Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to address the problem of why the poorest, most disadvantaged groups such as rural African women, benefit less from microfinance. The authors focus on the perception and experiences of ordinary rural entrepreneurial women on microfinance in a context of extreme poverty and where family responsibility and economic activities are closely intertwined.Design/methodology/approach: The authors purposefully sampled 15 poor females with small businesses in two Nigerian villages. The key characteristic guiding the sampling was that the respondents had to be poor. The authors held two focus groups and ten interviews to capture their experience and understanding of microfinance. The authors used thematic analysis to establish patterns in the data.Findings: For poor entrepreneurial women, a livelihood for survival, putting food on the table and paying school fees are priorities, not business growth. They see microcredit as debt and a great risk that could lead to irreversible losses. Family responsibilities for basic consumption needs of the household can affect their ability to repay loans; perceived dangers of microcredit may outweigh potential benefits.Research limitations/implications: The theories, especially functionalist economic theory, do not take account of microfinance users’ experiences.Practical implications: Microfinance should be aware that the poorest perceive microcredit differently and should eliminate the intimidating barriers raised to them. Instead of providing a means for the poor to alleviate poverty or coping strategies for them to manage cash flows and risks, microfinance causes fear and anxiety by demanding high rate of return in a very short period of time.Social implications: The very poorest, who should be the beneficiaries of microfinance, are less likely to be able to benefit. The condition of poverty creates different realities for those at the base of the pyramid.Originality/value: This research questions the neoliberal rationality assumptions that microfinance rest on; the paper fills a gap in the literature, i.e. how the potential borrowers themselves living in deep-rooted poverty perceive and experience microfinance.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of how the institutions of family and culture play out in shaping family business practices. This study focusses on family business led by poor entrepreneurial women in a context of extreme poverty.Design/methodology/approach: The methods included participant observation, focus groups and interviews in two poor villages in South-East Nigeria. Thematic analysis was used to develop insight about how the institutions of family and culture shape family business practices.Findings: The analysis demonstrated that the family, with associated responsibilities and norms, is a powerful institution that determines women’s role and business behaviours. Poor entrepreneurial women depend on the family to run their business, but also use the business to sustain the family. They make use of their limited resources (e.g. time, money, skills) to meet families’ basic needs and pay for necessities such as children’s education. These are family priorities, rather than maximising profits.Research limitations/implications: The study was limited to rural Africa, in particular to a small sample of rural women entrepreneurs in South-East Nigeria, and as such, the findings are not necessarily generalisable, but may be at a conceptual level.Practical implications: The study has highlighted the need to tailor micro-enterprise development programmes that facilitate change, add values to entrepreneurial activities and support women to fulfil their roles and ease institutional pressures affecting rural women economic activities. In short, such programmes need to account for cultural institutions.Social implications: This study presents insights of the influence of institutions (family and culture) in business led by rural Nigerian women.Originality/value: This research fills a gap in the family business literature by offering conceptual insights about how the institutional obligations of family mean that micro-enterprising should be conceptualised as an entity, rather than as a family in business or the family business.

We examine how female migrant entrepreneurs overturn disadvantage through social resourcing. We argue they are disadvantaged by the intersectionality of their identities; that social constructions and ensuing entrepreneurial expectations are a poor fit with their ascribed identity, that they are marginalised by their ‘otherness’. However, entrepreneurship is not only socially situated, but also socially enacted. We studied their entrepreneurial social enactment and found they had used agency to mobilise their identity. The shared identity of marginality as cultural strangers fostered a sense of togetherness as social capital. In turn, this produced group social responsibility, a socialised obligation to help each other. The entrepreneurs used this intangible resource to first establish their businesses then as a platform for wider engagements. We found that when the entrepreneurial self became superimposed on intersectional identity, disadvantage almost disappeared. Respondents reported confidence in themselves through their entrepreneurial achievement, paradoxically empowered by a negative social identity.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has brought advanced technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), transforming consumer behavior in retailing and arousing the interest of scholars in studying customer responses to these technologies in retail settings. However, owing to variations in specific contextual factors, the results of related research have been mixed, which impedes retailers’ capacity to gain a systematic understanding of the formulation of well-informed marketing decisions in the context of AR and VR retailing. To address these gaps, this systematic review synthesizes extant empirical evidence with 1099 effect sizes from 111 published studies with 136 datasets and 547,415 sample sizes. This study is based on well-established theories, including the technology acceptance model, the customer journey theory, and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology, which are extended to create a more comprehensive framework that is adapted for the customer journey in AR and VR retailing. Our findings reveal significant and positive correlations for all the proposed constructs, including the experience; intrinsic, extrinsic, hedonic, and utilitarian factors; and customer experience, attitude, intention, and loyalty, and verify the significant moderating effects for technology and product types. From a management perspective, our findings provide a systematic understanding of enhancing retailers’ integrated sustainable marketing strategies in the context of AR and VR retail and propose a forward-looking research agenda.

We investigate borrower and lender behaviours when the borrower has experienced a sequence of failed loan applications. Our analysis is based on half a million observations from an established peer-to-peer (P2P) loan platform in China from 2010 to 2018. We find that borrowers who have better credit scores and who accept to pay higher interest rates are likely to reapply for funds after experiencing an earlier failed attempt. However, women and applicants with more education are discouraged from re-applying compared to their male or less-educated counterparts, respectively. On the funding supply side, lenders strive to fund safe borrowers who have high credit ratings and high income, though not those who offer a high interest rate.

Social enterprises are often characterized by the vision and drive of an individual founder. We challenge this by taking inspiration from Alistair R. Anderson’s arguments that social entrepreneurship is better understood as enacted within a social context. We move beyond linear conceptualizations to consider a more nuanced, contextually informed picture, where understandings of what it is to be ‘social’ in one’s entrepreneuring are created at the interaction of the individual and their situation. A narrative approach is used to analyse 25 life stories used by social entrepreneurs in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan, an area of social transition. We access how these entrepreneurs give meaning to the ‘social’ aspects of what they do. Our findings present a multifaceted character, defined by their responses to changing social contexts. This is manifest in entrepreneurial practice, where we have a vacillation between acts of social rebellion and an enterprising organization of benevolence, evolving in a social context which changes with and, in part, because of our social entrepreneurs. We move beyond definitional characteristics and closer to a theory of practice, by considering how social entrepreneurs interact with changing social demands and adapt their activities accordingly.