Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Sciences économiques : Lyon 2 : 2004. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr.

In recent years young entrepreneurs have attracted considerable attention from policy makers and the media, and there is evidence that increasingly many young people aspire to start their own business. However, there has been little research into how young entrepreneurs actually build their businesses, and the limited existing research about young entrepreneurs has tended to focus on participants who have struggled to achieve business survival and growth. By contrast, this thesis investigates how young entrepreneurs are able to build high performing businesses. All participants have built a business with a turnover between £1 million and £90 million or otherwise raised at least £1 million in external investment. It takes a qualitative approach, based primarily on semi-structured interviewing, to understanding the knowledge and skills 21 young entrepreneurs used to build their businesses. It uses a human capital theory framework to analyse how the young entrepreneurs developed relevant knowledge and skills prior to start-up in order to build a business. It then considers what additional human and social capital the young entrepreneurs acquired during the venture creation process itself. The findings identify three different pathways, each of which typifies the human capital used by particular young entrepreneurs, according to their educational background and the precise age at which they started their business. The study also establishes the necessary human capital which all of the young entrepreneurs developed prior to start-up or during the early stages of starting their ventures, which was important to their success in growing a business. The study finally contributes to the debate about whether general human capital or venture-specific human capital is most important to entrepreneurs, finding that for young entrepreneurs developing pre-start-up general human capital is particularly significant.

This study examines the language attitudes of entrepreneurial students enrolled in the Academy for Creating Enterprise (ACE) in Mexico City toward six rural and urban varieties of Mexican Spanish to consider whether their attitudes towards these varieties influence their decisions about hiring. A verbal guise test and focus groups were used to determine the current attitudes held by 98 ACE students towards the popular and upper-class dialects of Mexico City; the urban dialect of Mérida, Yucatan; the urban dialect of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua; the urban dialect of Monterrey, Nuevo León; and the rural dialect of San Jeronimito, Guerrero. It was determined that the ACE students, who are current and future entrepreneurs and employers, do engage in “linguistic profiling” (Purnell et al., 1999), preferring the northern varieties of Spanish and the variety spoken by the upper class of Mexico City in all three dimensions of attractiveness, status, and hireability. These results indicate that speakers of the popular variety of Mexico City and the southern varieties of Yucatán and Guerrero are less likely to be hired. In addition, the students’ ratings of hireability were also influenced by the students’ age, gender, business owner status, and exposure to the dialect in question. The students’ level of income was found to be the most likely to influence the ratings of speaker attractiveness and status. This case study of current and future employers enrolled at ACE responds to a call for the application of language attitudes research (Edwards, 1982; Garrett, 2010) and provides a model for working with an organization. Based on these findings, it was determined that ACE should modify its curriculum to include explicit training regarding linguistic attitudes and hiring practices.

No description available.

The existing scholarship on women in China suggests that gender inequality still exists against the background of the country’s reform and opening in recent years. However, the situation of women in enterprise ownership and leadership seems to indicate that under the surface of women being disadvantaged, some of them are playing a more active and significant role in China’s economic development. Based on a series of interviews with women enterprise owners, wives of enterprise owners and women managers conducted in three localities in three difference provinces of China, this research aims to discover the deeper socio-political realities of leading women in enterprises. By analyzing information on these women’s personal experiences, career and families, this thesis investigates their status at work and at home, as well as their connections with local politics. The research results suggest that although traces of gender inequality can still be found in these women’s lives, they appear to be actively engaged in the business establishment and operation and gradually casting off the leash of domestic responsibilities. At the same time, these women have developed strong connections with the Party-state, not necessarily in their own right, but largely through their family ties. The research has also highlighted that the varied socio-economic development of each locality has its effects on these women’s development.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 339-356).

Mémoire (M.P.M.O.)-- Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 1993. / Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Mémoire (M.P.M.O.)-- Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 1993. / Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Thèses (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke (Canada), 1997. / Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 31 août 2006). Publié aussi en version papier.

Female entrepreneurs establishing new firms in Jordan mostly do not have adequate internal resources to help support the successful emergence and growth of their enterprise. Agreement has emerged among scholars that network ties are an effective source or route through which entrepreneurs are able to reach and obtain the resources necessary to assist their firm through its various stages development. Understanding more about how Jordanian female entrepreneurs engage in networking in order to establish and grow their firms, might help inform policy intervention as well as inform theory by identifying the model of network development in a field where there is a lack of studies and literature that explores the networking behaviour of female entrepreneurs, particularly in Eastern societies. Thus, this research investigates the development of networks for resource acquisition by exploring the experiences of female entrepreneurs in 14 technology-based firms in Jordan. It explores the structural characteristics and the content of their networks and how they have developed over time to deliver advantage in resource acquisition during the venture formation and early development stages. Rich qualitative data were collected utilising a two-stage, in-depth interview approach. Evidence is presented as to how changes in aspects of network structure, including diversity, reachability, density, centrality and the presence of strong and weak ties, yield different types of resources available to the entrepreneurs. The network structure of female entrepreneurs at start-up was characterised by business ties established within male-dominated networks. There was evidence of these women building new strong ties and reaching out through a small number of indirect ties. Typically there was a high degree of interconnectedness between different parts of the women’s networks, which were characterised by their density. These structural characteristics of the network enabled these women to reach and obtain human capital, financial resources and achieve legitimacy. As the female entrepreneurs grew their businesses there were changes in the network structure as it became characterised by a higher level of diversity in terms of types of tie. The prominence of male-dominated network ties continued, but there was a growing presence of weak ties; a decline in the level of network density; and the appearance of centrality, where women started to act as a broker between two other actors in their networks. These changes saw the women benefitting mainly in building network ties, including gaining access to new contacts of different types. The research revealed that professional business ties and access through these ties play an important role in venture creation and growth. These business ties are used to act as the gateway to resources rather than the personal ties identified in previous research. Further, in support of network-based research suggesting that the entrepreneurs’ network ties and their structural characteristics change overtime as the resource needs change, this research provides empirical evidence of the changing content (resources) that these structural characteristics provide through the start-up and early development stages. Therefore, the findings of this exploratory research on female technology entrepreneurs in Jordan contribute to theory development at the intersection of work on network processes, network development and entrepreneurship in Middle Eastern societies. The findings also have a number of implications for policy and practice, which are considered in the conclusions to the thesis.