1,720,955 research outputs found
The relevance of entrepreneurial self-efficacy, social networking, and the institutional environment on immigrant entrepreneurship in South Africa
No full textA thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management at the University of the Witwatersrand, Wits Business School, Johannesburg 2023South Africa has high rates of criminal activity and widespread corruption, which debilitates entrepreneurial activity, performance, and operations for many entrepreneurs. One of the causes of these issues is the restrictive nature of the regulatory environment. However, many immigrants are able to overcome these challenges, using their entrepreneurial self-efficacy and social networking capabilities. Entrepreneurial self-efficacy has been found to influence entrepreneurial intention, behaviour, motivation, and performance; furthermore, entrepreneurial self-efficacy is the targeted outcome of entrepreneurial education and training. Social capital is an advantage to immigrant entrepreneurs in the acquisition of capital resources, and their networks provide access to further opportunities. This study aimed to determine if an ethnic immigrant minority, Pakistani immigrant entrepreneurs, is able to operationalise their entrepreneurial self- efficacy and social networks to improve the performance of their ventures, despite all the regulatory challenges that they face in South Africa. This study employed a quantitative research method, using quantifiable variables to measure relationships. Immigrant entrepreneurs have capabilities, experience, and knowledge, all of which are useful, according to the resource-based theory, for conducting business internationally. These were measured in terms of entrepreneurial performance with a specific focus on growth and innovation. The results showed that the self-confidence of Pakistani immigrant entrepreneurs had a significant influence on their growth and innovation, whereas their social networks had a negative impact on their entrepreneurial performance. Furthermore, contrary to Western studies, which suggested that regulatory environments had an impact on business growth, it was found that South Africa's negative regulatory environment had no effect on the performance of Pakistani immigrant entrepreneurs.MM202
Social capital, decision-making and capital resource acquisition: a case study of Pakistani immigrants in Gauteng
No full textA research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Management specialising in Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation, 2019Social capital is the advantage and opportunity a person gets from belonging to
a community and includes the resources that are acquired from social ties.
Despite the contributions made by SMMEs to the economy, most are unable to
survive the early stages, with more than 70 percent of SMMEs failing within three
years of inception. This study seeks to determine how SMMEs can use social
capital to overcome challenges and address their shortcomings, by finding a
relationship between social capital (divided into community and government) as
the dependent variable, and decision-making, human capital, and financial capital
as the independent variables.
The focus of this study was Pakistani immigrants that engage in entrepreneurial
activities, be they formal or informal, in Johannesburg, Gauteng, and the
utilisation of their social networks to make faster and better decisions and acquire
capital resources. This was a positivist, cross-sectional, quantitative, primary
study, where the data was collected using a questionnaire based on several
previous studies. The data was analysed using correlation analysis, exploratory
factor analysis and multiple regression analysis
It was found that only social capital (government) had a significant positive
relationship with financial capital. All other relationships were found to be either
insignificant or negative. This finding could support the Department of Small
Business Development and other relevant stakeholders in channelling their
resources towards helping SMMEs create social capital. The commercial impact
of this study is focused on lenders, primarily banks, who are not issuing loans to
SMMEs, this study shows that, social capital (community and government) can
become a tool for banks to use when granting loans. The implications for societies
and communities are that they can actively seek to create connections that could
benefit them and their businesses.XL201
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Inmigrantes emprendedores en economías emergentes: Efectos institucionales,de autoeficiencia y de redes sociales en el rendimiento empresarial
Full text link[SPA] While extensive research exists on immigrants as workers and migrant laborers, studies on immigrants as entrepreneurs in emerging economies are only beginning to emerge. This article addresses the limited knowledge on how immigrant entrepreneurs' agency, particularly their motivations, influences their enterprise growth. It provides a novel, in-depth analysis of how immigrant entrepreneurs leverage self-efficacy and social capital to navigate the challenges posed by the regulatory institutional environment. The study was conducted in South Africa using primary survey data, analyzed through Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the proposed hypotheses. The findings indicate that entrepreneurial self-efficacy has a positive and significant impact on the growth and innovation performance of immigrant enterprises. However, the moderating effects of institutional factors were not significant in this relationship. This study underscores the importance of key drivers of immigrant entrepreneurship within emerging market contexts. The insights gained may be adapted by immigrant entrepreneurs to their specific local environments. The originality of this research lies in establishing closer empirical connections between previously unlinked factors in the study of immigrant entrepreneurship within an African market context.
[ENG] Si bien existe una amplia investigación sobre los inmigrantes como trabajadores y obreros inmigrantes, los estudios sobre los inmigrantes como empresarios en las economías emergentes sólo están empezando a surgir. Este artículo aborda el escaso conocimiento sobre cómo los empresarios inmigrantes, en particular sus motivaciones, influye en el crecimiento de sus empresas. Aporta un análisis novedoso y en profundidad de cómo los empresarios inmigrantes aprovechan la autoeficacia y el capital social para sortear los retos que plantea el entorno institucional regulador. El estudio se llevó a cabo en Sudáfrica utilizando datos primarios de encuestas, analizados mediante modelos de ecuaciones estructurales por mínimos cuadrados parciales (PLS-SEM) para comprobar las hipótesis propuestas. Los resultados indican que la autoeficacia empresarial tiene un efecto positivo y significativo en el crecimiento y la innovación de las empresas de inmigrantes. Sin embargo, los efectos moderadores de los factores institucionales no fueron significativos en esta relación. Este estudio subraya la importancia de los principales factores que impulsan la iniciativa empresarial de los inmigrantes en los mercados emergentes. Los empresarios inmigrantes pueden adaptar los conocimientos adquiridos a sus entornos locales específicos. La originalidad de esta investigación reside en el establecimiento de conexiones empíricas más estrechas entre factores hasta ahora no vinculados en el estudio de la iniciativa empresarial de los inmigrantes en un contexto de mercado africano
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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