Social Psychology of Organizations

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

http://www00.unibg.it/dati/corsi/910015/66577-zahra_2009.pdf

A Typology of Social Entrepreneurs: Motives, search Processes and Ethical Challenges

This paper reports on a qualitative field study of 16 hospitals implementing an innovative technology for cardiac surgery. We examine how new routines are developed in organizations in which existing routines are reinforced by the technological and organizational context All hospitals studied had top-tier cardiac surgery departments with excellent reputations and patient outcomes yet exhibited striking differences in the extent to which they were able to implement a new technology that required substantial changes in the operating-room-team work routine. Successful implementers underwent a qualitatively different team learning process than those who were unsuccessful. Analysis of qualitative data suggests that implementation involved four process steps: enrollment, preparation, trials, and reflection. Successful implementers used enrollment to motivate the team, designed preparatory practice sessions and early trials to create psychological safety and encourage new behaviors, and promoted shared meaning a...

Disrupted Routines: Team Learning and New Technology Implementation in Hospitals:

Research articles on women's entrepreneurship reveal, in spite of intentions to the contrary and in spite of inconclusive research results, a tendency to recreate the idea of women as being secondary to men and of women's businesses being of less significance or, at best, as being a complement. Based on a discourse analysis, this article discusses what research practices cause these results. It suggests new research directions that do not reproduce women's subordination but capture more and richer aspects of women's entrepreneurship.

/pdf/why-research-on-women-entrepreneurs-needs-new-directions-namkn8lf7t.pdf

Why research on women entrepreneurs needs new directions

Throughout the 20th century multiple discourses of the nature of enterprise and the entrepreneur have developed. In this article, we trace these discourses and perspectives as a backdrop to underst...

Social Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Towards a Convergent Theory of the Entrepreneurial Process

Critical incident technique.

It has been argued that networking by owner-managers of small businesses will enhance business performance. Yet to define and demonstrate the presence of networking activity is suffused with methodological difficulties. In this paper the authors attempt to disentangle some of these difficulties. The paper draws on quantifiable data from 104 owner-managers and qualitative data from 34 critical incident interviews from a study of microbusinesses to assess the nature and extent of networking activity. The paper shows: a high proportion of owner-managers use their trading contacts as sources of useful additional information; they use ‘weak ties’ for purposes such as recruitment; a sparse use of institutional networks; an association between networking activity and business performance, although it seems that this must be qualified by sectoral differences; an association between type of owner-manager on a scale of entrepreneurship and networking activity. The policy implications of this paper suggest that econ...

Networking, entrepreneurship and microbusiness behaviour

Entrepreneurs can be differentiated from non-entrepreneurs on the basis of intention, but intention is not always translated into performance that produces entrepreneurial outcomes. It is proposed that an alternative basis for differentiation is cognitive style (preferred approach to information processing). The present study hypothesizes that those owner managers who are, in practice, successful at identifying and exploiting opportunities for growth and capital accumulation (i.e., successful entrepreneurs) are (1) more intuitive in their cognitive style than the general population of managers; (2) no different in cognitive style from senior managers and executives; and (3) more intuitive than middle and junior managers. A questionnaire containing the Cognitive Style Index (CSI), a measure of the intuitive-analytic dimension, was distributed to the 437 founders of high growth companies listed in the latest edition of the publication Local Heroes (Scottish Enterprise, 1997). The 156 replies (representing a...

Intuition and entrepreneurial behaviour

Dr. Elizabeth Chell is Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour in the Department of Business and Administration, at the University of Salford, England. This paper considers critically three approaches...

Elizabeth Chell

Papers

Social Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Towards a Convergent Theory of the Entrepreneurial Process

Critical incident technique.

Networking, entrepreneurship and microbusiness behaviour

Intuition and entrepreneurial behaviour

The Entrepreneurial Personality: A Few Ghosts Laid to Rest?: