Germany:a changing country of immigration

Despite being one of Europe's most significant destinations for migration, Germany has long wrestled with the notion that it may or may not be a 'country of immigration'. Approaching this question from a positive rather than a normative perspective, this article explores how Germany is changing in this respect, by examining changes over the past two decades in terms of migration flows, the policy framework and the degree of societal and institutional adaptation to migration. It argues that Germany has become much more diverse and also notes the major policy developments that have taken place after the change of government in 1998. While the dominant theme of migration policy has moved on from prevention to integration, Germany's impending demographic transformation poses a major new challenge, which will require governments to look once again to more active recruitment of labour migration. © 2013 Association for the Study of German Politics.

Entrepreneurial profile of the UK in the light of the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index

In this research summary, we provide a novel look into the entrepreneurial profile of the UK in an international context. We use a new method – the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index GEDI – to identify the entrepreneurial strengths and weaknesses of the UK economy, as well as to identify potential bottlenecks that hold back the performance of the UK relative to other advanced economies. We perform a Penalty for Bottleneck analysis to identify the bottlenecks in the UK's entrepreneurial profile. We also explore optimal resource allocation for UK's policy for National Systems of Entrepreneurship.

Moving on from nascent entrepreneurship:measuring cross-national differences in the transition to new business ownership

Nascent entrepreneurship and new business ownership are subsequent stages in the entrepreneurial process. We illustrate how information from the largest internationally harmonized database on entrepreneurship, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor project, can be used to approximate the entrepreneurial process. We make a methodological contribution by computing the ratio of new business ownership to nascent entrepreneurship in a way that reflects the transition from nascent to new business ownership and provides cross-nationally comparable information on the efficiency of the entrepreneurial process for 48 countries. We report evidence for the validity of the transition ratio by benchmarking it against transition rates obtained from longitudinal studies and by correlating it with commonly used entrepreneurship indicators and macro-level economic indices. The transition ratio enables future cross-national research on the entrepreneurial process by providing a reliable and valid indicator for one key transition in this process. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media New York.

Performance-based vs socially supportive culture:a cross-national study of descriptive norms and entrepreneurship

This paper is a cross-national study testing a framework relating cultural descriptive norms to entrepreneurship in a sample of 40 nations. Based on data from the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness project, we identify two higher-order dimensions of culture – socially supportive culture (SSC) and performance-based culture (PBC) – and relate them to entrepreneurship rates and associated supply-side and demand-side variables available from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Findings provide strong support for a social capital/SSC and supply-side variable explanation of entrepreneurship rate. PBC predicts demand-side variables, such as opportunity existence and the quality of formal institutions to support entrepreneurship.

Global entrepreneurship and institutions:an introduction

This article is an introduction to the special issue from the 4th Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Research Conference held at Imperial College Business School, London, in 2010. The article has two objectives. The first is to summarize the history of the GEM consortium, some of the contributions that it has delivered, and some challenges and opportunities ahead. The second is to present a summary of the papers in the context of the utility of GEM data in comparative entrepreneurship research. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.

Institutions and social entrepreneurship:the role of institutional voids, institutional support, and institutional configurations

We develop the institutional configuration perspective to understand which national contexts facilitate social entrepreneurship (SE). We confirm joint effects on SE of formal regulatory (government activism), informal cognitive (postmaterialist cultural values), and informal normative (socially supportive cultural norms, or weak-tie social capital) institutions in a multilevel study of 106,484 individuals in 26 nations. We test opposing propositions from the institutional void and institutional support perspectives. Our results underscore the importance of resource support from both formal and informal institutions, and highlight motivational supply side influences on SE. They advocate greater consideration of institutional configurations in institutional theory and comparative entrepreneurship research.

The state of social entrepreneurship in the UK

This SEFORÏS policy report summarizes key figures and trends about social entrepreneurship in the UK. It includes a description of the sector including dominant forms of social enterprise in the UK and an overview of the context and support organisations for social enteprises in the UK including access to finance. The report also characterizes innovation by UK social enterprises and how they seek to achieve and measure social impact. Who should read this report? It is written for policy makers, social enterprises support organisations and social enterprises who want to get an overview of social enterprise in the UK.

Entrepreneurship, social capital, and institutions:social and commercial entrepreneurship across nations

We model and test the relationship between social and commercial entrepreneurship drawing on social capital theory. We propose that the country prevalence rate of social entrepreneurship is an indicator of constructible nation-level social capital and enhances the likelihood of individual commercial entry. We further posit that both social and commercial entrepreneurial entry is facilitated by certain formal institutions, namely strong property rights and (low) government activism, albeit the latter impacts each of these types of entrepreneurship differently. We apply bivariate discrete choice multilevel modeling to population-representative samples in 47 countries and find support for these hypotheses. © 2013 Baylor University.

The role of personal values in corporate social entrepreneurship

The literature acknowledges a distinction between immoral, amoral and moral management (Carroll, 1987; Crane 2000). This paper makes a case for the manager as a moral agent, even though the paper begins by highlighting a body of evidence which suggests that individual moral agency is sacrificed at work and is compromised in deference to other pressures. This leads to a discussion of the notion of managerial discretion and an examination of a separate, contrary body of literature which indicates that some managers in corporations may use their discretion to behave in a socially entrepreneurial manner. The underlying assumption of the study is that CSR isn’t solely driven by economics and that it may also be championed as a result of a personal morality, inspired by an individual’s own socially oriented personal values. A conceptual framework is put forward and it is suggested that individuals may be categorized as Active or Frustrated Corporate Social Entrepreneurs; Conformists or Apathetics: distinguished by individualistic or collectivist personal values. In a discussion of the nature of values, this paper highlights how values may act as drivers of our behavior and pays particular attention to the values of the entrepreneur, thereby linking the existing debate on moral agency with the field of corporate social responsibility.

Personal values as a catalyst for corporate social entrepreneurship

The literature acknowledges a distinction between immoral, amoral and moral management. This paper makes a case for the employee (at any level) as a moral agent, even though the paper begins by highlighting a body of evidence which suggests that individual moral agency is sacrificed at work and is compromised in deference to other pressures. This leads to a discussion about the notion of discretion and an examination of a separate, contrary body of literature which indicates that some individuals in corporations may use their discretion to behave in a socially entrepreneurial manner. My underlying assumption is that CSR isn’t solely driven by economics and that it may also be championed as a result of a personal morality, inspired by employees’ own socially oriented personal values. A conceptual framework is put forward and it is suggested that individuals may be categorized as Active or Frustrated Corporate Social Entrepreneurs; Conformists or Apathetics, distinguished by their individualistic or collectivist personal values. In a discussion of the nature of values, this paper highlights how values may act as drivers of our behavior and pays particular attention to the values of the entrepreneur, thereby linking the existing debate on moral agency with the field of corporate social responsibility.

THOMAS NIEHR AND KARIN BÖKE (eds), Einwanderungsdiskurse. Vergleichende diskurslinguistische Studien. [Immigration Discourses: Comparative Discourse Studies.] Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000. 241 pp. DM 56.00 (pbk). ISBN 3–5311–3307–1

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