Isaac Oduro Amoako - Trust, Institutions and Managing Entrepreneurial Relationships in Africa: An SME Perspective

The Palgrave Studies of Entrepreneurship in Africa series offers an urgently needed platform to document, promote and showcase entrepreneurship in Africa and create a unique home for top quality, cutting-edge work on a broad range of themes and perspectives.

Focusing on successful African firms, small and medium-sized enterprises as well as multinational corporations, this series will cover new and ground-breaking areas including innovation, technology and digital entrepreneurship, green practices, sustainability, and their cultural and social implications for Africa. This series is positioned to eminently capture and energize the monumental changes currently taking place in Africa, well beyond the pervasive informal sector. It will also respond to the great thirst amongst students, researchers, policy and third sector practitioners for relevant knowledge and nuanced insights on how to further promote and institutionalize entrepreneurship, and optimize its benefits across the continent. The series will offer an important platform for interrogating the appropriateness and limits of Western management practices in Africa, examining new approaches to researching the fast-changing continent.

A diverse set of established experts and emerging scholars based in Africa and around the world will contribute to this series. Projects will also originate from entrepreneurship-themed tracks and Special Interest Groups at major Africa-focused conferences, notably the International Academy of African Business and Development, the Academy of Management Africa, and the Academy of International Business African Chapter. The foregoing breadth and diversity of themes, target authors and manuscript sources will produce a richly distinctive series.

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This book would not have been possible without the support of those with whom I have had the opportunity to work at Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University. I am particularly grateful to the Dean, Mr Tim Nichols, Academic Director, Dr Adam Shore, Director of Research, Professor David Bryde, Professor Bettany Shona, Professor Ian Fillis, Dr. Seamus OBrien, and colleagues who have all been supportive of my passion for research. My next appreciation goes to the Head and the staff at the Centre for Enterprise and Economic Development Research (CEEDR) at Middlesex University where I received a scholarship for my PhD. I would particularly like to express my heartfelt appreciation to Professor Fergus Lyon, my Director of Studies and Dr. Leandro Sepulveda, my Second Supervisor, both at CEEDR. I am also thankful to the entrepreneurs who provided interviews for this book. Then thanks are due to my colleagues and friends; Dr. Frank Nyame Asiamah, Kingsley Obinna Omeihi, Dr. Loliya Akobo, Dr. Anne Broderick, Philomene Uwamaliya, Stephen Gyamfi and Vivien Bahire who read portions of the work and provided feedback. I would also like to thank the Series Editors-Professor Ibe, Professor Nwankwo, Professor Mersha and Professor Sriram whose feedback enabled me to improve on some sections of the book.

My final thanks go to my mother, Mary Yaa Adutwumwaa, my children Kwame, Yvonne, Noah, and Richmond, my granddaughter Marissa and my siblings Philip and Kofi whose support and encouragement enabled me to persevere during the many hours of writing.

26 June 2018