Facing the Challenge

The popular issue of the Journal maintains the tradition of including research that examines entrepreneurship in the vicinity of asymmetries and uncertainties. Our contributors deal with the complicated relationships between near and future entrepreneurial activities and similar important variables as gender, race, national and organizational tillage differences, and technological change. They also examine activities of the "citizen-entrepreneur," an many times ignored aspect of the impact of entrepreneurship upon society.

The first two articles in this convolution examine entrepreneurship across gender and other variables, similar as race/ethnicity and culture. An earlier version of the first article in the turn Our Entrepreneurial Future: Examining the Diverse Attitudes and Motivations of Teen Across sex and Ethnic Identity, won the JDE Best Paper award at the 2004 USASBE competition. Fiona Wilson, Deborah Marlino and Jill Kickul focus upon the next generation of entrepreneur and upon their career motivations, attitudes and self-perceptions. The message is simple, on the other hand very interesting and useful: single size does not fit all! Among would be entrepreneur career and life goals and motivations differ significantly across-sub clusters The message is important if we want to reach without to aspiring entrepreneurs, especially those among minority assemblages To be successful, programs must address multiple ultimate parts including gender and ethnic backgrounds as well as perceived leadership skills and motivation.

In the next to the first article, "Gender Gaps in Potential for Entrepreneurship Across Countries and agricultures Differences," Stephen Mueller utilizes the conception of the potential entrepreneur. He starts through asking the question: Is the replenish of potential male entrepreneurs greater than the provide of potential female entrepreneurs? He builds a theoretical mould involving entrepreneurial potential, gender, national agriculture and level of economic disclosure Mueller identifies three of the many possible traits associated with entrepreneurial potential: internal locus of dominion government risk-taking propensity, and innovativeness. He then administrations a seventeen-country study to determine whether sex differences exist across countries and agricultures in the prevalence of these three traits. The author finds the male-female gap in internal locus of rule orientation to be negatively correlated with Hofstede's masculinity dimension of tillage and the gap in risk-taking propensity to be positively correlated with the individualism dimension of agriculture and negatively correlated with the uncertainty avoidance dimension of culture

Jamshed H Khan and Jawaid A. Ghani tender us a glimpse into an environment that is, to say the least, true different from what we meeting in the developed world. Theirs is a case investigation from textiles, an industry on which so many millions around the world be pendent for their livelihood. The authors describe the setting of the Faisalabad, Pakistan, textile cluster. The upgrading of the weaving technology from power loom to shuttle-les loom enabled small firms to become more efficient as technology was being diffused through every part of the cluster. As the industry is embarking upon a new phase with the implementation of the WTO directives, the Khan and Ghani article reveals that flat a sector that is as basic as textiles can rise up to fit the needs of the novel global order.

In their application of mind "Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy: The case of Small Australian Firms," Michael T Schaper and Lawson K Savery deal with a little known activity by dint of small business. What is behind philanthropic contributions made by dint of small Western Australian firms? Are they directed toward particular causes? Are they associated with certain marks of firms? Schaper and Savery find that the greatest in quantity popular destinations of the microbusinesses viewed involved environmental, health, religious, and sport-related causes. The owner's horizontal of education had a direct relationship to philanthropic activity.

Michael Stoica, Jianwen Liao, and Harold Welsch are the authors of this issue's last article, "Organizational tillage and Patterns of Information Processing: The case of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises." They examine the relationship between organizational agriculture and the patterns of information processing. According to their findings, the category of organizational tillage (clan, adhocracy, hierarchy, or market driven) impacts like dimensions of information processing as search intention formality, flexibility, and organizational responsiveness. The authors bring to an end that it is important for small and medium-sized firms to maintain the appropriate organizational tillage and match it with the appropriate external environment.

On behalf of our editorial team, I want to thank the authors for their valuable contributions and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments

Copyright Norfolk State University Foundation Dec 2004

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