Knowledge that Transforms

…I was a good musician, so I thought, what better thing than to start a music company?

Although numerous countries have developed policies and programs to encourage entrepreneurial behavior in rural areas, there have been few attempts to compare the performance of entrepreneurial development programs in rural versus non rural settings. The existing literature led us to expect that such programs will be more efficient and effective in urban areas. However, in this study, virtually no significant relationships were found between urban and rural states—defined by the proportion of the population living in non-metropolitan counties—on the variables used to measure the performance of an entrepreneurship development program. This suggests that the need for special programs tailored to rural entrepreneurs deserves further, more critical, evaluation.

The premise of this article is that the management team of a small firm plays a key role in internationalization outcomes. Specifically, it is hypothesized that a greater degree of behavioral integration within a small firm's management team enables it to manage the complexity of foreign sales growth more effectively, leading to greater overall firm growth. Findings, based on data collected from two different industries (software products, food processing), support the hypothesis and indicate that the behavioral integration of the management team moderates the relationship between foreign sales growth and overall firm growth.

This paper demonstrates weaknesses in the ability of orthodox microenterprise development theory to represent issues relevant to women's success in the sector. Researchers tend to use gender simply as a variable to explain success without understanding gender as a social construct. Such work disregards how culturally specific power relations influence women's opportunities for success. Gender and microenterprise development theorists do better at incorporating power relations into explanations of why women start microenterprises and why their performance differs from that of men. They also take a broader view of microenterprise success by combining economic and empowerment outcomes, recognizing the diverse roles self employment plays for women. The relevance of power issues to success and the need for cultural sensitivity in evaluating women's opportunities to achieve positive enterprise outcomes are highlighted through the example of women's involvement in the microenterprise sector in South Asia.