As part of his sabbatical at the University of Rotterdam, Montpellier Business School assistant professor Mickaël Geraudel presented his work on social networks. It deals with the influence of gender on obtaining critical information.

How did you come to participate in the seminar in Rotterdam?

As a researcher, you have to participate in international conferences on very specialized topics. I wanted to do this two-week sabbatical in Rotterdam first of all for cultural and linguistic immersion. I also wanted to take the opportunity to have some time to work on my research papers.

The University of Rotterdam is a very stimulating environment. Their laboratory is known for its work on strategy and entrepreneurship, but it deals with the topic from an economic point of view. This interested me, linking a management approach with an economic approach.

What is the origin of the paper you presented at Rotterdam?

The article presented, "Information Returns and Personal Networks: Does Gender Matter?," was co-written with Vincent Chauvet and Barthélemy Chollet. We've been working on it for some years. The subject comes from my dissertation on social networks. We know that the performance of an SME is in part related to its director's access to information. Networks are important because they allow you to really get strategic information about markets, competition, pricing, etc.

What is the exact focus of your research?

The influence of gender on the ability to obtain information from social networks. Some studies report that businesses owned by women have a lower survival rate than those owned by men, show lower financial performance and face strong barriers to increasing capital and obtaining bank loans. We took several hypotheses from the literature to explain these results: women are more likely to be self-employed, their priority is not necessarily profitability, they're more involved in family responsibilities.

What did you discover?

We also considered the hypothesis that women benefit less from their social network than men and therefore they have less strategic information about the market. With equal networks, with similar use and behavior in regard to these networks, women get less. Now we're working on different theories to explain this phenomenon.



Mickaël Geraudel

Mickaël Geraudel, assistant professor at Montpellier Business School, received his Ph.D. in management science in 2008 and has conducted his research on the effects of social networks in different contexts: CEO of an SME, groups of innovative projects, competition between managers within a group. He has presented his doctoral dissertation at major conferences in France and abroad and has published his research in such peer-reviewed journals as Revue Internationale PME, Management International and Finance Contrôle Stratégie. He was recently appointed to the editorial board of Journal of Small Business Management.

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