SMEs and Marketing: A Systematic Literature Review

This paper presents a systematic review of recent academic literature analysing the role, organization and management of marketing activities in small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). To this end, 310 articles published between 2006 and 2015 in 69 main journals devoted to small firms/entrepreneurship and management/marketing fields were analysed. This review shows that SMEs’ marketing has received great attention in both management and marketing literature in recent years. Findings reveal, on the one hand, the emerging role of networks and information and communication technologies in marketing behaviour by SMEs, and on the other hand a research gap in terms of specific marketing practices. Entrepreneurial marketing has been used as the main conceptual framework in reviewed studies, even if findings overall still point out a distance between the theoretical bases of reviewed contributions and the study of SMEs’ marketing behaviour and practices. Therefore, future research on the role of resources, relationships and networks could benefit from the combination of theories developed within the field of entrepreneurship with other approaches such as the resource‐based view, the dynamic capabilities theory and the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) framework.     

Girls,boys, money. Economic socialisation,gender, and generations in Italy

The aim of this article is to discuss the issue of economic socialisation in Italy from a gender perspective. What do boys and girls know about money and economy? How do they acquire this knowledge? What roles do the family, school, and the media play?

The empirical material making up the base of our observations is composed of in-depth interviews with a group of Milanese families on the questions of economic socialisation and practices of money management. Gender differences emerge in the construction of the relationship with money by children and young adults: girls, in particular, undergo the strongest pressure, i.e. they are still more driven towards discipline and self-control.

Our results also suggest the need to activate targeted, gender-sensitive training programmes in economic education.     

A Structural Equation Model Estimation of the Role of Social Vulnerability as a Predictor of People’s Feelings of Unsafety

Social Indicators Research - People’s perception of insecurity is linked to a wide range of factors and up-to-date sources stress the impact of socially constructed concerns on feelings of...     

Happy Marriage,Happy Life? Marital Quality and Subjective Well‐being in Later Life

The authors examined associations between marital quality and both general life satisfaction and experienced (momentary) well‐being among older husbands and wives, the relative importance of own versus spouse's marital appraisals for well‐being, and the extent to which the association between own marital appraisals and well‐being is moderated by spouse's appraisals. Data are from the 2009 Disability and Use of Time daily diary supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (N = 722). One's own marital satisfaction is a sizable and significant correlate of life satisfaction and momentary happiness; associations do not differ significantly by gender. The authors did not find a significant association between spouse's marital appraisals and own well‐being. However, the association between husband's marital quality and life satisfaction is buoyed when his wife also reports a happy marriage, yet flattened when his wife reports low marital quality. Implications for understanding marital dynamics and well‐being in later life are discussed.     

Child Protection and Self‐Regulation in the Internet Industry: The UK Experience

In the United Kingdom (UK), the number of convictions for offences related to child abuse images fell back following the police investigation dubbed ‘Operation Ore’, but have still continued at levels unimaginable only 10 years ago. However, while government and the internet industry deserve credit for the steps they have taken to reduce the traffic in child abuse images online in the UK, the fact that a number of Internet Service Providers appear to be reluctant to act to block access to it calls into question the effectiveness of the self‐regulatory principle: the idea which has been central to the UK’s overall approach to internet policy since 1996.     

The insertion of Roma in Sénart Project (2000–2007): a local minority-targeted affirmative action following in the footsteps of the French republican citizenship model

Between 2000 and 2007, 34 Romanian families living in shanty towns in a Parisian suburb participated in a local group-specific social integration project. A socio-anthropological study was undertaken 2 years after it ended, including documentary analysis of its archives, interviews with its beneficiaries and the professionals involved and ethnography among three families with distinct integration histories. Using the analysis of the project’s implementation and outcomes, this article sheds light on how exceptional acts of minority identity recognition – sporadic and on a case-by-case basis – were ultimately functional in the performance of a republican redistributive policy on individual access to rights and resources based on the denial of racialised inequalities.