Building social capital to escape poverty:
An intersectionality perspective on women’s entrepreneurship at the base of the pyramid.

💪🏽👩👱🏿‍♀️👩‍🦱👩🏼‍🦰👩‍🦳👩‍🦲👩🏾‍🦱👵🏼👩‍🦰💪

https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2025.2473099

Despite the abundance of entrepreneurship research on the benefits of social capital (SC) for new businesses, little attention has been devoted to its role in women’s entrepreneurship at the base of the pyramid (BOP). Drawing on SC theory and intersectionality, this study examines the mechanisms through which BOP women entrepreneurs develop and access SC. Using inductive qualitative analysis, we identify three interrelated mechanisms through which such entrepreneurs develop SC: crossing traditional boundaries, navigating within the constraints of gendered roles, and developing an entrepreneurial ‘sisterhood’. Furthermore, we identify multiple benefits of using these approaches to develop and access SC, both for the entrepreneurs and for their communities. By doing so, our study responds to calls for exploring strategies and means that entrepreneurs in poverty use to engage with and alter complex institutional contexts. In addition, this study advances the scholarly debates on how entrepreneurship is shaped by gender and social inequalities. Finally, our study enhances the scholarly understanding of entrepreneurial SC by identifying the context-specific, idiosyncratic mechanisms through which women entrepreneurs at the BOP develop SC.

Bureaucratic Reputation Theory: Micro-Level Theoretical Extensions

https://doi.org/10.1093/ppmgov/gvaf004

@PubManGov
@JurgenWillems
ieji.de

Bureaucratic Reputation Theory: Micro-Level Theoretical Extensions

https://doi.org/10.1093/ppmgov/gvaf004

ABSTRACT: Bureaucratic Reputation Theory (BRT) focuses on the role of public agencies’ reputation as an asset in socio-political dynamics. Agencies aim to manage their reputation for different audiences to have higher levels of (publicly legitimized) strategic independence, autonomy, and discretion. Considering that reputations form because of shared reputational beliefs among individuals, we study bureaucratic reputation from a dialogic perspective between agencies and the individual stakeholders in their audiences. First, we make a case that such socio-cognitive elements are relevant for a broad range of public-serving organizations, pinpointing the broader relevance of BRT beyond public agencies. Second, building on interdisciplinary insights on the formation and evolution of individual perceptions, as well as the social network interactions within and between audiences, we derive 10 micro-level theoretical propositions in three related themes: (1) distinct information sources for reputational beliefs, (2) the episodic nature of agency-audience interactions, and (3) the reputation spillovers between structurally related units.

Performance rankings reduce cognitive processing of underlying performance information

https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2025.2464761

Rankings are used to present information and aggregate multiple dimensions of performance into an overall score. This facilitates benchmarking between organizations. We are familiar with this way of presenting performance information from hospital rankings, university league tables or school rankings.

In a recent study, Lisa Hohensinn, Jurgen Willems, Bert George and Steven Van de Walle ask whether performance rankings influence the cognitive processing of the underlying performance information.

Using performance information from the Shanghai University Ranking Initiative, findings from an eye-tracking experiment suggest that
🔹 the addition of ranking information draws attention away from other performance information, suggesting the existence of a substitution effect
🔹 ranking information, which is reported and applied by ordering units according to this rank, results in relatively more attention being paid to the top-ranked units.

Read more about this research in the following #openaccess article:

https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2025.2464761

Rankings are used to present information and aggregate multiple dimensions of performance into an overall score. This facilitates benchmarking between organizations. We are familiar with this way of presenting performance information from hospital rankings, university league tables or school rankings.

In a recent study, Lisa Hohensinn, Jurgen Willems, Bert George and Steven Van de Walle ask whether performance rankings influence the cognitive processing of the underlying performance information.

Using performance information from the Shanghai University Ranking Initiative, findings from an eye-tracking experiment suggest that
🔹 the addition of ranking information draws attention away from other performance information, suggesting the existence of a substitution effect
🔹 ranking information, which is reported and applied by ordering units according to this rank, results in relatively more attention being paid to the top-ranked units.

Read more about this research in the following #openaccess article:

https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2025.2464761

The Bureaucratic Reputation Scale: Cross-country and cross-language validation

To all the Public Administration #scholars out there: You have no reason anymore not to measure bureaucratic reputation in any of your further studies.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2024.2428718

We (re)validated the scale by Lee and Van Ryzin; in English, but in different context (NewZealand); and we also tested and confirmed the equivalence in other languages (Dutch, German, and Danish).