Abstract
The interplay between health, entrepreneurship and small and emerging businesses is a research field receiving growing interest. Studies point to both health-related risks and opportunities, which have implications for the social and economic lives of entrepreneurs and employees in small and new firms. Research has been carried out in different disciplines, which have contributed in different ways to the understanding of this inquiry. As the field is still premature and interdisciplinary in nature, there is a need to establish boundary-crossing avenues for developing new knowledge on the topic. This ambition has led to the development of this special issue. The issue includes results from original research on working life challenges encountered by small and new businesses, approached from a variety of disciplines. In this introduction, we begin by tracing an overarching framework, to which we add brief descriptions of the contributing papers. To conclude, we outline future research goals and discuss how issues around mental health, regulation and work environment inspections, race, disability and gender issues and the growing gig economy will affect the conditions for healthy entrepreneurial work.
Highlights
The theme for this special issue in Small Business Economics is “New and small firms in a modern working life: How do we make entrepreneurship healthy?”. This indicates that the papers in this issue will, in one way or the other, deal with matters related to work-related health, in the specific context of small and new firms
Entrepreneurship is not necessarily related to new or small firms—it is possible to launch into ventures without establishing a new firm—and the term intrapreneurship would cover such ventures within the frame of a large organization
Several health issues have been noted in relation to small and new businesses as well as to entrepreneurship (MacEachen et al 2010), while the lion’s share of research on work-related health has been done on larger organizations (MacEachen et al 2016)
Summary
The theme for this special issue in Small Business Economics is “New and small firms in a modern working life: How do we make entrepreneurship healthy?”. The theme of this issue pertains to the overall question of how different issues of workrelated health and illness interact with various forms of business structures in which entrepreneurial work takes place This theme allows for the development of new knowledge about the role of new and small enterprises (including older small firms) as agents for the development of sustainable workplaces and knowledge of specific health risks related to such ventures. Firms at this point have generally not adapted to the legal arrangements a larger organization needs to face, e.g. consortia agreements, employment agreements, work environment and social insurance legislation or procedures for collective bargaining Another key issue is the high failure or “churn” rate of new small enterprises, where this precariousness of enterprise will affect their behaviour, especially around occupational health and safety. This relates to broader topics of how small and new enterprises promote health and manage work disability and the organizational learning capacity related to identifying and management of occupational risks and hazards
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