1,721,049 research outputs found
Home-based business performance: A study of geography, gender and small business growth in the UK
No full textWith nearly half of all small businesses in the UK now located in or run from the home, it has become arguably the most important of all business locations (Mason et al., 2011). Home-based businesses are of significant interest to those studying the changing nature of work and home and the blurring of the traditionally separated workplace and domestic environments (Reuschke, 2015). Digital technologies, outsourcing and the reduction in importance of economies of scale have become key drivers of business formation in the home (Young, 2015; Reuschke and Mason, 2022). This in turn has moved the location of a significant amount of economic activity out of regional and business clusters, and into the home and its surrounding residential neighbourhoods – often to rural or suburban areas - a trend that has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Davies, 2021; Phillipson et al., 2020).Despite the proliferation of businesses based in the home over the last 20 years, there is only a small (but growing) academic literature which has studied this phenomenon, and very little specific policy attention has been given to these enterprises and their owners. Contemporary research has however revealed their high growth ambitions, highlighting the potential value of home-based businesses for job creation and local and national economies (Mason et al., 2011; Enterprise Nation, 2014). However, this literature has also highlighted that women-owned home-based businesses face significant and gendered challenges in growing their businesses, and may face a ‘performance penalty’ compared to both men/co-owned home-based businesses and women who run their business in a separate premises (Breen, 2010; Daniel and Owen, 2022).The lack of high-quality, longitudinal and generalisable data available on home-based businesses has led to many untested hypotheses on whether, how, where and for whom home-based businesses can achieve business growth. In turn, this has isolated home-based businesses from key discussions in the small business literature, entrepreneurship and economic geography. In particular, how the location and geographies of home-based businesses and their operationsacross different spatial scales may impact on their performance and how gendered business performance may be embedded within both the home and its surrounding neighbourhoods, cities, and regions (Reuschke et al., 2015; Kleinhans et al., 2017).Combining theories of gender and enterprise from the small business literatures with socio-spatial theories from economic geography, this thesis presents a comprehensive quantitative study of the business growth and performance of UK home-based businesses from 2015 to 2019. The analysis and findings presented in this work utilise the UK Longitudinal Small Business Survey as the primary data source, with additional linked data from the Business Structure Database.The thesis makes several contributions to academic scholarship. First, the research highlights home-based business performance across multiple measures – firm size, innovation, profit, exporting, and derives a novel typology for understanding the distinct growth strategies of small businesses located in the home. Second, the analysis is able to distinguish, for the first time, the difference in job creation potential between businesses which remain in the home and those which relocate into a separate premises. Third, the research makes a significant contribution to gender and enterprise and women’s entrepreneurship research by dispelling myths and revealing the spatial heterogeneity of growth and performance in women-owned home-based businesses. Fourth, the work reveals the geographies of home-based business growth from remote rural locations to semi-urban areas and major cities, highlighting the significance of urbanisation and agglomeration economies for home-based business growth.Finally, due to the widespread homeworking which public health measures forced employees and the self-employed to adopt in 2020, there is now a significant policy interest in flexible and homeworking arrangements and what implications these will have for the small business sector moving forward (Mutebi and Hobbs, 2022). However, given the paucity of research on home-based businesses and their growth and performance prior to the pandemic, this research provides a much needed base on which to build policies and support for the growing and significant number of home-based businesses operating in the UK today
Performance and innovation in women-owned home-based businesses: Exploring the gender-location link
No full textCurrent figures from the UK suggest that 60% of Small to Medium– Sized Enterprises (SMEs) with no employees and 25% of SME employers locate in the home (BEIS, 2018). In the literature, home-based businesses (HBBs) are often linked to the debates surrounding the specific challenges that female business owners face in growth and performance (Walker & Webster, 2004). Notably, it has been identified that work-life and work-family conflict may lead to low financial performance in women-owned HBBs (Loscocco & Smith, 2004; Thompson et al., 2009). However, the empirical literature on this topic is modest, and it remains unclear whether there is a gender-gap in home-based businesses across different indicators of performance. Thus, the objective of this study is to investigate whether women-owned HBBs underperform men-owned HBBs in turnover, innovation, and employment. Drawing on theory from both economic geography and the small business literature, we also explore the oft-neglected role of location in driving gendered business outcomes (Rosenthal & Strange, 2012; Lee & Marvel, 2014). We use a representative sample of 3,578 home-based businesses from the 2015 UK Longitudinal Small Business Survey (UKLSBS) to conduct the empirical, quantitative analysis. We use multiple regression models to control for key firm demographics that differ between men and women-owned enterprises, including business location and industry. The findings from this study reveal that when controlling for firm demographics, women-owned HBBs do not underperform in turnover or innovation and quite the opposite, they out-perform men-owned HBBs in employment. However, we find that business location plays no role in any measure of business performance in this study. These findings contribute to the growing home-based business literature by highlighting specific processes and peculiarities of the sector that have not previously been tested, and revealing the heterogeneity of women-owned businesses in the under-researched context of the home. The study also serves as a contribution to the growing evidence base that women-owned firms do not underperform men when employing sophisticated, multi-measure and multivariate analysis techniques (Farhat & Migid, 2017; Sappleton, 2018; Zolin et al., 2013) and identifies a rare case of over performance by women-owned enterprises (Marco, 2012)
Testing the differential impact of COVID-19 on self-employed women and men in the United Kingdom
No full textThis paper investigates whether the female self-employed are more affected by the COVID- 19 crisis than the male self-employed using longitudinal data four months following the first ‘lockdown’ in the UK. We specifically test the role of family/social, economic and psychological factors on gendered differential impact. We find that self-employment exits are not gendered but women are more likely to experience reductions in hours worked and earnings. This greater adverse impact on women’s working hours and earnings is despite family responsibilities and home-schooling, industrial gender segregation and women’s greater propensity to run a non-employing business and to work part-time. However, lower attitude to risk in women is associated with lower risk of reduction in earnings. Policy needs to look beyond business exits when considering crisis support for the self-employed
Self-employment in Wales during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Get PDFThe economic fall-out from the COVID-19 crisis continues to wreak serious damage in the labour market, and at the time of writing the full extent of this damage is some way from becoming apparent. One significant group of workers who have been very badly affected by the economic shock resulting from ‘lockdown’ are the self-employed. In previous analysis it was reported that almost 4 in 10 of the jobs created in Wales over the decade following the 2008 financial crisis were in self-employment (Henley and Lang, 2017). Furthermore, this analysis demonstrated the high degree of diversity of self-employment activity across Wales, both in spatial and sectoral dimensions. This paper looks at how this group in Wales have fared so far during the crisis and makes some suggestions on how policy may address the prospects of the self-employed
How has Covid-19 affected self-employment in UK regions?
No full textSelf-employment has fallen sharply in the UK during the Covid-19 crisis but the extent differs across regions. In the past, it has often risen in recessions and declined in booms. The limited government support for the self-employed may explain the drop during the pandemic
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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
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