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Entrepreneurship & Regional Development
This is the official channel for Entrepreneurship & Regional Development Podcasts. Our aims: - sharing the knowledge created by ERD to a large audience - augmenting the experience of authors by sharing podcasts about their articles - giving access to tips from the editors
This paper seeks to further our understanding of how Moroccan ethnic minority women entrepreneurs in the Netherlands navigate and negotiate their entrepreneurial identities. Using postfeminism as an analytic device, we interrogate how gendered, ethnicised, and postfeminist discourses intersect in shaping the entrepreneurial identities of ethnic minority women entrepreneurs, drawing out the enabling and constraining factors...
As businesses become crucial to tackling the environmental, social, and economic challenges plaguing the world, there is still a lack of understanding about the specific role of entrepreneurs in poverty contexts to the sustainable development agenda. This paper addresses a central concern for entrepreneurship scholars and sustainable development advocates by revealing how women entrepreneurs are...
This paper questions the form of power attributed to migrant women entrepreneurs often emanating from their pre-established social positions, which limits their engagements to mere reaction and adaptation to dominant power holders (i.e. specific groups, contexts, structures). Drawing on the life stories of four migrant women entrepreneurs of Turkish origin in Sweden and the Netherlands,...
Entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa is often portrayed through a deficit lens, emphasizing constraints such as financial limitations and weak institutions. While recent studies emphasize the potential of high-tech ventures in such settings, we still lack process-based accounts of how these ventures navigate these environments, particularly how their embeddedness unfold over time and how social, spatial...
The study explores how international enterprises navigate expansion in other markets simultaneously contributing to the regional development. Such international enterprises use digital platforms and disruptive technologies to transform their business models. Digital platform adoption and technological integration accelerate internationalization efforts and facilitate regional economic growth. A new theoretical framework is built upon international entrepreneurship orientation...
The everyday turn in entrepreneurship scholarship positions entrepreneurship as a social technology capable of driving regional change in turbulent times. We argue that the resilience of everyday entrepreneurs requires a reframing of firm growth. We explore this from the perspective of everyday artisan food entrepreneurs at farmers’ markets. Farmers’ markets as sites of grassroots resistance...
While religion is important to billions of people worldwide, research at its intersection with entrepreneurship is in its infancy. We add to this nascent stream through an abductive, qualitative study exploring how religious entrepreneurs address institutional voids to produce positive and/or negative outcomes through their ventures. Merging insights from structuration theory and religious agency from...
This study investigates how successors, by acting entrepreneurially, contribute to family firm transgenerational value creation. By focusing on the transgenerational value creation process, we investigate transgenerational entrepreneurship in family businesses under successor leadership. Employing a multiple case study approach, we analyse 15 Italian family firms, based on direct interviews, follow-ups, field observations, and approximately 300 historical...
Previous efforts to integrate culture and gender into a comprehensive theoretical framework for family support in entrepreneurship have fallen short. This study aims to clarify the influence of gender and culture on family support for women entrepreneurs in a patriarchal society. We use a qualitative approach, conducting 25 semi-structured interviews with Chinese women entrepreneurs who...
The growing subfield of religious entrepreneurship typically examines how faith impacts entrepreneurial outcomes, but much less work has examined the reverse. In this inductive study, we interview church planters, individuals engaged in forming a new religious organization that may or may not be connected to a broader Christian denomination, to understand how entrepreneurial action impacts...
While the research on Indigenous entrepreneurship (IE) has gained momentum, Indigenous worldviews, a key construct in understanding the distinctiveness of Indigenous people and their communities, remain underexplored. Drawing on narrative inquiry and graphic elicitation technique, this article examines how Indigenous worldviews shape and are shaped by the entrepreneurial journeys among urban Mapuche entrepreneurs from Chile....
Entrepreneurial ecosystem research increasingly recognizes the importance of sub-ecosystems, yet their dynamics in contexts of precarity remain underexplored. This article introduces the concept of precarious entrepreneurial sub-ecosystems and examines how entrepreneurship unfolds under conditions of resource scarcity and social vulnerability in Montpellier, France. By mobilizing a complex adaptive systems perspective, we develop a multilevel model...
The intersectional nature of gender-based violence (GBV) makes it unlikely that survivors can escape the socio-economic precarity that perpetuates this social ill. Current conceptualizations of the entrepreneurial process do not sufficiently account for the material constraints GBV survivors face in developing countries and/or in contexts of poverty, and as such, may not fully grasp their...
This article examines gendered household dynamics and the organization of labour in Entrepreneurial Households (EHs), using Glucksumann’s Total Social Organization of Labour theory (TSOL). It challenges the perception of EHs as neutral spaces and argues that analysing households provides a more nuanced understanding of the gendered dynamics in households where a member is formally self-employed...
Our study explores the interplay between the Big Five Personality Traits (B5-PT) and Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) among home and international entrepreneurs in the Middle East, focusing on Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Utilizing fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), we investigate how different combinations of personality traits influence EO in distinct entrepreneurial contexts....
This paper improves our understanding of how the teaching of entrepreneurial competencies is conceived in secondary school and how this relates to students’ employability. We conducted a qualitative investigation involving six French schools in the vocational training system preceding the university. From our interviews with alumni, teachers, pedagogical experts, school managers, and business owners, we...
This editorial examines entrepreneurship in rural areas, advocating for renewed interest due to global transformations, such as climate change and inequality, that challenge the traditional focus on urban-led economic growth. This article highlights the essential role of rural entrepreneurship in promoting sustainability, creating social value, and building resilience, thereby extending the field beyond mere economic...
In this article, we examine the emerging role of women entrepreneurs within changing socio-cultural institutions. The current literature presents limited insight on the processual dynamics of entrepreneurship among socio-cultural change, and so we adopt an inductive theory-building approach, drawing on the concept of institutional entrepreneurship. From this, we see the interaction of women’s entrepreneurial practices...
Venture growth creates tensions that, in turn, cause entrepreneurial identities (EI) to evolve as entrepreneurs have to engage with new forms of strategic thinking in order to scale up. However, little is known about how these tensions inform emergent entrepreneurial identity work and its consequences, as entrepreneurs reorganize ventures for growth. We explore this issue...
This article offers a comprehensive review of the literature on entrepreneurialism, framing it as a pervasive ideology, not merely an extension of neoliberalism. While often seen as a hyper-individualistic ethos, we show that entrepreneurialism also functions as a model for social action, organizing collective behaviour, legitimizing institutional norms, and framing political choices. Although entrepreneurialism has...
This paper theorizes impact entrepreneurship (IE) in relation to place by examining dynamics at the individual, community, and organizational levels. While existing IE literature emphasizes entrepreneurship aimed at addressing grand challenges, it often adopts an aggregate view that overlooks how locally embedded entrepreneurs access and mobilize social and economic resources. We introduce a novel, multidimensional...
Multi-faceted approaches are mandatory to advance entrepreneurship research. This is especially true when scholars investigate the effect of entrepreneurship on local development. In this case, scholars usually rely on the nexus ‘entrepreneurial profile/context’. In line with the above and the principles of the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD), a European policy aiming to...
This study investigates differences in entrepreneurial networking between entrepreneurs across migrant statuses (native-born, first-generation, and second-generation), focusing on how societal modes of incorporation – the policies and cultural attitudes that shape how newcomers integrate into a host country – influence these networks. Using data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) survey of 15,123 entrepreneurs across...
In this article, we study 25 Mapuche entrepreneurs from Chile, exploring how their deep spiritual beliefs and values influence their entrepreneurial orientation, decision-making processes, and business results. Using qualitative methods, we found an ancestral calling that summoned Indigenous individuals to revitalize a distant past rather than pursue opportunities in the proximal future, thus distinguishing their...
This conceptual paper offers a research agenda in examining the role of standards for innovation in high-tech SMEs’ business models from a capability perspective. This paper aims to address the research question, how are SMEs using standards in a new environment of rapidly emerging technologies to produce innovations and what are the new directions for...
This study investigates three pivotal factors influencing workers’ shift towards knowledge-based self-employment: the facilitation effect of telework, age-related modifications to this effect, and geographic influences, drawing from Self-Determination Theory, Procedural Utility, and the Job Demands-Resources Model. Pre- and post-pandemic teleworkers are categorized into four groups based on telework history: Never Teleworked, Newly Teleworked, Used to...
Entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) are changing as funding for traditional support structures is reduced and large corporations are running corporate accelerators (CAs). These new support organizations are struggling to survive and address challenges of legitimacy. However, research on EEs has not yet investigated the conditions of their existence from an ecosystemic perspective. Drawing on neoinstitutional theory...
The aim of this article is to show how student entrepreneurs construct their social capital within the sub-ecosystem of student entrepreneurship. We conducted a single case study on the professional network of a cohort of students participating in an entrepreneurship programme in the city of Strasbourg in France. Analysis of their professional networks for their...
Entrepreneurship can be a pathway to emancipation from social constraints and economic oppression. However, the stories of emancipatory entrepreneurship reveal that these pathways are as diverse and unique as entrepreneurs themselves. Inspired by Hermann Hesse, we explore this variation by conceptualizing emancipatory entrepreneurship as the lifelong pursuit of Eigensinn, a self-creating process of development that...
Uncertainty, discrimination, and socioeconomic marginalization in host countries lead many refugees to entrepreneurial bricolage. Understanding their bricolage practices is crucial to designing policies and programmes to support refugee entrepreneurship, yet little is known about how refugees enact bricolage practices where institutional support is lacking, resources are constrained and where they contend with war trauma due to displacement....
Rural entrepreneurship scholarship has long underscored the importance of contextual conditions that enable or constrain entrepreneurial activities. However, contextual relations are, at times, characterized by a stereotypical or superficial understanding of what ‘rurality’ is and means for rural entrepreneurship, prompting calls for an exploration of new theoretical foundations. We develop a novel theoretical framework that...
Drawing on the entrepreneur-as-poet analogy, I explore the visceral aspect of the entrepreneurial imagination and how this visceral aspect is fuelled. I use a two-pronged method of exploring literary works whose protagonists are poets (such as Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives). The first prong is an aesthetically faithful summary that explores the construct of the...
Sustainable entrepreneurs are not only confronted with a ‘liability of newness’ that characterizes any entrepreneur but also with a ‘liability of otherness’ as they pursue both collective goals and personal interests. The resulting obstacles include the need for legitimation and a lack of financial, administrative, and informational support. This study explores how sustainable entrepreneurs strive...
This study introduces a novel framework that integrates social neuroscience and entrepreneurship to explore how neuronal pathways enable the transformation of individuals into entrepreneurs with robust capabilities. Moving beyond traditional individual-centric views, it investigates inter-individual neural and social synchronization, identifying neurosocial mediators that drive the development of entrepreneurial competencies within enterprises. By leveraging the extended...
This paper contributes to the senior entrepreneurship and rural entrepreneurship literature by developing a contingency view on the likelihood of entrepreneurial entry by senior individuals in rural areas in emerging economies. Drawing on utility maximization theory, we propose that multi-level factors and their joint effects help older individuals overcome barriers to entrepreneurial entry. Using data...
Using an experimental approach, we examine how gender and feminine adornments impact stakeholders’ spontaneous perceptions of entrepreneurs. Although previous research shows that female entrepreneurs face negative stereotypes and prejudice, we find that compared to their male counterparts, female entrepreneurs and their ventures are no longer viewed less favourably and are even generating more positive perceptions...
Despite scholarly interest in how emotional and instrumental place attachments motivate entrepreneurship, the influences on embeddedness remain underexplored. Building on the notion that entrepreneurship becomes embedded in a locality, we argue that this process is packed with place-based interpretations of the material and imagined reality. Engaging with the empirical setting of Chile, the world’s largest...
Family businesses are rich in stories and narratives and offer a fertile ground to explore ‘everyday life of family businesses’ that ‘may be difficult to access through other forms of empirical material’ (Nordqvist and Gartner 2020, 122–123). In this paper, we use Helen (Tse’s 2007) biography Sweet Mandarin to explore the complex dynamics of gender,...
Existing research highlights the confident, heroic founder figure as a gendered norm in entrepreneurship. Moreover, confident behaviours and powerful speeches have been presented as key factors in delivering successful pitches. This study applies a dramaturgical approach to explore how pitch-training sessions as a backstage context reinforce the gendered ways of displaying confidence and how different...
Public support for enterprises contributes to fostering innovation and entrepreneurship. The impact evaluation is a relevant and complex topic that still receives relatively limited scholarly attention. The study consists of an integrative review of a systematic selection of 60 articles published between 1998 and 2023 on public financial and non-financial support and firm performance outcomes....
This study uses a narrative approach to explore how role modelling unfolds throughout the start-up process. Drawing on the experiences of 25 nascent and novice entrepreneurs, we illustrate how attributes of role models, role modelling outcomes, and related mechanisms change for entrepreneurs over time. Our emerging theoretical model highlights three distinctive role modelling narratives: ‘Taking...
Collaborative spaces such as fab labs, incubators, and coworking spaces have become a worldwide phenomenon based on their promise of fostering creativity and entrepreneurship. Mature, large organizations have also tried to benefit from this by creating such spaces in-house. This paper studies a failed attempt to create one such space in a large bureaucratic organization....
The importance of home and hometown for entrepreneurs has significant implications for entrepreneurial identities, venture success, and broader contextual dynamics. Traditionally, the concept of home in entrepreneurship literature is viewed instrumentally, largely focusing on the unit of dwelling (i.e. premises/house/apartment), the implications of location choices, and their effects on performance. We employ a mobilities lens,...
This study investigates the interplay among parental support, familial legitimacy, and next-generation succession intentions in family businesses in different societal contexts. Building on attachment theory and insights from family business literature, the study underscores the influence of family at both the parental and societal levels in creating a nurturing environment that supports succession intentions. Using...
ntrepreneurship is growing in popularity as a tool to combat the challenges of unemployment and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa. A host of training programme offerings have emerged to mitigate the challenges of starting and sustaining a business in this context. Non-formal trainings (educational activities outside formal places of learning such as universities or schools)...
Culture plays an important role for the study of entrepreneurship. However, whereas cross-cultural research in management (CCM) has strongly evolved in the last three decades and identified different paradigms, paradigmatically diversified research is still lacking in cross-cultural entrepreneurship. To fill this gap, this study suggests an integrative literature review with two objectives: 1) provide an...
This study contributes to the debate on family business environmental sustainability by investigating the environmental orientation of family versus nonfamily firms. We study whether family business status affects (i) the extent of environmental orientation, i.e. the number of incentives set for environmental sustainability activities, contingent upon firms’ engagement with policymakers, and (ii) how firms’ environmental...
Positioned within the context of active ageing, this research investigates the relationship between entrepreneurship and physical and psychological health, and examines whether health outcomes for entrepreneurs vary across different contextual dimensions. To achieve this, a systematic review was conducted including 78 empirical papers from 1993 to 2023 investigating the relationship between entrepreneurship and physical and...
Little is still known about the approach and rationale of family members’ entrepreneurial behaviours for sustainability that occur at different interconnected levels. Our study helps to fill this void by examining a multilevel web that links a family firm, a cooperative and a rural community. We rely on an inductive semi-grounded approach guided by conceptual...
This study conceptualizes graduate entrepreneurship as a spatial phenomenon. Specifically, we explore how combinations of university-related (knowledge exchange intensity and entrepreneurship support) as well as regional conditions (economic prosperity and entrepreneurial culture) might explain the presence or absence of high graduate entrepreneurship as possible (or likely) explanations based on a configurational approach. We applied fuzzy-set...
Prior research on crisis management focuses on crisis strategies used by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), predominately without considering their initial state of preparedness – how these SMEs stepped into the crisis in the first place. This study examines the effects of financial, organizational and cultural crisis preparedness on the strategic choices SMEs make during crises, specifically whether they retrench, persevere, or innovate. Utilizing a unique longitudinal representative dataset of SMEs spanning from 2015 to 2020, we test hypotheses related to the first COVID-19-related lockdown in Denmark. Our findings contribute significantly to the literature by showing that crisis preparedness is critical to SME’s strategic choices during crises. We demonstrate that the nature of SME’s pre-crisis preparedness – across financial, organizational, and cultural dimensions – distinctly shape their during-crisis strategic approach.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2024.2352448
In this study, we analyse savings and credit groups (SCGs) to investigate whether belonging to these groups contributes favourably to entrepreneurship. SCGs are community-based groups that represent a form of informal finance in developing countries. For the analysis, we adopt the social embeddedness theory, and test our hypotheses on a unique sample of respondents to a survey in Kenya finding a positive relationship between SCGs and the creation of new ventures. The results show that the levels of education and wealth are positively associated with the likelihood of creating a new venture, but SCG membership negatively moderates these relationships. Thus, the benefits of SCG membership are larger for less-educated and less-wealthy individuals that can offset, at least in part, the disadvantages related to these low levels. Finally, to provide insights for future research and policy, we focus on the group characteristics associated with the likelihood of creating new ventures.
Full article available on Taylor & Franics website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2024.2331150
Research suggests that business families may favour family members’ ability to act entrepreneurially and convey an entrepreneurial legacy to successors to ensure the continuity of family businesses. Nonetheless, families’ entrepreneurial imprinting can extend beyond successors, as non-successors can also pursue an entrepreneurial path. Little is known, however, about non-successor daughters’ entrepreneurial experiences outside of family businesses. Drawing on the family entrepreneurship field and adopting the identity work theory, this paper investigates non-successor daughters who decided to set up their own enterprises and analyses how they formed their entrepreneurial identities in the business family context. Based on the constructivist grounded theory, we analyse ten life story interviews with non-successor daughters and identify three processes through which they form their entrepreneurial identity: avoiding competition; defending; emancipation. Each process is articulated in three building blocks, i.e. Antecedents, Decision and Outcomes, and shows that daughters’ entrepreneurial identity can take shape through step-by-step processes in which interactions between daughters, business families and family businesses can occur differently, causing positive or negative effects at the individual, family and business level. In these processes, daughters’ identity work ranges from adapting to eluding families’ norms and expectations to forming their own entrepreneurial identity consistent with self-perception.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2024.2339978
Entrepreneurship research rarely explores and explains how people approach ambiguity differently as they combine knowledge during the entrepreneurial journey. In this paper we introduce curiosity as a source of intrinsic motivation that addresses this shortcoming. We find that the full range of curiosity-driven entrepreneurial behaviour is not well-described by terminology found within the curiosity literature, such as ‘specific curiosity’ or ‘diversive curiosity’, which have characterized curiosity according to excessively ‘configurational’ mixes of features. For that reason, we develop a new classification system based on behaviour. By focusing on three dimensions – the approach towards ambiguity, emotional valence, and experimentation versus theorization – we develop a unique 3 × 2 typology of ‘curious search’. The six forms of curious search – tweaking and sleuthing (what we call ‘clarifying’ types of curious search), spelunking and stargazing (‘adventuresome’ types), and fiddling and wool-gathering (‘bored’ types) – are described and illustrated in a variety of entrepreneurship situations, and are also shown to apply to a variety of existing entrepreneurship research topics, especially entrepreneurial imagination.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2024.2353306
This paper explores how a future – as something that can only be imagined but can inspire entrepreneurial action – can attract economic capital. We integrate Dor’s (2015) model of language as a communication technology for the instruction of imagination with Bourdieu’s theory of practice to account for how an entrepreneur’s words can hold sway over an investor by virtue of meaning something significant. We introduce opportunity capital as the symbolic significance of the entrepreneur’s future-venture story and the exchange counterparty to the investor’s economic capital. Our portrayal of the future as a symbolic phenomenon inducing action by others offers foundational insights to research on the early stages of venturing and the acquisition of resources by entrepreneurs.
Full text available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2024.2340735
Entrepreneurship is an elusive phenomenon and its meaning has been vigorously debated. This study seeks to contribute to critical perspectives on entrepreneurship by investigating how entrepreneuring participates and intervenes in the dominant discourse, and thus, in the practices that constitute meaning. To explore this crucial question, I use the framework of entrepreneuring as a mode of critical engagement. This perspective is supplemented by the performative notion of provocation, which helps in conceptualizing entrepreneuring and its artefacts as critical participants of the discourse. Next, I build a case around a video game as an artefact produced by an entrepreneurial venture. The findings reveal three practices that emerge from entrepreneuring: caricaturing, metaphorizing, and devaluing. I develop a model that illustrates how entrepreneuring provokes (i.e. problematizes and establishes) different versions of entrepreneurship. This study contributes to entrepreneuring and its critical capacity by theorizing entrepreneuring as provocation. Provocation highlights the various practices of critical engagement, draws attention to the involved material artefacts, and informs our understanding of the implicated ethics.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2024.2335617
We apply the sociological lens of linked lives to show how household contexts channel transitions to self-employment in ways strongly differentiated by gender. We investigate the impact of demographic transitions to marriage, cohabitation and having children on the transition to self-employment using fixed-effects models on 10 waves of the UK’s nationally representative survey, Understanding Society. Men’s transitions to self-employment and separately to business ownership are remarkably impervious to the arrival of a new child in the household. In contrast, second births raise the odds of self-employment for women and have a strong and statistically significant association with business ownership, highlighting the role of birth parity as a household influence. Within the subset of opposite-sex couples, lives are indeed linked: a partner’s long hours precipitate the other partner’s transition into self-employment for men and women. However, the effect is asymmetric to the extent that women are much more likely to have a partner working long hours. Marriage is associated with a much higher likelihood of transitioning to business ownership for both men and women, which does not hold for self-employment overall.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2024.2310107
In the field of international entrepreneurship, there are increasing calls for the study of cognition in its social context. In this regard, this article draws on social representations theory to explore and better understand the cognition of entrepreneurs. The objective of the present study is to explore the social representation of legitimacy among different social groups and show how these collective images vary depending on the context in which entrepreneurs operate. By applying social representations theory to data gathered from a sample of 150 French entrepreneurs, we construct a framework that elucidates social development and the changes that influence entrepreneurs’ decision-making. In addition, this article reveals a new avenue of study in relation to legitimacy from a collective perspective.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2024.2313562
Entrepreneurship is often about the individual drive for innovation and the exploitation of opportunities; however, in an increasingly connected world, entrepreneurial ecosystems have gained considerable research interest. In many developed countries, entrepreneurial ecosystems emerge from organic collaborations between businesses and investors, with little political involvement. However, in a post-communist country like Kazakhstan, different stakeholders have diverse expectations, leading to tensions among them. In this study, we took a qualitative approach and drew from discursive institutionalism theory in entrepreneurship research in order to understand the influence of politics on the governance of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Our findings reveal tensions between collective aspirations and individual goals, generating multiple institutional logics. The generative institutional discourse that is brought about by politics, their influence on governance, and facilitating factors is a mechanism that helps to turn such tensions into policies and collective action. To gain a better understanding of the influence of politics on the governance of entrepreneurial ecosystems, we propose a generative institutional discourse model.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2024.2327050
Using a phenomenological approach, we analyse the voices of entrepreneurs living in the peripheral ecosystems of Newcastle Upon Tyne (UK), Palermo (Italy) and Perth (Australia). These ecosystems are defined by the considerable physical distance between their geographical location and the location of a larger, more established ‘core’ ecosystem in their nation. The purpose of our paper is to examine how distance from the core is perceived to both enable and constrain entrepreneurship in peripheral contexts. We introduce ‘distance from the core’ as a significant hitherto unexplored theme to consider when exploring the lived experiences of entrepreneurs in peripheral contexts. Empirically, we present data that affirms and expands extant findings revealing how entrepreneurs rooted in peripheral contexts react to the structural conditions around them. Methodologically, we demonstrate the value of phenomenological research in revealing the subjective ways entrepreneurial agency, structure and distance intersect. We highlight that policymakers must take the voices of entrepreneurs in a peripheral ecosystem into account when designing and implementing enterprise policies that aim to develop entrepreneurship in peripheral contexts.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2024.2313560
Entrepreneurs usually have several means at their disposal to deal with and overcome adverse circumstances, ranging from simple non-resourceful coping strategies to more elaborate resourceful behaviours. However, entrepreneurs who find themselves in conditions of prolonged adversity and disadvantage have few effective possibilities to withstand sudden adversity such as crises and income shocks. Based on these premises, we develop theory on the types, antecedents, and outcomes of entrepreneurial responses to adversity by investigating how entrepreneurs living in conditions of extreme poverty may behave resourcefully while facing two major crises in a short timeframe. Through an analysis of entrepreneurship in South-West Cameroon, we identify three behaviours entrepreneurs enact in response to crises: passive, hustling, and future-oriented, which differ with regards to activities, driving motivations, main objectives, approaches towards present and future adversity, and dominant focus concerning the use of resources. We also find that entrepreneurs’ enacted behaviours depend chiefly on the nature of the losses they incur and on the type of social capital they can avail of in the aftermath of a crisis. Lastly, we suggest that the different behaviours result in further changes in the entrepreneurs’ resource levels, which subsequently influence the likelihood that entrepreneurs will shift between behaviours.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2024.2324320
The aim of this research is to undertake explorative research and present propositions that would identify the drivers of regional emergency networks, i.e. regional technological collaborative agreements under extreme conditions. Based on previous studies on emergency management, we empirically evaluate how 49 organizations built 53 technological cooperative agreements within the context of COVID-19. We consider individual, dyadic and whole network level variables to build on theory about how these emergency networks are created. We propose that emergency networks are developed under embedded relationships, with physically proximate partners that are also indirectly connected. Secondly, we establish that emergency networks are characterized by heterarchical leadership with lower density connections between many different partners. Finally, we deliberate on the role of partner diversity in developing emergency networks, establishing alternative propositions based on the similarity in innovative capacity and institutional character of the partners.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2024.2310108
Answering the call for more process-oriented research into the inception and development of companies, this paper analyses the funding acquisition process of nascent ventures. Based on optimal matching techniques combined with multinomial logistic regression, we identify how the most typical funding acquisition processes of nascent ventures evolve and identify in which circumstances ventures pursue the respective processes. First, and in line with pecking-order theory (POT), we find a standard pattern of founder self-funding. Second, we theorize under which initial conditions, and how, ventures deviate from the path that is set out by POT. The degree of innovativeness and complexity of the venture’s offering determine which funding sequence is chosen. With this study we, first, show the importance of initial venture characteristics and strategy for the further resource acquisition and corresponding venture development process and, second, introduce the optimal matching technique to the realm of the entrepreneurship literature.
Full artivle available on Taylor & Francis webstite: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2298997
Craft-based ventures draw on associations with tradition, place and quality to differentiate their products from mass-produced counterparts. However, ‘place’ in the context of craft entrepreneurship is both underexamined and undertheorized, with extant research predominantly focused on the positive impact of place. We argue that this perspective ignores the impact of place on craft entrepreneurs’ passion when place is not viewed as conducive to creative expression. Within this paper, we draw on affordance theory to extend understanding of how craft entrepreneurs’ passion is shaped by place, the impact on entrepreneurial behaviour and how that relationship may evolve over time. Our empirical data that are situated in Northern Ireland span 18 years and detail 13 longitudinal cases constructed through life history narrative accounts. Our findings validate the importance of the interaction between place and passion as a source of ideas and persistence and interestingly underscore that craft entrepreneurs may minimize signifiers of place to protect their passion. As a result of our adoption of affordance theory, our study demonstrates that the relationship to place can evolve and change over time, and as such, craft entrepreneurs draw on, conceal, accommodate and celebrate place and space, in their journeys as craft entrepreneurs.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2024.2313549
The study examines the influence of inspiring role model (IRM), social entrepreneurship (SE) compassion, and the SE education and their interactions and consequences for nascent SE behaviour. Utilizing a quantitative survey approach, the study acquired a total of 136 valid responses from nascent social entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia. The data analysis through partial least square structural equation modelling (SmartPLS 3.0) revealed that IRM exposure has an impact on nascent SE behaviour, and that SE compassion is a valid predictor of nascent SE behaviour. SE education was observed to have an indirect impact on nascent SE behaviour through SE compassion, while its direct effects on nascent SE behaviour were not proven. Meanwhile, SE compassion was determined to not be a mediator of the effects of IRM on nascent SE behaviour. The study generates several academic and managerial implications while providing a framework for furthering research on SE behaviour.
Full article is available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2024.2310735
In this paper, we explore the micro-interactions through which a regenerative enterprise engages with proximate natural ecosystems in its attempt to repair and protect them. Through an ethnographic study of a regenerative farming enterprise in rural Southern Patagonia - Fundo Panguilemu - we discover a reciprocal relationship between the enterprise and animals, central to their regenerative efforts. This relationship is formed and actively maintained by the founders through three practices – joint rewilding, ambivalent relationality, and task interdependence. We leverage nature relatedness to conceptualize the relationship between these practices as human-animal mutualism in regenerative work. We advance regenerative entrepreneurship research by revealing novel human-nature interactions formed and fostered by a rural enterprise in the pursuit of local regeneration and expand our understanding of micro-level phenomena in rural entrepreneurship.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2024.2305648
Studies of social incubators illustrate the importance of these organizations in promoting social innovations and entrepreneurship at regional level. However, little is known about the main categories of contingency factors that influence the organizational design and fit of social incubators. We apply a comparative case study methodology to analyse the mission, structure and activity of four pioneer social incubators, located in Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Romania. Our findings reveal four categories of regional contingency factors – social needs, institutional framework, entrepreneurial ecosystem and socio-economic characteristics – that influence the design of the incubators’ mission, structure and activity and determine the achievement of organizational fit. By employing a contingency lens, we propose a dynamic model that explains the interdependence between the social incubators’ profiles and specific regional contingencies.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2277788
This article analyses the influence of gender stereotypes in entrepreneurship by jointly studying the effect of gender-role orientation (GRO) and sex (women vs. men) on the entrepreneurial intentions (EI) and actions of individuals. Entrepreneurship is associated with the typical male stereotype in most societies, leading to a lower rate of women entrepreneurs. Our model builds on social role theory (SRT) to identify how descriptive and prescriptive gender stereotypes exert this influence. It integrates SRT and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to analyse the differential effect of sex and GRO on entrepreneurial motivations, intentions, and new venture creation behaviours. We test our model on a sample of highly educated adults in Spain using a longitudinal research design. Our results indicate that descriptive gender stereotypes influence individuals’ entrepreneurial motivations and intentions depending on their GRO. Androgynous people (women and men alike) exhibit the most favourable perceptions regarding entrepreneurship, and, through them, a higher EI (compared to masculine, feminine, and undifferentiated GRO individuals). In turn, prescriptive gender stereotypes affect individuals’ actual venture creation depending on their biological sex. Men are significantly more likely to act on their EIs and launch their venture than are women.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2295266
Drawing on a qualitative study of Syrian refugees in constrained immigration contexts in the North of England, this article explores refugees’ perceptions of integration and social exclusion through entrepreneurship. By exploring refugee experiences as they engage in entrepreneurship programmes or business start-ups, our findings highlight a divide among refugees with the means to start-up businesses successfully and those without. The article contributes to understanding entrepreneurship as a tool for refugees that indicates dyadic outcomes of idiosyncratic integration among equipped refugees and liminal integration among vulnerable refugees. The article extends our appreciation of the nuance in entrepreneurship, and develops liminality debates by stressing the transformative nature of refugee journeys that involve cross-domain transitions characterized by multiple separations. We call for the acknowledgement of refugee heterogeneity in neoliberal economies in ways that encompass holistic views of integration beyond the current focus on economic contributions at the expense of all else.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2297388
This study explores the dynamics of online community entrepreneurship, using a rural grocery store as a case study. I examine the role of social media in community entrepreneurship, revealing insights into the interplay between social interactions, spatial factors, and the entrepreneurial process. The case account outlines a process where online communities turn ideas into actions and shape local environments. Social media acts as a platform for collective effort, resource allocation, and coordination, challenging traditional notions of localized entrepreneurship. Three key themes emerge: social media facilitates communication and collaboration; collective agency empowers online communities for change; and the dynamic nature of context blurs the boundaries between local and online. I introduce the concept of ‘online community entrepreneurship’, which connects participants based on shared interests, promoting social goals and asynchronous engagement. This research enriches an understanding of community entrepreneurship by highlighting the transformative impact of online communities.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2287696
n this paper, we apply a feminist interpretation and an extension of Bourdieu’s theory of practice to explore the gap in our understanding between gender gap issues – the institutionalized and structural inequalities that underpin the differential access to resources by women and men – and women business owners. Drawing on an interpretivist analysis of the lived experience of women entrepreneurs who were members of women-only or open-to-all formal entrepreneurship networks, we examine their enculturation and the strategies they employ to be deemed credible players in the field. We conclude that women-only formal entrepreneurship networks have had a limited impact on helping these women overcome the isolating and individualizing effects of a gendered entrepreneurial field. Despite the promise of familiarization with and sensitization to the field, women-only formal entrepreneurship networks only serve to perpetuate and reproduce the embedded masculinity of the entrepreneurship domain in the absence of appropriate activating mechanisms or ‘margins of intervention’.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2298981
Our study develops a contextually embedded institution-theoretic model of the major influences precipitating entrepreneurial founders’ leadership succession. Drawing on a unique sample of 184 listed firms from 10 national securities markets across the Caribbean region, we find that both business group (BG) and private equity (PE) ownership are associated with an increased likelihood of founder retention. The results also show that firms’ adoption of shareholder value corporate governance negatively moderates the BG main effect, while positively moderating its PE counterpart. We argue that this is reflective of a simpler lifecycle in emerging economies centred on one major transition, namely the transition from internal to external resource provision.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2289571
We investigated the relationship between employment growth and profitability and propose that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) hire employees, they experience an increase in profitability due to their acquisition of additional human capital. These benefits, however, are limited by the firm’s ability to efficiently integrate the newly recruited employees and adjust its internal managerial practices and organization accordingly. Using a large sample of SMEs in the European Union, we examined the relationship between employment growth and profitability as a quadratic function with an inverted U shape. The empirical results strongly supported our prediction as we observed that profitability decreased when SMEs exceeded a 100% growth rate in employment. Importantly, we observed strong homogeneity in our results across various industries. This paper empirically documents the ‘maximum’ speed at which firms should grow and highlights the homogeneity of this result across industries.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2283715
Entrepreneurship Education (EE) programmes world-wide serve a highly standardized menu of activities for student consumption, such as pitching exercises, competitions and mini-companies. This situation has been called the McDonaldization of EE, where standard activities are adopted globally. In this paper we study the influence of Junior Achievement (JA) – the ‘original burger’ - to draw attention to the institutionalizing pressure it exerts on EE. We use data from JA organizational websites in England, Sweden and Denmark to describe JA as a global institution exerting homogenizing pressures on the field of EE. Five common dynamics are identified to explain in more detail how JA contributes to the homogenization of EE through: neutralizing ideology; propagating the mini-company template; evidencing strategically; facilitating communion and mythologizing success. New research avenues studying the influence of JA as a powerful institution and potential counter-actions to de-institutionalize EE are proposed. Junior Achievement has been studied before, but most investigations consider the impact of JA on individuals, in terms of effects on students’ knowledge and skills. The contribution of this study is in how it focuses on the homogenizing influence of JA as an institution on the system of EE.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2279171
Realizing cultural diversity’s impact on regional entrepreneurial activity has become crucial for scholars and policymakers. As a step in this direction, this study integrates insights from creative cognitive psychology and the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship to examine this effect and the boundary conditions explaining it. Based on a six-year multi-sourced panel dataset for the 50 U.S. states, the analyses support the proposed arguments in that they indicate that cultural diversity is positively associated with entrepreneurial activity, and this relationship is moderated by regional immigration policy and regulatory framework. Specifically, the effect of cultural diversity on entrepreneurship is more substantial when a region’s immigration policy climate is more inclusionary than exclusionary. In addition, this relationship is also more robust when a region’s regulatory policy is more conscientious than more lax. These findings make novel contributions to our knowledge of how and when contextual conditions regulate (i.e. stimulate or hinder) the effect of cultural diversity on entrepreneurship. The manuscript draws vital implications for policymakers.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2287147
Entrepreneurial identities have a significant influence on new venture emergence. Yet, an entrepreneur’s (meaning-constructing) interpretive engagement with situations such as entrepreneurial opportunities remain relatively unexplained. This paper explores how entrepreneurs’ personal identities influence their interpretive engagement with entrepreneurial opportunities. We presented 34 entrepreneurs with three business scenarios and, using verbal protocols and content analysis techniques, inductively identified seven individual value types. We find that these value types vary among individual founders, revealing distinct personal identities (as personal value structures). These types are reflections of exogenously and endogenously oriented personal identities that depict how individuals perceive scenarios as situations that represent the environment as exogenous (scenarios as what is) or as endogenously constructed (scenarios as what could be). Therefore, we contribute to the entrepreneurship literature by highlighting the significance of personal identities as representations of entrepreneurial goals that give rise to different framings of situations as entrepreneurial opportunities as these become expressions of their personal identities.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2285818
Family is the most important, yet under researched, dimension in family business research. Following recent calls in Entrepreneurship-as-Practice, we bring a practice-based approach to family business research to understand next generation engagement over extended periods in family life. Drawing on a culinary family business’s three published cookbooks, theorized as ‘discursive artefacts’, we examine how mundane family business practices can enable next generations to become successors. This study contributes to family business research with its re-focus on the family and offers new insights into practice theory-building in the emergent Entrepreneurship-as-Practice. Our findings illustrate how everyday practices in family lives – for example, cooking – can enable next generations’ becoming family business successors, through socializing, bridging, and leading.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2265324
Despite contributing to host country economies, there is limited examination of self-employed female immigrants in the literature. While human, social, and financial capital are important for entrepreneurship in general, given immigrant women’s intersectional identities, the potential exists for these factors to affect them differently. This study uses US data obtained from Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) to empirically test the relationship of human, social, and financial capital on female immigrants’ self-employment and compares these relationships with US-born women and male immigrants. While the results are mixed, overall, the findings suggest that female immigrants’ odds of being self-employed, in relation to their levels of human, social, and financial capital, are influenced to a greater extent by their immigrant identity than their gender identity. Implications for future research and public policy are discussed.
Full artilcle available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2264803
The Gulf States have dedicated much attention and many resources to entrepreneurship, particularly in supporting women entrepreneurship. These efforts are reflected in the increase in research focused on women entrepreneurs in the Gulf States. The vast majority of relevant studies have explored the reasons for the low engagement of women in the economic sphere. Recent works have shifted attention to the agency of women entrepreneurs. However, most of the literature has applied Western epistemology without challenging and unpacking the unique contextual dimensions that influence women’s entrepreneurial activities in the Gulf States. This study thus systematically reviews the literature on women entrepreneurship in the Gulf States, increases the understanding of how these women are ‘doing context’ by discussing three different conceptualizations of how they enact and do context in the Gulf States, and proposes future research avenues for developing context-specific epistemologies.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2227977
The emergence of digital technologies is transforming entrepreneurial processes and outcomes. This creates a plethora of research questions at the intersection of digital technologies and entrepreneurship. A key question is if existing entrepreneurial models are applicable to understanding digital entrepreneurship. In this study we provide novel insights by exploring the following research question: How are established models of the entrepreneurial journey and the entrepreneurial experience challenged by the proliferation of social media? We utilize the entrepreneurial journey model proposed by Morris and Kuratko (2020) and the ten characteristics of the entrepreneurial experience proposed by Morris et al., (2012) as reference tools to understand if traditional process-based approaches to entrepreneurship are still relevant within a social media digital context. We provide novel contributions to traditional descriptions of entrepreneurship by providing an augmented view through a digital lens. The findings illustrate that the proliferation of social media challenges our established theoretical understanding of both the entrepreneurial journey and the entrepreneurial experience. We also provide new insights into the lived experiences of social media entrepreneurs, who are a distinct type of entrepreneur, with very different entrepreneurial journeys and experiences compared to traditional entrepreneurs.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2240749
The barefoot entrepreneurship literature rarely acknowledges the role of space in the development of informal economic activities. However, the concept of liminal space, defined as a place of transition and largely discussed in geography, can provide a new conceptual lens through which the trajectories of barefoot entrepreneurs can be viewed. This interdisciplinary research leverages this perspective to raise the following question: How do barefoot entrepreneurs experience liminal spaces to engage in informal economic activities? To answer this question, this article explores how 10 homeless youths in New York City panhandle, steal, deal and prostitute themselves to survive. Drawing on a four-year ethnography and the use of geographic methods, we explain how these barefoot entrepreneurs experience liminal spaces. More precisely, we underline how these spaces are ambivalent places of becoming: on the one hand, they support the development of barefoot entrepreneurship; but on the other hand, they lead to ‘entrepreneurial traps’ in the sense that these activities tend to increase the entrepreneurs’ marginality. Based on these results, we contribute to the literature on barefoot entrepreneurship, and to a better understanding of the implication of liminal spaces in entrepreneurial dynamics.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2233010
In times of crisis, SME entrepreneurs refresh and replace corporate resources and capabilities in the strategic renewal processes to sustain organizational resilience. Appearing in the form of internal development and external sourcing, the strategic renewal outcomes are explained by the synergy of individual, organizational and environmental-level factors that build up SMEs’ dynamic capabilities. This research presents a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of the conjunctural causality between multi-level dynamic capabilities configurations and SME strategic renewal outcomes. Based on the survey data of SMEs in Laval, Quebec amid COVID-19 pandemic, we find that entrepreneurs’ constraint awareness and partnership willingness are not the necessary conditions of strategic renewal. Complementarily, the individual-level microfoundation of dynamic capabilities must be combined with the organizational and environmental context to explain the strategic renewal outcomes. Specifically, we identify complex organizational processes, global connectivity, and government partnership as supplementary core conditions to explain SME strategic renewal in crisis.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2223158
Family background matters for entrepreneurship, but why do siblings differ in their propensity to become entrepreneurs and the type of ventures they pursue? I draw on family socialization and resource allocation theories to develop hypotheses about the differential effects of family structure – comprising birth order, family size, and sibling gender – on (growth-oriented) entrepreneurship. Using firm incorporation as a marker of growth orientation, I test these hypotheses in a sample of Swedish siblings. Relative to older siblings, later born children are more likely to become unincorporated entrepreneurs, partly because they occupy family niches corresponding to lower educational attainment and higher labour market frictions. Moreover, children in very large families are less likely to pursue incorporation, with stronger effects for men and earlier born children, in line with their limited ability to develop self-efficacy due to resource dilution. Growing up with an opposite-gender sibling does not influence entrepreneurship, indicating that sibling sex composition may not foster stronger gender norms or sex-typing in this domain in Sweden. This study integrates existing findings and offers novel insights, broadening our understanding of family background in entrepreneurship.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2243465
We posit that the quality of information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure and the effectiveness of crisis-specific policy response are essential for entrepreneurial growth aspirations during major external shocks. Enhancing the quality of ICT infrastructure is a relevant strategy for building ecosystems that are resilient to multiple types of crises. It enhances entrepreneurs’ growth ambitions during the crisis, and makes them less reliant on crisis-specific response policies adopted by governments. We provide empirical support for this, utilizing Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data from the pandemic period in Chile.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2233473
We explore how digitalization impacts young firms’ growth. A longitudinal panel analysis of the EU’s new ventures during 2010–2018 reveals that digital sectoral capabilities affect young firms’ growth autonomously and via interaction with other sectoral capabilities. Digital sectoral capabilities play an important complementary role in facilitating the upscaling of young firms operating in R&D-intensive contexts as they mature and within environments rich in tangible capital investments. In business contexts characterized by high digital but low human capabilities, young firms struggle to grow, flagging a mismatch of skills’ composition. The effects of digitalization vary depending on the level of competition within each sector. The results on complementarities of sectoral capabilities suggest that horizontal policy solutions favouring specific capabilities in isolation may have limited or counterproductive effects. Instead, policy should target a portfolio of capabilities and consider their complementarities under competitive market structures. Our analysis shows that effective innovation policy should be broadly defined and closely integrated with competition policy.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2218314
Research has shown that social enterprises must constantly balance conflicting demands between their social and economic goals. However, little is known about the factors that shape managers’ strategic choices in response to the tensions associated with social enterprises’ hybrid nature. To address this issue, we conducted a case study analysis of six work integration social enterprises that draws on insights from previous literature on organizational hybrids and managerial frames. This study identifies two distinct cognitive frames that managers adopt to interpret the hybrid condition of their organization, balancing and integrative, each of which is associated with different types of strategies for managing hybridity, defensive and exploratory, respectively. Additionally, we unveil the mechanisms through which these frames shape hybrid strategies, namely, through the representation of the environment, representation of agency, and capability to integrate conflicting prescriptions. These results underscore the individual agency of managers and their idiosyncratic cognitive processes as important explanatory factors for the wide array of strategic responses observed in the management of social enterprises.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2223610
Transcription of the interview Automatic transcritption.
Welcome to the Entrepreneurship & Regional Development Podcast. Each publication in our Journal is a great opportunity to share significant and audacious contributions to a large audience. My guest today is Anna Maria Bojica. She recently published an article entitled Framing Conflicting Demands and Strategies for managing hybridity in social enterprises. She published this article in entrepreneurship and regional development, a journal edited by Taylor and Francis. She co-authored this paper with Javier Martinez Del-Rio. Ana, welcome to our podcast.
Ana Thank you very much for having me.
LEFEBVRE Vincent Can you tell us what is the origin of your paper? Why have you decided to address this particular topic and what is the question you want to answer?
Ana
Yes, of course. The the origin of this paper lies in in my coauthor interest and my own interest in in social enterprises hybrid organizations. We have always found intriguing and talked a lot about the complexity surrounding surrounding making decisions in situations of conflicting prescriptions. This is the primary focus of most previous literature literature on social enterprises, and it is what sparked our interest in this topic. But at the same time, I have been teaching social entrepreneurship for the past ten years, and when I invited social entrepreneurs and managers of social enterprises as guest speakers in my courses or met them with different events, I observed that some of them talked about these projects as a continuous struggle emphasizing conflict. The same conflict that that literature talked about, but others did not emphasize tensions regarding the management of economic and social dimensions. Therefore, we we wanted to delve into why executives take such different approaches to the management of social enterprises. So we could say that the origin was a gap between the observed phenomenon and academic literature.
LEFEBVRE Vincent What are the main contributions of your paper?
Ana We identified 3 main contributions. First, we introduce cognitive frames in the literature and social enterprises as an important explanatory factor for the heterogeneous responses that social enterprises give to the tensions arising from their hybrid mission. We identified 2 managerial cognitive frames. The balancing and the integrative and describe them. The balancing involves the assumption that simultaneously pursuing social and economic goals is paradoxical, and it's problematic. For example, the words and expressions used by those managers with the balancing frame when talking about the mission of the enterprise include tension difficult 1000 contradictions, thousands of adjustments every day. These are hard. Lots of conflicts. Headache. This is always the bone of contention. It is all. It isn't always understood, so I would like to emphasize something that we consider very important here. This is a paradoxical frame, and it is paradoxical because. The paradoxes are not addressed by leaning towards one or another of the goals. Instead, these managers seek to achieve balance by making adjustments and compromises in both respects. So we could say that they take a win, lose approach to this paradoxes impacting both on the economic and social domains. On the other side, the integrity frame we identified involved that the tensions are rising from the hybrid condition of the enterprise, are not perceived as negative. They are seen as a differential attribute that is fundamental and inherent to the film is existence. Uh, the semantic field, for example, revolving around the integrative frame, includes very different words from those identified in the balancing frame. For example, here they permanently, they refer to the dual logic dual prism dual work dual component or they said more than clashing. It's getting people to understand there is no social mission without management and I remember very well on an interview with one of these managers saying otherwise, we wouldn't be who we are. We'd be another type of organization that says a lot about us, so we could say that the integrity frame presents a win win approach. The hybrid condition of of social enterprises. The second contribution is that we also identify and describe various strategies that social enterprises use to manage their social and market activities. We label these strategies hybrid strategies and according to their content, we group them into categories that defensive and exploratory. The defensive strategies involve refusal to grow and important limitations in the scope of the market and social activities. The exploratory strategies involved innovation both in products and in the social insertion programs. Market growth and market growth was seen as a mean for creating more insertion opportunities and growing their social impact. Because I don't know if I mentioned before, but the type of social enterprise that we, we focus our analysis on is that of work, integration, social enterprises. This is why the social mission here is in the social impact lies in creating insertion opportunities for. People that are at risk of social exclusion, a third we also identify the mechanism through which cognitive frames shapes strategy and this mechanism are the representation of the environment, the representation of agency and the capability to integrate conflicting prescriptions. So to put it more simply, our findings show that managers who adopt the balancing cognitive frame tend to perceive the environment as threatening believe the enterprise has limited capacity for agency and self imposed limits on the ability to combine market and social goals. In turn, uh, these perceptions of adversity are associated with defensive responses, which lead the company to adopt strategy to preserve the status quo. And this involves alternatively compromising on both social and market activities. These compromises limit the scope of films activities, but ensure that it remains sustainable in the long run. On the other side, those adopting an an integrative cognitive frame. And I have morning haze perceptions of opportunities and there are angentic capability. And this enables them to identify synergetic alternatives. Our findings suggest that these factors drive working integration social enterprises to adopt more proactive and exploratory strategies. And is an additional contribution to this three main that I that I mentioned? I would like to emphasize that while most previous research in social enterprises assumes intractable conflict between dual goals and the means employed to achieve them, we find that managers also take synergistic approaches to the social and economic domains when they adopt integrative cognitive frames. And release through this frames the tensions associated with their dual condition. So this is also related to to it's it's a response to our initial research question.
LEFEBVRE Vincent What was for you the the main theoretical or maybe methodological challenge of challenges in addressing such a question?
Ana Oh yes, the both. My girlfriend. Myself are quantitative researchers. It was a great challenge to adopt the different mindset when approaching the research question and developing the analysis, but we have no doubt that this was the adequate approach to respond to our research question. So we we went for it in terms of theory, we have different theoretical perspectives and several of them were relevant to approach our research question. For example, the institutional logics perspective, the paradox management perspective sense making. But we couldn't talk to all of them. We have to focus umm, we are used to start with. Theory is quantity quantitative researchers, but this was an inductive research, so theory came with the back end with with more prominence in the review process. We have to say that that reviewers and the editor were very helpful and we are very grateful for that, orienting us to focus on our data analysis and then discuss our results in relation to theory and this narrowed down the focus to the perspective to each our study contributed the most and it was very helpful.
LEFEBVRE Vincent During your research journey, what was the biggest surprise or the most concerning creative result?
Ana I guess that's some social enterprises had a truly entrepreneurial and innovative discourse very far from the portrait of struggling films that the literature draws most of the time of them, particularly of the social enterprises. Uh, that we analyze in our in our study, which are working integration, social enterprises and in addition I would like to mention something that was not necessarily surprising, but it was really inspiring and this the passion and and commitment that people that we interviewed put into what they do. It was a way of living. Full dedication.
LEFEBVRE Vincent What are the main implications of your work for entrepreneurs, managers, policymakers, practitioners in general?
Ana I I would say that we have two main implications. One is creating awareness of the cognitive frames employed in the understanding of the company's mission. Because this cognitive frames may introduce some biases in the understanding and therefore in the choices this managers make, so becoming aware of this at this cognitive frames and the potential biases they might introduce, maybe helpful in terms of. Developing different strategies that wouldn't come at 1st and UM. The second implication would be. The mapping of the different types of hybrid strategies, what actually what we do when we map the defensive and exploratory strategies is that we develop an inventory of strategies that can inspire and help entrepreneurs and executives of social enterprises manage the inclusivity oriented tests and also the growth economic growth of the organization.
LEFEBVRE Vincent Thanks a lot Ana for participating to our show and presenting your paper entitled Framing of Conflicting demands and Strategies for managing hybridity in social enterprises. All our podcasts are available on entrepreneurship-erd.com and other main podcasts platforms.
Research has shown that social enterprises must constantly balance conflicting demands between their social and economic goals. However, little is known about the factors that shape managers’ strategic choices in response to the tensions associated with social enterprises’ hybrid nature. To address this issue, we conducted a case study analysis of six work integration social enterprises that draws on insights from previous literature on organizational hybrids and managerial frames. This study identifies two distinct cognitive frames that managers adopt to interpret the hybrid condition of their organization, balancing and integrative, each of which is associated with different types of strategies for managing hybridity, defensive and exploratory, respectively. Additionally, we unveil the mechanisms through which these frames shape hybrid strategies, namely, through the representation of the environment, representation of agency, and capability to integrate conflicting prescriptions. These results underscore the individual agency of managers and their idiosyncratic cognitive processes as important explanatory factors for the wide array of strategic responses observed in the management of social enterprises.
We conducted a field experiment in Burkina Faso to investigate the impact of informal sharing obligations within kin networks on entrepreneurial effort. Tailors were incentivized to produce bags and our treatment intervention was to subtly inform tailors’ families about this income opportunity. We expected that informing the family should lead to an average decrease in entrepreneurial effort. However, the overall treatment effect we find is insignificant and the observed effect even points in the opposite direction than expected. Ex-post explorative analysis motivated by previous research findings, reveals that average effects mask differences regarding how tailors adjusted their production processes. Heterogeneity in working longer hours vs. asking additional people for help between the two treatment groups highlights the importance of reciprocity norms and income hiding. Additionally, we show how some tailors in the treatment group were able to utilize their kin network to their joint advantage, underlining the positive potential of kin networks in an uncertain business environment.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08985626.2023.2214534
Practicing entrepreneurship is important for entrepreneurial learning in institutionalized education. However, research is attentive to how this challenges conventional learning arrangements and requires teachers and students to change familiar ways of relating and participating. In this study, we investigate the landscape of participation in a case of experiential entrepreneurship education for non-business postgraduate students. Employing the notion of legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice, we show how students are initiated into entrepreneurship education practice through three modes of participation: compliance, autonomy and authenticity. Even though these participatory modes make sense one by one, their accumulation created tension. Hereby, we illustrate the complex organization of entrepreneurship education as situated social practices. We theorize by employing a practice theory perspective to explore why tensions may be inherent to widely recognized ideals of best practice in experiential entrepreneurship education. This is in contrast to individual learner oriented explanations.
Full text available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2177353
In response to strong revenue and income losses facing a large share of self-employed individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic, the German federal government introduced a €50bn emergency-aid program. Based on real-time online-survey data comprising more than 20,000 observations, we analyze the impact of this program on the confidence to survive the crisis. We investigate how the digitalization level of self-employed individuals influences the program’s effectiveness. Employing propensity score matching, we find that the emergency-aid program had only moderately positive effects on the confidence of self-employed to survive the crisis. However, self-employed whose businesses were highly digitalized, benefitted much more from the state aid than those whose businesses were less digitalized. This only holds true for those self-employed, who started the digitalization processes already before the crisis. Taking a regional perspective, we find suggestive evidence that the quality of the regional broadband infrastructure matters in the sense that it increases the effectiveness of the emergency-aid program. Our findings show the interplay between governmental support programs, the digitalization levels of entrepreneurs, and the regional digital infrastructure. The study helps public policy to improve the impact of crisis-related policy instruments, ultimately increasing the resilience of small firms in times of crises.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/08985626.2023.2196267?
Through the qualitative analysis of 81 semi-structured interviews of academics from the STEM fields, working in UK, Australia, and Italy, we support and challenge the previous literature on academic entrepreneurship. On the one hand, our research supports previous studies which suggest that some academics find compatibility between their academic roles and forms of science commercialization and knowledge transfer. The findings suggest that such an alignment of roles takes place in contexts (disciplinary, proximal) which stimulate and support academic entrepreneurship. At the same time, we argue against of the idea of fusion of academic-entrepreneur role identity and we suggest whilst the two roles may coexist, they are separate, as the academic identity remains the central salient identity. Continuity of core academic values is linked to ‘supranational’ factors such as norms and values of the academic profession and of disciplinary fields, which influence perceptions of alignment or misalignment with various activities, including the entrepreneurial one. We offer a redefinition of academic entrepreneurship through the lens of social entrepreneurship which could constitute the bridge between two worlds which are typically considered difficult to connect.
Full article is available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2178676
This study aims to understand the complex mechanisms of entrepreneurship in context and explores the entrepreneurial identities and experiences of women entrepreneurs in relation to opportunity structures in Turkey. Turkey’s position at the boundary of Western and Middle Eastern geographies and cultures presents a compelling context for the study of women’s entrepreneurship. Drawing on life-story interviews with 11 women entrepreneurs, this study analyses social, political, and institutional opportunity structures in Turkey. The findings illustrate that women entrepreneurs engage in exaggerated perfectionism, strategic political distancing, and closed social positioning in relation to the opportunity structures in Turkey. This study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by providing a more in-depth and nuanced understanding on the relationship between different opportunity structures and women entrepreneurs and herewith responding to the dominance of Western thinking and context on entrepreneurial experiences and identities.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2023.2189314
As social entrepreneurship gains maturity, research has begun to explore the less alluring aspects of the field, including the heroic stance of social entrepreneurs, the assumed moral superiority of their intentions, and the misleading emphasis on solutionism. In this paper, we explore a central component of this criticism, which is the construction of un-realistic venture ideas in social entrepreneurs’ pitches for social change. We analysed social venture business plans and the written feedback provided by judges during a social venture competition, and we used speech act theory to analyse the claims and promises triggering judges’ disbelief. We discovered three linguistic artefacts that underlie the construction of un-realistic venture ideas in social entrepreneurship, which we label holism, devotion, and enlightenment. While these artefacts trigger disbelief, they also play an expressive role as they channel both contestation and dreams. We leverage magical realism to forward an alternative explanation of how venture ideas in social entrepreneurship can act as a cultural form of social protest, which can be seen as a historically contingent, modern revolution.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2158492
Has the Mittelstand lost its charisma? Based on a corpus of newspaper articles, we use a multi-dimensional approach combining content, framing, and metaphor analysis to expose how media report about the digital transformation in the German Mittelstand. In terms of contents, media focus on technical issues, narrowing down the scope of digital transformation. Articles with a main focus on digital transformation show a more positive tonality compared to those with a minor focus. We identified four distinct media narratives. The negative narrative portrays the Mittelstand as in need of help to master the digital transformation, with sickness and military metaphors underlining the negative assessment. The positive narrative reinforces narrow stereotypes of who is successful with digital transformation. The future-oriented narrative evokes a desirable but vague imagined future of digital transformation. The chance-challenge narrative is the only one portraying the Mittelstand both openly and implicitly as being capable of mastering the digital transformation, not least because this narrative also relies on external experts who provide a more varied picture. We contribute to the growing body of narrative entrepreneurship research by illustrating the various mechanisms media use to create a predominantly negative and sceptical assessment of the Mittelstand and its digital transformation.
Technostress is an important by-product of information and communication technologies (ICT). The technostress literature suggests focusing on specific dimensions of technostress, such as techno-overload, which describes when ICT usage demands to work faster and longer. However, only a few studies have dealt with the technostress of small business owners, let alone techno-overload. This is surprising since work overload in general has been identified as an important dimension of job stress for small business owners, and technostress has been identified as an important impediment for workers in general. The aim of the current study is to investigate the effect of techno-overload on well-being outcomes (as a composite measure consisting of physical well-being, mental well-being, sleep quality, burnout, and loneliness) using three data sets of French small business owners. Our results indicate a strong negative correlation between techno-overload and our composite measure of well-being for all three data sets. We interpret our findings for several different disciplines: information systems, small business owners and entrepreneurship, health and well-being, psychology and organization studies. Our data also allow for the identification of contextual effects – the COVID-19 pandemic – since one survey was conducted before, one at the start of, and one during the pandemic.
Full text available on Taylor & Francis Podcast : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08985626.2023.2165713
How does the grand challenge of refugees influence nascent entrepreneurs in host countries? To explore this question, we build on social identity theory and analyse how the 2015 European refugee event is related to the strength of different founder social identities (i.e. Darwinian, Communitarian, and Missionary founder social identities) of nascent entrepreneurs in the countries accommodating the refugees. Using a dataset of 6,096 nascent entrepreneurs from 24 European countries, we reveal a positive relationship between the refugee event and the strength of the Communitarian founder social identity. This relationship is even stronger when the previous percentage of foreign migrants in a country is lower and is mediated by the human health and social work industry. Interestingly, we do not find significant relationships between the refugee event and the strengths of the Darwinian or Missionary founder social identity, respectively. Hence, refugees as a grand challenge are likely to have divergent influences on different types of entrepreneurship in society.Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/08985626.2023.2165712
Identity work, the process through which entrepreneurs create a coherent and distinctive identity for themselves and their businesses, constitutes an important source of legitimacy. Yet while the ongoing social and spatial contexts in which entrepreneurs operate are increasingly viewed as critical contingencies for understanding their identity work, historical context is largely neglected. We focus on how entrepreneurs in the nascent start-up scene in Phnom Penh, Cambodia employ history in their identity work as they navigate a rapidly changing societal context. Based on three months of qualitative field research, our findings indicate that research participants distance themselves from the older generation by describing them as risk-averse, conventional and distrusting, while they embrace their own generation as innovative, globally oriented, and socially engaged. Through the articulation of these generational identity markers, young entrepreneurs construct and position themselves within a historical narrative of Cambodian development and, in turn, seek legitimacy for themselves, their business ventures, and the broader start-up scene. Our contribution lies in providing a more historically-sensitive understanding of entrepreneurial identity work, proposing generational identity work as a mechanism for entrepreneurs to gain legitimacy, and illuminating the importance of conceptualizing generations as social forces in entrepreneurship studies.Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2145616
The development of a nation or a region depends on saving existing businesses as much as on creating new ones. Small business orientation theories suggest that small business owners’ long-term commitment may contribute to the robustness of their venture. Our study further investigates the relationship between small business owners’ affective, continuance and normative commitment and intention to persist with an underperforming venture. Based on a sample of 298 small business owners from Reunion Island, our results first confirm a negative effect of venture decline on small business owners’ intention to persist with their venture. Second, they show a positive effect of affective and continuance commitment on venture persistence. Finally, our main finding is that venture performance positively moderates the effect of normative commitment, with the latter only becoming significant when venture performance declines. This research renews small business orientation theory by suggesting that robustness is not always straightforward and sometimes means persisting in the face of decline, and by arguing that these adverse circumstances put small business owners to the test and fully reveal the strength of their commitment.Full text available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/08985626.2022.2152107
This paper introduces and discusses the concept of animatorship in relation to rural enterprise and development. At its simplest level, animatorship is the art of animating others to achieve their objectives. We develop and apply this concept to understanding community development and community enterprise, with a specific emphasis on rural communities. We present a descriptive, conceptual study of a new concept i.e. animation in the context of entrepreneurship. The fieldwork for this paper took the form of structured face-to-face interviews with community development workers in November-January 2015/2016. These workers actively stimulate, motivate and inspire others and orchestrate situations and people to bring about change through others, not merely doing things for them. They build environments and relationships in which people grow, directing and focusing energies to develop and empower people’s emotional and social lives and relationships through patient, open listening and group conversation.Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2017.1401122
Informed by contributions of Professor Alistair Anderson to the social perspective of entrepreneurship, rooted in social relationships and social capital, this article examines how members of an online community collectively interpret and negotiate the challenges of pursuing entrepreneurship alongside parenthood. This article adopts a multi-staged research design, incorporating netnography, participant observation, and qualitative semi-structured interviews. The analysis reveals the critical role of networking in how entrepreneuring women construct and maintain community connections and distinguishes between three dimensions of community engagement: Building, Being and Belonging. Drawing on communities of practice as an analytical lens, we offer new insights into the form and function of communal entrepreneurial practices facilitated by the digital environment.Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2083692
Blockchain technology is expected to have many far-reaching effects on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial activity. In this paper, we explore blockchain technology from the perspective of vulnerable entrepreneurial ecosystems. Specifically, we look into how blockchain technology is affecting six domains of entrepreneurial ecosystems identified by prior researchers: policy, finance, culture, supports, human capital and markets. We highlight major opportunities that blockchain technology can create for vulnerable populations by its effect on these domains. The analysis of this paper is expected to help researchers understand the implications of blockchain technology to vulnerable entrepreneurial ecosystems and generate research insights that can benefit vulnerable communities. Various research avenues have been outlined.Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2162979
We explore the experiences of LGBT ethnic minority entrepreneurs, their changing locations and their entrepreneurial activities. Using a unique mixed-method approach which collected empirical data from Germany and the Netherlands, the paper combines an ethnographic fieldwork of intersectional entrepreneurs, community activists and policy-makers with an original survey with LGBT customers. Our findings contribute to understanding of intersectionality by revealing the role played by the contextualized embeddedness of intersectional entrepreneurs at the different geographic scales of supranational, national, regional and inter and intra-urban. While such embeddedness frames the challenges they face, it also provides opportunities for intersectional entrepreneurs. Using a multi-scalar perspective, this paper delivers a spatially contextual perspective of entrepreneurial diversity and provides a framework to analyse the complex issues and contexts with which intersectional entrepreneurs are both confronted and embedded within. This paper contributes to refining the spatial context of entrepreneurship which has gained attention in recent studies of entrepreneurship and regional development. The paper responds to a call for gender entrepreneurship scholars to contribute to understanding of intersectional entrepreneurship. Finally, this study goes beyond the binary view of female migrant entrepreneurship by adopting a more gender diverse lens which considers the experiences of LGBT* entrepreneurs from ethnic minorities.Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2120086
How can cryptocurrency gain legitimacy in the eyes of users? Drawing upon the theories of institutional uncertainty and legitimacy, we propose a process model in which legitimacy for cryptocurrencies acquired at the market level via rhetorical strategies (i.e. evasive action) will reduce uncertainty in the formal institutional environment. This reduction in institutional uncertainty will beget additional legitimacy, and thus higher performance for individual crypto firms, on average. This study (1) advances institutional entrepreneurship research by investigating the legitimation process of cryptocurrency; (2) extends our understanding of the evolution of an innovation and its diffusion under institutional uncertainty; (3) contributes to the development of institutional theory by elucidating how cryptocurrencies can change existing institutions, and even create new ones, through evasive entrepreneurship; and (4) provides an overall theoretical rationale for how cryptocurrency can become more widely accepted.Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2121859
The practice of ‘academic entrepreneuring’ here signifies a scholar’s innovative, integrative and persistent mode of pursuing and integrating a university’s three tasks, those of doing research, teaching students and performing outreach activities. The success of academic entrepreneuring is conditioned by the individual’s and the university’s ability to become recognized as a legitimate and trusted knowledge-creator in the regional context. Building such confidence in turn requires continuous, hands-on and whole-hearted engagement with relevant stakeholders. This calls for the mobilization of embodied practical knowledge that draws upon cognitive, affective as well as connative capabilities. Four consecutive autobiographic projects, each covering two decades or more, are reported and reviewed as instances of academic entrepreneuring. These projects and their different qualitative methodologies and varying researcher identities jointly constitute a scholar’s life-long learning and achievements as an academic entrepreneur, beginning with mainly listening to the field and ending with invasive enactive research.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2126014
Research on business incubation has been dominated by studies exploring university-industry technology transfer and high technology accelerators. Less is known about Business Incubation Centres (BICs), specifically, how their formal and informal structures may impact upon client development. Drawing on concepts from the community of practice (CoP) literature and organizational culture, we explore if BICs can be considered to be CoPs. We also seek to unravel the key elements which underpin the culture of a BIC and how these elements may provide enabling or constraining conditions for a CoP to emerge. Through a qualitative methodology of regional-based BICs in Ireland, we illustrate how the amount of time spent on campus; the nature of the working week; the scalability of the enterprise; and the capacity of the enterprise to meet the criteria associated with high potential start-ups influences clients’ perceptions of the value of BICs. We provide new theoretical insights which suggest that BICs are a CoP with a culture that can be studied, captured, and illustrated. Practical and policy implications are suggested to enhance the effectiveness of BICs for both clients and regions.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2112761
Social enterprises are often characterized by the vision and drive of an individual founder. We challenge this by taking inspiration from Alistair R. Anderson’s arguments that social entrepreneurship is better understood as enacted within a social context. We move beyond linear conceptualizations to consider a more nuanced, contextually informed picture, where understandings of what it is to be ‘social’ in one’s entrepreneuring are created at the interaction of the individual and their situation. A narrative approach is used to analyse 25 life stories used by social entrepreneurs in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan, an area of social transition. We access how these entrepreneurs give meaning to the ‘social’ aspects of what they do. Our findings present a multifaceted character, defined by their responses to changing social contexts. This is manifest in entrepreneurial practice, where we have a vacillation between acts of social rebellion and an enterprising organization of benevolence, evolving in a social context which changes with and, in part, because of our social entrepreneurs. We move beyond definitional characteristics and closer to a theory of practice, by considering how social entrepreneurs interact with changing social demands and adapt their activities accordingly.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2077990
Studies on the intersection between women’s education, motivations for entrepreneurship, and the structural constraints women face in Sub-Saharan Africa are scarce. In this study, we analyse the influence of education level on how women entrepreneurs in Uganda define business success. To this end, a total of 109 female agribusiness entrepreneurs were interviewed. The results firstly show that women’s definition of business success and their level of education are intertwined. Secondly, that the main definitions of success are business performance, economic independence, and family welfare, which can be categorized in terms of women’s practical interest, strategic interest, or a continuum of both, and where the education level of women is an influencing factor. The study has practical implications for policies aimed at women’s economic empowerment and education. To transform the structure of gender relations, more opportunities for women’s entrepreneurial training and child education are also needed, as well gender-sensitive indicators of business success that account for the particular interests of women in specific contexts.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2128897
Building on Alistair Anderson’s work, this paper proposes transforming enterprise education to deeply address questions of sustainability, social justice and hope in our time of multiple and complex crises. New pedagogies, practices, vocabularies and connections help us to enact crises in entrepreneurial, ethical and creative ways, enabling us to remain hopeful in the face of unknown horizons. Drawing from critical pedagogies, from Epistemologies of the South, and from the wisdoms of Alistair Anderson, the paper outlines how transforming to a more, hopeful, socially just and sustainable enterprise education could move us beyond present alternatives. We suggest that transforming enterprise education (TrEE) would better facilitate students as ethical change-makers when they engage with their worlds, and its unseen future horizons. TrEE emphasizes the time needed for questioning dominant meanings and space for experimenting with new ones. It invites re-placing us in the margins and with the excluded. It takes an expansive view of the ecosystem, and places enterprise within its wider context. It focuses students, teachers, entrepreneurs and various other stakeholders in learning together with the non-human and relies on sustainable stewardship, social justice and hope at the core of transforming enterprise education.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2071999
Intrapreneurship is critical for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in that it enhances innovation and organizational performance. This study details how intrapreneurship develops in subsidized relative to unsubsidized SMEs. We build on behavioural additionality research, as these studies examine changes in firm behaviour that occur after the firm receives public support. Prior studies focus on the effect on external collaboration, but subsidies also can lead to organizational learning and upgraded competencies, implying the potential for changes to organizational routines. Our test of the behavioural additionality effect relies on an original longitudinal data set involving manufacturing SMEs in the Dutch province of Limburg. The data analysis combines propensity score matching with a difference-in-difference approach, which reveals a significantly higher increase in one aspect of intrapreneurship, namely strategic renewal behaviour, among SMEs that receive an innovation subsidy. The findings advance understanding of intrapreneurship and behavioural additionality effects and provide policy makers with new evidence of the added value of subsidy programmes.
Full text available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2117417
Drawing on self-leadership theory, this study investigates the influence of rewards, – classified as natural rewards and material rewards, – and of prosocial motivation on the crowds’ willingness to contribute to social entrepreneurial crowdfunding. Data was collected from a tailor-made crowdfunding campaign. Survey results from 208 respondents confirmed that the expectation of natural rewards is positively related to the crowds’ willingness to contribute to social entrepreneurial crowdfunding and that prosocial motivation mediated this relationship. Likewise, we found a strong negative relationship between material rewards and prosocial motivation. Surprisingly, this negative relationship weakly affected the willingness to contribute. In other words, material rewards can crowd-out the prosocial motivation, but with limited impact on the willingness to contribute. These findings extend current understanding of the motivational drivers of social entrepreneurial crowdfunding in a prosocial-giving context. It contributes to theory-driven knowledge of crowdfunding by applying self-leadership theory to social entrepreneurial crowdfunding. The study implies that social entrepreneurs must strategically design their crowdfunding campaign to enhance the crowds’ prosocial motivation and expectation of natural rewards in order to attract funders that are most likely to contribute. The study calls for future investigation on the design of crowdfunding campaigns with or without material rewards.
Full text available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2108904
This paper engages with the concepts of ‘populism’ and ‘activism’ in entrepreneurial storytelling in order to explain how entrepreneurship may be both an individual and a collective endeavour. Through a case study of a moose park, we show how entrepreneurs move back and forth between individualism and collectivism with what seems to be little forethought. Our findings suggest that populism and activism function as a duality that essentially serves two purposes: populism reinforces the entrepreneur stereotype, highlighting the individual entrepreneur’s business venture; whilst activism challenges stereotypes, initiating new meaning, and social and ecological value change. Embeddedness appears a necessary condition for both these processes – the social connections in context affect the possibilities to initiate change, whether individualist or collectivist. Thus, we contribute to entrepreneurship as practice by showing how storytelling both strengthens and changes social context; and how storytelling alters depending on the social context, and the different forms of embeddedness in it.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2083690
This research uses hierarchical linear modelling to test the KSTE in a developing-country context. By trying this theory on a different setting as is usually studied, we attempt to identify boundary conditions, expanding this theory’s understanding. Results show the low effectiveness of this theory in a developing economy, suggesting that additional dimensions are needed to understand it completely. In reviewing the high-tech sector (the only sector in which we found evidence that the KSTE mechanisms apply), our data shows the importance of diversity for technological innovation and thus for firms born out of spillovers. Finally, we find that easiness to start a business interacts with human capital into forming high-tech new firms. Under a more bureaucratic system, high-knowledge human capital will have fewer incentives to switch from employment to self-employment and start a venture. By dealing with the specificities of developing economies when dealing with the KSTE, policymakers can avoid applying police recipes coming from findings related only to developed economies that cannot fit with the characteristics of these countries. In this context, this phenomenon is not particularly relevant for fostering new ventures, joining on the call of avoiding standardized strategies to build efficient entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2117418
This article explores if and how the entrepreneuring efforts of an endogenous NGO can entrepreneurially empower widow necessity entrepreneurs living in extreme poverty in a rural area of Northern Ghana. In reconceptualizing necessity entrepreneurship as engagement in necessity contexts, three main context specific actions and processes were foregrounded: values-based action focus, upskilling by boundaried choice; and forming, organizing and maintaining symbiotic relationships. Subsequently, the extent to which these actions and processes contributed to empowerment were assessed and explained. Upon outlining how the research contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of entrepreneurship in necessity contexts and broadens our understanding of entrepreneurship, the article ends by discussing the research’s implications and limitations.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2087746
This article, in an act of transmutation or world-making, replaces a workshop that was envisioned between one of the authors and Alistair Anderson. It takes the form of a dialog with one of his main co-authors to retrospectively and analytically explore the collective work of Alistair on ‘embeddedness’. We find that Alistair initiated a scholarly community of practice on a socialized view of entrepreneurship (‘entrepreneuring’), the essence of which can be captured through the notion of embeddedness. We describe the emergence of this community, its key production phases, and highlight the main features and insights of its approach, which was never theorized as such. The article also presents possible theoretical extensions of this research by opening several research doors for future work.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08985626.2022.2072000
Entrepreneurship has been both celebrated and critiqued in terms of its ability to assist women in developing countries to overcome the constraints of patriarchy, with recent views acknowledging its potential for incremental, dialectical change. This is particularly true for women entrepreneurs in contexts where Islamic gender relations are practiced, which can pose certain limits to women’s entrepreneurship. We contribute to an emerging stream of research that highlights how women entrepreneurs in such contexts leverage diverse interpretative repertoires to describe and justify their work. In particular, we shed light on the understudied but populous group of women entrepreneurs of lower social class in contexts of moderate Islam. We identify virtuous repertoires as a key discursive element that assists women in these contexts to present their entrepreneurial activities and discuss implications for theory and practice.
Full paper available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2072002
In this article, we introduce the special issue on entrepreneurship and embeddedness. We do so by providing a brief overview of existing research on the topic focused on three important conversations related to process, context and theoretical foundations. The overview highlights essential contributions from extant research and suggests that expansion and advancement in the research conversation can be accomplished by focusing on dynamic and multilayered conceptualizations of embeddedness and by broadening the theoretical foundations of our research. We also present and position the papers in the special issue within the conversations on process, context and theoretical foundations in entrepreneurship research on embeddedness.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2055152
This paper aims to extend the theoretical foundations of entrepreneurship education by integrating several of the most relevant lessons from Anderson’s contribution into current conceptualizations. We identify three main dimensions of Anderson’s work useful for our purpose: conceptualization of entrepreneurship; network and social capital as mechanisms to explain entrepreneurship as a socially embedded phenomenon; and epistemological and methodological reflection. These dimensions enrich the debate on the strategic dimensions targeting, connecting and reflecting suggested to advance the field of entrepreneurship education. We highlight important implications that help us reflect on the value of entrepreneurship education by emphasizing the role of the social dimension in teaching entrepreneurship, the importance of understanding entrepreneurship as a complex phenomenon to identify goals and more specifically tailor pedagogy, and the need to question methods of inquiry as the field evolves and expands its area of investigation.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2072001
Migrant entrepreneurship has been acknowledged in the literature to be a dynamic and diffused phenomenon that characterizes local systems within European countries in the form of ethnic economies. The aim of the paper is to investigate the phenomenon of ethnic quasi-enclave industrial sub-clusters within industrial districts and to analyse social capital within the economic and social dynamics. The interpretative framework adapts the mixed-embeddedness approach to a case study of Wenzhounese migrant socioeconomic quasi-enclave leather industrial sub-clusters located adjacent to the industrial district area of Florence (Italy). Given the complexity of the phenomenon, the research study adopted a mixed-method approach. The qualitative methods included a one-year observational analysis, in-depth interviews conducted with key stakeholders and life-course interviews conducted with migrant Wenzhounese entrepreneurs. Structured interviews were conducted with multiple micro-entrepreneurs and their households to conduct a multiple-case study analysis and social network analysis. Both were based on data collected via a survey administered to a random sample of enterprises. This analysis contributes to the existing literature on migrant enterprises and communities within industrial clusters in Italy, adding new evidence related to ethnic entrepreneurship and the importance of social capital in the social and economic dynamics that influence micro entrepreneurs and their community.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2062620
A generalized belief in entrepreneurship as a source of economic growth ensures sustained interest in the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) concept, capturing the attention of governments and regional authorities. This has generated a plethora of public policies aimed at creating and developing EEs, frequently without solid theoretical and empirical foundations for its design, with consequent policies risking being ineffective. To address this, we develop theory through a systematic synthesis of qualitative studies, exploring a set of EEs, from different countries, dimensions, and characteristics. Our evidence-based approach diverges from extant studies that frequently examine a single ecosystem. The results of the systematic synthesis led us to propose a typology of ideal-types of intervention, the ecologist, the creator, the promoter and the landscaper. These provide a path towards the development of a better understanding of the type of dominant policy intervention in EE, also enabling the study of policy evolution and its alternative trajectories regarding future development. By using an evidence-based analysis, we enhance coherence through incorporating diverse perspectives not as conflicting or contradictory, but as part of a structured set of policymaking options. This sets a basis for future research, especially related to the evolution process, and provide evidence-based advice for practitioners.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2045634
Based on the works of Alistair Anderson, this article explores entrepreneuring in the context of entrepreneurial families prior to, and following, the death of a leading family member in business. Until now, literature has suggested that the loss of a leading family member may bring complexity and chaos to ongoing entrepreneurial efforts. Drawing on a complex adaptive system and stewardship perspective, this study examines the role of death in entrepreneuring in four entrepreneurial families. With the loss of a leading family member in business, social processes of adaptation in entrepreneurial trajectories are revealed. Our analysis shows that these processes allow members to reorganize, recalibrate, and reconnect aspects of family and business. Our study contributes to understanding social processes in entrepreneuring by capturing how death can influence entrepreneurial choices and progression over time, focusing on what family entrepreneurs do. Conceptualizing the family as a complex adaptive system contributes to a theoretical perspective of stewardship as fluid and collective.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2067902
In this research note, we further Alistair R. Anderson’s argument that an atomized view of entrepreneurship as an economic function provides limited understanding of what it is to actually do entrepreneurship. We take the stance that entrepreneurship, as a process, is born of social context. What it is to be and what it is to do entrepreneurship is informed directly by the images of entrepreneurship accepted in society. To better understand the implications of this, we access the ways in which entrepreneurship is imagined in three ostensibly similar country settings: UK, Italy and Finland. We analyse the social discourses surrounding the concept from a sample of enterprise students across the three areas. Importantly, these participants are not entrepreneurs in their own right, but are considered interested stakeholders, in that the meaning they ascribe to entrepreneurship will partly inform their future approaches to it. We contrast data from 15 semi-structured interviews with policy commentary and measurable outcomes and find nuanced differences in how entrepreneurship is perceived and enacted. The implications of our findings encourage a more holistic approach to the study of entrepreneurship, avoiding the self-affirming dogma of the purely economic or purely constructionist.
Full text available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2071997
his paper employs a practice perspective to understand the hanging-together of networking and production practices in small craft-food businesses. Based on a case study from a rural region of Germany, we explore how practices are held together by teleoaffective structures and socio-material arrangements, pointing to the role of machines as nodes in networking and production practices. We furthermore demonstrate how the niche-specific mode of these practices facilitates cooperation within the niche but hampers cooperation beyond the niche. Last, the hanging-together of producing and networking practices eventually leads to a niche-specific path for business growth. We add to the blossoming entrepreneurship-as-practice (EaP) literature by delineating how the bundle of entrepreneurial practices of producing, selling, and networking works to constitute a niche business realm, highlighting the agency of matter.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2062619
The purpose of this paper is to add a contextual understanding of care ethics to the nascent literature on ethics in social entrepreneurship. To this end, an interpretive study of social bricoleur entrepreneurs in rural India is presented and the constitutive effects of the enactment of care ethics are articulated. First, this enactment is examined as a relational practice between social entrepreneurs and local communities. Then, the notion of formative context is used to analyse how this enactment has expressions of human agency that constitute the societal context. Further, it is shown that context is not something that exists on its own but is instead enacted in the caring practices of social entrepreneurs. The micro-level practices of relating and the macro-level societal structures become malleable in the enactment of care ethics. This study has two major contributions. First, by departing from the notion of ethics as a characteristic of an individual, it shows how social entrepreneurs give and receive care through mutuality and human interaction. Second, by adding the analysis of sensemaking and formative context to care ethics, it deepens the understanding of context as conditions that facilitate the enactment of care ethics and is constituted by that enactment.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2055150
Forced displacement drastically changes the nature of refugees’ connection to their home countries and requires them to build new ties to their host countries. While refugees undergo the dynamic transformation of their embeddedness after arriving in host countries, previous studies on refugee entrepreneurship have not sufficiently examined the dynamic and procedural nature of refugees’ embeddedness and its influence on their entrepreneurial activities. This study seeks to understand how the process of embedding influences refugees’ resource mobilization in their entrepreneurial activities. Based on 20 interviews with refugee entrepreneurs in Germany, this study revealed that forced detachment from home-country contexts led to a loss of certain resources while simultaneously creating opportunities for refugees to develop resources by building new connections. This study challenges the conventional structural deterministic approach of mixed embeddedness and theorizes disembedding and re-embedding processes of refugee entrepreneurs. The findings suggest that these processes require a cognitive process on the part of entrepreneurial agents to become aware of a loss of resources and to reinterpret the value of their resources. Furthermore, this paper discusses how these processes constrain and enable refugees’ access to resources. The findings offer implications for policymakers of refugee-hosting countries and refugee support organizations.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2047799
This paper reviews the literature on community enterprises (CEs), i.e. organizations that engage in commercial activity and operate for the development of a local community by bringing economic, social, and environmental benefits. In the face of widespread recognition of the positive role they play in impoverished territories, there is no general agreement on their very nature and the type of underlying entrepreneurship. Through a systematic review of CE literature, referred to the period 1990–2020, our paper aims to provide an extensive background of issues related to CEs, their specificities, the kind of entrepreneurship they rely on, their role in local development. In addition, we try to outline their liabilities and the main challenges they face, intending to delineate implications for future research on the issue. Beyond descriptive analytics, results highlight the main research topics of CEs, as well as multiple challenges that connect researchers and practitioners interested in the topic. Given the role of CEs in the regeneration of places and communities, our study also highlights the need for research to incorporate broader analytical perspectives that simultaneously examine both the barriers faced by CEs in these contexts and the factors that may sustain them.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2047797
There is a re-positioning of entrepreneurship towards the sustaining, the frugal, the local, and the everyday. This poses challenges for peripheral policy work, especially around growth, at sectoral and regional levels. Through collaborative workshops with engaged craft brewing stakeholders, this study generated deep new insights into how diverse forms of value can come to be created, shared, stewarded, invested in, grown, given away, and held as a collective resource, in order to both sustain community, and build sectoral growth. As such, we highlight novel entrepreneurial practices and capitals which, taken together, can respond both to critical chorus demands for an urgent repositioning towards frugal sustaining folk enterprise, and yet also retain a strong sense of peripheral socio-economic progress implied by the growth agenda, and its policies.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2021.1914741
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We conduct a comprehensive review of embeddedness in entrepreneurship research. Although the term “embeddedness” is frequently used in this field of study, less is known about the ways in which it is operationalized and applied. Using criterion sampling, we analyse 198 articles in order to investigate how embeddedness is conceptualized and what role it plays in the extant entrepreneurship literature. We categorize our findings based on different phases of the entrepreneurial process (early, mature and exit) and outline the dominant focus and the main conceptualization of embeddedness for each phase. We highlight important learnings for each of the three phases and identify potential areas for conceptual development. Across the phases, we find that embeddedness and context are often used interchangeably. We thus call for construct clarity in the field. In the existing literature, entrepreneurs are generally portrayed as reactive to embeddedness, resulting in a loss of entrepreneurial agency. To remedy this, we introduce the term agencement, which takes into account the relationship between the entrepreneurship and embeddedness. Further, entrepreneurs are found to be embedded in multiple contexts at the same time, and embeddedness can be understood at different levels and to different degrees. To address this complexity, it is relevant to focus on the embedding process itself, acknowledging that it takes place in social interactions including cultural, cognitive, and emotional aspects between contexts and across levels. While the extant literature supports the notion that embeddedness is important for understanding entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs, it does not necessarily support our understanding of how embeddedness takes form or why it takes certain forms. We therefore include a call for future research to turn to process and practice theories.
Full article on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2021.2021298
This article examines the development of an entrepreneurial community focused on civic wealth creation. This case study identifies how a team of community entrepreneurs successfully leveraged their relationships to develop a shared vision and invest complementary assets to re-build a defunct cotton mill and form an entrepreneurial community around it to create civic wealth through the creation of opportunities of others and curation of the space. Building on the case, the paper explicates the process through which the entrepreneurial community is formed with the intent to create civic wealth, elaborates on the challenges of maintaining dual roles of animator and entrepreneur and highlights the importance of the maintenance of relationships in entrepreneurial communities.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2021.1964612
Literature examining the emergence of social enterprises from traditional non-profits has noted a shift in organizational mission, from a predominantly social mission towards a dual focus on both social and commercial goals. Less is known about how such social enterprises, which transition from traditional non-profits, retain the original non-profit social mission. The present study, employing an institutional logics perspective, identifies how a social enterprise, emerging from a traditional non-profit in India, re-conceptualized its means in diverse ways towards a common social end, preserved its core guiding principles and processes, and maintained a broad organizational vision, to seamlessly retain and continue with the original social mission. The study concludes with implications for social enterprise and institutional logics research.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2037163
While angel investment is a vital source of seed capital, evidence suggests that gendered ascriptions leave women at a disadvantage in terms of both the supply and demand for angel finance. With the bulk of research being skewed towards advanced economies, this paper investigates the motivations and implications behind a woman-to-woman angel fund in an Arab patriarchal context and argues for how it is extending the institutional space. Semi-structured interviews conducted with Lebanese women angel investors show that they are driven by the responsibility to empower women economically and legitimize females’ entrepreneurial roles at seed level. In turn, the initiative broadens the ecosystem’s boundaries on the one hand, while also legitimizing women-led start-ups by giving them a voice and visibility, allowing them to secure additional onboard seed investments. Accordingly, while acknowledging that rebalancing the gender disparity in the entrepreneurial market is not exclusively a women’s issue, our findings show that such initiatives could be an entry point for a gradual transformative change in similar patriarchal societies.
Full paper available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2037164
Entrepreneurs’ use of linguistic practices, such as storytelling, in building legitimacy with customers and others is well documented. Yet, not all entrepreneurs may equally use or benefit from such practices in their legitimacy-building efforts. For those with stigmatized social identities, like disability, embodied properties and practices of non-linguistic, more visual kind, may be salient despite being under-explored in the entrepreneurial legitimacy studies. To address this knowledge gap, this article examines how disabled entrepreneurs gain legitimacy with customers and, more specifically, how impairment visibility shapes their capacity to do so. Drawing primarily on in-depth interviews with UK-based entrepreneurs, the article extends Suchman’s work by reconceptualizing his legitimacy-building strategies considering impairment visibility. It is argued that impairment visibility can both enable and constrain legitimacy depending on the product offering and the target market. Disabled entrepreneurs are found to adopt four embodied legitimacy-building strategies in the marketplace, each with specific implications for their micro-level interactions with customers.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2021.1974101
Entrepreneurship research views context as central to understanding entrepreneurship as a fluid social construction. Our study answers recent call to focus on a diversity of organizational forms to deepen theorizing and to broaden the domain of what is considered entrepreneurship. Worker cooperatives are a type of social enterprise under exposed in the entrepreneurship literature. Thus, we investigate how context impacts collective social entrepreneurial processes over time by exploring how worker cooperative entrepreneurs view their contexts and their own entrepreneurial initiatives’ purposes. We introduce the term ‘participative social entrepreneurship’, which we define as ‘democratic and collaborative action, amongst both similar and diverse actors to foster positive societal change’. Findings based on a longitudinal study of worker cooperative entrepreneurs from two European territories over 2011-2020 highlight the relevance of context and purpose interplay in shaping worker cooperative entrepreneurs’ perceptions and so, the construction of participative social entrepreneurship. The study reveals that while, in theory, the worker cooperative form has a prosocial purpose naturally embedded in its democratic governance structure, social entrepreneurship in action does not always translate into voices that contest the status quo and highlights the necessity of paying attention to the factors that make participative social entrepreneurship dynamic and real.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2021.1914740
Globalization, digital technologies, societal and environmental concerns influence the way family firms operate locally and internationally. Family firms are often torn between their local and global environments, simultaneously visible and embedded in their local environment while marketing their products and services abroad. Unlike large multinationals that have often lost their roots, family firms manifest an active interest in maintaining their local roots and traditions. Moreover, increasing concerns with sustainable development call for continuity through sustainability aimed at improving local and global socioeconomic conditions. This editorial of the special issue on ‘Locality and Internationalization of Family Firms’ discusses this tension that family firms face and how they can build bridges between communities increasingly drifting apart. By bridging local and global environments, family firms can contribute to the sustainable development of society. We present a research agenda addressing this particular bridging function of family firms and propose several avenues for future research.
Full introduction available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2021.1925846
There is emergent literature that converges from neuroscience and entrepreneurship research, but the definitions and interlinkages are still inconsistent. We conduct a systematic literature review of 167 papers on the interface between neuroscience and entrepreneurship to address this. We observe the literature trends examining the interlinkages between neuroscience and entrepreneurial intention through six antecedents, namely - molecular neuroscience, systems neuroscience, behavioral neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, and computational neuroscience. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurial intention impacts entrepreneurial activity through five factors, including (1) opportunity recognition, (2) evaluation and risk-taking, (3) entrepreneurial cognition, (4) entrepreneurial behavior, and (5) entrepreneurial decision-making. From our discussions, the links among the neural factors affecting entrepreneurship are identified, and a research agenda highlighting a pathway for future studies is proposed.
Full text available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2021.1966106
- Can you tell us what is the origin of your paper; why have you decided to address this particular topic and what is the question you aimed to answer with your paper? Context/observed phenomenon/own practice/literature gap…
Entrepreneurship is an important subject as it helps develop creative business models without falling prey to older ideas. The very first question that I have observed over time is what brings the discovery of new business models, why some entrepreneurs are more successful than the others, what thought process underlies the entrepreneurial decisions. All these questions pertain to the black box of the human body that is the brain. So, neuroentrepreneurship is at the intersection of neuroscience and entrepreneurship.
It is interesting to understand the underlying entrepreneurial activity from the lens of neuroscience. Observation is very important to make us see the unexpected and stimulate curiosity, leading to new experiments and establishment of new paradigm, which forms the subject matter of neuroentrepreneurship.
- What are the main contributions of your paper?
Our study presents a comprehensive synthesis of missing aspects of neural compositions that could be beneficial to entrepreneurial decision-making. We suggest the role of various methodologies in conducting neuroentrepreneurship studies for investigating entrepreneurial behaviour. Neuroimaging techniques such as EEG, FMRI, etc., are crucial in mapping the functional areas of the brain while performing task-based studies and correlating with psychological assessments via questionnaires, in-depth interviews, etc.
Whether an entrepreneur is born or made can be answered by using the nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy method for assessing the role of genetic biomarkers and comparing it with functional brain activations.
As part of practical implications, the paper suggests introducing neural and behavioural artefacts or a target-oriented training for entrepreneurs by the use of neuroplasticity for educating entrepreneurs for better decisions.
- What was for you the main theoretical and/or methodological challenge(s) in addressing such a question?
The study underlines the relationship between neuroscience and entrepreneurship by reviewing and critiquing 167 articles about the interface between neuroscience and entrepreneurship, which is the most important part and yet challenging in nature. The study reveals that the brain’s neural underpinnings impact entrepreneurial intention through six antecedents: molecular neuroscience, systems neuroscience, behavioural neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, and computational neuroscience, to review the articles and understand their actual placement as to which antecendent is more important for synthesis of the literature. Understanding the role of cognitive factors and social psychological factors in entrepreneurial activity was another vital task of this study.
However, successful entrepreneurial decision-making rests on problem-solving capacity and opportunity recognition at the junction of temporal, neural, and cognitive levels. As researchers, it is pertinent to understand the challenges involved in such interdisciplinary studies and also, to understand the need to overcome those for evolution of the new paradigm of Neuroentrepreneurship.
- During your research journey what was your biggest surprise or the most counter intuitive result?
The role of molecular neuroscience is linked with the occupational choice of an individual, opportunity recognition and career choice. Our biggest surprise comes from the studies in molecular neuroscience. I come from management background and I was amazed to see the role of Dopamine and serotonin as they both are neurotransmitters and regulate similar functions in human body while have different effects on it. The dissociable role of dopamine receptor system is seen in learning about outcomes in value-based decision-making while serotonin plays a role in learning about bad decision outcomes and regulation of cognitive biases.
I feel that neuroscience and entrepreneurship can pave way for some great discoveries in the near future.
- What are the main implications of your work for entrepreneurs, managers or practitioners in general?
Introducing neural and behavioural artefacts for a target-oriented training for entrepreneurs by the use of neuroplasticity, which can be used both by institutions of tertiary education to educate potential entrepreneurs and by entrepreneurial training institutions that are targeting active entrepreneurs. Hence, the practical utilization of the results shall be of a global character. Therefore, the utilization of the results in terms of articles, presentations, and lecture notes can go beyond the scope of entrepreneurs and enterprises can use this research to improve entrepreneurial skillset and better opportunity recognition in the businesses that have underlying neural processes. These are also important for managers and practitioners in the field of management. At this point, we cannot neglect the biological foundation of us and what makes us Homo sapiens different from other species and the neural underpinnings helping us to take decisions.
This paper explores the interaction and interdependence between family firms and sparsely populated regions. Interactivity underlines the dynamics of the setting and how it changes based on activities between the firm and the context, whereas interdependence refers to how the family firm and the region become mutually reliant on one another. Five case studies show that while the firms act under similar conditions in terms of disparity, their interplay with and dependence on the region differ. The study points to how the citizenship of the family firms is fundamental and how employment is at the heart of the interdependence, while those firms interacting most strongly with the region are those expanding beyond what would be expected by a family firm in terms of traditions and risk aversion. This again indicates a complex pattern of interactivities and interdependencies between family firms and sparsely populated regions. The paper provides important dimensions to theories on family firms’ local contexts specifically related to under-researched settings of sparsely populated regions and important implications for managers, public actors and policy makers, not the least related to support to such contexts.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2021.1925847
Entrepreneurial resource construction through bricolage is an underappreciated element in a growing body of entrepreneurship and organization studies examining bricolage as an organizational strategy under conditions of resource scarcity. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic data, this study of the Danish island Samsø’s successful transition to renewable energy argues for a richer understanding and a more positive appraisal of entrepreneurial bricolage as a multifaceted strategy for change on the community level. By demonstrating the constructed nature of the resource environments identified on Samsø, the article argues that bricolage, rather than revolving around the combination of already available resources to create new entrepreneurial ventures, is a process involving the construction of resources to achieve change. An in-depth understanding of this process of resource construction is especially relevant in the context of local sustainable energy transitions, as bricolage, in this context, can enable the community to work towards a shared goal without accepting the constraints of the resource-scarce local environment.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2021.1964613
Our study investigates whether the quality of regional institutions influences firms’ likelihood of being a family firm. We explore our conjecture using the EU-EFIGE/Bruegel-UniCredit dataset, which provides comparable cross-country data on manufacturing firms in seven European countries. We use a multilevel framework to analyse how firm- and regional-level variables influence firms’ likelihood of being a family firm. We find evidence that location matters in explaining firms’ probability of being a family firm but that differences between countries are more relevant than are differences between regions. Our results show that the lower the quality of regional institutions, the higher the likelihood of a firm being a family firm. Our results are robust to alternative regional-level control variables and persist after several robustness checks.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2021.1925849
The heart of family business and family entrepreneurship is the family. Challenging our current understanding of what constitutes a family is important to advance the emerging field of family entrepreneurship. In this conceptual paper, we expand previous research focus with a transactional approach to family and explore family entrepreneurship across generations using the context of Benedictine organizations. The monastic family, defined from the transactional point of view, represents approximately 1,500 years of family history and entrepreneurial activities. Considering an extraordinary example of Benedictines and integrating literature from organizational behaviour, psychology, family science, family business and family entrepreneurship, we investigate the transactional family influence on development and maintenance of resilience capacity (i.e. resiliency) at organizational, family and individual levels. In particular, we develop a theoretical model conceptualizing how values and behavioural guidelines communicated through a code of ethics influences resiliency of (1) family firms through development of a long-term orientation, (2) families through maintenance of a balanced family type, and (3) individuals through enhancement of an individual work-nonwork balance. Finally, we discuss theoretical and practical implications.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2020.1727092
War and conflict brings about adverse changes for those who are displaced. How do entrepreneurial individuals respond to such adversity to either set-up, or continue with their existing entrepreneurial endeavours that would improve their own livelihood or that of others who have been affected? Whilst previous studies have found local knowledge, networks and resources to be crucial in the development of ventures in the war and conflict context, alienation from mainstream society within the host location often means that to succeed, those who are displaced require alternative strategies and approaches. Through examining the entrepreneurial ventures of six internally displaced entrepreneurs in Pakistan, our study identifies that entrepreneurial individuals find different ways to adapt to the new order, with both internal and external bricolage becoming the key strategies deployed to either re-establish their previous businesses or to develop new endeavours in the host location. To compensate for lack of local knowledge, networks and resources, we found that entrepreneurs followed closely their previous paths in their bricolage attempts, relying on reconfigurations of their pre-existing competencies, as well as utilizing pre-established and clandestine networks.
Full article on Taylor & Francis webpage: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2018.1541592
Social enterprises respond to local needs through an integrated economic and social model. It is known that social enterprises facilitate outcomes for their participants; less is known about how social enterprises contribute to outcomes for others in their locale. Activity within social enterprises was observed and interviews conducted with participants, staff, customers and leaders in Australian regional cities. Data were analysed using a conceptual framework informed by social capital and social enterprise literature that uncovered actions involving social enterprises that realise place-based outcomes, motivations for these actions, and social capital networks that facilitate them. Linking networks among high level actors in regional cities supported development of bridging networks between social enterprises and other organisations. These were activated by social enterprises or others to generate opportunities for social enterprise participants. Local organisation motivations for interacting with social enterprises complemented social enterprises’ dual social and economic mission. Local production and ‘consumption’ of products realised benefits including wellbeing and social inclusion. Findings extend knowledge by showing that social enterprises’ dual social and economic missions place them in multiple networks with overlapping membership. Network overlap generates a space for work on place-based social and economic problems and opportunities that benefit social enterprises and cities.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2021.1899293
The main aim of this paper is to investigate if and to what extent entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE) have an impact on economic resilience at local level. The paper is based on a quantitative analysis for the Italian provinces (NUT-3 level) and presents two novelties: first, it provides a composite index of EE at local level by capturing the different aspects encompassing political, social, cultural and economic dimensions of an EE; second, it analyzes the role of EE in terms of resistance to and recovery from external shocks. The empirical results show that EE has a relevant role in explaining the resilience of local systems to economic shocks. The positive effect also remains when controlling for the direct impact of new firm formation, thus highlighting that the EE concept has a greater significance for characterizing resilience and entrepreneurial activity at local level than entrepreneurial rates.
Full text available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2021.1888318
This paper examines how entrepreneurs within different settings reflect on social interactions to work on their identity. Using life story narratives, we explore a business membership network and a creative hub in the central belt of Scotland. Our subsequent model shows how individuals in these settings use different dominant interpretive repertoires, as represented by structural-instrumental work in the business network and relational work in the creative hub. We also show how the interpretive repertoires both shape and are shaped by what individuals strive for in their identity work: striving for esteem and striving for closeness. We discuss how our findings offer insight into the dynamics of social identities and how they are reproduced and maintained through situated exchange using specific interpretive repertoires and striving agendas.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2021.1890231
This qualitative, longitudinal study of 12 innovative young New Zealand ventures investigates how individual entrepreneurs develop their venture opportunity amidst emerging rivalry. Two phases are identified: the pursuit of the initial opportunity, and developing it under rivalry. Adopting a sensemaking perspective and a social understanding of rivalry, we explain how entrepreneurs’ backgrounds impact opportunity confidence and the construction of rivalry, and reveal three main pathways whereby entrepreneurs develop their venture. First, entrepreneurs with neither start-up experience nor industry knowledge construct rivalry as threatening and narrow their network as opportunity confidence declines. Second, entrepreneurs with industry knowledge construct emerging rivalry as a challenge and strengthen within-industry ties to meet it. Third, entrepreneurs with serial start-up experience remain unfazed by rivalry and may abandon existing networks in favour for new networks. Comparing pathways, the paper makes two main contributions. First, it illustrates a link between entrepreneurs’ backgrounds and the construction of rivalry. This construction impacts opportunity confidence. Second, the paper suggests that such changes in opportunity confidence guide decisions about how to embed the venture into social context. Overall, the paper contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms whereby entrepreneurial backgrounds influence developing venture opportunities in competitive settings.
Full text available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2021.1886332
The aim of this paper is to explore how entrepreneurial behaviours are transmitted and embedded across generations within a Transgenerational Entrepreneurial Family (TEF). Although extant family business research has acknowledged the importance of learning in facilitating the transference of values, norms and attitudes, we know little about how learning embeds entrepreneurial behaviours at the family level. In order to address this, we adopted a longitudinal perspective of four TEF cases, drawing on numerous interviews, archival sources and observational instances. An iterative procedure for data analysis, which involved open coding, within-case analyses, second-order coding and cross-case analysis, was undertaken. Our findings illustrate how the implementation of entrepreneurial behaviours within TEFs was a process of negotiation and reification, informed by differences among families in response to critical incidents. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the presence of entrepreneurial behaviour enablers in each TEF has facilitated the perpetuation of entrepreneurial behaviours. Finally, we illuminate the importance of unlearning, the disregarding of prior learning to accommodate new information and behaviours, in the TEF context, where such entities are faced with unlearning paradoxes that subsequently influence their entrepreneurial behaviours.
Full article available on Taylor & Francis: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2020.1727088
This paper examines how family members support each other’s entrepreneurial activities through sharing resources created at the business-level. Drawing on the concept of ‘enterpriseness’ the study examines the flows between a family and the business and how it influences the impacts of the businesses on the family (enterpriseness). We capture the enterpriseness by focusing on entrepreneurial families where more than one member is an owner-entrepreneur. Through in-depth interviews with entrepreneurial families in Mexico, we show how different forms of capital resources emerging from multiple businesses flow back into the family and contribute to enterpriseness. The entrepreneurial family enables access to human, social and financial capital resources that are easily mobilized and combined by other members for their multiple firms, showing a subsequent effect to the business-level. Consequently, enterpriseness influences entrepreneurial behaviours which have a variety of consequences for the entrepreneurial family and their businesses. The paper concludes with a number of contributions to theory.
Full paper on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2020.1727093
The concept of opportunity is central to entrepreneurship theory. This article contributes to theorizing family entrepreneurship across generations by examining how entrepreneurial opportunities are constructed, communicated, and acted upon at the intersection between family and business. Drawing on the experiences of four families in different business sectors in Honduras, the study adopts a narrative perspective and argues that metaphors of entrepreneurial opportunity can enrich our understanding of family entrepreneurship. Findings also suggest that metaphors play a role in developing entrepreneurial legacy. This study of metaphors of opportunity, and how they might entail entrepreneurial legacy, opens up new avenues for theorizing intergenerational family entrepreneurship. In examining the metaphors referring to entrepreneurial practices developed and repeated in the family, this study contributes to understanding family entrepreneurship as a social and discursive process where meanings and values are communicated and maintained in everyday interactions.
Full text available on: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2020.1727089
In this paper, we examine how entrepreneurs living in communities under continuous threat prepare themselves to continue with their enterprising activities or engage in new ones after the expected crisis occurs. Most of the crisis literature on disasters and entrepreneurship focuses on aftermath responses, but the antecedents of such entrepreneurial behaviour and its connection to past and future crises remains largely unexplored. Based on a two-stage exploratory study pre and post the Calbuco Volcano eruptions in 2015 and 2016 in Chile, we introduce the notion of entrepreneurial preparedness in a context of continuous threat and elaborate on its four central attributes: anchored reflectiveness, situated experience, breaking through, and reaching out. Subsequently, our work develops a refined understanding of pre and post-disaster entrepreneurship and offers a novel base for theorizing on the relationship between entrepreneurial preparedness in contexts of continuous threat.
Full Article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08985626.2018.1541591?journalCode=tepn20
Employing a panel setting of 88 counties in the State of Ohio over the five-year period ending in 2006, this study aims to investigate the applicability of the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship in explaining the relationships between flagship enterprises, entrepreneurial clusters, and business entry rates. The study confirms the overall positive relationship between flagship enterprises and startup rates, and the negative relationship between entrepreneurial clusters and startup rates. It further demonstrates that the effect of clusters is moderated by local unemployment rates so that higher rates of unemployment weaken the negative impact of entrepreneurial clusters on startup rates. Based on the evidence collected, policy makers should increase support for flagship enterprises in their regions, and would-be business owners should consider locating their ventures in proximity to flagship companies.
Full Paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2021.1872942
The success of women-owned businesses with regard to the stages of economic development of countries is under-examined on a global basis. This study explores the relationship between country economic and political contexts and assesses the importance of entrepreneurs’ networks and managerial skills on women’s entrepreneurial success. The research uses data from 22 countries chosen from multi-dimensional country context constructs (i.e., select economic and political factors) and measures both family and external moral and financial support and managerial skills. The results show that stock (managerial skill) and flow (family and non-family support) differentially influence women’s entrepreneurial success in countries at varying levels of competitive development. In particular, the results confirm the positive influence of managerial skills and family moral and financial support on women’s entrepreneurial success (based on annual income) in countries at a higher level of competitive development and confirm their negative influence in countries at a lower level of competitive growth. Moreover, the results reveal influences of non-family financial support (positive for highly competitive countries) on income but not non-family moral support. Public policy implications are discussed.
Full text: https://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/08985626.2021.1872939
Using a 2019 data set, 236 regions across 26 European countries are investigated, focusing on four, interlinked, conditions of potential relevance to SME innovation, specifically measures focused on levels of human capital, internal firm innovation, innovation collaborations and broader knowledge collaborations between public and private sectors. The methodology applied uses a configurational approach to elucidate relationships, specifically fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to evaluate how these conditions affect sales of new-to-market and new-to-firm innovations as a percentage of total turnover for SMEs in each region against the EU 2019 average (NMFS). In addition to existence of the classic ‘core’ region ‘innovation ecosystem’ recipe, having presence of three of the four conditions (in-house innovation being non-relevant), analysis reveals innovation policy may require specific tailoring in certain types of regions. This suggests greater collaboration is required to overcome more extensive absence of other parts of the Regional Innovation System, in-house innovation required to overcome lack of education alone. The main contributions of the research are to generate a more comprehensive evaluation of the complexity of innovation at the regional level, graphical ‘map’ based elucidation of findings also contributing to establishing a baseline for future analysis for European regions’ SME-innovation performance.
Full article: https://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/08985626.2021.1872936
Seed accelerators are a new generation of business incubators. While the number of seed accelerators worldwide has grown exponentially, there is as yet no consensus on how to measure and analyse their performance. Therefore, the present study, using two pioneering surveys, aims to cast new light on this field by empirically assessing the performance of accelerators and the prospects of their accelerated firms. A model is built on two perspectives that are used to assess the prospects of the accelerated firms: (1) the accelerator´s perspective, and (2) the accelerated start-ups’ perspective. The results confirmed, at statistically significant levels, that the portfolio size of accelerators, their start-ups´ survival rates, and the number of employees in the accelerated firms, have a positive effect on the median value of the funding received by the accelerated start-ups from the accelerators’ funds. Furthermore, accelerators located in the U.S., and those with the greatest longevity, are shown to have a higher impact on start-ups´ survival rates. The study is not free of limitations, but its findings contribute to the still scarce quantitative literature on the performance of accelerators, and provide important managerial implications for their managers, investors, and entrepreneurs.
The initial development of Silicon Valley and its indigenous start-ups relied on various endowments, including abundant resources and a set of institutions and know-how inherited from previous industrial activity. This article identifies the entrepreneurial ecosystem that supported key tech start-ups on the San Francisco Peninsula prior to the 1960s, shows how the ecosystem developed and how it evolved. By 1940, a far-flung ecosystem—from Santa Clara County to San Francisco to Washington, DC – was in place, well before the arrival of the Valley’s first venture capitalists in 1959 and the establishment of the region’s first high-tech law firm in 1961. Federal agencies and laws provided revenue and risk reduction. Local universities provided brainpower. San Francisco-based banks and their Peninsula branches provided financing. San Francisco law firms drafted organizational agreements and protected intellectual property. Without such institutional support, there would be no Silicon Valley as we know it. Silicon Valley’s early high-tech start-ups were supported by an ecosystem that was developed for the agriculture, extractive, and transportation industries. That ecosystem was repurposed for defence-based electronics and telecommunications, and then transformed for the consumer world of calculators, video games and personal computers. The “master cluster” benefitted from being in the right place at the right time, and by inheriting the right ecosystem.
Full text available on Taylor & Francis website : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2020.1734259
For firms in symbolic (creative) industries, the region is usually seen as the main arena for knowledge sourcing and exchange. Why and how these firms use global innovation networks remains however poorly understood. This paper draws on in-depth interviews with firm representatives and network data collected through a survey of video game developers in southern Sweden. Video game development is a typical example of a symbolic industry, encompassing the development of non-tangible and symbol-intensive products and services. In recent years, this industry has advanced from a niche sector into a global mass market. Understanding how the hybrid character of the industry – with strong symbolic cultural roots but also a significant global engagement – affects the geography of innovation networks is the focus of this paper. The analysis reveals that knowledge sourcing and exchange take place likewise on the regional and global scale, but for different purposes and through different mechanisms. It also shows that not all variance in network engagement can be explained by differences in industrial knowledge bases or regional innovation systems. In contrast, the target market and the nature and geography of demand are important explanatory factors.
Full text available on : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2020.1736184
This article reports on a longitudinal process study of the critical role of anchor MNEs in the metamorphosis of a high-tech industrial cluster into a local entrepreneurial ecosystem. It draws on entrepreneurial ecosystem and international business literatures to frame the study of the genesis and evolutionary processes of an entrepreneurial ecosystem that emerged from two MNE subsidiaries, both of which had evolved into advanced R&D centres of excellence around a technology specialism. It shows how multiple new venture spinouts by former MNE employees introduced technological heterogeneity that catalysed into a resilient entrepreneurial ecosystem. The theoretical and policy implications that can be drawn from this case study emphasize the existence of both technology specialism and heterogeneity for resilience in an entrepreneurial ecosystem, and that reaching such a position is evolutionary in nature.
Full text available on : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08985626.2020.1734260
Despite its rapid proliferation, the extant literature on entrepreneurial ecosystems has not paid sufficient attention to the evolutionary nature of entrepreneurial ecosystems, mainly on account of the prevailing structuralist approaches in previous research. Particularly unclear is the early evolutionary context in which a region without rich entrepreneurial resources gains momentum and transforms into a nascent entrepreneurial ecosystem. The literature overlooks ecosystem dynamics in regions with limited entrepreneurial resources, as most studies have investigated more developed entrepreneurial ecosystems. This study illuminates one means to overcome resource scarcity on a regional level: resource injection by attracting transnational entrepreneurs, who transfer unique resources from one location to another. Based on an explorative qualitative study in the Santiago entrepreneurial ecosystem in Chile, where governmental actors incentivized transnational entrepreneurs to temporarily relocate to Santiago, this article proposes a three-step model of resource injection by transnational entrepreneurs with the following components: (i) stimulation of early ecosystem evolutionary momentum, (ii) evocation of institutional changes, and (iii) establishment of a resilient ecosystem. The findings offer practical implications for policymakers in emerging countries to utilize transnational entrepreneurs’ resources for developing an ecosystem in their region.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2020.1734265
In this article, we are primarily concerned with the influence and role of time on an entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE). Hence, the dynamics incorporated into the conception of the EE comes into focus. The recent work on this aspect has generally observed time as an evolutionary element for shaping and forming the context for entrepreneurial outcomes or that time is related to the change in entrepreneur and network profiles within a region. Other scholars have also noted how certain aspects of an EE will be affected by dimensions of size over time or that the profile of resources will alter the EE attractiveness for entrepreneurs. Time itself as a dynamic influence has not been explicitly examined and here we seek to draw out the multiple perceptions of time that influence the different rates of start-up, firm growth, change and evolution. We conclude by drawing attention to the simultaneous interaction of the different perceptions of time and outline the contributions to this Special Issue on the dynamics of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2020.1734257
ABSTRACT
The mobilization of resources is an essential challenge for entrepreneurs. Existing research suggests that access to standard and high-quality resources is an important condition for entrepreneurial success, yet such resources are often out of reach for entrepreneurs. In this study, we explore entrepreneurial resource mobilization in resource-constrained peripheral locations. We identify three activities together constituting an underlying logic of spatial bricolage, defined as making do with the resources at hand in the immediate spatial context. Further, we suggest that the likelihood and prevalence of this logic of action is both situational and dispositional, as individual and contextual factors combine to generate important differences in the resource mobilization activities of the entrepreneurs. Our study contributes to a contextualized understanding of entrepreneurship by showing how spatial bricolage as a distinct logic can help entrepreneurs overcome resource constraints, and how the spatial context incorporates an important dimension of what constitutes ‘at hand’ in entrepreneurial bricolage.
Co-authored by Steffen Korsgaard, Sabine Müller & Friedericke Welter
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2020.1855479
ABSTRACT
Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EEs) are expected to support high growth entrepreneurship. Yet, little is known about how they actually promote entrepreneurial activities. Based on Giddens’ structuration theory, this paper takes the entrepreneurs’ perspective to understand how they actually use the resources provided by an EE. Based on semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs and other relevant actors in the Berlin EE along with participant observation at entrepreneurship events, this case study focuses on the resourcing practices of different types of entrepreneurs. It shows that the Berlin EE comprises two distinct subsystems. On the basis of this evidence it is proposed that EEs can have different degrees of integration and that this characteristic strongly impacts how entrepreneurs can actually acquire resources from the EE and thus how specific EEs promote different types of entrepreneurs. Heterogeneous structures therefore do not only exist between EEs but also within EEs. This heterogeneity needs to be recognized in order to understand how EEs function, enhance the comparability of research results, and design suitable political instruments to promote entrepreneurship effectively.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2020.1734263