Aaron F. McKenny

Family Business and Market Orientation: Construct Validation and Comparative Analysis

Market orientation refers to the collection, dissemination, and utilization of market information that promotes a sustainable competitive advantage. Despite the contribution of the market orientation construct to both the strategic management and marketing literatures, little attention has been devoted to exploring how market orientation relates to family businesses and how these relationships might differ from nonfamily businesses. To address this gap and stimulate further research in this area of inquiry, this study develops and validates a market orientation measure using content analysis of CEO letters from the S&P 500 and tests for differences between family businesses and nonfamily businesses.

Research on Crowdfunding: Reviewing the (Very Recent) past and Celebrating the Present:

Crowdfunding is a rapidly growing phenomenon wherein entrepreneurs seek funding for their entrepreneurial activities from a potentially large audience of interested individuals. Crowdfunding has exploded in popularity over the last decade and now accounts for tens of billions of dollars annually. But despite the importance and growth of crowdfunding, little scholarly knowledge exists about the topic. To address this gap, this special issue includes five articles that each advance knowledge about crowdfunding in important ways. We briefly review past work on crowdfunding in leading entrepreneurship and management journals. We then highlight the diverse contributions offered in the special issue articles.

How Should Crowdfunding Research Evolve? A Survey of the Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice Editorial Board

The explosion of crowdfunding within entrepreneurial circles is attracting increased academic interest in the nature of crowdfunding, its antecedents, and its consequences. In an effort to help researchers concentrate their inquiry on the most promising questions and theories involving crowdfunding, we surveyed key thought leaders within the entrepreneurship field—the Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice editorial review board—regarding what inquiry they believe is needed. Their responses offer implications for crowdfunding research. For example, cross–disciplinary work is one approach that board members believe holds high potential. In response, we outline a cross–disciplinary research agenda that can inform scholarly efforts.

An Empirical Examination of Firm, Industry, and Temporal Effects on Corporate Social Performance

Research examining firm and industry effects on performance has primarily focused on the financial aspects of firm performance. Corporate social performance (CSP) is a major aspect of firm performance that has been under-examined empirically in the literature to date. Adding to the fundamental debate regarding firm versus industry effects on performance, this study uses data drawn from the Kinder, Lydenberg and Domini Co. (KLD) database to examine the degree to which CSP is related to firm, industry, and temporal factors. The results of these analyses suggest that CSP tends to change in a linear manner over time; however, the slope of this line varies across firms and industries. These findings are supported by several robustness checks accounting for autocorrelation, alternative measures of industry, different samples commonly used when using KLD data to measure CSP, and alternative measures of CSP when using the KLD database. The authors also directly compare firm, industry, and temporal effects between CSP and financial performance.

What Doesn’t Get Measured Does Exist: Improving the Accuracy of Computer-Aided Text Analysis

Computer-aided text analysis (CATA) is a form of content analysis that enables the measurement of constructs by processing text into quantitative data based on the frequency of words. CATA has been proposed as a useful measurement approach with the potential to lead to important theoretical advancements. Ironically, while CATA has been offered to overcome some of the known deficiencies in existing measurement approaches, we have lagged behind in regard to assessing the technique’s measurement rigor. Our article addresses this knowledge gap and describes important implications for past as well as future research using CATA. First, we describe three sources of measurement error variance that are particularly relevant to studies using CATA: transient error, specific factor error, and algorithm error. Second, we describe and demonstrate how to calculate measurement error variance with the entrepreneurial orientation, market orientation, and organizational ambidexterity constructs, offering evidence that past substantive conclusions have been underestimated. Third, we offer best-practice recommendations and demonstrate how to reduce measurement error variance by refining existing CATA measures. In short, we demonstrate that although measurement error variance in CATA has not been measured thus far, it does exist and it affects substantive conclusions. Consequently, our article has implications for theory and practice, as well as how to assess and minimize measurement error in future CATA research with the goal of improving the accuracy of substantive conclusions.

Institutional Factors Affecting Expansion within the East African Community: An Analysis of Managers’ Personal Stories

This study investigates the roles of the regulative, normative, and cognitive institutional pillars as perceived obstacles and facilitators of internationalization within an integrated region. Integrated regions involve efforts to create institutional similarities among member nations and encourage intra-regional trade. These efforts make integrated regions a theoretically interesting and important context for analyzing managerial perceptions of the institutional environment. We content analyze essays and questionnaires from managers in the East African Community (EAC) to compare the three pillars. Our findings suggest that managers perceive the regulative pillar to be the greatest source of institutional obstacles to expansion within the EAC. Interestingly, the managers also perceive the regulative pillar to be the greatest source of institutional facilitators of expansion within the EAC.

The Impact of Collective Optimism on New Venture Creation and Growth: A Social Contagion Perspective:

Social contagion research suggests that individual decision making is shaped by collective, social processes. We extend the entrepreneurial optimism literature by arguing that collective optimism—the shared, positive expectations about future outcomes—is salient to key entrepreneurial outcomes. We test our position by examining how fluctuations in U.S. collective entrepreneurial optimism influence venture creation and growth using 1993–2010 NFIB entrepreneurial optimism data. Results indicate that collective entrepreneurial optimism exhibits a curvilinear relationship with venture creation and growth, which is moderated by environmental dynamism. We validate the NFIB measure by constructing an alternative measure of collective entrepreneurial optimism using media reports.