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As technology entrepreneurship is on the rise, many individuals around the world aspire to enact the ideals embedded in highly visible entrepreneurial success stories. But how do they perform technology entrepreneurship in their distinctive environments? Based on ethnographic research in Kenya's ICT sector, we develop an open-ended process model that captures the micro-phenomenological perspective of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the process and outcomes of importing global institutional templates about entrepreneurship into a society. Supplementing studies of the pattern of global diffusion, we are concerned with an understanding of how globalization happens in the trenches, in the practical interactions between actors that to varying degrees subscribe to global and local templates. Data comes from a study of the nascent entrepreneurial Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector in Nairobi, Kenya and includes 156 interviews and 4 months of observation at various sites. We find remarkable differences between a global template of entrepreneurship anchored on the archetype of Silicon Valley, and local understandings of entrepreneurship, the role of failure, community and capital providers. We propose a process model of practices through which differences are resolved, decoupled or ignored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this symposium, we focus on entrepreneurship in resource-constrained environments, and how entrepreneurs work to construct an identity for themselves (as entrepreneurs) and for their ventures. The symposium centers around three talks on entrepreneurship in different geographical areas that are resource-constrained and a general discussion by two field experts. The first talk focuses on migrant entrepreneurs in Europe and the US; the second looks at Palestinian entrepreneurs; and the third talk is about entrepreneurs in Kenya. In each of these talks, the panelists discuss how the entrepreneurs used cultural entrepreneurship processes and developed an entrepreneurial identity, against the cultural background in which they operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurship has gained remarkable global prominence in recent years. Importantly, scholarly and societal attention have moved beyond a traditional focus on the economic significance of new venture creation towards a consideration of "entrepreneurship in action" - evoking the potential for entrepreneurial activity to bring about diverse types of socio-economic change. This symposium brings together a range of perspectives from scholars studying the enactment of entrepreneurship across a variety of unconventional contexts (including the Canadian sex industry, French banlieues, rural Tanzanian villages, and tech entrepreneurship in Kenya). The combined works further our understanding of how global entrepreneurship ideals are enacted in local settings, and the extent to which entrepreneurial activity contributes (or not) to individual, field-level, and socio-economic development. Emotional Emancipation: Creating Pride Through Entrepreneurship in a Stigmatized Field Presenter: Trish Ruebottom; Brock U. Presenter: Madeline Toubiana; U. of Alberta Why Entrepreneurship? Means Versus Ends-Based Theories of Social Impact Presenter: Nevena Radoynovska; EMLYON Business School Hakuna Matata or When Cultures Collide: Social Entrepreneurship in Rural Africa Presenter: Laura Claus; U. of Cambridge Presenter: Royston Greenwood; U. of Alberta & Edinburgh U. Presenter: John Mgoo; N/A Entrepreneuring an Industry: The Case of Kenyas Technology Entrepreneurship Sector Presenter: Tim Weiss; Stanford U. Presenter: Klaus Weber; Northwestern U. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drastic socioeconomic changes over the past decades have profoundly affected the Global North, with the result that the institution of stable, full employment - upheld by the "organization man" - has entered a new era that is fundamentally changing work into a world of flexible work arrangements that oftentimes run in parallel which is best captured by the image of an assiduous multi-active individual. This paper argues that a fresh view on contemporary work dynamics through an inductive qualitative study outside of well-researched contexts can provide new conceptualizations of the multidimensional work realities today's workers are exposed to. Using empirical data from Kenya's technology entrepreneurship sector and an interpretative methodological design, four interrelated work dimensions emerge: hustling, organizational work, relational work and personal finance activities. Taken together, these constitute a comprehensive interface from which the multi-active individual in Kenya engineers a comprehensive work portfolio to hedge risks in the pursuit of a steady income flow, create social welfare and pursue the possibility of exerting agency for changing the status quo in an otherwise volatile and unpredictable environment - transforming the multi-active individual into a portfolio workpreneur. The implications of this conception on the future of work, organizing and organizations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The by-now omnipresent and largely taken-for-granted diffusion of organizational forms thought to advance market formation and socioeconomic development (particularly in transition and new-minted market economies) in various economic regions around the globe is well documented. Yet organizational sociologists lack a systematic framework for assessing the profound impact that these nonnative forms can have on the evolutionary trajectory of the organizational context in the adopting locale. By modelling this organizational dimension of global diffusion processes with concepts and empirical insights from population ecology, an evolutionary process model emerges that theorizes effects of form diffusion on firms that adopt nonnative forms, on the forms themselves and on the adopting organizational context-or, as population ecologists would call it, the community ecology-as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A cultural dimension of economic globalization is the proliferation of seemingly universal templates for economic action. One example is "technology-based entrepreneurship," which is increasingly presented as a recipe for international development and national competitiveness. But what does it mean to perform technology entrepreneurship? The paper develops a micro- phenomenological answer to this question. The case of the nascent Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector in Nairobi shows how participants in this sector construct contrasting templates of entrepreneurship that are coded as alternatively as global and local. We use ethnographic and semiotic methods to understand the content of these templates, and the approaches that participants use to manage resulting tensions in interacting with each other. Each approach gives rise to unintended consequences that prevent the full resolution of tensions and prompt subsequent action. As a result we develop a model of the local generative processes in the course of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editorial contributions from top management journals, in concert with recent calls for action from leading scholars in the field of strategy, entrepreneurship and institutional theory, have repeatedly underlined the importance of considering new market contexts for research. In particular, emerging and developing economies are mentioned as a fertile research ground for management scholars to test and extend extant theories in addition to developing new theory. In this symposium we bring scholars from different fields together who, having heard the call, have ventured into the international arena. Panelists will share their experience and strategies in becoming enmeshed and maneuvering the research context as well as the domestic academic infrastructure. In particular, the symposium will establish distinguishing characteristics between the role of the researcher in emerging and developing countries as opposed to the researcher's role in North-America and Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]