“The person with maximum knowledge will win the race”: Conceptualizing knowledge in microbusinesses

Abstract

The concept of knowledge and the process of knowledge sharing in ethnic minority microbusinesses remain neglected in contemporary debates even if their role for economic development is recognized. Drawing on a culturalist view, we explore how knowledge is defined and shared in a local niche market. Thematic analysis of semistructured qualitative interviews with 32 ownermanagers and 11 employee-managers reveals that, contrary to studies on larger firms, local knowledge creation and sharing narrowly based on ethnic strengths are valuable sources of competitive advantage. Our study has implications for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in exploring, supporting, and integrating ethnic minority microbusinesses.

Post-Pandemic Sustainable Business Solution

“…They have in-depth knowledge of developments in sectors and this has been further validated by the results from the survey and the academic research that supports it. The findings of the survey are supported by literature (Haq and Davies, 2020). Immediate efforts need to be focused on people and operations; this is what extrapolated from our findings and our recommendations are based on these two elements.…”

Influence of Ethical Leadership on Employees’ Innovative Behavior: The Role of Organization-Based Self-Esteem and Flexible Human Resource Management

“…When ethical leaders care for employees' self-development, provide innovation resources, tolerate employees' innovation failure and actively authorize employees to implement innovation, employees usually show more innovative behaviors [14]. Some scholars investigated the underlying mechanism from the aspects of intrinsic motivation [13], psychological capital [14,15], psychological security [16] and knowledge sharing [17] in organizations. Although some valuable conclusions have been drawn from these studies, there remains space for further exploration.…”

Compassionate customer service in ethnic minority microbusinesses

“…Despite the growing interest in microlevel ethnic minority entrepreneurship (Vershinina & Rodgers, 2020), scholarship in this domain remains under-theorized (Dabić et al, 2020;Light & Dana, 2013). We seek to contribute to this emerging subfield of microentrepreneurship (Fernandes, Mason, & Chakrabarti, 2019), specifically ethnic minority microbusinesses (Haq & Davies, 2020), by theorizing a customer service perspective. To understand the effects of customer service capabilities on ethnic minority microbusiness survival and success, we integrate Neneh's (2019) work on customer orientation in small firms with a resource-based view (RBV) (Barney, 1991).…”

“…Cultural capital has been explored in microbusinesses (Vershinina & Rodgers, 2020), however, RBV studies focus on large organizations (Hoskisson, Gambeta, Green et al, 2018) not microbusinesses (Alonso & Bressan, 2016;Haq & Davies, 2020;Kelliher & Reinl, 2009).…”