A meta-analysis of the correlation between heritage language and ethnic identity

The interaction between heritage language (HL) and ethnic identity has gained increasing scholarly attention over the past decades. Numerous quantitative studies have investigated and vindicated this interaction within certain contexts. Nevertheless, quantitative evidence on this interaction across contexts is absent to date. The current meta-analysis aims to make a contribution in this regard. By integrating relevant studies, this meta-analysis presents a powerful estimation of the reality in relation to the interaction between HL and ethnic identity. By virtue of certain retrieval strategies and selection criteria, the meta-analysis includes 43 data-sets emerging from 18 studies that have addressed the statistical correlation between the proficiency of HL and the sense of ethnic identity associated with different ethnic groups. When contrasted to one another, the results of these included studies are significantly different. However, when combined together, these studies point to a statistically significant moderate positive correlation between sense of ethnic identity and proficiency of HL across different ethnic groups. This result has a medium effect. The meta-analysis also inspires some methodological and theoretical discussions.

ACE research vignette 037 : Bill Gates’ mug shot : Is there a secret link between rule-breaking, crime, and entrepreneurship?

This series of research vignettes is aimed at sharing current and interesting research findings from international entrepreneurship researchers. In this vignette, Dr. Martin Obschonka, considers the relationship between entrepreneurship and rule-breaking.

The whole world shook : shifts in ethnic, national and heroic identities in children's fiction about 9/11

Like many other cataclysmic events September 11, a day now popularly believed to have 'changed the world', has become a topic taken up by children's writers. This thesis, titled The Whole World Shook: Ethnic, National and Heroic Identities in Children's Fiction About 9/11, examines how cultural identities are constructed within fictional texts for young people written about the attacks on the Twin Towers. It identifies three significant identity categories encoded in 9/11 books for children: ethnic identities, national identities, and heroic identities. The thesis argues that the identities formed within the selected children's texts are in flux, privileging performances of identities that are contingent on post-9/11 politics. This study is located within the field of children's literature criticism, which supports the understanding that children's books, like all texts, play a role in the production of identities. Children's literature is highly significant both in its pedagogical intent (to instruct and induct children into cultural practices and beliefs) and in its obscurity (in making the complex simple enough for children, and from sometimes intentionally shying away from difficult things). This literary criticism informed the study that the texts, if they were to be written at all, would be complex, varied and most likely as ambiguous and contradictory as the responses to the attacks on New York themselves. The theoretical framework for this thesis draws on a range of critical theories including literary theory, cultural studies, studies of performativity and postmodernism. This critical framework informs the approach by providing ways for: (i) understanding how political and ideological work is performed in children's literature; (ii) interrogating the constructed nature of cultural identities; (iii) developing a nuanced methodology for carrying out a close textual analysis. The textual analysis examines a representative sample of children's texts about 9/11, including picture books, young adult fiction, and a selection of DC Comics. Each chapter focuses on a different though related identity category. Chapter Four examines the performance of ethnic identities and race politics within a sample of picture books and young adult fiction; Chapter Five analyses the construction of collective, national identities in another set of texts; and Chapter Six does analytic work on a third set of texts, demonstrating the strategic performance of particular kinds of heroic identities. I argue that performances of cultural identities constructed in these texts draw on familiar versions of identities as well as contribute to new ones. These textual constructions can be seen as offering some certainties in increasingly uncertain times. The study finds, in its sample of books a co-mingling of xenophobia and tolerance; a binaried competition between good and evil and global harmony and national insularity; and a lauding of both the commonplace hero and the super-human. Being a recent corpus of texts about 9/11, these texts provide information on the kinds of 'selves' that appear to be privileged in the West since 2001. The thesis concludes that the shifting identities evident in texts that are being produced for children about 9/11 offer implicit and explicit accounts of what constitute good citizenship, loyalty to nation and community, and desirable attributes in a Western post-9/11 context. This thesis makes an original contribution to the field of children's literature by providing a focussed and sustained analysis of how texts for children about 9/11 contribute to formations of identity in these complex times of cultural unease and global unrest.

Power law distributions in entrepreneurship : implications for theory and research

A long-held assumption in entrepreneurship research is that normal (i.e., Gaussian) distributions characterize variables of interest for both theory and practice. We challenge this assumption by examining more than 12,000 nascent, young, and hyper-growth firms. Results reveal that variables which play central roles in resource-, cognition-, action-, and environment-based entrepreneurship theories exhibit highly skewed power law distributions, where a few outliers account for a disproportionate amount of the distribution's total output. Our results call for the development of new theory to explain and predict the mechanisms that generate these distributions and the outliers therein. We offer a research agenda, including a description of non-traditional methodological approaches, to answer this call.

Entrepreneurial opportunities and the entrepreneurship nexus : a re-conceptualization

The literature on “entrepreneurial opportunities” has grown rapidly since the publication of Shane and Venkataraman (2000). By directing attention to the earliest stages of development of new economic activities and organizations, this marks sound redirection of entrepreneurship research. However, our review shows that theoretical and empirical progress has been limited on important aspects of the role of “opportunities” and their interaction with actors, i.e., the “nexus”. We argue that this is rooted in inherent and inescapable problems with the “opportunity” construct itself, when applied in the context of a prospective, micro-level (i.e., individual[s], venture, or individual–venture dyad) view of entrepreneurial processes. We therefore suggest a fundamental re-conceptualization using the constructs External Enablers, New Venture Ideas, and Opportunity Confidence to capture the many important ideas commonly discussed under the “opportunity” label. This re-conceptualization makes important distinctions where prior conceptions have been blurred: between explananda and explanantia; between actor and the entity acted upon; between external conditions and subjective perceptions, and between the contents and the favorability of the entity acted upon. These distinctions facilitate theoretical precision and can guide empirical investigation towards more fruitful designs.

ACE research vignette 040: Three steps towards more corporate entrepreneurship within an organisation

This series of research vignettes is aimed at sharing current and interesting research findings from our team of international Entrepreneurship researchers. In this vignette, Henri Burgers investigates what managers can do to make their firm more entrepreneurial.

ACE Research Vignette 043: Can academic entrepreneurship research identify and explain the next Apple, Google, or (even) Halfbrick studios?

This series of research vignettes is aimed at sharing current and interesting research findings from our team of international entrepreneurship researchers. This vignette, written by Professor Per Davidsson, reports findings on the extremely skewed distributions of entrepreneurship outcomes and other key variables of interest to entrepreneurship research and practice, as well as what this means for what and how we can learn through academic research.

ACE Research Vignette 044: Can entrepreneurship be taught (II)? Further Evidence

This series of research vignettes is aimed at sharing current and interesting research findings from our team of international entrepreneurship researchers. This vignette, written by Professor Per Davidsson, examines new evidence on whether entrepreneurship education and training leads to more entrepreneurial action and success.

ACE Research Vignette 045: Are “Entrepreneurial Opportunities” a meaningful topic for entrepreneurship research?

This series of research vignettes is aimed at sharing current and interesting research findings from our team of international entrepreneurship researchers. In this vignette, Professor Per Davidsson discusses research on “entrepreneurial opportunities”. A “Government Health Warning” is in place for this particular vignette: it mainly concerns matters internal to entrepreneurship research; however, reflective practitioners may find it to be of interest.

ACE Research Vignette 046: Australian Youth Entrepreneurship and Education

This series of research vignettes is aimed at sharing current and interesting research findings from our team of international Entrepreneurship researchers. In this vignette, Associate Professor Paul Steffens investigates how Australia is placed on the word stage in terms of Youth Entrepreneurship.

Party On! A call for entrepreneurship research that is more interactive, activity based, cognitively hot, compassionate, and prosocial

It is the Journal of Business Venturing's (JBV) 30th birthday. Although the community of entrepreneurship scholars deserves to celebrate JBV's achievements over the last 30 years (and congratulate the journal's parents—Ian Macmillan and S. Venkataraman), my focus is more on the future of entrepreneurship (and by extension JBV). A focus on entrepreneurship is both timeless and timely. On the one hand, entrepreneurship is timeless given the long-recognized importance of entrepreneurs to economies and societies (e.g., Jean Baptiste who supposedly coined the term in about 1800). On the other hand, a discussion of entrepreneurship is timely because now that the field of entrepreneurship has achieved legitimacy, it faces both opportunities and threats. It is thus timely to acknowledge the threats and think about opportunities to advance the field. A discussion of entrepreneurship is also timely because society faces a number of grand challenges (including the durability of poverty, environmental degradation [ Dorado and Ventresca, 2013]), challenges well suited to entrepreneurial responses...

Academic entrepreneurship: A multilevel examination of individual, subunit and organizational effects

This study utilizes a multilevel approach to both estimate the relative importance of individual, subunit, and organization effects on entrepreneurial intentions in academia, as well as to investigate specific factors within the subunit effect and their interactions with other levels. Using a dataset of 2,652 researchers from 386 departments in 24 European universities, our findings reveal that intra-university differences, caused by the influence of the department, should not be ignored when studying academic entrepreneurship. Whereas researchers’ entrepreneurial intentions are mostly influenced by individual differences, department membership explains more variation than the university as a whole. Furthermore, drawing upon organizational culture literature, we identify a department’s adhocracy culture, characterized by flexibility and an external orientation, to be positively related to entrepreneurial intentions. Finally, consistent with trait activation theory, we find that strong adhocracy cultures reinforce the positive association between proactive personality and entrepreneurial intentions. This effect is further intensified when the university also has a technology transfer office with a substantial size. Our results have relevant implications for both academics and practitioners, including university managers, department heads and policy makers.

Agent-based simulation as a component of mixed methods in entrepreneurship research

As a new research method supplementing the existing qualitative and quantitative approaches, agent-based modelling and simulation (ABMS) may fit well within the entrepreneurship field because the core concepts and basic premises of entrepreneurship coincide with the characteristics of ABMS (McKelvey, 2004; Yang & Chandra, 2013). Agent-based simulation is a simulation method based on agent-based models. The agentbased models are composed of heterogeneous agents and their behavioural rules. By repeatedly carrying out agent-based simulations on a computer, the simulations reproduce each agent’s behaviour, their interactive process, and the emerging macroscopic phenomenon according to the flow of time. Using agent-based simulations, researchers may investigate temporal or dynamic effects of each agent’s behaviours.