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Emotions have a physiological, subjective, and expressive/motivational dimension. They are often triggered when issues of concern such as needs, and goals are threatened or fulfilled. Being neglected for a long time in management science as irrational interference, they are now considered an integral part of family business life. The intersection of family, business, and ownership system create a special complexity of emotions in the family business. Each system has their own emotion framing and display rules. Other factors like family ownership logic, socio-emotional wealth, and norms and values create an emotionally charged context. Breaches of psychological contracts and lack of emotion communication give rise to strong emotions and emotional messiness. Emotions can influence strategic business decisions, foster attachment and positive family and family business functions, or energize conflicts. Emotion work and the social sharing of emotions can lead to a healthy emotion climate.

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.

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.

From introduction: The purpose of this essay is to provide an insight into why family businesses are imbued with emotions where interactions among family members make them especially »high« on emotions.

Moral dilemmas are ubiquitous aspects of organisational life. Tensions underlying many fundamental aspects of business, for example, between transparency and privacy, sustainability and growth, innovation and compliance, are not extraordinary occurrences. This paper aims to improve the understanding of moral dilemmas in organisations and how to develop pedagogical methods for coaching management students to resolve these challenges. We adopt a performative and action-based model of responsible management education. In exploring this performative approach to working with moral dilemmas, the project takes family business as a setting of special relevance for disclosing ethical tensions and the dilemmas emerging from those tensions. Family businesses are sites that intensify moral quandaries and disclose loyalties and values that highlight the need for responsible decision-making and action. The research will generate a series of outcomes ranging from classroom exercises to conceptual innovations for improving responsible management education about moral dilemmas., Conference event cancelled due to COVID-19. Proceedings published.

What series of activities do entrepreneurs engage in that lead to a compassionate organization? And What role does spirituality have for the activities of compassion? Drawing on spirituality and compassion as a conceptual lenses and a single case study from Pakistan, we find that through activities of compassion, grounded in the spiritual beliefs, owner entrepreneurs can develop a sustainable organization. Besides, we identify a set of activities and build an activity model of a sustainable organization. This study contributes to the literature on compassion, spirituality, and sustainable entrepreneurship.

Contemporary research has demonstrated that entrepreneurship is a fundamentally contextualized phenomenon and unfolds differently in different contexts. Despite the extensive coverage of the importance of embeddedness for entrepreneurial activities, the research predominantly relies on somewhat static, single layered, and binary notions of embeddedness. We argue that there is a strong need for studies that problematize embeddedness and the relationship between entrepreneur and context. This call for papers, thus invites contributions that explore embeddedness as dynamic, processual and multi-layered, as well as elaborate on the paradoxes of embeddedness?

The decision to become an entrepreneur may be one adaptation strategy individuals enact when they experience low work-related wellbeing. To date we know that the interplay between work-related identification and work-related subjective wellbeing affects individuals work-related choices. However, we possess less knowledge about the nature of this relationship. Extant studies have linked work-related subjective wellbeing (SWB) to identification, yet conceptualization of work-related identification has, like SWB, typically been considered from a static state perspective rather than a dynamic process perspective. Further, researcher imposed definitions have been used rather than seeking individuals self-definitions. Our study seeks to complement existing work by showing that identification is a dynamic process where we explore the relationship between multiple identifications and wellbeing. We empirically investigate the interplaying processes of identification and work-related wellbeing in an in-depth, person-centered, life story approach to the entrepreneurial endeavor. Our sample was purposively selected to include individuals with a strong professional identification while enhancing the variability of challenges faced over time in the entrepreneurial identification process. Our novel sample and life story methodology contribute to illustrating the dynamics of wellbeing over time with a constant identification and dis-identification in moving between aspired and experienced wellbeing; as well as highlighting that wellbeing becomes the antecedent, means and result while entrepreneurship is the believed mechanism to come closer to experienced wellbeing.

Nominated to best paper at AoM 2018.

This chapter explores a entrepreneurial stewardship perspective in a dynamic environment. The coffee industry in a developing country is examined highlighting how diverse contextual pressures may affect a family in business. This qualitative study focuses in Guatemala, Central America, with a single case study. Findings reveal that contextual crisis can ignite a differentiation approach which align with an entrepreneurial stewardship perspective. Such approach emphasizes a shared vision to look after the family coffee farm, the application of traditional and specialised knowledge to bring out the best features of a product and the development of diverse relationships to serve the business over time.

Entrepreneurship in emerging economies and developing countries presents us with a unique set of working attitudes, modes of thinking, social practices and processes. This book explores these characteristics’, focusing on the conceptualization of entrepreneurship ‘in-between’. It highlights top-down, bottom-up and hybrid initiatives as well as driving forces for entrepreneurial activities, presenting the diversity, nuances and multiplicity of facets of relevant but unexplored contexts that we need in order to expand our dominant and traditional understandings of entrepreneurship.This book examines entrepreneurship as a contextualized phenomenon from different theoretical and empirical perspectives, gathering a group of researchers with different nationalities, backgrounds and contexts to shed light on how societies with alternative paths of development trigger different entrepreneurial activities and practices. It covers geographical contexts from five continents in a novel and multifaceted analysis.Including case studies, literature reviews and discourse analysis, this book will be a valuable resource for academics and PhD students as well as programme directors in entrepreneurship, development studies and economic geography, and policymakers working with local and regional development and entrepreneurship.

This book focuses on management challenges in different types of companies, ranging from small to large, from private to public and from service to manufacturing in the African context. With empirical data from countries as diverse as Rwanda, Kenya and Ethiopia, it discusses the increasing economic importance of the African continent, covering relevant topics on sustainability and environmental issues, exports, logistics, HR issues, innovation and financial reporting. Through different conceptual insights and empirical case studies, the research presented serves as a useful resource for academics, students, and policy-makers interested in in-depth studies on management challenges in Africa.