Literature on the creation of organizations is often cast within a masculine gender framework. This paper draws from three theoretical perspectives to develop a new perspective that broadens the view of organizational creation by encompassing the relative balance of feminine and masculine perspectives in the entrepreneur's venture start-up process and new venture attributes. We elaborate the relatively less visible feminine and personal perspective and compare this with the traditional or masculine perspective. Important to the discussion is the distinction between biology (sex: male and female, man and woman) and socialized perspectives (gender: masculine and feminine). While research and the general public often use the concept of gender loosely to signify sex, we follow a more precise feminist distinction. The paper advances new concepts of gender-maturity (an individual difference) and gender-balance (an organizational quality).

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.

Research on factors influencing performance in new and small companies is extensive. Earlier work found that strategies (e.g. cost, quality, differentiation, etc.) affected performance contingent on industry conditions, the environment, and the entrepreneur’s background. Although this work provides a solid basis for understanding differences in entrepreneurial performance, some firms are limited in their choices of strategy due to size, age, or industry. Often these firms are in industries where entry barriers are low and competitive advantages are easily imitated. Small service and retail businesses operate in sectors where these conditions are apparent. Comprising more than 50% of all small firms, they require minimal start-up investments but face intense competition. Lacking the “glamour” of high innovation/high growth firms, service and retail companies are at the “end” of the value chain, their fortunes rising and falling as a result of the direct influence of the owner-founder. Hence, performance variation may be better explained by the capabilities of the firm or individual competencies of the owner-founder, that is the resource-base and resource combinations, rather than strategy. The strategic importance of an organization’s resources and capabilities is the foundation of resource-based theory. Resources are tangible and intangible assets tied to the firm in a relatively permanent fashion. Their combinations are heterogeneous and form the basis for product/market strategies. Studies of resources, strategies, and performance are emerging in the entrepreneurial area. Research shows that various resources in concert with different strategy types can lead to above average performance over the business life cycle, and that combinations of resources are related to survival. Yet the vast majority of work focuses on high growth, high tech, or manufacturing businesses. Less is known about the relationships of resources to performance in less “glamorous” sectors. In these small service and retail businesses, we speculate that resources, in particular human and organizational resources, may play a greater role in explaining performance than strategy. Further, as other authors have suggested, it is expected that the combinations of these resources will vary across age and size. This study examines the influence of human and organizational resources on performance in a sample of 195 service and retail firms operating in central New Jersey, using a structured questionnaire. All companies utilized a focus strategy (either focused cost or focused differentiation) and employed a minimum of 3 to a maximum of 100 employees. All measures had theoretical and/or empirical precedent and were tested statistically for reliability. We used factor analysis to reduce the independent variables to: two human resource variables (owner resources and commitment), one organizational resource variable (comprised of planning, systems, and staff skills), and one strategy variable (focused cost and focused differentiation). Control variables were business age, business size, environmental benignness, and industry growth. The dependent variable performance was measured in two ways: net cash flow and log of growth in employees over 3 years. The study first examined whether strategy or resources had a greater influence on performance. Results showed that strategy influenced performance less than human and organizational resources both individually and interactively. The influence of owner resources (background and attitudes) on net cash flow was stronger than on growth, where the only significant variable was industry (market) growth. To analyze effects of resources on performance by size, we divided the sample by size groupings, selecting the smallest (maximum five employees) and largest quartiles (minimum 16 employees), which were comprised of 55 and 50 companies, respectively. These analyses showed that owner resources, commitment, and organizational resources contributed positively to net cash flow in very small firms; however, interactive effects of these resource combinations were negative. For instance, owner resources and organizational resources together, and organizational resources and commitment together, resulted in less positive cash flow than when analyzed separately. This implies that different resource combinations can have negative influences in these very small firms. We examined age effects in the same manner as size—dividing the sample into age group quartiles and conducting an analysis only for very young (fewer than 5 years) and very old (minimum 19 years) groups, which comprised 54 and 52 companies, respectively. These analyses showed that although growth was more rapid among the youngest firms, there were no distinctive resource-based correlates to growth in either age group. Substantive increases in formalized systems and procedures were not apparent among the oldest of these companies compared with the youngest, contrary to previous work showing the evolution of these over business life cycles. Results of this study are applicable only in the context of service and retail firms, and, readers should note this sample was nonrandom and geographically concentrated. Our purpose was not to predict, but describe associations between resources and performance. This study shows that, for firms in competitive industries at the end of the value chain, type of strategy is less important than resource combinations for certain types of performance. Human and organizational resources are associated with more positive cash flow, whereas industry and market factors are related to growth. These results imply that firms seeking growth are best served by selecting and entering growth markets and industries. On the other hand, if strong positive cash flows are the primary objective, attention to combinations of resources is more important. For instance, owner-founders having a strong business and managerial background, and industry experience will need less formalized systems, whereas those owner-founders with weaker managerial resources might benefit from more formalized procedures and skilled staff.

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.

We consider the role that gender-stereotyped behaviors play in investors’ evaluations of men- and women-owned ventures. Contrary to research suggesting that investors exhibit bias against women, we find that being a woman entrepreneur does not diminish interest by investors. Rather, our findings reveal that investors are biased against the display of feminine-stereotyped behaviors by entrepreneurs, men and women alike. Our study finds that investor decisions are driven in part by observations of gender-stereotyped behaviors and the implicit associations with the entrepreneur’s business competency, rather than the entrepreneur’s sex.

The dramatic expansion of scholarly interest and activity in the field of women's entrepreneurship within recent years has done much to correct the historical inattention paid to female entrepreneurs and their initiatives. Yet, as the field continues to develop and mature, there are increasingly strong calls for scholars to take their research in new directions. Within this introduction to the special issue, we expand upon the reasons for this call, describe who responded, and summarize the new frontiers explored within the work appearing in this and another related collection. We conclude by delineating new territories for researchers to explore, arguing that such endeavors will join those in this volume in not only addressing the criticisms raised to date, but also in generating a richer and more robust understanding of women's entrepreneurship.

This article examines individual factors influencing performance of 200 Israeli women-owned businesses. Whereas research on women entrepreneurs is extensive in developed countries, especially in the United States and Europe, there are comparatively few studies of performance of women-owned businesses in non-OECD countries. There is evidence that social structures (work, family, and organized social life) vary among developed and developing countries as these relate to women entrepreneurs. However, these differences have not been considered as they may relate to theories explaining performance of women-owned businesses. The extent to which existing theories are useful in the context of non-OECD countries is of increasing importance as women in these countries are assuming a greater role in enterprise creation and economic development as a result of radical geopolitical and economic policy changes worldwide. In Israel, women suffer from occupational segregation and typically earn less money than their male counterparts, despite a generally high level of education. Entrepreneurship offers a vehicle for Israeli women to achieve economic parity. Approximately 5.1% of Israeli women are self-employed (compared with 15% of Israeli men) of the 816,800 Israeli working women. This study is the first systematic investigation of performance variation among Israeli women entrepreneurs, thereby contributing to our understanding of women's entrepreneurship in non-OECD countries. Five theoretical perspectives explain performance: individual motivations and goals; social learning (entrepreneurial socialization); network affiliation (contacts and membership in organizations); human capital (level of education, business skills); and environmental influences (location, sectoral participation, and sociopolitical variables). Each of these perspectives is associated with empirical work showing relationships between these individual level factors and performance. Three questions directed this study: (1) Which factors influence the performance of Israeli women entrepreneurs? (2) Which factors explain any variance in performance among businesses established by Israeli women entrepreneurs? (3) How similar are these explanatory factors to those found in other countries? A sample of 220 Israeli women business-owners responded to a survey instrument originally composed by Hisrich and Brush (1982, 1985) that was translated into Hebrew and adapted to the particular conditions of the Israeli population. A majority of the questionnaires was distributed at meetings of professional associates of women entrepreneurs and returned by mail, but one-fourth was distributed to women who were not members of any professional association. No significant differences were found between the respondents who were members or non-members of associations. Reliability testing showed alpha coefficients of 0.65 and higher for scaled questions, which is acceptable for survey data. Statistical analyses, including Pearsons's correlations and multiple regressions, examined relationships between factors identified from theoretical perspectives and performance, which was measured by profitability, income, size (number of employees), and revenues. Demographic variables were examined, and the age of the woman entrepreneur's children was significantly related to profitability (p < .01). The majority of Israeli women entrepreneurs are married and became entrepreneurs after their children were grown. This is consistent with the strong family orientation prevalent in the Israeli culture and the existence of institutional arrangements that support the working mother model as long as she gives priority to family responsibilities. Of the five theoretical perspectives, results showed network affiliation, motivation, human capital, and environmental factors affected different aspects of performance, whereas social learning theory or existence of a role model had no significant effect on performance outcomes. Network affiliation was significantly related to profitability (p < .001), and the use of outside advisors also was related to revenue. In contrast, participation in multiple networks was negatively related to revenue, income, and size of the business. Motivations showed a strong relationship to performance. Factor analysis identified three basic groups of motives: achievement, independence, and economic necessity. Similar to findings in other countries, achievement motives were highly related to personal income, whereas economic necessity was significantly related to both profitability and revenue. Analyses of human capital variables showed mixed results; education level, areas of study, and previous entrepreneurial experience had no effect on previous experience. The fact that this population was highly educated (51% had university degrees) may have impacted on this result. Consistent with prior research findings, previous experience in the industry had a direct and significant effect on performance (p < .001). Previous salaried employment and involvement in the creation of a business were significantly correlated with sales and number of employees. Results also showed that indexes of women entrepreneurs' business skills (obtaining financing, budgeting, labor management, and planning ahead) were highly correlated with revenues (p < .01). Regression analysis showed the business skill index significantly related to profitability (p < .01). Environmental factors were significantly related to performance in that the sectoral affiliation (service versus manufacturing) was related to revenues and employees, but not to profitability and income. This study supports previous research from the United States and Europe on women entrepreneurs, which found that performance is related to previous industry experience, business skills, and achievement motivation. However, the differential effects of network affiliations was significantly more important for women entrepreneurs in Israel. Affiliation with a single network was highly related to profitability, whereas involvement in multiple networks was detrimental to both revenues and the number of employees. These findings imply that to perform well, Israeli women entrepreneurs should gain related industry experience, develop business skills, and seek to achieve success. Most importantly, commitment to a single network for support and advice is better than a loose alignment with many support groups. This research has implications for studies of women entrepreneurs in other non-OECD as well as developing countries. In countries such as Russia or China, anecdotal evidence shows self-employment offers women an opportunity to improve their economic status as more capitalistic policies are adopted. The extent to which individual factors found important in this study, such as business skills, motivations, previous industry experience, and network affiliation, affect performance in these countries is a topic for future investigation. This study suggests that individual factors affect performance differentially as a consequence of variations in social structures, work, organized social life, and family. Future research should explore the extent to which this is the case. Examination of aspects of organizational strategies and government policies as these influence performance is another topic for future study.

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.