Matthias Fink

Johannes Kepler University of Linz | JKU

In this paper, we draw from the theory of social and emotional aging to examine the mechanisms of age-related emotional exhaustion among entrepreneurs. Based on longitudinal data from a sample of 840 entrepreneurs in four European countries, our study shows that, with increasing biological age, entrepreneurs experience less emotional exhaustion due...

In this study, we investigate how production Cooperatives with a Sharing Economy Business Model (CSE‐BMs) foster innovations in structurally weak rural places. Taking a place‐based social capital perspective, we argue that the strength of CSE‐BMs in developing process, service, product, and social innovation lies in their ability to reconfigure sha...

Accelerating the sustainability transition demands managers to more intensively and more frequently envisage in supererogatory acts. Supererogatory action is not legally or morally required but consist of praiseworthy acts beyond duty that have the capacity to build a better future. This perspective paper argues that strategic decision-making durin...

Social robots—such as autonomous vehicles, service robots, or healthcare robots—are designed to support tasks in a broad range of human activities. However, these robots face moral dilemmas because they must make decisions that may do good for one human but potentially inflict harm on another. We argue that Kant's categorical imperative provides a...

Crime in metropolitan areas is a key societal issue that can potentially be addressed with emerging technologies, such as Big Data and facial recognition, based on artificial intelligence leveraged in closed circuit television (CCTV). This article uses the novel concept of functional distance on a unique longitudinal dataset comprising 255 758 crim...

Corporate decision-makers form their intention to adopt new technology for their venture based on their perception of its usefulness and ease of use. However, the formation of this intention might be influenced by the fear of missing out (FOMO), making decision-makers fear losing their relatedness with fellow managers and leading to decisions based...

The topics of ethical conduct and governance in academic research in the business field have attracted scientific and public attention. The concern is that research misconduct in organizations such as business schools and universities might result in practitioners, policymakers, and researchers grounding their decisions on biased research results....

Social media communication is attractive for non-profit organizations (NPOs); however, the channels of social media are not homogeneous; a factor not sufficiently considered by empirical research. We address this gap by looking into the moderating effect of social media channel choice on the impact of brand trust on process and outcome quality. By...

Third-party funding of academic research has grown rapidly in its scope and impact. However, several forces demand greater attention to potential opportunities, challenges and threats of third-party research funding. Adopting a historical approach rooted in Anglo-Saxon academia, we discuss what third-party research funding means for European busine...

The problems facing the 21st century world, and the new technologies that have emerged to meet them, are harbingers of a new industrial revolution–Industry 4.0 (I4.0). The resulting information-based economy is challenging traditional economic thought, as evidenced by the appearance of “Abundance” as an economic philosophy. Abundant economic though...

We explore the role of government initiatives fostering entrepreneurship—in the form of tax advantages and government support—in influencing the probability that entrepreneurial firms obtain bank credit and are not discouraged from applying for a loan. We propose that government initiatives fostering entrepreneurship should allow entrepreneurial fi...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how competence trust (i.e. trust regarding the ability of the counterpart) and goodwill trust (i.e. trust regarding the benevolence and integrity of the counterpart) affect the probability that the auditor or the client stand up to the respective negotiation partner’s position in situations of dis...

Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Rural Europe investigates how social entrepreneurship advances social innovation in rural Europe and contributes to fighting social and economic challenges in these regions. Based on longitudinal data collected in four European countries, this book explains how social enterprises enact their business model...

Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Rural Europe investigates how social entrepreneurship advances social innovation in rural Europe and contributes to fighting social and economic challenges in these regions. Based on longitudinal data collected in four European countries, this book explains how social enterprises enact their business model...

The ability to transfer knowledge effectively in the networks of small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) is paramount for supporting firm competitiveness. Our research is the first one that explores the joint effect of trust and control mechanisms on knowledge transfer in the case of networks of SMEs. We use a multiple case study approach based on six...

Innovation offshoring (IO) has become a widespread management practice. Yet, evidence on the performance implications is inconsistent, and scattered across disciplines and contexts. We argue that the benefits firms can derive from IO depend on the institutional environment at home. Drawing on recent work on institutional theory in international bus...

Social media offers a myriad of opportunities for entrepreneurial marketing strategies that leverage the power of communities, especially when they are combined with traditional approaches such as celebrity endorsement. The reach, frequency, and speed of communication on social media offer the ideal leverage for the drivers of entrepreneurial marke...

The entrepreneurial process is associated with high uncertainty. Uncertainty is also a major source of stress. Therefore, a core aim of entrepreneurs is to reduce uncertainty to an extent that allows the entrepreneurial process to unfold. However, entrepreneurship scholars have insufficiently addressed stress processes that may be associated with t...

The aim of the paper is to develop a more nuanced and multilevel understanding of the social network arena in which the rural social entrepreneur operates. We introduce and empirically assess a conceptual framework for systematic investigation of rural social entrepreneurship that is informed by both social capital theory and place-based entreprene...

Additive manufacturing (AM) is an umbrella term for various layer-based manufacturing processes which are often portrayed as a new technological revolution. Despite impressive AM process developments the revenue of the AM industry is still a fraction of that of other manufacturing processes. This AM based revenue discrepancy raises many questions....

The major challenges facing the 21st century world demands disruptive technology based solutions. One of the most promising exponential technology set to address world challenges is the Internet of Things (IoT) based Trillion Sensor System (TSS). The IoT supports many revolutionary commercial and societal solutions including wearable or unobtrusive...

Loan managers’ trust in entrepreneurs can be a useful tool for overcoming entrepreneurial firms’ opaqueness. Nevertheless, the possibility for loan managers to leverage trust can be affected by differences in the regulative institutions within the banks (type of bank) and by place-bound normative institutions (social context). By relying on semi-st...

Social entrepreneurship increasingly drives social innovation addressing social challenges in marginalised rural regions. Because social entrepreneurs are seen as promising new players with a capacity to tackle social problems, policies that effectively support social entrepreneurship counteracting challenges in rural Europe are very much needed. T...

This study empirically investigates the relationship between auditors' identification-based trust in client firms' managers (CEOs/CFOs) and their perceptions of auditors' professional skepticism. We employ a multimethod approach broken down into two studies. First, in Study 1, we approached auditors and clients using narrative interviews in order t...

A bank’s lending decision is affected by the amount of information it can access and by its capability to manage this information. The latter aspect implies that the bank has to decide whether borrowers should be managed in a local branch of the bank or in its headquarters. By looking at a sample of Finnish banks, the present research investigates...

The positive relationship between innovativeness and firm performance is well established and applies equally to all businesses, including family firms. However, little is yet known about how the unique characteristics of family firms influence this relationship. Drawing upon the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm, this study explains how the in...

The beginnings of three-dimensional (3D) printing and bioprinting can be traced to as early as 1984. From printing inorganic models for the generation of biologic scaffolds, additive manufacturing (AM) developed to the direct printing of organic materials, including specialized tissues, proteins, and cells. In recent years, these technologies have...

The question whether patenting impacts patenting firms' subsequent financial performance is important for technology-oriented companies. However, relevant research has led to contradictory results. We strive to overcome this impasse by introducing innovation competition and patent age as moderators of patents' performance contribution into the disc...

We draw on the Effort-Reward-Imbalance (ERI) Model to examine factors related to the development of burn-out symptoms as well as the consequences of burn-out. Our sample consists of 168 small and newly founded business ventures. Our results indicate that physical well-being is negatively related to the development of burn-out symptoms. Moreover, bu...

Additive manufacturing (AM) is likely to contribute considerably to key targets of innovation policy such as employment, R&D and education. The expectations of those engaged in AM, such as providers, users and policy makers, regarding the potential of this technology influence its future development and thus create opportunities for technology entr...

This paper revisits the sustainable entrepreneurship journey by introducing a ‘place-based’ sustainable venture path model. We suggest that distinguishing between emotional (‘caring about the place’) and instrumental (‘using the place’) place attachment of sustainable entrepreneurs deepens our understanding of how place-based challenges of sustaina...

In this study we investigate the impact of trust on the performance of cooperating firms, taking into account two core aspects: First, we look at environmental uncertainty, which shows in the degree of change there is in business freedom. Second, we account for behavioral uncertainty—captured as the average level of freedom from corruption in a cou...

This analysis demonstrates the relevance and robustness of the theory of planned behavior in the prediction of business start-up intentions and subsequent behavior based on longitudinal survey data (2011 and 2012; n = 969) from the adult population in Austria and Finland. By doing so, the study addresses two weaknesses in current research: the limi...

Change has always fascinated scholars across disciplines and numerous theories and models of organizational change and development have been published (Weick 1979; Van de Ven and Poole 1995). In management science, change has long been conceptualized as the opposite of stability (Adler et al. 2009; March 1991; Nelson and Winter 1982; March and Simo...

We examine the relation between the quality, quantity, completeness, and timeliness of the information loan managers obtain from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the amount of short-term credit provided to them by looking at 828 loan–manager–SME relationships in Italy. The result suggests that a reduction in information asymmetry is as...

Research on innovation offshoring (IO) has increased substantially over the last decade. IO is (still) widely regarded as the domain of multinational enterprises. Even though more and more researchers are claiming that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) also practise IO, so far, the particularities of SMEs have been widely neglected. This is...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how age and job identification affect entrepreneurial intention. Design/methodology/approach – The researchers draw on a representative sample of the Austrian adult workforce and apply binary logistic regression on entrepreneurial intention. Findings – The findings reveal that as employees age t...

This study draws on the Rubicon model of action phases to study the actions or lack of actions that follow the formation of entrepreneurial intentions. Concurrently, it examines the roles of self-control and action-related emotions in explaining the intention–action gap using longitudinal survey data (N = 161). The results show that self-control po...

Migration from Eastern to Western Europe has increased under transition from planned to market economies. As migrants return home they may enhance local entrepreneurial activity by transferring skills and knowledge gained abroad. Internationalization of small and medium sized-enterprises (SMEs) may thus be initiated. This article presents a review...

Migration from Eastern to Western Europe has increased under transition from planned to market economies. As migrants return home they may enhance local entrepreneurial activity by transferring skills and knowledge gained abroad. Internationalization of small and medium sized-enterprises (SMEs) may thus be initiated. This article presents a review...

Due to their potential to create innovation and jobs, business start-ups are positively associated with e conomic growth. However, seizing entrepreneurial opportunities requires founders not only to contribute mentally, but also expend physical effort. The stress that founders experience during start-up bears a high risk of provoking burnout sympto...

Research finds that entrepreneurship in society is often framed as an activity for younger individuals. Such stereotyping can mean that older workers do not finding starting a business as desirable or appropriate for their age, and it may also lead to subtle forms of ageism from family, friends, prospective clients and financiers. This paper examin...

This research adds to the literature on relationship lending in the small business context by discussing the roles of entrepreneurial competence and voluntarily disclosed information as determinants of credit access. More specifically, we propose that the loan manager’s evaluation of the information voluntarily disclosed by the entrepreneur is an i...

This paper documents a methodology used to assess, for the first time, the costs to the taxpayer of small and medium enterprise (SME) and entrepreneurship policy in Sweden. It then uses that data to compare the resulting expenditure patterns with the focus of policy as expressed by experts. It finds important areas where the two diverge, implying a...

This article develops a new understanding of the role of regional culture in the emergence of business start-up behaviour. The focal construct is regional social legitimacy: the perception of the desirability and appropriateness of entrepreneurship in a region. The econometric analysis utilizes a combination of bespoke longitudinal survey data from...

This article provides new insight into the local institutional embeddedness of entrepreneurial behaviour. By introducing a sociological institutional framework to place-based entrepreneurship, the study particularly adds to the knowledge of the role of regulative, normative and cognitive institutions for local entrepreneurial practices in rural Cen...

The predominant perspective of entrepreneurship was rooted in the battle of entrepreneurship scholars to establish and legitimate a distinct discipline within the economics research community by delineating it from neighbouring disciplines such as sociology and psychology. As a result, social science aspects have tended to remain ignored; entrepren...

Research on relationship lending pays only marginal attention to the role of loan managers’ trust in the managers of SMEs. Trust literature suggests that trust reduces agency costs. Thus, trust is expected to be positively related to the amount of short-term credit granted and negatively related to SMEs’ risk of being credit constrained. Results fr...

In this article, we investigate into local economic restructuring in rural areas that are affected by disruptive technologies. Drawing on an institutionalist framework we apply systematic theory-informed case study analysis of two rural communities in Austria and identify practices that are crucial for a sustainable development of local communities...

This article analyses the determinants of the entrepreneurial potential in Europe’s ageing population based on the 2007 Flash Eurobarometer Survey on Entrepreneurship. The findings contribute to an empirically underpinned public discourse on the scope of senior entrepreneurship in Europe and the design of entrepreneurship policy, and provide implic...

We investigate the economic impact of short-term loans, long-term loans, cash management and non-interest-related products/services on banks’ risk-adjusted profitability, using 4,276 observations of small-banks/small-businesses relationships collected in Finland in the period 2001-2005. Banks are able to generate risk-adjusted profitability from al...

The increasing involvement of individuals in social media over the past decade has enabled firms to pursue new avenues in communication and sponsoring activities. Besides general research on either social media or sponsoring, questions regarding the consequences of a joint activity (sponsoring activities in social media) remain unexplored. Hence, t...

Purpose The purpose of this article is to develop a contextualized definition of the phenomenon of rapidly internationalizing ventures (RIVs) ‐ such as born globals or international new ventures ‐ building upon the commonly noted dimensions of internationalization: speed, degree and scope. Design/methodology/approach The study builds on a theory i...

The governance of nanotechnology seeks to limit its risks, without constraining opportunities. The literature on the effectiveness of approaches to governance has neglected approaches that impact directly on the behavior of a researcher. We analyze the effectiveness of legal regulations versus regulation via self-commitment. Then, we refine this mo...

How can municipalities in Central Europe create favourable conditions for local business? What and how can municipalities learn from each other? How can each individual in the local area contribute? And what requirements have to be met before know-how can successfully be transferred on a communal level? To answer all these questions, the authors o...

Social media networks (e.g., Facebook) have become a major factor influencing various aspects of consumer behaviour and have thus also become the targets of marketers. Social networks that gather special interest groups, such as celebrity fan groups, provide a particularly attractive point of leverage for community marketing. However, there remain...

Cooperation based on self-commitment of the partners is relevant for successful alliances in the context of uncertainty. However, the performance impact of self-commitment can be contingent on the type of uncertainty. Based on the distinction between environmental uncertainty and behavioural uncertainty, we analyse the contingent effect of cooperat...

Company networks play an important role for SMEs. This is particularly the case for regional networks that are organized into specific clusters focusing on one particular industry. Within these clusters, companies join together to form co-operations that have varying intensities ranging from loose, sporadic co-operations to the complete integration...

In the context of the controversial topic of research evaluation this article first discusses the different approaches to quantify research output and then focuses on approaches to evaluation on the basis of journal rankings. Even though research evaluation has become a heavily discussed topic in the literature as well as among the members of the s...

Wissenschaftliche Disziplinen an Universitäten grenzen sich durch die Spezifikation ihrer Forschungs- und Lehrinhalte voneinander ab und ermöglichen so eine erkenntnisförderliche Fokussierung auf bestimmte Inhalte und gegebenenfalls damit korrelierte Methoden.

Due to the importance of family firms for the economy, researchers have begun to embrace family firms as a research object. This article seeks to summarise and to structure family firm research based on an extensive survey of the literature. Important research foundations such as the definition of family firms, a theoretical foundation in the resou...

This paper discusses an alternative conceptualization of Entrepreneurial Marketing that can be understood as "marketing with an entrepreneurial mindset". By combining the definition of marketing of the American Marketing Association (AMA) and two conceptualizations of entrepreneurship (entrepreneurial orientation and entrepreneurial management), we...

For technology-oriented SME, innovation and growth are important aspects of firm performance. A strategic orientation that emphasises entrepreneurial behaviour (entrepreneurial orientation, EO) may be an effective way to obtain these goals. However, there is little information on the internal organisational processes that link EO to innovation and...

The main challenge in innovation seems to be not a lack of ideas, but a deficit in the evaluation and transformation of ideas into new processes or products. Due to their specific characteristics and the fact that innovations of SMEs are application-oriented, SMEs depend on external know-how for fundamental research. They therefore need a support n...

Reverting to the resource-based view of strategic management and cooperation theory, we provide argumentation for the value of two critical resources to cooperating firms: cooperation experience and maxim-based trust. The results of a large-scale survey in three European countries (Austria, Slovenia and the Czech Republic) reveal an important fact:...

The authors examine the extent to which differences in dependency and power burden cooperative relationships between small and large companies. They also identify the consequences of the behaviour of the cooperation partners. For both small and large cooperation partners, the authors discuss various withdrawal and investment strategies as options f...

We examine the effect of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and hypothesize that EO has a positive impact on business performance. We create a contingency model and a configuration model and compare their results to those derived from a main-effects model. The study replicates the work of Wiklund and Shepherd (2005) and tests the validity of their re...

For technology-oriented SME, innovation and growth are important aspects of firm performance. A strategic orientation that emphasizes entrepreneurial behavior (entrepreneurial orientation, EO) may be an effective way to obtain these goals. However, there is little information on the internal organizational processes that link EO to innovation and g...

In current business literature, it has been shown in diverse contexts that committing oneself to maxims based on trust put in one's cooperation partner constitutes a successful entrepreneurial action. Against the backdrop of the growing interest in family firms, it seems worthwhile to ask whether or not this also holds true for this special group o...