From algorithmic hallucinations to alien minds: Addressing the ideator's dilemma through entrepreneurial work

Employees’ different levels of entrepreneurial work are likely to be associated with varying levels of knowledge and intentions in a country. This leads the current paper to argue how entrepreneurial work by employees influences employees’ approach to running their businesses in India and Slovenia. Random samples of employees in India and Slovenia were surveyed from 2012 to 2019 by Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. The current study emphasized the significant role of entrepreneurial work by employees in their potential to become independent entrepreneurs, albeit with differences between India and Slovenia. Our main theoretical contribution is bridging the gap between dynamic capability and entrepreneurial work by employees at the macro level in India and Slovenia. Additionally, the study provides practical suggestions for Indian policymakers and Slovenian owners/managers.

The interest of specialists in the entrepreneurial intent determinants study is that it has gradually emerged as a predictor of effective entrepreneurship. For this reason, this article seeks to understand the links between employees' human capital and their entrepreneurial intent through entrepreneurial work that would generate the desire to create a business in them. Our paper uses a linear hierarchical modelling based on a large sample of 58,664 employees aged 18 through 64 from 15 countries, made up of the GEM Adult Population Survey. Comparison between MENA region countries, Spain and Denmark highlights the overriding role of human capital in both entrepreneurial work and entrepreneurial intent. The major result of this analysis is the moderating effect of the context on the predictive variables in defining employees' entrepreneurial work and defining entrepreneurial intent.

This research is inspired by Baumol’s lifetime effort in introducing the entrepreneur to mainstream economics. The paper examines entrepreneurial work and suggests a return to classical economic theory of the entrepreneur in the tradition of Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter. We assume entrepreneurial work to be the intrinsic character of the entrepreneur, who divides her working time into subsistence and entrepreneurial productions. The entrepreneur taking pleasure from entrepreneurial work is the crucial conjecture of our analytical model. The model predicts 1) maximum utility can be reached if and only if the market value of the marginal product of labor in subsistence production is greater than that in entrepreneurial production; 2) government interventions artificially alternating the price of subsistent production may lead to misallocation of limited labor time into the two productions.

Beyond the diversity of an entrepreneur's activities, this chapter discusses how different public and/or economic actors help to shape "entrepreneurship" and "entrepreneurial work," developing programs to support entrepreneurial activities, and formulating moral judgments to qualify (or disqualify) some of these activities. Drawing on three national cases (Germany, France and Ethiopia) it sheds light on the relations between the national and the supranational levels where these categories are conceived and implemented. Focusing on those dominant visions of "entrepreneurial work" and "entrepreneurship" that are nurtured and disseminated by international institutions – eager to promote the so-called entrepreneurial spirit as a desirable future of work – this chapter examines how these visions are operationalized into public policies in Ethiopia, France and Germany. It argues that this translation always implies a moral dimension that contributes to distinguish between "good" and "bad" entrepreneurs, a terminology that is reappropriated by the entrepreneurs themselves to defend their position and support their entrepreneurial work.

The article shows some problems of social and labour relations in entrepreneurship on the example of the payment of entrepreneurial labor in connection with the lack of the necessary methodological support of calculations of the complexity of this work. At that time according to article 132 “Remuneration of labor” of the Labor code of the Russian Federation of December 30, 2001 No. 197-FZ (in edition as of October 1, 2016) the salary of each worker depends on his qualification, complexity of the performed work, quantity and quality of the spent work and the maximum size is not limited. At the same time, any discrimination in setting and changing the conditions of remuneration is prohibited. This requirement of labour law should be respected with regard to the wages of employees of enterprises and organizations in any sphere and sector of the economy, including the economy of entrepreneurship, in view of employees engaged in entrepreneurial work. At the same time, entrepreneurial work has its own unique specificity, but in practice these specific wage conditions are not taken into account. Involuntarily, there is discrimination of entrepreneurial labor in the field of wages due to the lack of necessary methodological recommendations to address this problem. First of all, there is a lack of methodological approaches to determine the complexity of entrepreneurial labor, taking into account such important fundamental signs of its complexity as uncertainty, risks and competition.

This chapter defines copyright as arising whenever a work is created under qualifying conditions. The Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) defines eight types of work that fall under two categories: works that must be original or ‘authorial works’, including literary works, dramatic works, musical works, and artistic works; and works that need not be original or ‘entrepreneurial works’: films, sound recordings, broadcasts, and the typographical arrangement of published editions. Copyright is infringed by copying or communicating the whole or a substantial part of a work—referred to as primary infringement—or by dealing in infringing copies of a work-referred to as secondary infringement. There are some major and many minor defences to copyright infringement including the ‘fair dealing’ defences and the public interest. Many aspects of copyright law have been harmonized by the European Union.

Managing older employees is a major challenge for companies, especially during COVID-19. Therefore, creating a healthy and entrepreneurial work environment as well as an inclusive culture within organizations is crucial for companies to maintain their sustainable advantage. The main objective of this paper is to develop a multidimensional model of a healthy and entrepreneurial work environment for older employees and determine its impact on their work engagement during COVID-19. Structural equation modeling was used for data analysis. The results show that workplace health promotion, entrepreneurial working conditions, and leadership lead to better well-being of older employees. In addition, entrepreneurial working conditions that promote intergenerational synergy lead to higher work engagement of older employees, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. For the elderly, the entrepreneurial work environment is therefore particularly important, even though entrepreneurship is mostly attributed to younger men. In addition, older employees’ well-being and the promotion of intergenerational synergy have a positive impact on their work engagement. The results will help companies better manage their older employees, shape their workplace, and increase the sustainable benefits of their businesses during and after the COVID-19 crisis.

This chapter defines copyright as arising whenever a work is created under qualifying conditions. The Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) defines eight types of work that fall under two categories: works that must be original or ‘authorial works’, including literary works, dramatic works, musical works, and artistic works; and works that need not be original or ‘entrepreneurial works’: films, sound recordings, broadcasts, and the typographical arrangement of published editions. Copyright is infringed by copying or communicating the whole or a substantial part of a work—referred to as primary infringement—or by dealing in infringing copies of a work—referred to as secondary infringement. There are some major and many minor defences to copyright infringement including the ‘fair dealing’ defences and the public interest. Many aspects of copyright law have been harmonized by the European Union.

This chapter examines how entrepreneurial work is being compensated for and what role motivational factors play when making the career decision to work in the life sciences and in a life science venture. Studies show that entrepreneurial work is not compensating for higher market-risk exposure in current employment contracts, which is comparable to a lower pay given the stipulated level of risk. The empirical material reported still reveals that venture workers are by and large pleased with their career choice and their employment conditions, giving them the chance to contribute to a domain of work that is regarded as being meaningful, to work on a team that creates a sense of espirit de corps, and to work in a smaller company with better possibilities for transparent activities. In this view, venture work offers possibilities for meaningful and rewarding work, regardless of higher levels of economic insecurity.

This article traces the experiences of Vicky, a female entrepreneur who runs a circular business that produces swim and activewear from regenerated fishing nets. The idea of a circular economy, which moves away from the linear economic model based on a make-use-dispose logic towards the elimination of waste and a sustainable use of the world’s resources, has rapidly gained popularity. Vicky’s story highlights the often overlooked but critical role of small businesses and their owners in this systemic change. Vicky performs three intertwined but distinct forms of work – entrepreneurial work on the business, identity work on the self and institutional work on the wider world – that all contribute to the circular transition. At the same time, Vicky exemplifies an alternative approach to entrepreneurship through a relational interpretation of circularity. Her case draws attention to how the labour of actors in the grassroots propels large-scale transitions.

Podcasting is an innovative form of technical and professional communication (TPC), and a case study of Haven and Harper's work in the knitting community through podcasting demonstrates how women have found ways to maneuver outside of traditional workplaces in order to reterritorialize their workspaces. Such entrepreneurial engagements illuminate the inclusiveness and exciting nature of the work happening on the fringes and the forward momentum of the field of TPC as a whole. The entrepreneurial work in this case study reveals the situated networking, connected mediation, and contextualized professionalism that occurs in entrepreneurial TPC. While these women have applied their TPC expertise to knitting, the form of podcasting and the techniques they use can be translated across disciplines and demonstrates a need to connect with and value users. Entrepreneurial work through new media technologies is leading the way to future TPC, as audiences have become increasingly complex in their expectations for communication.

‘Lifestyle-based entrepreneurs’ are self-employed people who work from home and have moved into entrepreneurship to live a certain lifestyle and escape insecure wage work. This chapter looks at the example of home-based businesses in Sweden and Finland hosting the ‘dog hobbyists’ who participate in dog training in rural settings. In this new entrepreneurial work, production, reproduction, and consumption blur together as the entire lifestyle becomes commercialised. Despite individualised risk, the entrepreneurs remain optimistic that they have the resources to make real their fantasies of living the ‘good life’.

Platforms for gig work like Uber advertise their job opportunities as “entrepreneurial work” to potential workers and their company as technologically innovative to potential investors. One of the central features of these platforms is a layer of automated middle management in the form of a coordinating algorithm that interacts with workers completing tasks through the platform. The algorithmic middle management is useful to the platform as a status signaling tool to investors, a cost cutting measure, and a rhetorical tool for separating themselves further from their workforce. In practice, however, algorithms are limited in how well they can coordinate a widespread workforce and the extra management work falls to the workers themselves to manage. Using data from 41 interviews with Uber, Amazon, and Lyft gig workers, we examine the tasks that algorithm completes vs. the middle management tasks that fall to gig workers to complete on their own. We find that “entrepreneurial work” for these gig workers means that they must absorb several types of middle management tasks in addition to the tasks they were explicitly hired to do. Gig workers also bear the costs associated with representing a platform and themselves when there is any contrast between the projected expectations of the customer and the completed service.

This article addresses the problem of understanding and assessing how entrepreneurial and self-employed workers engage with economic fields as they pursue their interests. It considers the differing experiences of entrepreneurial workers by developing a transferable approach to studying the relations between their environments, practices and values. The approach developed combines Bourdieusian and critical realist scholarship to explore qualitative data about the networking practices of 25 self-employed and entrepreneurial human resource consultants who competed in a conurbation in the North of England. We argue that the form of analysis that develops, which we call Realist Bourdieusian Analysis, reveals more about the causal properties of the social formations entrepreneurial workers navigate than analyses that are limited within each lexicon. Arguably, combining Bourdieusian analysis and critical realism enriches our understanding of the constituent parts of economic fields, the resources entrepreneurial workers access through them, and agents’ relations, experiences and reflexive struggles. This novel approach, we argue, facilitates deeper appreciation of these workers’ experiences and more insightful critique of existing supports to entrepreneurship, as well as the possibility of prescribing policy supports that might enable workers within the field studied. The analysis concludes by highlighting the practical, theoretical and methodological contributions of this research.

Over the past few decades, the desire of residents on urban peripheries in Brazil to have their own businesses has grown. Consequently, several authors have critically pointed out the advance of neoliberal ideas among the urban popular classes. In this article I discuss the origins of this ‘entrepreneurial disposition’ and its relationship with neoliberal discourse that seeks to encourage ‘entrepreneurialism of oneself’. The analysis presented in this article is based on ethnographic research carried out among entrepreneurial workers on the outskirts of São Paulo through in‐depth interviews focusing on life histories and participant observation in strategic spaces (online and in person) during 2020 and 2021. I explore adherence and opposition to and resignification of neoliberal entrepreneurial ideology from different cultural and material backgrounds by retelling the history of five entrepreneurs from three different families. I argue that rather than neoliberal ideas being an ideological conviction, they are embedded in social practices that are quite common in the periphery of São Paulo. Therefore, they should be analysed in the light of these previously existing practices and moralities. From a peripheral point of view, ethnographic analysis also allows us to examine the limits of this embeddedness and shed light on possible forms of resistance.