Developing a Model of Community Wellbeing and Resilience in Response to Change

This study examines the relationship between base of the pyramid (BoP) entrepreneurship success and wellbeing. The major contention is that the success of the BoP entrepreneurs is influenced by information and training support provided by large private organizations. A total of 134 BoP entrepreneurs, who run community information centres in remote areas of Bangladesh with the support of a leading private telecommunications company, participated in this research. The result revealed that support from a large private organization is important to ensure business success, and that this subsequently enhances the wellbeing of BoP entrepreneurs. Not only has this study empirically confirmed that assistance provided by large private organizations to BoP entrepreneurs influences business success, assistance also enhances the wellbeing of this vulnerable group and thus facilitate to reduce poverty within the local community. This study therefore can be a guideline for large private organizations that are willing to carry out pragmatic corporate social initiatives.     

Contextualizing Arab female entrepreneurship in the United Arab Emirates

ABSTRACT

Cultural and structural challenges within the Arab context are found to constrain women’s opportunities towards entrepreneurial development and activity. In addressing the call for feminist theorizing in entrepreneurship research, we bring together gender, identity and networking into the subjective experiences of Emirati female entrepreneurs. Through antenarrative perspectives, we demonstrate that developing cooperation with men is a viable and complementary means to addressing contextual challenges and achieving empowerment. Our contribution illustrates that Emirati female entrepreneurs’ multi-layered identity work manifests in a relational manner via efforts to strategically construct opportunity by means of engaging in discursive relationships with men.     

Satisfied Residents in Different Types of Local Areas: Measuring What’s Most Important

In efforts to enhance subjective urban quality of life (QOL), most empirical research focuses on measuring satisfaction. However, other research suggests most residents are satisfied with where they live because they choose local areas which satisfy them on attributes important to them, within the constraints they face. Thus residents choosing very different local areas tend to have similar satisfaction levels. Rather than focusing on residential satisfaction in local areas, it may be useful to focus on residential preferences to both characterize and improve subjective urban QOL in local areas. This study compares satisfaction and preference measures in four broad types of urban environment in South East Queensland, Australia. As expected, the results showed similar levels of satisfaction across these urban environments (spanning inner city, suburban, outer suburban, and coastal areas) with regard to three broad attributes (access to services and facilities, the natural environment, and the social environment). In contrast, the importance of these attributes for residents varied between these urban environments. Thus residential preferences may characterize subjective urban QOL in different urban environments better than residential satisfaction. Moreover, residential preferences provide additional guidance for maintaining and enhancing subjective urban quality of life in local areas. This paper argues for a renewed focus on importance measures in addition to the existing focus on satisfaction measures in subjective urban QOL research.     

Missing regressor values under conditions of multicollinearity

The performance of some common procedures for replacing missing regressor values is investigated under varying conditions of multicollinearity" Analytical and numerical results indicate that the popular method of substituting sample means for missing values appears preferrable to other more sophisticated procedures given ill-conditioned designs In addition, results indicated that incomplete sample observations should not be thrown away under conditions of extreme multicollinearity.