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We use concepts from rhetorical history and mnemonic communities to expand on the notion of “intermarriage” in a family business as the merger of shared histories among family members, nonfamily members, and individuals from other families and suggest that a common mnemonic narrative defines the parameters of the family business rather than the structural properties of the firm or the genetic relationships among family members. Our analysis reveals how fundamental family business practices can be changed when confronted with the intimate knowledge of the rhetorical history of the failure of others.

Social transformation is core to the idea of entrepreneurship, yet it plays a minor role in entrepreneurship research. We explore humanistic approaches to change by building on the Schumpeterian perspective of transformation/creative destruction and expanding it in three critical ways. First, we argue that entrepreneurship and history should engage methodologically with transformation ‘as a perspective’ taken by the researcher or observer. Second, we contend that to explore the process of entrepreneurial transformation historically, it is necessary to engage in a broader conceptualisation of temporality. Third, we posit that to fully grasp transformation, we ought to study not just the reconfiguration of material resources that Schumpeter has proposed but also the immaterial (intellectual and imaginative) re-evaluations that trigger social transformation, thus focussing on the semantics of transformation. The articles in this Special Issue explore entrepreneurship and transformation through these three lenses, making social transformation more central to historical entrepreneurship research.

PurposeThe authors explore the relationship between adolescent behavior and subsequent entrepreneurial persistence by drawing on scholarship from clinical psychology and criminology to examine different subtypes of antisocial behavior (nonaggressive antisocial behavior and aggressive antisocial behavior) that underlie adolescent rule breaking. The intersection of gender and socioeconomic status on these types of antisocial behavior and entrepreneurial persistence is also studied.Design/methodology/approachUsing a longitudinal research design, this study draws from a national representative survey of USA adolescents, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997) (NLSY97). Nonaggressive antisocial behavior was assessed with a composite scale that measured economic self-interest and with a second measure that focused on substance abuse. Aggressive antisocial behavior was assessed as a measure of aggressive, destructive behaviors, such as fighting and property destruction. Entrepreneurial persistence was operationalized as years of self-employment experience, which is based on the number of years a respondent reported any self-employment.FindingsAggressive antisocial behavior is positively related to entrepreneurial persistence but nonaggressive antisocial behavior is not. This relationship is moderated by gender and socioeconomic status.Originality/valueThese findings contribute to research on the relationship between adolescent behavior and entrepreneurship in adulthood, the effect of antisocial behavior, and demographic intersectionality (by gender and socioeconomic status) in entrepreneurship. The authors surmise that the finding that self-employment for men from lower socioeconomic backgrounds involved in aggressive antisocial behavior was significantly higher compared to others may indicate that necessity entrepreneurship may be the primary driver of entrepreneurial activity for these individuals.

This editorial offers ways to develop qualitative studies in entrepreneurship research. We indicate why and how qualitative methods clearly and distinctively contribute to the understanding of curr...

PurposeThis study offers empirical evidence from a nationally representative panel dataset of nascent entrepreneurs (PSED-II) regarding when external financing is acquired and how certain factors affect this timing during the cumulative process of nascent entrepreneurs taking actions toward establishing an operational entity. By assessing the relationship between the external financing event and the cumulative set of actions that nascent entrepreneurs undertake to create new businesses, we improve our understanding of how the timing of acquiring external financing affects organizational survival and growth.Design/methodology/approachWe apply nonparametric and semiparametric survival analysis techniques to a nationally representative panel dataset of nascent entrepreneurs. This ascertains the probability of an external financing event at any given moment in time and a set of startup conditions that we hypothesize will affect this timing. First, we use Kaplan–Meier analysis to explore when external financing occurs during new business creation. We then use discrete-time survival analysis to investigate whether certain startup conditions affect when external financing occurs. Finally, we conduct a test of independence to examine the external financing event relative to other startup activities completed during new business creation.FindingsNascent entrepreneurs tend to acquire external funding relatively late in the new venture startup process – on average, about two-thirds of the way from conceiving of the idea and becoming operational. They tend to take actions that are less resource-demanding early in the startup process to build their organizations to a fundable stage. Net worth tends to speed up the acquisition of external funding as wealthy entrepreneurs tend to ask for funding earlier in the process. Finally, entrepreneurs in capital-intensive industries do not seem to get outside funding before entrepreneurs in other industries.Originality/valueThis study is unique in three ways. First, we investigate the timing of the highly important external financing event. Timing is critical in unpacking and making sense of the very early stages of a new business and in guiding entrepreneurs and students about when to do what. Second, we do so in a subsample of preoperational, nascent, funded entrepreneurs derived from a nationally representative panel dataset of startup attempts. Third, our findings provide a counter-intuitive yet systematic understanding of organizational emergence and very early-stage financing.

Research SummaryWe articulate the value of historical methods and reasoning in strategic entrepreneurship research and theory. We begin by introducing the papers in the special issue, contextualizing each within one of five broader methodological approaches, and elaborating on the applicability of each to other topics in entrepreneurship research. Next, we use the papers to induce a framework for integrating history into entrepreneurship theory. The framework demonstrates how historical assumptions play a formative role in operationalizing time and context in entrepreneurship research. We then show how variations in these treatments of time and context shape theoretical claims about entrepreneurial opportunities, actions, and processes of change. We conclude by discussing why this may be a particularly opportune time for strategic entrepreneurship research to develop a deeper historical sensibility.Managerial SummaryHistory can serve as an especially important guide to understanding entrepreneurship during moments of change. We draw on articles from the special issue on “Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship Research” to illustrate different forms of historical reasoning and research about entrepreneurship. Moreover, we use the articles to develop a framework for understanding how historical context and time shape entrepreneurial opportunities, actions, and processes of change. We emphasize, in particular, the value of history in understanding variations in entrepreneurial practices.

This paper theorizes the spiritual processes of community entrepreneuring as navigating tensions that arise when community-based enterprises (CBEs) emerge within communities and generate socio-economic inequality. Grounded on an ethnographic study of a dairy CBE in rural Malawi, findings reveal that intra-community tensions revolve around the occurrence of ‘bad events’ – mysterious tragedies that, among their multiple meanings, are also framed as witchcraft. Community members prepare for, frame, cope and build collective sustenance from ‘bad events’ by intertwining witchcraft and mundane socio-material practices. Together, these practices reflect the mystery and the ambiguity that surround ‘bad events’ and prevent intra-community tensions from overtly erupting. Through witchcraft, intra-community tensions are channelled, amplified and tamed cyclically as this process first destabilizes community social order and then restabilizes it after partial compensation for socio-economic inequality. Generalizing beyond witchcraft, this spiritual view of community entrepreneuring enriches our understanding of entrepreneuring – meant as organization-creation process in an already organized world – in the context of communities. Furthermore, it sheds light on the dynamics of socio-economic inequality surrounding CBEs, and on how spirituality helps community members to cope with inequality and its effects.

This study theorizes on the sociomateriality of food in authority-building processes of partial organizations by exploring alternative food networks (AFNs). Through the construction of arenas for food provisioning, AFNs represent grassroots collectives that deliberately differentiate their practices from mainstream forms of food provisioning. Based on a sequential mixed-methods analysis of 24 AFNs, where an inductive chronological analysis is followed by a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), we found that the entanglements between participants’ food provisioning practices and food itself shape how authority emerges in AFNs. Food generates biological, physiological and social struggles for AFN participants who, in turn, respond by embracing or avoiding them. As an outcome, most AFNs tend to bureaucratize over time according to four identified patterns while a few idiosyncratically build a more shared basis of authority. We conclude that the sociomateriality of food plays an important yet indirect role in understanding why and how food provisioning arenas re-organize and forge their forms of authority over time.

This book focuses on family entrepreneurship and the role that families play in starting, growing, changing and transforming businesses. If you are interested in knowing more about how families act entrepreneurially across generations in terms of gaining insights into practical knowledge that can be applied, as well as learning about the ideas and the reasons behind this practical knowledge, then you will find this book to be of great value. We have assembled leading experts on multi-generational entrepreneurial families to address this issue. These experts, as consultants, educators and researchers on family entrepreneurship, represent the collected wisdom of hundreds of years of experience working with and studying successful entrepreneurial families.

In discussions with entrepreneurial families about their futures, we often suggest that each family member should consider four aspects of their lives—achievement, happiness, significance and legacy—as a broad framework to explore their goals and values and to reflect on “who they are” and ultimately “who they want to be.” This framework comes from Just Enough, a book written by Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson that focuses on the meaning of success for highly accomplished individuals and families. In this chapter, just as in our conversations with the members of entrepreneurial families, we first describe and contextualize the framework. We then focus on two specific elements of the framework—legacy and achievement—because they tend to be a primary source of conflict and misunderstanding among the members of entrepreneurial families. Finally, building on insights from our own ethnographic research with entrepreneurial families, and from scholarship on identity, we reflect on what it might take to create an environment in which certain family members’ aspirations for legacy and others’ need for achievement coexist in unison. We believe that by fostering this alignment, the family’s entrepreneurial activities might have a greater chance at lasting success.

International audience; This article presents an exercise designed for successors and other business family members with the aim to enable them to communicate their understandings of their family and family business’ past legacies and to express their future-related projections. First initiated in France in 2014, then duplicated in United States in 2019, the exercise has been used in undergraduate, graduate, and executive education courses, with national and international cohorts. While the exercise has typically focused on classes composed of successors, it has also been used in executive education courses with business family members from older and younger generations. The learning activity asks participants to draw three consecutive images of their family business—past, present, and future—to develop a visual narrative of the family and family business legacies and future. Participants are then invited to tell the story of their family business and to depict its imagined future using the three drawings as guides, within the group setting. This visual sensemaking exercise enables participants to access tacit modes of relating to past legacies and contributes to developing multitemporal awareness and reflexivity in multigenerational family businesses.

There are two battles at the heart of the “opportunity wars”: (1) Are opportunities discovered or created, and (2) Should we perhaps abandon the opportunity concept altogether? We argue that the first question is a pseudo-question, made possible by the loose use of “opportunity” in the discovery/creation debate during the last two decades. However, we refrain from going so far as to conclude that the opportunity concept should be abandoned altogether, since we observe that strategy and entrepreneurship scholarship prior to the 2000s made a more meaningful use of the concept. It alluded to the environmental conditions necessary for the actualization of desirable futures and hardly ever questioned the agent-independence of such conditions. Accordingly, we maintain that the opportunity concept should simply exit the blind alley created by the “discovery/creation” distraction and help reorient attention toward the agent-independent sources of opportunity and threat—beyond unrealistically optimistic views of entrepreneurship as an act of “opportunity discovery” and/or “opportunity creation.”

This editorial introduces the six articles in the Special Issue Filling in the Blanks: ‘Black Boxes’ in Enterprise/Entrepreneurship Education. The first article offers an overview of the analysis of the past forty years of scholarship. The next three articles focus on various aspects of context. The first presents a new framework to help us understand how context has been addressed, and how it can be adapted and designed within EEE. The next explores the role of socialised learning in developing entrepreneurial competences at the university level. The final article on context develops a multidimensional framework that identifies the characteristics of entrepreneurial spaces in university settings. The fifth article in this issue develops a new impact measurement for assessing different experiential approaches. Last, but not least, the final article offers an insight into ways of deconstructing and reconstructing EEE.

What do entrepreneurs do? In a comprehensive and detailed exploration using three perspectives - behavior, practice and process - this Research Handbook demonstrates specific methods for answering ...

In this article, we contend that entrepreneurship studies would greatly benefit from engagement with contemporary theorizations of practice. The practice tradition conceives of the process of entrepreneuring as the enactment and entanglement of multiple practices. Appreciating entrepreneurial phenomena as the enactment and entanglement of practices orients researchers to an ontological understanding of entrepreneuring as relational, material and processual. Therefore, practice theories direct scholars towards observing and explaining the real-time practices of entrepreneuring practitioners. Articles in this special issue on ‘entrepreneurship-as-practice’ are discussed and suggestions for future research and scholarship that utilize contemporary theorizations of practice are offered.

Purpose The purpose of this paper commentary is to explore the intersection of project management and entrepreneurship through a poetic exploration of Flannery O’Connor’s short story: “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Through the use of the Japanese Haiku format, this commentary probes the nature and meaning of “projects,” the importance of goals and their limitations, the influence of context across time, and the role of agency and circumstance in entrepreneurship as denoted by the idea of serendipity. Design/methodology/approach Poesis. Findings Imagination steers the course. Vision sees the possibility; But the mind’s eye sees through a distorted lens that is always misfit. So the unplanned path becomes the project. Always; Accidents happen. Originality/value Project Management: Goals with temporary; Collective action; Entrepreneurship: “Organizing collective Action.” Compromise?

This study investigates how members in community-based enterprises (CBEs) engage in processes of co-constructing their collective prosocial identities. Based on an inductive analysis of 27 organizations that were formed explicitly as communities and sought to build alternative forms of production and consumption through innovative ways to pool and recombine resources, we found that all of the CBEs engaged in distributed experimentation that lead to epiphany sense-making. These two approaches triggered and enacted collective processes of shifts in identity or identity persistence. We advance a processual model that identifies approaches for how members of CBEs either embrace epiphanies in identity shifts or limit and react to epiphanies in identity persistence.

By applying stewardship theory and threshold theory, we derive three criteria that founders of social business ventures use to set performance thresholds towards exit: 1) the desired social impact ...

This paper is an introduction and overview of a Special Issue of EJIM on Family Business. All of the articles in this Special Issue use data from the 2018 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) that involved surveys from over 54 countries on entrepreneurial activity and family businesses. The articles span a wide range of topics that fall under three broad categories: context, organisation and outcomes. Articles covering context focus on the institutionalisation of family business in the cultural environment, rural and urban regions, and whether the pull of opportunity or the push of necessity may be related to governance of businesses by family or non-family members. Articles covering organisation focus on a variety of organisational features that differentiate between family and non-family businesses, notably survival, age, growth and familiness in forms of ownership, management and staffing. Articles covering outcomes examine family business endeavours, such as innovation, exporting and aspirations for growth.

With this special issue we aim at furthering the entrepreneurship as practice perspective by grounding the broader and contemporary ‘practice turn’ in social science (Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and vo...

The Editors offer their views about important issues for advancing a research agenda on entrepreneurship and contexts, and they offer an invitation to readers to add their own ideas to this agenda. ...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between low-wealth business founders in the USA and external startup funding. Specifically, the authors test whether a founders’ low personal net worth is correlated with a lower probability of acquiring funding from outside sources during the business creation process. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use a double-hurdle Cragg model to jointly estimate: first, the decision to acquire external financing; and second, the amount received. The sample is the US-based Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics II (PSED II). The PSED II tracks business founders attempting to start ventures from 2005 to 2012. Findings – Receipt of outside financing during business formation is largely determined by the business founder’s personal finances (controlling for human capital, venture type and industry, and whether money was sought in the first place). A higher household net worth results in larger amounts of external funding received. Low-wealth business founders, therefore, are less likely to get external funds, and they receive lower amounts when they do. The disparity between low-and high-wealth business founders is more pronounced for formal, monitored sources of external financing such as bank loans. Research limitations/implications – Because the study eliminates survivor bias by using a nationally representative sample of business founders who are in the venture creation process, the findings apply to both successful business founders and those who disengaged during the business creation process. The authors offer insights into the sources and amounts of external funds acquired by individuals across all levels of wealth. The authors accomplish this by disaggregating business founders into wealth quintiles. The study demonstrates the importance of personal wealth as a factor in acquiring external startup financing compared to human capital, industry, or personal characteristics. Social implications – If the ability to acquire external funding is significantly constrained, the quality of the opportunity and the skill of the business founder may be less a determinant of success at creating a new business as prior studies have suggested. Consequently, entrepreneurship (as measured by business formation) as a path toward upward, socioeconomic mobility will be afforded only to those individuals with sufficient financial endowments at the outset. Originality/value – Unlike prior studies, the data used are not subject to survivor bias or an underrepresentation of self-employment. The statistical model jointly estimates acquisition of financing and the amount received. This resolves selection and censoring problems. Finally, the dependent variables directly measure liquidity constraints in the context of business formation, that is, before a new venture is created. Prior research contexts have typically studied existing businesses, and are therefore not true examinations of conditions affecting business creation.

This paper suggests that entrepreneurship is the process of “emergence.” An organizational behavior perspective on entrepreneurship would focus on the process of organizational emergence. The usefulness of the emergence metaphor is explored through an exploration of two questions that are the focus of much of the research in organizational behavior: “What do persons in organizations do?” (we will explore this question by looking at research and theory on the behaviors of managers), and “Why do they do what they do?” (ditto for motivation). The paper concludes with some implications for using the idea of emergence as a way to connect theories and methodologies from organizational behavior to entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this study was to explore whether certain cognitive factors of potential entrepreneurs (as measured by a personal efficacy scale and the kinds of reasons people offer for their decision to undertake efforts to start a business) can be used to predict their subsequent persistence in business start-up activities and in new venture creation success. Two hypotheses were tested: 1. H1 : Potential entrepreneurs who offer internal and stable explanations for their plans for getting into business (e.g., “I have always wanted to own my own business”) should be more likely to persist in actions that lead to successfully starting a business. 2. H2 : Potential entrepreneurs with high personal efficacy scores should be more likely to persist in actions that lead to successfully starting a business. The beginning pool of subjects for this research consisted of 142 consecutive preventure clients (47 women, 95 men) of a Small Business Development Center between October 1990 and February 1991. As part of their initial consultation, these individuals were asked to explain their decision to enter business. These responses were coded on the basis of a detailed procedure derived from the attributional model (Weiner 1985). Potential entrepreneurs also responded to a locus-of-control questionnaire: Paulhus (1983) Spheres of Control Scale. In February 1992, all 142 people were sent a follow-up questionnaire designed to assess the extent of their new venture development activity in the intervening year. Responses from 85 individuals were available for this analysis. The follow-up questionnaire listed 29 separate activities involved in starting a business. These activities were grouped into five major categories: gathering market information, estimating potential profits, finishing the groundwork for the company, structuring the company, and setting up business operations. The measure of success at getting into business was operationalized by the question: “Have you completed the first sale (defined as having delivered the product or service and collected the payment from your customer)?” An analysis of the results found that HI (internal/stable attributions, e.g., “I have always wanted to be my own boss”) was supported for female potential entrepreneurs, whereas external/stable attributions (e.g., “I had identified a market need”) were significant for male potential entrepreneurs. SIC code classifications revealed no significant differences in the sorts of businesses being contemplated by women and men. H2 (personal efficacy) was not supported. Those activities that focused on setting up business operations (e.g., purchasing materials, hiring employees, producing the product/service, distributing the product) distinguished potential entrepreneurs who had started businesses from those who had not. We believe that one of the important features of this research is the use of a longitudinal research design. By measuring attributions before these potential entrepreneurs had started (or not started) their businesses, we can make stronger claims for a causal relationship between initial attributions and each individual's subsequent success or failure in business start-up. Given all of the events and activities that occur between an individual's attributions for getting into business and the actual start-up, the attributional findings about male and female potential entrepreneurs have important implications for future research and practice. Men and women do have different reasons for getting into business that appear to be significant indicators of their future ability to start a business successfully. We believe that the development of measures focusing on details of the attributional model (i.e., perceptions of skills, abilities, the difficulty of the task, luck, and the value of the opportunity) will likely lead to a more comprehensive and accurate conception of the factors that influence entrepreneurial persistence. We offer some suggestions for how the use of an attributional model might influence the selection, counseling, and training of potential entrepreneurs.

This article explores the characteristics of emerging organizations and suggests that emerging organizations can be identified by four properties: intentionality, resources, boundary, and exchange. These properties are defined and discussed. Suggestions are made for selecting samples for research on emerging organizations. Implications for research and theory on new and emerging organizations are discussed.

In this study we develop and validate an empirically grounded taxonomy of new business ventures (NBVs) using qualitative and quantitative data generated from interviews of and questionnaire responses from 106 entrepreneurs. The taxonomy describes eight different types (gestalts) of NBVs. These eight types are profiled across four dimensions: Individual: What kinds of background characteristics, abilities, skills, and motivations do these entrepreneurs have? Organizational: What kinds of competitive strategies and organization structures are used by NBVs? Environmental: What kinds of competitive environments are NBVs created in? Process: What kinds of activities are pursued, and how much effort is devoted to the activities that entrepreneurs undertake to create their NBVs? An NBV gestalt is an ideal type generated through cluster analysis. It is a composite summary of the case descriptions of the NBVs that fell into each particular cluster. Although each NBV gestalt is a complex combination of many different characteristics, a simplistic description of each NBV gestalt is outlined to provide an overall view of the taxonomy. Type 1: Escaping to Something New: Individuals who start these firms seek to escape from their previous jobs—jobs that from their perspective offer few rewards in terms of salary, challenging work, and promotion opportunities. The new venture is in a different industry and is a different type of work than the entrepreneur's previous job. This firm enters an established highly competitive market and offers goods/services similar to its competitors. Type 2: Putting the Deal Together: The concern of the entrepreneurs in this group is to assemble the different aspects of the business (suppliers, wholesale and retail channels, customers) into a “deal” in which each participant in the deal can be assured of winning. Contacts are a crucial factor. Type 3: Roll Over Skills/Contacts: Before the start-up the entrepreneur worked in a position using technical skills and expertise similar to those required in the new venture. He or she spends little time selling, marketing, or advertising because customer contacts from a previous position are used. This firm provides goods or services that are based on the owner's professional expertise and are usually generic services (e.g., auditing, advertising). The firm competes by offering better service than competitors. Type 4: Purchasing a Firm: Since this is a purchase, a great deal of time is spent acquiring capital for the acquisition. The venture is viewed as a turn-around situation from the previous owners. Upon acquisition a great amount of time is spent evaluating the firm's products and services. The firm competes by adapting to the changing needs of customers. Type 5: Leveraging Expertise: This entrepreneur is among the best in his or her technical field. The firm starts with the help of partners. The firm enters an established market and competes through flexibility in adapting to customer needs since the entrepreneur is keenly aware of changes in the environment. A great deal of time is devoted to sales. The environment is characterized by high technical change and complexity. Type 6: Aggressive Service: The firm is a very aggressive service-oriented firm, usually a consulting firm in a very specialized area. The environment requires that the entrepreneur have profes- sional or technical expertise of some kind. Knowing the right people in this industry is very important for making sales or for gaining access to those who influence which firms have the opportunity to make sales. Type 7: Pursuing the Unique Idea: The firm is created because of a new idea for a product or service that is not being offered. The products or services are not technically sophisticated or difficult to manufacture. Since this is the first firm in the marketplace to offer such products/services, there is some uncertainty as to whether customers can be found. Type 8: Methodical Organizing: The methodical aspect of the start-up is reflected in the entrepreneur's use of planning both in acquiring the skill venture. The firm's products or services are similar to those of other firms, but the firm has some new twist, either a slightly different way to manufacture the product or provide the service or by selling to a slightly different customer. The NBV taxonomy outlines a situation-based framework that may be useful for helping potential entrepreneurs match their skills, abilities, and interests to possible new venture types.