## Research **Management scholar investigating cultural evaluations: how culture shapes who and what is judged legitimate, authentic, and worthy in markets and organisations, and the contests those judgements generate.** ### Stream one: Cultural evaluations in entrepreneurship **Evaluative inequality.** How inherited cultural categories shape who is judged worthy of capital, recognition, and opportunity, and so who gets to build. - Exclusion and stereotyping in the host country shape how African immigrant entrepreneurs build hybrid ventures and balance social and commercial value - Social class background shapes whether founders rise, fall, or hold steady venturing across borders - Inherited stereotypes distort how impact investors judge social entrepreneurs, skewing who gets funded - Entrepreneurs use public blockchains to authenticate heritage and reshape how ventures earn legitimacy - Indigenous entrepreneurs meet financing systems built on assumptions that exclude their traditions - Female immigrant founders face compounding cultural and gendered barriers ### Stream two: Cultural evaluations in governance **Evaluative authority.** Who holds the right to confer legitimacy, worth, and belonging, how that authority is contested, and when it holds or breaks. An emerging stream, alongside a decade of board practice. - African American and African communities contest who counts as belonging, and who decides - Rival communities contest authenticity and legitimacy in digital markets, where delegitimation can backfire - Governing bodies keep their legitimacy even when insiders admit it isn't working ### What connects them **Evaluative systems:** the screens, criteria, and governance arrangements through which worth is judged, carry assumptions about what they are assessing. When they meet something those assumptions cannot accommodate, they do not break. They keep running, and applying normal criteria to inputs that violate their premises produces outcomes opposite to the system's purpose. The system fails by working normally. This keeps the work in the social evaluations tradition while shifting its focus, from how audiences confer judgements to the systems doing the judging and what their built-in assumptions do when violated. Cultural evaluations is the accessible name for it, because culture is the most legible of those assumptions. --- **Phenomena:** Immigrant and indigenous entrepreneurship, transnational venturing, social entrepreneurship, impact investing, heritage and belonging, blockchain markets, board and organisational governance. **Theoretical Interests:** Social evaluations (legitimacy, authenticity, status, categories, stereotypes), organisational paradox, cross-cultural psychology. **Methods:** Grounded theory, narrative interviews, netnography, comparative case study, digital archival, computational text analysis, questionnaires, systematic review. --- ### Publications My research has received three Best Conference Paper Awards from the European and American Academies of Management, and the doctoral thesis won the Mollie Holman Medal at Monash University. **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. **Grants:** Co-lead, Improving Policy Leadership (IPoL), a Wellcome Trust-funded initiative across Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St Andrews building academics' capacity to inform public-sector governance (£41,499, 2024-2026). [[About]] | [[Entrepreneurship]] | [[Governance]] | [[Teaching]] | [[Journey]] | [[Connect]]