Tony Blackwood

Expatriate-owned Small Businesses: Measuring and Accounting for Success

TONY BLAcKwoOD AND GRAHAM MowL ARE both lecturers at the University of Northumbria, England. this paper aims to identify and account for patterns of success and failure among small, expatriate-owned businesses operating in the tourism service sector of the major resorts of the Costa del Sol in Southern Spain. This group of businesses is particularly interesting because they have acquired a reputation for economic instability and relatively high rates of business failure. Furthermore, the need has been argued for both area and industry specific research on small business failure in order to gain a more contextual understanding of their problems. To understand any patterns of business success and failure it is necessary to investigate not only the behaviour of business owners but also the more general economic and social processes affecting the industrial sector and the locality in which the firm operates. The paper assess the tourism industry and in particular the role of small businesses within the tourism-related sector. It also investigates the background, aims and business management practices of individual entrepreneurs and attempts to use these findings to generate possible explanations of the patterns of business success detected.

The entrepreneurial middle ground: Higher education entry decisions of aspiring entrepreneurs

The growing demand for more entrepreneurs has engendered a proliferation of entrepreneurship education programmes, which, in different ways, aim to assist aspiring entrepreneurs ‘learn’ entrepreneurship. Yet, understanding the higher education entry decisions of aspiring entrepreneurs is a veritable research lacuna, which creates fertile ground for investigation. This paper reports on an exploratory study investigating the entry decisions of first-year participants enrolled on a recently launched degree programme employing a team-based, experiential approach to learning. The analysis uses an interpretive frame to explore why aspiring entrepreneurs opt for formal education in place of, or alongside, other learning and career journeys. Findings indicate that some participants opted for a university education as part of a positive compromised decision, reflecting the reticence of these aspiring entrepreneurs to ‘go it alone’ in the world of business. In this sense, such experiential forms of entrepreneurial education may provide a suitable ‘middle ground’ for some aspiring entrepreneurs.

Business undergraduates' knowledge monitoring accuracy: how much do they know about how much they know?

It has been argued that the ability of students to appreciate the extent of their own knowledge is essential to enable them to appreciate where gaps may exist and prompt the development of remedial learning strategies. This article reports on a study investigating this capability in which 307 business undergraduates provided 7525 judgements on the state of their own knowledge in respect of issues addressed in their study programme. The findings indicated a general tendency for overconfidence in knowledge, which was more evident in those studying on the first year of their degree programme than students in their second year. These findings suggest that effective learning may be hampered by students’ ignorance of gaps in their knowledge, particularly in the early stages of academic programmes, and that they may benefit from interventions to assist them in developing a better appreciation of their current state of knowledge.

Making Sense of Learning: Insights from an Experientially-Based Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Programme

Entrepreneurial learning is complex, reflecting the distinctive dispositions of entrepreneurs (including nascent entrepreneurs at an early stage in their entrepreneurial life course). The surge in entrepreneurship education programmes over recent decades and the attendant increase in scholarship have often contributed to this convoluted field. Consequently, universally applicable articulations of entrepreneurship education can be problematic, especially demarcating between more formal and less formal learning experiences that are not necessarily confined to traditional educational institutions. The authors explore the ways in which nascent entrepreneurs experience and articulate their own ‘learning’ and development during the first year of a specific three-year experientially-based programme. Drawing attention to their deployment of sense-making narratives, the paper presents key findings that have implications for theory and practice.

The characteristics and motivations of expatriate tourism service providers on the Costa del Sol, Spain

Expatriate-owned businesses account for a significant proportion of the total supply of small licensed premises within the main mass tourist resorts of the Costa del Sol in southern Spain. This paper presents some findings from a questionnaire survey conducted with owners of these small businesses in the resorts of Torremolinos and Fuengirola and focuses in particular on the behavioural characteristics and motivations of this group of small business owners. Using evidence from other research a comparison is made between the characteristics and motivations of this sample of expatriate tourism business owners and those of other small business owners in the tourism and hospitality industry. It is argued that although these expatriate owners are more likely than other owners of small tourism firms to possess relevant management and industry experience, they too are predominantly driven by non-economic motives and are prepared to work incredibly long hours in order to reap other intrinsic rewards.