The book ?Women Entrepreneurs: Moving Beyond the Glass Ceiling,? by Dorothy Moore and Holly Buttner, offers an insightful contribution to our understanding of the experiences, feelings, and perceptions of 129 women business owners who left corporations to start or acquire their own businesses. Data collected from 13 focus groups across the United States yield rich stories illustrating the personal transitions of women who left corporate jobs to become entrepreneurs. These qualitative data are supplemented with surveys, the results of which statistically support the themes derived from the focus groups. In their ensuing discussion, the authors compare ?corporate climbers? and ?intentionalists??the former organizational women who were pushed to entrepreneurship and the latter women who planned to be entrepreneurs.

Measuring the performance of new ventures is of interest because they are a major source of job creation and because improvement in performance is critical to their survival and growth. However, collecting data on the performance of new ventures is often difficult due to a lack of historical information and accessibility. This article presents conclusions from a literature review of 34 current empirical studies from the entrepreneurship field that measured some aspect of performance and describes the results of an exploratory study that tested empirical variation across two methods of data collection and three sources of information used in measuring the performance of new ventures. Sixty-six recently formed (4–6 years old) manufacturing firms in Massachusetts were identified and queried on different aspects of performance. The sample was split: one group being surveyed by telephone, the other by mail. Besides the self-report by the venture, two additional sources of performance information were used: an archival source and a competitor that had been identified by the new venture. Measures of performance information included those most frequently used by researchers, such as annual sales, number of employees, return on sales, growth in sales, and growth in employees. Both subjective and objective measures were employed. Correlational tests and regressions were used to compare measures, sources, and methods for reliability. Results show that sales figures obtained from archival sources and direct questioning of new ventures were highly and significantly correlated. Competitors proved to be a reliable third source in that the performance estimates they made were highly correlated with the estimates reported by the new ventures themselves, but their estimates sometimes differed widely in absolute value. Both mail and telephone methods rated well in obtaining complete responses, even though the response rate for the telephone was twice that of the mail responses. The main implications for researchers are consideration of the trade-offs in terms of cost, time, and accuracy for various methods of data collection and sources of performance information. This research does not attempt to prescribe which measure to use; rather, it offers the results of empirical tests that suggest which methods and sources might be used to collect the information. For the new venture owner/manager, this research suggests that competitors of new ventures are often knowledgeable of the sales and profitability of new ventures.

Small firms face unique challenges in crafting strategies that best utilize their resource bases. Research shows strategies that combine with resources lead to performance. The entrepreneurship literature finds the contingent effects, or moderating roles, of strategy and external factors, but the relationship between firm strategy and internal factors, such as resources, is less well studied. Based on the contention that the quality of a firm's strategy cannot be judged independently of the resources upon which it is based, we examine the relationship between firm resources, strategies, and performance in a cross-section of 192 small firms. Using a structural equation analysis, we examine the mediating role of firm strategies as they lead to firm performance in small firms operating in traditional industries. Our findings demonstrate that neither resources nor strategies alone explain firm performance, but instead, small firms fit their strategies to their resource profiles. Human and organizational resources in combination with a strategy of quality/customer service enhance firm performance.

The process of new venture creation is central to the field of entrepreneurship. The effects of initial organizing have a direct influence on survival, yet empirical examination of the dimensions of emergent organizations is limited. Using longitudinal data on nascent entrepreneurs, this paper empirically tests four properties of emerging organizations-intentionality, resources, boundary and exchange- and their effect on likelihood of continued organizing [Katz, J., Gartner, W.B., 1988. Properties of emerging organizations. Academy of Management Review 13(3), 429–441]. Our results suggest that all four properties are necessary for firm survival in the short-term and those firms that organize more slowly are more likely to continue to organize. Further, nascent ventures in which intentionality preceded the other organizing properties were not significantly more likely to continue in the organizing effort. Our results suggest an extension of the original Katz and Gartner [Katz, J., Gartner, W.B., 1988. Properties of emerging organizations. Academy of Management Review 13(3), 429–441] framework.

Anchored in signaling theory, we use a configurational approach to examine how new ventures credibly communicate their underlying firm quality, using a unique dataset of 117 new ventures that sought investment from a prominent angel group located in the Northeastern United States. Unlike existing research, which employs econometric models to reflect one best solution, we use crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis (cs/QCA) to understand signal configurations during the angel investment decision-making process. Our findings suggest that there are multiple paths to our three outcomes, passed small group screening, passed large group presentation, and passed due diligence/invested, validating notions of equifinality. Signals are complementary and configurations differ by industry sector. We also find that effective signal configurations differ by stage of investment, thereby offering evidence of cognitive dual processing on the part of the angel investors. We contribute to the literature on signaling by linking our findings to recent work on signal interactions and by highlighting the configurational and temporal aspects of signaling in the angel investment context. Implications are discussed.