## Research **Organisation theory scholar investigating how cultural heritage shapes venturing and organising.** I draw on paradox theory, social evaluations, and cross-cultural psychology to address this question. Entrepreneurship is my primary empirical context, but the theoretical contributions are to organisation theory. ### Cultural Heritage in Venturing and Organising Cultural heritage is the experiences, beliefs, practices, and artefacts that individuals inherit or adopt from past and present communities, and that persist through transmission. It informs how entrepreneurs develop their ventures, how communities evaluate belonging and worth, and how organisations structure governance. My research programme investigates what happens to venturing and organising when cultural heritage crosses spatial and temporal boundaries. #### Across Space In this stream, I explore how actors venture and organise with cultural heritage across geographical, sociocultural, and technological spaces. - African immigrant entrepreneurs leverage cultural heritage for new ventures, producing distinctive approaches to paradoxical tensions and a mirroring mechanism between personal and organisational hybridity - Social class heritage shapes how entrepreneurs use reasoning orientations across national boundaries, producing upward, downward, and steady patterns of transnational social venturing - Culturally inherited stereotypes between impact investors and social entrepreneurs distort evaluations of impact and worth, creating a social evaluation paradox in capital allocation - Entrepreneurs use public blockchains to preserve, authenticate, and commercialise cultural heritage - Indigenous entrepreneurs carry cultural heritage into financing systems built on assumptions that do not accommodate their traditions - Female immigrant entrepreneurs navigate pathways shaped by intersecting cultural and gendered barriers across borders - African American and African communities draw on different inherited understandings of cultural heritage into pan-African discourse, producing competing evaluations of belonging #### Across Time In this stream, ongoing work recovers cultural heritage from historically distant and systematically excluded societies, asking whether they reveal approaches that contemporary frameworks for venturing and organising would benefit from. - Ancient societies developed cultural heritage around reasoning about competing demands, and recovering that heritage can inform how we address contemporary challenges --- **Phenomena:** Immigrant and indigenous entrepreneurship, transnational venturing, social entrepreneurship, impact investing, heritage and belonging, blockchain markets, ancient traditions, indigenous knowledge systems. **Theoretical Interests:** Organisational paradox, social evaluations (legitimacy, authenticity, status, stereotypes), cross-cultural psychology. **Methods:** Grounded theory, narrative interviews, netnography, comparative case study, digital archival, computational text analysis, questionnaires, systematic review. --- ### Pipeline - **Revise and resubmit.** Female immigrant entrepreneurship: an integrative review. *Entrepreneurship & Regional Development*. - **Finalising.** Fixed records, contested meaning: how public blockchains reconfigure entrepreneurial legitimation and evaluation. *Academy of Management Journal*. - **Finalising.** The social evaluation paradox: how societal stereotypes shape evaluative dynamics in impact investing ecosystems. *Journal of Business Venturing*. - **Finalising.** Large language models for qualitative methodologies: reporting LLM use. *Organizational Research Methods*. - **Grant in development.** ESRC Responsive Mode Standard Grant (£350,000–£1,000,000): how Indigenous communities build blockchain ventures to authenticate and commercialise cultural heritage, and how digital infrastructure design reshapes heritage venturing. ### Publications **Mafico, N.,** Krzeminska, A., Härtel, C. and Keller, J., 2021. The mirroring of intercultural and hybridity experiences: A study of African immigrant social entrepreneurs. *Journal of Business Venturing*, vol. 36, no. 3, 106093. ABDC A*. - Annual PhD Publication Award, Monash Business School Department of Management, 2021 - Best Student Paper Award, Gender and Diversity Division, Academy of Management, 2019 - Kauffman Best Student Paper on Gender and Diversity in Organisations and Entrepreneurship Award, Academy of Management, 2019 - Best Paper Award, 'Business for Society' Strategic Interest Group, European Academy of Management, 2019 Carmine, S., Andriopoulos, C., Gotsi, M., Härtel, C.E., Krzeminska, A., **Mafico, N.,** Pradies, C., Raza, H., Raza-Ullah, T., Schrage, S. and Sharma, G., 2021. A paradox approach to organizational tensions during the pandemic crisis. *Journal of Management Inquiry*, 30(2), pp.138-153. ABDC A. **Mafico, N.,** Krzeminska, A., Härtel, C. and Keller, J., 2024. Upward, downward or steady: How social class experience shapes transnational social venturing. *Journal of Business Venturing Insights*, 21, p.e00462. ABDC A. de Gruyter, E., Gordon, J., Qureshi, I., Bhatt, B., **Mafico, N.**, 2025. Financing indigenous entrepreneurs: A review and research agenda. *Australian Journal of Management*, ABDC A. [[About]] | [[Entrepreneurship]] | [[Governance]] | [[Teaching]] | [[Journey]] | [[Connect]]