A. Rebecca Reuber

A theoretical overview and extension of research on sex, gender, and entrepreneurship

Abstract With the rising number of women-owned businesses has come a considerable amount of research, and even more speculation, on differences between male and female entrepreneurs and their businesses. To date, these findings and speculations have been largely atheoretical, and little progress has been made in understanding whether such differences are pervasive, let alone why they might exist. Thus public policy-makers have had little guidance on such difficult issues as whether or not unique training and support programs should be designed for women versus men. Moreover, lenders who finance new and growing firms have little to go on but their own “gut instinct” in assessing whether womens and mens businesses are likely to run in similar ways, or whether they might be run in different but equally effective ways. The lack of integrative frameworks for understanding the nature and implications of issues related to sex, gender, and entrepreneurship has been a major obstacle. Two perspectives that help to organize and interpret past research, and highlight avenues for future research, are liberal feminism and social feminism. Liberal feminist theory suggests that women are disadvantaged relative to men due to overt discrimination and/or to systemic factors that deprive them of vital resources like business education and experience. Previous studies that have investigated whether or not women are discriminated against by lenders and consultants, and whether or not women actually do have less relevant education and experience, are consistent with a liberal feminist perspective. Those empirical studies that have been conducted provide modest evidence that overt discrimination, or any systematic lack of access to resources that women may experience, impedes their ability to succeed in business. Social feminist theory suggests that, due to differences in early and ongoing socialization, women and men do differ inherently. However, it also suggests that this does not mean women are inferior to men, as women and men may develop different but equally effective traits. Previous entrepreneurship studies that have compared men and women on socialized traits and values are consistent with a social feminist perspective. These studies have documented few consistent gender differences, and have suggested that those differences that do exist may have little impact on business performance. While this interpretation of past findings is relevant to the question of if and how female and male entrepreneurs differ, there are still large gaps in our knowledge. In particular, only one study (Kalleberg and Leicht 1991) has systematically explored whether or not potential differences related to discrimination or socialization affect business performance; the study used limited measures of business performance, and assessed only a restricted range of male I female differences. This article reports on a study that explored other potential differences related to discrimination and to socialization (which are hypothesized based on liberal and social feminism) and looked at their relationship to a more comprehensive set of business performance measures. The study indicates that for a large, randomly selected sample of entrepreneurs in the manufacturing, retail, and service sectors, there were few differences in the education obtained by males and females, or in their business motivations. Women entrepreneurs were, however, found to have less experience in managing employees, in working in similar firms, or in helping to start-up new businesses. Womens firms also were found to be smaller than mens, to have lower growth in income over two years, and to have lower sales per employee. Regressions undertaken to examine predictors of a range of business performance indicators suggest that womens lesser experience in working in similar firms and in helping to start-up businesses may help to explain the smaller size, slower income growth, and lesser sales per employee of their firms. For policy-makers, this article suggests that systemic factors that afford women less access to experience must be addressed. Support for classroom training or related advisory activities may not be warranted; there is little evidence that women lack access to relevant classroom education. However, programs that help increase womens access to hands-on experience in starting firms or in working in the industry in which they hope to set up business does seem advisable. In-class education or counseling would not seem to compensate for lack of real-world experience, which suggests that any available funds should be directed more toward initiatives centered on apprenticeship programs than toward those centered on classroom teaching. Implications for lenders and investors are less clear cut, but suggest that whatever innate differences may exist between men and women are irrelevant to entrepreneurship. While womens businesses do not perform as well as mens on measures of size, they show fewer differences on other, arguably more critical business effectiveness measures-growth and productivity—and no differences on returns. Discrimination against women-owned businesses based on these findings would clearly be both unethical and unwarranted. The fact that women appear to obtain similar growth, productivity, and returns, in fact, suggests that they may be compensating for experience deficits in ways that current research does not illuminate. While more systematic inquiry is required to assist in understanding why mens and womens firms may differ in some predictable ways, this study would suggest that lenders and investors wishing to assist small businesses should focus on evaluating the amount and quality of the business and non-business experience of entrepreneurs, and consider sex an irrelevant variable. For entrepreneurs, this research reinforces the notion that acquiring relevant industry and entrepreneurial experience is of considerable importance if they seek to establish large firms and/or to achieve substantial firm productivity and returns. In particular, helping in the start-up of firms and spending extended periods of time in the industry of choice appear to yield subsequent rewards in the performance of any individuals firm. Future research is needed to investigate whether or not other types of business experience or non-business experience might bring additional benefits in terms of positive impact on future business performance, but the indication of the current work is that ones sex per se is neither a liability nor an asset.

Support for Rapid-Growth Firms: A Comparison of the Views of Founders, Government Policymakers, and Private Sector Resource Providers

The paper contrasts the perspectives of firm owners, government policy advisers, and external resource providers on how rapid‐growth firms should be supported. Qualitative data were analyzed to identify similarities and differences in groups’ perspectives. The research indicates that each group sees its roles as critical. Policymakers and external resources providers have incentives to interact with rapid‐growth firms. Rapid‐growth firms have incentives to obtain advice from government sources and external resource providers but prefer to obtain advice from their peers. These findings suggest a network‐based approach to the support of rapid growth that is consistent with a new Ontario‐based program, the Innovators Alliance.

Foreign Sales and Small Firm Growth: The Moderating Role of the Management Team

The premise of this article is that the management team of a small firm plays a key role in internationalization outcomes. Specifically, it is hypothesized that a greater degree of behavioral integration within a small firms management team enables it to manage the complexity of foreign sales growth more effectively, leading to greater overall firm growth. Findings, based on data collected from two different industries (software products, food processing), support the hypothesis and indicate that the behavioral integration of the management team moderates the relationship between foreign sales growth and overall firm growth.

The Company You Keep: How Young Firms in Different Competitive Contexts Signal Reputation through Their Customers

This article explores how young firms, across different competitive contexts, signal reputation through their customers. Four distinct competitive contexts were differentiated based on whether the complexity of the customers purchase process was high or low and whether the product/service was customized or standardized. CEOs of young firms operating in each of the four contexts were interviewed to discern patterns, both within and across contexts, in the reputational signals conferred by customers. Analysis of the interview data yields suggestions for how current theory on the exchange partners of young firms can be refined and extended, as well as propositions related to customer–derived reputation in different competitive contexts.

The Role of Socially Constructed Temporal Perspectives in the Emergence of Rapid-Growth Firms

This study examined how owners and top management team members in firms that are growing very rapidly socially construct time so as to facilitate rapid growth. A blend of interview and text-based qualitative methods was used to study some firms that have achieved rapid growth and some that have yet to do so. Analysis led to the identification of several thematic patterns regarding the enactment of time. The first was simultaneity: informants appeared to sustain a simultaneous focus on the events actually occurring in the present and the outcomes desired in the future, so that strategies to deal with the present are emergent but the goals and time-frames for obtaining them remain relatively fixed. The second was selectivity: rather than passively accepting the time-frames of key customers or employees, these firms sought out customers and staff who shared a pace and movability of enacted time in congruence with the firms’ goals. The third theme was shaping: top managers in rapid-growth firms adopted or developed systems and procedures that allow them to shape the enactment of time throughout their organizations. The paper concludes with some propositions about the nature of enacted time in firms that are more versus less successful in growing rapidly.

Strengthening Your Literature Review

All articles, whether they are conceptual or empirical, contain a literature review. Knowledge is accumulated incrementally in scholarly fields, and a literature review is a key element in this process. The literature review frames an article by positioning it against past research. It is an important part of an article for all its readers: reviewers, Family Business Review (FBR) readers, and scholars who will follow in that research stream. A strong framing can be enormously influential in the review process by convincing reviewers that your scholarly field will benefit from knowing about your research. A clear framing makes it easy for readers to follow an author’s logic and understand the choices that have been made in conducting the research. Once an article is published, a thorough and articulate literature review provides a useful synopsis of a body of research for scholars working in that area and for scholars working in adjacent areas who want an accessible entry point into that body of work. In other words, it provides another reason— beyond the findings themselves—for an article to be read and used. Literature reviews are normally positioned at the start of an article and so not only are important in themselves but also are influential in setting expectations about what is to come. A literature review that is creative, thoughtful, and thorough leads to positive first impressions, and these are likely to influence how the remainder of the article is perceived. Conversely, a weak literature review sets initial expectations negatively, reducing the persuasiveness of later arguments and increasing skepticism of the author’s research skills. Despite the importance of a well-researched and wellwritten literature review, reviewers are frequently disappointed by those that cross their desk. Therefore, as part of FBR’s series of Editor’s Notes, we are providing some suggestions on ways in which authors can increase the value of their literature review before submitting their manuscript for publication. Outlined below are the attributes that characterize a strong literature review.

Marketing (in) the Family Firm

We are proud to introduce this special issue of Family Business Review on Marketing and Family Businesses because we believe it has the potential to spark the development of novel and interesting family business research. This issue contains four empirical articles that collectively span family businesses that are among our oldest and newest, largest and smallest, publicly traded and privately owned. The articles analyze firms and families and integrate concepts from marketing and strategic management. This special issue is part of a series of special issues that focus a disciplinary lens on phenomena related to family businesses (for past special issues in this thread, see Salvato & Moores, 2010; Sorenson & Bierman, 2009). The Family Business Review editorial board saw a need for a special issue related to marketing because even though the discipline has a long and established tradition among business school scholars and because marketing practices are critical to the success of large and small firms, there is little prior literature on marketing by family firms or on the marketing of family firms. The few recent extant studies can be classified into two groups. The first group examines perceptions of family firms in the market. Along these lines, Carrigan and Buckley (2008) explore consumer perceptions of the meaning of “family” when linked to family businesses and the implications of these perceptions for consumers’ purchase behavior. Byrom and Lehman (2009) suggest that firm-specific perceptions can be managed. They illustrate how an Australian brewery has been adept at leveraging the “family” aspect of its business and increasing the meaning of “family” to include staff and consumers. The second group of studies is focused on marketing practices within family firms. Teal, Upton, and Seman (2003) find that there are few differences in the marketing strategies and practices of high growth family versus nonfamily firms, suggesting that their high growth orientation is more consequential than their ownership. Examining differences among family firms, Tokarczyk, Hansen, Green, and Down (2007) show that familiness can be related to greater market orientation, with a positive impact on firm performance. This finding is consistent with that of Craig, Dibrell, and Davis (2008), who show that the promotion of a family-based brand identity within a firm is related to a greater customer-centric orientation, which positively influences firm performance. This pioneering work provides a basis for the research presented here, and there is a similar grouping among the four articles in this issue. The first two articles are focused on family-related brands. Given the paucity of research in this area, the objective of both articles is to develop new theory. Accordingly, and consistent with calls for more qualitative family business research (Chenail, 2009; Sharma, 2011), both articles report the findings of a qualitative, inductive study. In “Concealing or Revealing the Family? Corporate Brand Identity Strategies in Family Firms,” Micelotta and Raynard (2011) examine the heterogeneity in branding strategies among 92 of the world’s oldest family firms, all founded prior to 1800. The article serves as an exemplar of strong qualitative methods. Analyzing website content, the authors show that there are three patterns in the way in which families communicate family and business heritage in their corporate brand strategies and suggest factors that may influence the pattern a particular family business uses. These patterns differ in terms of the primary element of the firm’s external identity, the extent to which the past is emphasized externally, and the meanings associated with the family and its relationship to the business. Thus, there is more variation in how “family” is communicated by

An Assemblage–Theoretic Perspective on the Internationalization Processes of Family Firms:

Much scholarly attention has been paid to the internationalization of family firms. In this paper, I contend that our knowledge remains limited because of a dominant focus on decision making. I problematize this dominant focus in the literature, propose assemblage theory as a new lens through which to examine family business internationalization, and draw attention to new research questions constructed around the conceptualization of internationalization as a destabilizing influence on family firm logics and routines. In doing so, I pay particular attention to processes associated with internationalization triggers, geographic distance, cultural differences and the family firm as an unfamiliar market actor, and to temporal considerations associated with these processes.

Using a tacit knowledge methodology to define expertise

Consideration of the nature of expertise is inherent in expert systems development efforts. A number of assumptions regarding expertise are often made which can be problematic, particularly in management domains. This paper identifies a pre-knowledge acquisition activity that can be performed in order to address these assumptions. This activity is centered around the psychological concept of tacit knowledge. The paper outlines how the tacit knowledge methodology is being used to define and delineate expertise in the domain of entrepreneurship.

The Anatomy of a Paper

Title and abstract are the two most searched and used parts of an article by scholars from within the field and others alike. Thus, it is important to use terms that can be understood by a broader audience, while addressing the fundamental elements that the reviewers typically want to know about a paper. The importance of a carefully crafted abstract cannot be overemphasized because the online search engines of bibliographic databases typically list the title, authors, and abstract of a paper. Some search systems still use key words but most scan the title and abstract for these words or phrases. The abstract frames the 3Ps of an article—Purpose, Procedure, and Principal findings (Craig, 2010; Koopman, 1997; Michaelson, 1990). For the author, preparing the abstract is a beneficial exercise as it helps strip away the peripheral information to expose the central purpose, process used, and the most significant contributions. For the editors and reviewers, it helps set the tone for the manuscript. Once the article is published, a carefully crafted abstract may encourage or discourage potential readers toward the full paper. Michaelson (1990) observed that “when properly written, the abstract becomes a definitive piece of writing for both author and reader, but when it is poorly written, both are at a disadvantage” (p. 31). Crafting an effective abstract is not simple. In a few sentences, using succinct phrases that weave in key words, the author must convey the crux of the manuscript and entice the reader to the rest of the paper. The word limit of the abstract is specified by the journal, and for FBR the limit is 100 words. The abstract of an empirical article will read quite different from that of a theory building or a review article. In addition to using the abstract of a previously published paper as a template for your abstract, valuable guidance can be found in sources such as the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (American Psychological Association, 2009), Huff (1999), and Michaelson (1990). In selecting an exemplar abstract of a recently published article in FBR, we shortlisted five that we found to be effective using our measure of clarity of purpose, procedure, and principal findings and ran this shortlist by FBR’s editorial team. While each abstract had some notable elements and none was found perfect on all dimensions, the following abstract by Lungeanu and Ward (2012) was the most well received by our team because of its “clarity in describing with few targeted words the addressed phenomenon, conceptual lenses adopted, methodology used, and key result”. Further appreciated was the fact that it “gets to the point right away,” “follows the logical structure of the paper,” is “more precise with regard to the findings,” and “explains the contents of the article in a fairly straightforward way.” However, it was noted that the wording could be streamlined further and the last sentence could be more informative. This article brings together research on philanthropy, family business, and governance to examine patterns of giving by U.S. family versus nonfamily independent foundations. The authors use a sample comprising the 200 largest U.S. independent foundations in 2007 to show that family foundations are more focused in their grant making than nonfamily foundations. Board size moderates this relationship. They also offer a new typology of family foundations to show that the generation stage of the family and the foundation board’s composition are associated with different levels of grant making diversity in family foundations but in dissimilar ways. Scholarly and practical implications are discussed. Through a long review process, authors, reviewers, and editors can overlook a manuscript’s title and abstract,when everyone’s attention is focused on the details of the paper’s revisions, and they can come to be mismatched with the paper’s content.Once a paper is at the Minor Revision or Acceptance stage, the author should check to see whether they need to be changed. They will be read and scrutinized more frequently than the paper itself, and so it is important that they reflect the paper accurately and favorably.