Special Issue: Minority Groups in Entrepreneurship, Part I, Strategic change: Briefings in Entrepreneurial Finance, Volume 31, Issue 2, Pages: 193-268, March 2022, Guest editors: Carla Susana Marques, Vitor Braga, João J. Ferreira, and Helen Lawton Smith
In these turbulent and frightening times it is even more important for there to be better understanding of the challenges faced by disadvantaged groups as they strive to improve their wellbeing, and that of society, through entrepreneurship.
In this first of two special issues of Strategic Change: Briefings in Entrepreneurial finance, the twin focus is on gender and entrepreneurship and immigrant entrepreneurship. The seven papers of the present issue demonstrate the difficulties and opportunities faced by minority groups in different international contexts.
The first paper, Entrepreneurial intention amongst women. A Case study in the Portuguese academy by Sofia Gomes, Tânia Santos, Marlene Sousa, José Oliveira, Márcio Oliveira, and João Lopes explores how and why young women students in Portugal decide to become entrepreneurs. Their study focuses on the societal impact: the paper is about how female university students are increasingly encouraged to create their companies to boost their region’s social and economic development.
The second paper also focuses on young entrepreneurs but from an intrapreneur perspective. Pedro Baena Luna, Macarena Suarez, Isadora Torre, and Esther Rio ask, To what extent are PhD students intrapreneurs? A study from a gender perspective. In their study of PhD students at the University of Seville,they find that there are gender differences in the key elements and factors of intrapreneurial intention among doctoral students.
In the third paper by Vjosë Latifi, Veland Ramadami, and Gadaf Rexhepi, the theme of intention is continued, in this case in Eastern Europe. Their paper Women minority-entrepreneurs in Kosovo: an exploration of motivational factors and accompanying challenges report oninterviews of ten ethnic Turkish women entrepreneurs. They find that there are still many challenges associated with minority-women entrepreneurs related to the imbalance of life and work and the lack of government support as a form of facilitation for entrepreneurship.
The important issue of female empowerment was tackled by a UK team in the fourth paper by Luca Andriani, Sarika Lal, and Asif Aftab Kalam Their paper, Entrepreneurial activities and women empowerment in rural India between microfinance and social capital found thatwomen’s empowerment is conditioned upon their control on financial resources and activities outside their households’ tasks, such as entrepreneurial activities. Their evidence is drawn from in-depth semi-structured interviews with female members of the group lending model of the microfinance institutions in Uttar Pradesh, northern India.
In the fifth paper, a team from France focus on gender inequality in access to venture capital using evidence from 100 technological digital startups from India in the period 2014-2017. The authors Nirjhar Nigam, Cristiane Benetti, and Hareesh Mavoori ask:Access to venture capital: Does gender (still) really matter? They find that female entrepreneurs are held to a different standard than male entrepreneurs in obtaining financing from venture capitalists.
Moving to the theme of immigrants as minority entrepreneurs Soumodip Sarkar, José Jacinto Bilau, and Marco Correia ask: Financing creation of micro enterprises with microcredit: Does being an immigrant make a difference? They used a bank’s loan dataset containing information on 669 small loans granted in Portugal between 2016 and 2019 to provide the evidence. Their conclusions are that immigrants are different from their national counterparts in terms of human capital and location of business activity.
Finally, Carla Susana Marques, Anderson Galvão, Carla Mascarenhas, and Diana Pinto, a team from Portugal and Spain, report on their study of The importance of immigrant and ex-immigrant entrepreneurship in the development of a low-density region. In their study of the wine growing region of Alto Douro, nine immigrant and nine returning migrant entrepreneurs participated in semi-structured interviews. From these, the authors concluded that immigrant and return migrant entrepreneurs contribute to the development of low-density territories.
Website: Minority Groups in Entrepreneurship, Part I: Strategic Change: Vol 31, No 2 (wiley.com)
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This post has been contributed by Helen Lawton Smith
