The language of social entrepreneurs

This paper questions the application of the entrepreneurship discourse to social entrepreneurship in the UK and looks at how people ‘doing’ social enterprise appropriate or re-write the discourse to articulate their own realities. Drawing on phenomenological enquiry and discourse analysis, the study analyses the micro discourses of social entrepreneurs, as opposed to the meta rhetorics of (social) entrepreneurship. Analysis using both corpus linguistics software and Critical Discourse Analysis showed a preoccupation among interviewees with local issues, collective action, geographical community and local power struggles. Echoes of the enterprise discourse are evident but couched in linguistic devices that suggest a modified social construction of entrepreneurship, in which interviewees draw their legitimacy from a local or social morality. These findings are at odds ideologically with the discursive shifts of UK social enterprise policy over the last decade, in which a managerially defined rhetoric of enterprise is used to promote efficiency, business discipline and financial independence. The paper raises critical awareness of the tension in meanings appropriated to the enterprise discourse by social enterprise policy and practice and illustrates the value of discourse analysis for entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship research.     

Entrepreneurship education: the role of local business

Entrepreneurship education is high on political agendas for its contributions to cultural change and economic growth. Scholars have suggested that the local context may influence the results of entrepreneurship education, and have recommended that educators strengthen their relationships with local businesses and help students learn from actual business settings. By combining policy analysis with empirical data, the present qualitative study explores two issues. First, we look at how the role of local business is expressed in entrepreneurship education policy documents. Second, we explore how local entrepreneurial activity and culture may influence how policies are understood and translated into practice at the local level. The findings indicate that collaboration between schools and business life may strengthen, rather than change, existing local development paths. The present paper contributes to the literature and understanding of the interplay between entrepreneurship education policy and the local context and proposes several policy recommendations emerging from the empirical study.     

Embeddedness in context: understanding gender in a female entrepreneurship network

ABSTRACT

In this paper I argue that through a process of embeddedness in context, a female entrepreneurship network is able to challenge gender structures. I investigate how a female entrepreneurship network is constructed and how they reinforce and possibly challenge existing gender structures. From an ethnographic study, three processes in the female entrepreneurship network were identified: making proper entrepreneurs, building relationships and engaging in change. In the different processes the women involved in the network reinforced gender structures through compliance with a masculine discourse of entrepreneurship, but also challenged gender structures through questioning this discourse. Through becoming embedded in their local community, the women entrepreneurs were able to take charge of the development of the network and challenge gender structures as a result of questioning the masculine discourse of entrepreneurship. This implies an interplay between embeddedness and gender as two separate but dependent processes. Linking together gender and embeddedness elicits a new take on the way female entrepreneurship networks are constructed and how they could advance gender equality within entrepreneurship. Consequently, this paper emphasises a need for further examination of embeddedness within gender and entrepreneurship research.     

Telling their own stories: Māori entrepreneurship in the mainstream screen industry

We examined how factors from Indigenous entrepreneurship research (social capital, cultural capital, self-efficacy) help explain the high level of Māori entrepreneurial performance in the mainstream screen industry. Results, based on ten case studies and a one-year series of structured interviews, extend prior research by showing that these Indigenous entrepreneurs benefit jointly from two forms of capital: cultural and social. We found high levels of both forms to increase the desire for emancipation of cultural and community identity – not just individual identity – through entrepreneurship. Self-efficacy and storytelling helped ameliorate discontinuities across Indigenous and mainstream contexts. Our research sheds new light on how Indigenous ventures can pursue mainstream entrepreneurship while maintaining cultural identity. It also makes several distinct contributions to the Indigenous entrepreneurship literature. First, it provides an integrative theoretic review. Second, it illustrates a culturally appropriate methodology for researching Māori entrepreneurs with implications for other Indigenous communities. Third, it proposes cultural capital and social capital as a two-part framework for explaining Indigenous entrepreneurial action. Fourth, it shows how entrepreneurship can be empowering for Indigenous communities. Finally, our paper demonstrates that entrepreneurship is a promising mechanism for preserving and promoting the cultures of Māori and other Indigenous peoples.     

The embedding process of community ventures: creating a music festival in a rural community

Community entrepreneurship is a potentially powerful mechanism to improve the well-being of rural communities. To mobilize inhabitants for collective action, an emerging community venture must be embedded within a local community. Yet, the embedding process of community ventures is not well understood. Accordingly, this study explores how a community entrepreneur (CE) embedded an emerging community venture into a rural community and simultaneously stimulated social change in the community. Drawing on a longitudinal case study of a CE who created a jazz music festival in a rural Norwegian community, a dynamic conceptual framework was developed that highlights the roles and mechanisms that support the embedding process. The CE promoted social change by introducing external impulses to the local community and assumed a bridging role between the villagers and external actors in the embedding process. Some villagers assumed local embedding roles, while several external actors assumed external embedding roles. I identified four strategies that were used to increase the embeddedness of the community venture in the rural community and one strategy that was used by the CE to de-embed the venture in order to avoid constraints imposed by the local community. The importance of the different roles and mechanisms changed over time.     

Culture,entrepreneurship and uneven development: a spatial analysis

Interest in the proposed connection between culture and entrepreneurship has grown significantly in recent years. However, less attention has been given to the nature of the overall impact of this proposed association on development outcomes, particularly at the local level. In response, this paper analyses the relationship between the nature of the culture, entrepreneurship and development experienced across localities, proposing that the link between culture and development is mediated by entrepreneurship. It focuses upon the concept of community culture, as well as embracing a notion of development incorporating both economic and social well-being outcomes. Drawing upon a multivariate spatial analysis of data from localities in Great Britain, the findings indicate that differences in rates of entrepreneurship are strongly influenced by the community culture present in these localities. Furthermore, a bidirectional relationship is found to exist between entrepreneurship and economic and social development outcomes. It is concluded that the embeddedness of local community culture presents a significant challenge for those places seeking to promote entrepreneurially driven development.     

Sustainable Entrepreneurship and B Corps

Sustainable entrepreneurship contributes to solving social and environmental problems through the means of successful for‐profit businesses. This paper contributes to understanding how sustainable entrepreneurship is implemented by exploring an emerging new form of business, ‘B Corps’, that employs market tactics to address social and environmental issues. Through interviewing 14 B Corps, the exploratory research study found that B Corps treat profit as a means to achieve positive societal ends, they regard the B Corp model as a tool for change, the B Corp model provides a common collective identity for internal and external validation, they are focused on societal impact rather than maximizing profits and they attempt to legitimate this form of sustainable entrepreneurship by influencing the business community and government officials. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Community entrepreneurship - cases and conceptualization *

As starting and managing a small business means both social and economic risk taking so is building a robust community a social as well as an economic endeavour. Such a community is a most vital context for entrepreneurship. If located in a remote area and if the environment is hostile cooperation is stimulated between firms and other community groups. Their success is especially ascribed to qualified community entrepreneurship, i.e. personal and innovative ways of building support for local autonomous entrepreneurs. An integrative approach to local economic development is illustrated by two successful, albeit contrasting, Swedish cases.

The cases are reviewed with the help of a conceptual framework that particularly points out the importance of local and global networking in both community and autonomous entrepreneurship. In a mixed economy such networks must be carefully managed and encompass linkages on, beside the market, institutional and political arenas. The very role of the community entrepreneur is to bridge these different settings through alert leadership, if required organized as a team.     

Using the Past to Construct Territorial Identities in Regional Planning: The Case of Mälardalen,Sweden

This study examines how the past is used in the construction of regional identity narratives in policy discourses and documents. Despite assumptions that regional identity is based on shared culture, some authors argue that new forms of regional identity have emerged as the consequence of regions’ involvement in wider networks. Identity has been pursued as an asset to regional attractiveness and economic growth and, as such, is shaped by regional development strategies concerning particular social groups. Socially shared representations of the past through history, cultural heritage and collective memory play an important role in this process, since the past is a powerful resource that may be used to construct images of places, legitimizing claims on territories. Document analysis and interviews with planners are used to analyse strategies for regional development in five counties located in the Mälardalen region, Sweden. This study shows that regional strategies are guided by narratives framing regions from an exclusive outside perspective, leaving internal qualities unnoticed. The past is used to structure these narratives and construct identities that serve economic growth rather than the integration of the plural heritages of the region.     

SME policy implementation as a relational challenge

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between actors, who implement the small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) policy, and entrepreneurs, who are the targets of the policy, by focusing on the question who is serving whose interests. The paper presents a case study conducted in one of the sub-regions in Finland. The data include individual interviews with 10 policy implementers and 19 small business entrepreneurs and two group discussions. The data are approached from the perspectives of discourse analysis and positioning theory. The results are further interpreted in terms of agent–principal relations. The results indicate that one relational challenge faced in the implementation of the SME policy is the proxy agency, in which both policy implementers and entrepreneurs position themselves as the principal and the other party as their agent. The proxy agency can be viewed as an interactional pitfall caused by the incompatible discourses of entrepreneurs and policy actors and the actor positions constructed with these discourses. Besides addressing the relational problems enabled by certain individual discourses, the paper also demonstrates how there is also a need to address the potential conflict that stems from the collision between discourses.     

Entrepreneurial motivation: a non-entrepreneur’s journey to become an entrepreneur

In entrepreneurship literature, much research effort is focused on differentiating entrepreneurs, recognizing or exploiting opportunities, resources available or required, or a combination of the three entrepreneurship-defining factors. There is, however, very little research on understanding a non-entrepreneur’s motivation to become an entrepreneur. This greatly limits our knowledge of the entrepreneurial process. It has hindered our understanding of how non-entrepreneurs are motivated to pursue entrepreneurial career options and has led to misinformed decisions by scholars and policy makers. In this paper, our goal is to develop a theory of entrepreneurial motivation that explains how non-entrepreneurs develop the motivation to pursue entrepreneurship. We argue that an individual’s self-assessment of their identity is the primary factor in individuals developing entrepreneurial motivation. The identity self-assessment leads individuals either to seek enhancement of their identity or establish a new identity that opens them to the influence of entrepreneurial motivation reinforcing entrepreneurial exposure in their social environment.     

International entrepreneurship and the small business

The topic of ‘international entrepreneurship’ is becoming increasingly popular with researchers concerned with examining how international and entrepreneurial activities intersect when people in organizations engage in pro-active brokering and risk-taking behaviour in cross-border contexts. Some caution is needed in over-generalizing the meaning and significance of international entrepreneurship – especially in relation to small businesses. Not all entrepreneurial risk-taking, brokering and opportunity-seeking activities lead to internationalization (as the statistics on small business international activities indicate). This might suggest then that the only truly internationally entrepreneurial firms are those that are ‘born global’. However, their entrepreneurial activities are more ‘spatial’, concerned with what can be constructed again in relation to global markets rather than in relation to the local/regional context in which the business is located. For small firms that internationalize a few years after start-up (late starters), processes of international entrepreneurship are different. For ‘later starters’, international entrepreneurship is distinctive in that it is characterized by extending and modifying entrepreneurial understandings and practices that have been socially constructed in relation to the local and regional context in which the small firm is located.     

Development of academic entrepreneurship in a non-mature context: the role of the university as a hub-organisation

This paper focuses on how the evolving roles of a university and its Technology Transfer Office (TTO) are stimulating academic entrepreneurship in a non-mature entrepreneurial ecosystem. A more mature entrepreneurial ecosystem was built gradually by these actors through their progressive creation of innovation intermediaries and coordination among the local players involved in the creation of start-ups. We analyse how the university became a hub organisation. We use the case of the University of Strasbourg to show that the university contributed to the development of the entrepreneurial ecosystem by acting as a boundary spanner and by building and orchestrating the network of the stakeholders in the local system of innovation. This ‘hub’ university became a leading regional organisation at the political level. The TTO played a central role in supporting academic entrepreneurship at the operational level based on its evolution from a revenue maximising model to a model that takes account of social and economic regional development. The progressive adoption of a more selective model of start-up creation requires good coordination among the local actors. Over time, the TTO’s boundary spanning function increased to encompass the development of operational network building and orchestrating functions.     

高校计算机实验室服务地方经济建设的措施与对策——以六安职业技术学院计算机实验室为例

当前,地方高校承担的社会职能日益凸显,怎样更好地融入社会、立足地方经济并为之服务,已成为学校完善自身职能面临的重要课题。六安职业技术学院计算机实验室面向社会开放个性化服务,探索出了服务地方经济建设的发展途径,对高校服务地方经济建设及自身进行准确定位提供了新的思路。     

Credibility lost: attempting to reclaim an expert identity in an HR professional context

Professional insecurity is a long‐standing concern within HR, with claims to expertise seen as critical to credibility. Considering HR as an epistemic community and drawing on the identity work literature, we examine an identity threat to, and subsequent response by, a training and development (T&D) team. Based on ethnographic exposure to their practice, we explore how team members experience the threat and follow their attempts to re‐establish their position in the local epistemic community, the HR department. We examine both individual and collective identity work, considering how both the identity threat and subsequent responses are embedded within T&D and HR practice more broadly. Through this analysis, we offer academic insight on the nature of HR practice and the construction of claims to expertise.     

‘Embrace the masculine; attenuate the feminine’ – gender,identity work and entrepreneurial legitimation in the nascent context

This article critically analyses how gender bias impacts upon women’s efforts to legitimate nascent ventures. Given the importance of founder identity as a proxy for entrepreneurial legitimacy at nascency, we explore the identity work women undertake when seeking to claim legitimacy for their emerging ventures in a prevailing context of masculinity. In so doing, we challenge taken for granted norms pertaining to legitimacy and question the basis upon which that knowledge is claimed. In effect, debates regarding entrepreneurial legitimacy are presented as gender neutral yet, entrepreneurship is a gender biased activity. Thus, we argue it is essential to recognize how gendered assumptions impinge upon the quest for legitimacy. To illustrate our analysis, we use retrospective and real time empirical evidence evaluating legitimating strategies as they unfold, our findings reveal tensions between feminine identities such as ‘wife’ and ‘mother’ and those of the prototypical entrepreneur. This dissonance prompted women to undertake specific forms of identity work to bridge the gap between femininity, legitimacy and entrepreneurship. We conclude by arguing that the pursuit of entrepreneurial legitimacy during nascency is a gendered process which disadvantages women and has the potential to negatively impact upon the future prospects of their fledgling ventures.     

Economic resilience and entrepreneurship: lessons from the Sheffield City Region

This article examines the relationship between economic resilience and entrepreneurship in city regions. Resilience is an emerging concept which has been employed to examine economic performance and responsiveness to exogenous shocks such as financial crisis and recession. Drawing on a literature review of academic articles in this emerging field and interviews with policy-makers in the Sheffield City Region of England, the article examines how entrepreneurship is central to sustain a dynamic economy and demonstrates that it is being fore-fronted in policy debates as a key aspect in creating more resilient economies. The article finds that entrepreneurship is integral to promoting the diversification and capacity building of regional economies, traits which are characteristic of (more) resilient economies. We advance the emerging literature through the development of a conceptual framework to highlight the links between economic resilience and entrepreneurship. In doing so, the article argues that entrepreneurship is critical to the restructuring and adaptation of local (city region) economies and draws out a series of recommendations concerning the wider policy implications of the study.     

The geography of talent: entrepreneurship and local economic development in Oxfordshire

This paper considers the interaction of stocks of talent, entrepreneurship, processes of institutionalization and networking in local development. The main theme is that although innovation necessarily involves social networks and collective action, it should not be overlooked that the quality of those networks is dependent on the quality or talent of individuals who have initiated particular developments. The paper argues that the literature on local and regional development tends to overlook the agency of individuals and that to do so ignores processes that lead to the distinctive characteristics of localities. Using Oxfordshire as a case study, it demonstrates how the expertise of talented individuals has been translated in the fastest growing high-tech economy in the UK. This has brought visibility to the county's techno-economic and institutional achievements feeding into high-level professional and political policy agendas.