1,720,955 research outputs found
“Mudalalis” in Business and Society: A Critical Examination of Sri Lankan Entrepreneurs
No full textWe live in a world where we formulate different social identities and get evaluated by different social groups and societal stakeholders. In such a socially embedded world, stigma and legitimacy play important roles in business and privately. Stigma and legitimacy are complex, multi-level social constructs where social norms, beliefs, and values play a major role in their formation. In business contexts, they also influence the success and failure of entrepreneurs and their ventures in powerful ways by providing the foundation for the level of trust and acceptance between entrepreneurs and the other major stakeholders, like investors, customers, suppliers, and government regulators. Trust becomes crucial in overcoming the liabilities of newness, gaining access to limited resources, securing a reputation in the market, creating strategic partnerships, and ensuring long-term business viability. Despite their importance, management scholars observe an interesting paradox in the stigma-legitimacy relationship and their interplay. One group of management scholars posits that stigma and legitimacy exist on a single continuum – with legitimacy corresponding to a lack of stigma and the existence of illegitimacy. The other group suggests that stigma and legitimacy occupy two independent continuums. The single-continuum view suggests that both cannot coexist; if actors increase one, the other decreases. The view of two different continua, however, posits that stigma and legitimacy can coexist in an interdependent way, based on the audience or context. This theoretical tension and the highly socially embedded and contested nature of entrepreneurship in Sri Lanka represent the focal point of my PhD research.
As I am Sri Lankan, I have decided to conduct my study in the emerging South Asian context of Sri Lanka, where entrepreneurs are typically referred to as Mudalalis. The indigenous term Mudalali carries a negative connotation, implying a ‘money lover’ and contributing to the stigmatization of Sri Lankan entrepreneurs, which is not a desired career path in Sri Lanka, contrary to many other emerging markets. Such stigmatization significantly impacts the actions and behaviours of Sri Lankan entrepreneurs as a mainstream social group (not a marginalized minority group), posing challenges to their long-term survival in the market. However, the situation also creates a unique space for entrepreneurship researchers to explore the intersection of stigma and legitimacy against the backdrop of religion and colonial history. Since the legitimization of stigmatized mainstream groups has not been widely studied in the entrepreneurship literature, my study has particular theoretical significance.
Positioned within the interpretive paradigm, I have employed a qualitative thematic analysis to understand the sources and types of Sri Lankan entrepreneurs’ stigma, their stigma mitigation strategies, ways in which they seek to legitimize themselves in the eyes of the general public and on specific legitimacy-building mechanisms Sri Lankan entrepreneurs employ as individual, for their ventures, and collectively as a social group. Employing elite informant interviews, I have collected data from 30 Sri Lankan entrepreneurs. I present my findings in two empirical papers, one focusing on the relationship between stigma and legitimacy (i.e., Paper 1) and the other focusing on legitimacy and the micro-macro translation of legitimacy-as-perception (i.e., Paper 2). The study in Paper 1 employs an abductive qualitative approach. The findings draw on stigma sources and mitigation strategies proposed by Zhang et al. (2021), exploring both the relational nature of stigma and its multiple levels (Aranda et al., 2023). The findings reveal novel insights into the social identity stigmatization of mainstream entrepreneurs, highlighting various sources (i.e., moral, associational and tribal stigma) and characteristics of stigma (i.e., centrality, disruptiveness and malleability). My findings also point to specific strategies Sri Lankan entrepreneurs use to mitigate the stigma associated with their social identity. These strategies include strategies, like, boundary management, dilution, reconstruction, and emotional work – collectively reflecting the complex and multi-level nature of entrepreneurial stigma where social cognition plays an important role against the backdrop of specific institutional logics (i.e., religion, profession and the market) and colonial history.
The second empirical paper explores the multi-level nature of the entrepreneurial legitimacy of Sri Lankan entrepreneurs. Employing the less studied legitimacy-as-perception perspective introduced by Suddaby et al. (2017), the paper examines the multi-level nature of entrepreneurial legitimacy, and the cross-level effects of their associational stigma linked to Mudalalis. The qualitative thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with 30 Sri Lankan entrepreneurs reveals novel insights into the entrepreneurial legitimation processes at the individual, firm, and collective levels. Perhaps most importantly, it shows how Sri Lankan entrepreneurs use their ventures as vehicles for external social legitimation, not just internal self-identity and self-esteem. Furthermore, my findings also point to an agent-object duality within the process of entrepreneurial legitimation at individual, firm and collective levels, again driven by multi-level socio-cognitive mechanisms. In pursuing social legitimacy, Sri Lankan entrepreneurs engage in three important legitimacy-building mechanisms across all three levels, namely, differentiation, symbolism and distancing. While being stigmatized through their association with Mudalalis, Sri Lankan entrepreneurs also at the same time also perpetuate the stigma against the Mudalalis, thus acting as both victims and perpetrators of the social stigma of the Mudalalis
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
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
Re-solving Wicked Problems in Global Value Chains: How Probing Into Modern Slavery Can Advance Mne Research and Support Better Policymaking
No full textPurpose
This paper aims to respond to the response pieces by Burmester (2024) and by Dindial and Voss (2024) to the original paper on “Taming wicked problems through international business policy: recommendations for addressing modern slavery”. Beyond engaging with the issues raised by Burmester (2024) and Dindial and Voss (2024), the follow-up helps further clarify the key difference between so-called “grand challenges” and “wicked problems” for both international business (IB) policymaking and multinational enterprise (MNE) research.
Design/methodology/approach
In response to Burmester (2024), the paper juxtaposes key literature on grand challenges and wicked problems to show the theoretical value of applying a wicked problem lens to modern slavery. In engaging with some of the issues raised by Dindial and Voss (2024), this paper further builds on the most current review papers on navigating control and coordination issues within MNEs and the literature on global value chains (GVCs).
Findings
The paper operationalises the field of IB policy of relevance to modern slavery research and proposes an augmented conceptual model of MNEs’ control and coordination mechanisms to address modern slavery under conditions of distributed responsibility in their GVCs.
Originality/value
This paper problematizes the grand challenges’ label imposed on modern slavery and leverages a wicked problem theoretical toolkit that can help better guide modern slavery’s global and multi-level governance nexus. The proposed augmented conceptual model also provides a significant attempt to address some of the key theoretical gaps in GVC and MNE control−coordination literature
A Slide in Global Corruption Rankings Is Bad for ‘Brand NZ’ – What Can the Government Do?
No full textDispelling 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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