Emotional arousal and entrepreneurial outcomes: Combining qualitative methods to elaborate theory

This qualitative study of innovators in the superyacht industry blends longitudinal content analysis with narrative case vignettes to extend nascent theorizing about the antecedents and consequences associated with the arousal of entrepreneurial emotion. The empirically grounded framework induced through our research offers two key theoretical elaborations. First, it extends the existing set of theorized antecedents by highlighting the overlooked roles played by dramatic performances (staged or improvised) and ambient conditions (project, actor and venue considerations). Second, it calls attention to the consequences of emotional arousal for such entrepreneurial outcomes as generating novel solutions to specific problems encountered during the creation process, developing innovative end products, and fostering a general context for innovation.     

Novelty and new firm performance: The case of employment systems in knowledge-intensive service organizations

This paper investigates a question at the core of entrepreneurship research: how does novelty affect new venture performance? We address this question for a type of factor-market innovation deemed critical in the contemporary economy: novelty in employment systems. Our longitudinal study of new firms in a knowledge-intensive service industry shows that the relationship between employment-system novelty and organizational productivity is curvilinear and U-shaped. We also find suggestive evidence that new firms with employment systems exhibiting discrepant degrees of novelty (i.e., combinations of highly conforming and highly novel practices) are less productive than those with coherent employment systems.     

Institutions,entrepreneurs, and communities: A special issue on entrepreneurship

This Special Issue's aim is to demonstrate that drawing on sociological research can further enrich entrepreneurship studies of institutions, entrepreneurs, and communities. We develop an organizing framework for our ten Special Issue papers that categorizes the pieces by community level and type, observed changes, form of entrepreneurial actor, institutional and entrepreneurial concepts and processes, and integrative methodologies. This set of categorizations helps us to identify components that scholars can use to build more mid-range theory around our special issue topics. The framework also helps us to isolate limitations in the Special Issue papers, thereby providing avenues for future research.     

The nudge wars: A modern socialist calculation debate

We investigate the claims of behavioral paternalism in the more realistic framework of complex choice. In particular, we analyze the claims made by behavioral paternalists that predictive analytics over large amounts of data will make it possible to target and successfully implement purportedly welfare-enhancing nudges deemed to make nudged agents better off “as judged by themselves” (AJBT). We draw parallels between the socialist calculation debate and nudge theoretical arguments, particularly the libertarian socialism of H. D. Dickinson and the libertarian paternalism of Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. We find that if actual idealized behavior is a more complicated process of recursive feedback using a knowledge classification method, behavioral paternalists engaging in an automatized process of notice-and-comment rulemaking using Big Data methods still encounter epistemological problems and the problems associated with radical uncertainty unearthed during the socialist calculation debate and afterwards.