Micki Eisenman

Employee-management Techniques: Transient Fads or Trending Fashions?

In this theory development case study, we focus on the relations across recurrent waves in the amount and kind of language promoting and diffusing, and then demoting and rejecting, management techniques—techniques for transforming the input of organizational labor into organizational outputs. We suggest that rather than manifesting themselves as independent, transitory, and un-cumulative fads, the language of repeated waves cumulates into what we call management fashion trends. These trends are protracted and major transformations in what managers read, think, express, and enact that result from the accumulation of the language of these consecutive waves. For the language of five waves in employee-management techniques—management by objectives, job enrichment, quality circles, total quality management, and business process reengineering—we measure rational and normative language suggesting, respectively, that managers can induce labor financially or psychologically. The results reveal a gradual intensification in the ratio of rational to normative language over repeated waves, suggesting the existence of a management fashion trend across these techniques. Lexical shifts over time, however, serve to differentiate a fashion from its predecessor, creating a sense of novelty and progress from the earlier to the later fashions.

Role Demands, Difficulty in Managing Work-Family Conflict, and Minority Entrepreneurs

By exploring difficulty in managing work-family conflict for minority entrepreneurs, this study considers work-family issues for business persons who have received little attention in the literature, yet form new businesses at rates exceeding the national average. We employ a role theory perspective to examine two major research questions using a nationally representative sample of African-American, Mexican-American, Korean-American, and White business owners. Specifically, we ask: do minority business owners experience greater difficulty in managing conflicts between work and family roles when compared to White entrepreneurs? And does difficulty in managing work-family conflict negatively impact business performance? Empirical results show that Korean-American and Mexican-American entrepreneurs have greater role demands, and subsequently, higher levels of difficulty in managing work-family conflict than African-Americans and Whites. Furthermore, difficulty in managing work-family conflict negatively impacts business performance whether performance is measured through the perception of the business owner, or through more objective financial measures. We contribute to the literature on minority entrepreneurs as well as expand the work-family conflict literature by shifting the focus from employed individuals to entrepreneurs, and by emphasizing the effect of such conflict on performance rather than well-being.

SEGMENTING THE POPULATION OF ENTREPRENEURS: A CLUSTER ANALYSIS STUDY

This paper contributes to our understanding of minority entrepreneurs in the US by showing that ethnicity alone should not be used to describe or categorize small business owners. We examine a sample of 508 entrepreneurs from three minority groups (African, Mexican, and Korean Americans) and a white group using cluster analysis to explore a categorization pattern that best describes the differences among these entrepreneurs. Our findings suggest that minority entrepreneurs are in fact a very heterogeneous group on a multitude of dimensions such as motivations for entry, satisfaction with the business, nature of problems experienced, and demographics of the business such as its size and gross income. Based on our findings, we recommend that educational and support programs targeting minority entrepreneurs should consider other variables rather than focusing on ethnicity alone.

IMMIGRANT AND US-BORN MEXICAN-OWNED BUSINESSES: MOTIVATIONS AND MANAGEMENT

In this study, we seek to understand the key differences between the entrepreneurial experience for Mexican immigrant and US-born Mexican entrepreneurs. We focus on differences in motivation for start-up, reliance on ethnic enclaves and business management practices. Using data from the 2005 National Minority Business Owner Survey, our sample consisted of 156 Mexican American entrepreneurs (55 immigrants and 101 US-born). Results suggest that even within a particular minority group, there are key distinctions between immigrant and US-born entrepreneurs. For example, US-born Mexican entrepreneurs are more motivated by the individualistic financial benefits of being an entrepreneur, while Mexican immigrant entrepreneurs are more motivated by serving society and their co-ethnic community. Implications are discussed.

A Multimodal Investigation of the Institutionalization of Aesthetic Design as a Dimension of Competition in the PC Industry

Abstract The study applies a multimodal approach to position aesthetic innovation, i.e., the strategic use of aesthetic design attributes, such as color and shape, as an institutionalized aspect of competition, rather than as a firm-specific differentiation strategy, in settings that favor the symbolic meanings of products. Empirically, the study offers a detailed case study of the personal computer (PC) industry to examine the institutionalization of aesthetic innovation as a dimension of competition across industrial firms. The study examines the color and shape of PCs over the 1992–2003 period and situates changes to these attributes in the competitive conditions that characterized the industry, paying particular attention to the introduction of the Apple iMac in 1998. Furthermore, it examines the discursive manifestations of aesthetic innovation by content analysis of reviews of PCs and interviews with industry executives. Findings demonstrate that, in a period coinciding with a decline in demand for PCs and an overall mature market as well as with the introduction of the iMac, the majority of firms engaged in aesthetic innovation and used a greater number of aesthetic words in describing their PCs.