit activities and dealings above the law in the realm of the ‘untouchables’. Significantly, the road to reform, which must necessarily be political in the first instance, is fraught with obstacles, not the least of which is that favouritism is institutionalized in the letter of Algerian law. With good reason, Algerians in general have become highly circumspect with candidates and an electoral process that are open to every tactic of manipulation. This article provides valuable insider information into the specifics and mechanics of Algerian corruption, which even the ruling elite has been obliged to admit constitutes the primary threat to the stability and continuity of the state. The research and distillation of conclusions in this article are drawn from the full-length Arabic-language book by Muḥammad Ḥalīm Līm ām entitled Ẓāhirat al-Fasād al-Siyāsī fī al-Jazāʾir: al-Asbāb wa al-Āthār wa al-Iṣlāḥ. Beirut: Center for Arab Unity Studies (CAUS), 2011.

The Effects of Entrepreneurial Growth Orientation on Organizational Change and Firm Growth

Managing growth in an enterprise as it grows beyond the startup phase is a challenge for many entrepreneurs. One key element that can help or hinder growth is the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurial growth has been linked to micro variables (motivations and psychological attributes of the entrepreneur) and macro variables. However, few studies have examined the role of the growth aspirations of the entrepreneur on the necessary elements of organization change related to growth. This paper reports a study employing a typology of entrepreneurs based on their growth aspirations using an established dichotomous scale devised by Smith to differentiate between what he called craftsmen versus opportunistic entrepreneurs. The findings, while not supporting all expectations, do support the literature that points to the growing importance of intellectual capital, technological upgrading and participative management approaches as competitive weapons of small firms.

Charles Sumner and the Annexation of the Dominican Republic

During his first term in the White House, President Ulysses Grant attempted to annex the Dominican Republic to the United States. Support for the proposed treaty came from both countries. The United States pressed the annexation plans motivated by the prospects of acquiring hegemony in the Caribbean, by the likelihood of increasing its commercial avenues, by the possibility of establishing a black state, by opportunistic entrepreneurs, and by the idea of the Manifest Destiny Doctrine intermingled with the Monroe Doctrine. On the other hand, the Dominican government supported annexation with the intention of annihilating a rebellion backed by the Haitian government, and by the desire to satisfy personal financial interest among the government elite. Moreover, the typical colonial structure of the country assisted the government's efforts toward annexation.

Defining the inventor-entrepreneur in the context of established typologies

Some 25 years ago while developing his type of entrepreneur and type of firm classification system. Smith (1967) thought he had identified a subtype of entrepreneur that did not fit either his craftsman or his opportunistic models. The data at that time were too sparse to be sure, but it appeared that there were certain entrepreneurs whose major concern was to develop an organization, not as an end in itself as with the opportunistic type, but rather as a vehicle to allow the invention and production of various products. This research now provides much more convincing evidence that the inventor-entrepreneur does indeed exist, using a sample of 147 National Science Foundation grant applicants who are also entrepreneurs. This sample was deemed particularly likely to contain large numbers of inventor-entrepreneurs. The support for Smith's (1967) early speculations turns out to be rather amazing. The inventor-entrepreneurs are located exactly where Smith (1967) expected them to be in the type of entrepreneur versus type affirm matrix. As anticipated, inventor-entrepreneurs, like other entrepreneurs, are more likely to head growing companies to the extent that they themselves are of the opportunistic type and their firms are of the adaptive type; there is nothing in the inventor-entrepreneur concept alone that calls for company growth. Also as hypothesized, the presence of a large number of inventor-entrepreneurs in a sample tends to dilute the usual finding of a strong positive correlation between type of entrepreneur and type of firm measures; among inventor-entrepreneurs it is not necessarily true that opportunistic entrepreneurs tend to head adaptive firms and craftsman entrepreneurs head rigid ones. There was one unexpected finding, however. Smith (1967) originally associated the inventor-entrepreneur with a proclivity for taking out patents. Although this association is supported by this research, it is dwarfed by another factor. What is really indicative of inventor-entrepreneurship is a strong commitment to a company strategy of new product development. Although not established by this research, it would appear that increasingly those who invent are dissuaded from seeking patents by the costs involved, the time delays, and the prospect in many new industries that patents will provide very little protection. It seems likely that patents will continue to decline in popularity among inventor-entrepreneurs, and that rapid market entry with new products to become a market leader will be the preferred strategy of the future. This assumes of course that inventor-entrepreneurs have access to sufficient capital to pursue this new product development strategy effectively. Investors should recognize, however, that the real importance of the inventor-entrepreneur stems not so much from immediate profit potential and the prospects for asset growth, although these are there, as from the contributions these individuals make to an expanding economy and the well-being of society.

MARKETING BEHAVIORS OF NEW ENTREPRENEURS SPECIFIC TO THE START-UP CRISIS: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY

ABSTRACT This longitudinal study aims to bring new insight into the comprehension of the management behaviors of the craftsman and the opportunistic entrepreneurs in the case of newly created manufacturing firms, taking into account the role of the marketing function. Seventy owner-managers were interviewed and the results about the “business knowledge before starting up” indicate that two variables allow to discriminate between the opportunistic and the craftsman entrepreneurs. Other results indicate that the management of the opportunistic entrepreneur deals with more functions (production, marketing and finance) then the management of the craftsman entrepreneur (production). Some marketing management behaviors allow discrimination between these two types of entrepreneurs during the first year of operation of the firm.

Toward an occupational classification for self-employed men: An investigation of entrepreneurship from the perspective of Holland's theory of career development

This study addressed entrepreneurship from the perspective of Holland's theory of career development. Sixty-four male entrepreneurs were interviewed and administered Holland's Vocational Preference Inventory. The respondents were classified as either Craft Entrepreneurs or Opportunistic Entrepreneurs, and the characteristics of the two groups were compared. The results of this study indicated that the Craft Entrepreneurs can be described as having a Holland occupational code of ERA, and the Opportunistic Entrepreneurs can be described as having a Holland occupational code of EAI. It is recommended that additional research should investigate self-employment as a distinct career option.