This article investigates relationships between Owner Managers and First Line Managers (supervisors) in small firms. A model comprising four components - competency, role, style and vision - was developed to consider the operating reality of this dyad, and its robustness considered using an...

Quintessentially a US phenomenon, the information and knowledge economy (IKE) combines regional clusters of innovation with new and sophisticated forms of intellectual and finance capital. For those European economies struggling to adjust to global competition, the IKE is seen as the panacea. It...

For some, networks have ontological status, being associated with the embeddedness of social life in general and the necessary embeddedness of firms in their industries and regions in particular. For others less certain about ontology, networks are vital ingredients in firm-specific competitive...

Networks of interaction have assumed particular significance in recent years because of their presumed importance for learning and innovation. Alliances between related firms are thought to encourage interactive learning between participating organizations through the sharing of knowledge and...

Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) are publicly funded organisations that provide small loans to people in financially underserved areas of the UK. Policy makers have repeatedly sought to understand and measure the performance of CDFIs to ensure the efficient use of public funds,...

This paper examines the different mechanisms used by multinational corporations (MNCs) in Nigeria seeking to make long-term social investments by meeting the critical challenge of improving water provision. Community enterprise – an increasingly common form of social enterprise, which...

This paper draws on social network theory to develop a model of regional cluster performance. We suggest that high performing regional clusters are underpinned by (1) network strength and (2) network openness, but that the effects of these on the performance of a cluster as a whole are moderated...