“Salt of the Earth:” ABF Freight and Entrepreneurial Processes in American Trucking

Research Summary : Much research suggests that entrepreneurial opportunities in established firms result from bottom‐up initiative in a diverse workforce, senior management's main role in the entrepreneurial process is to select among opportunities generated in the bottom‐up process, and it should refrain from directly getting involved in this process. We develop an alternative and more active view of the role of senior management in the opportunity formation process in which senior management intervenes in the entrepreneurial process to resolve coordination and collaboration problems across initiatives and decide on resource allocation. We proffer rival hypotheses concerning the effect of such senior management involvement in the entrepreneurial process. Specifically, we hypothesize that the positive relations between bottom‐up initiative/employee diversity and opportunity formation are positively (negatively) moderated by such direct involvement by senior management. We examine these ideas using two matched data sources: a double‐respondent survey of CEOs and HR managers and employer–employee register data. We find support for the view that senior management involvement positively moderates the relations between bottom‐up processes/diversity and opportunity formation. Managerial Summary : What are the processes through which entrepreneurial opportunities emerge in established companies? Research has pointed to diversity and bottom‐up initiative, but our understanding is limited with respect to what senior managers should do to optimally promote entrepreneurship in such companies. In one view, senior management should keep a distance and limit their involvement to picking the best opportunities out of those they are presented with in the bottom‐up process. In contrast, we argue that given bottom‐up initiative in the context of a diverse workforce, senior management should play a more direct role in the entrepreneurial process. The reason is that senior‐management involvement at early stages of the opportunity formation process is required to handle the management challenges arising from diversity and bottom‐up initiative. Overall, our study suggests that firms that wish to seize the potential benefits (in terms of entrepreneurial opportunities) of having a more diverse workforce and more bottom‐up initiative need senior managers that directly engage in the entrepreneurial process.

Purpose– This paper aims to verify the positive impact of legislative changes aimed at decontrolling the market on the entrepreneurial process of new companies’ creation. The entrepreneurial process has been analysed in the context of innovation, risk and market opportunities, which represent the three main approaches to entrepreneurship theories. The analysis is focussed on the social service sector in Finland.Design/methodology/approach– The study is based on anex post factoresearch design. The data are based on official statistics and the data bank of legislation. The case of Finland is used as an example for explaining the determinants of new company creation.Findings– Legislative changes aimed at decontrolling the market seem to have a positive impact on the entrepreneurial process of new company creation. This influence is manifested in the form of market opportunities, risk bearing and the introduction of innovation. Of these three factors influencing the start-up process, the opportunities for market exploitation seem to have the greatest impact. In the Finnish social service sector, entrepreneurial opportunities are based on changes in the political structures that influence the market conditions. Entrepreneurs have also contributed to the opportunities by being active and innovative in filling any new gap in the market structures.Practical implications– These results might be useful in the debate on policies supporting entrepreneurship. The example of the Finnish social service sector indicates that political changes in market regulations are a very effective method of supporting the process of entrepreneurship.Originality/value– The paper is among the first to analyse both legislative changes and market changes affecting the entrepreneurial process, which indicates that the research is comprehensive. Second, legislative political actions to decontrol the market are a starting point in the discussion on the determinants of the entrepreneurial process. Third, the contribution of legislative changes in terms of market opportunities, innovation and risk bearing as avenues of influence on the entrepreneurial process is analysed.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to critically investigate the use of metaphor in the entrepreneurial process. In particular, the paper focuses on how metaphors are used in the construction of the environment, a precondition for the creation of business opportunities.Design/methodology/approachThis paper reports on a two‐day meeting between Light, a management consultancy firm, and Epsilon one of their clients. The data are drawn from a larger ethnographic study within Light. The consultants and their clients are followed in their daily work. The focus was on how metaphor use influenced their organisational practices.FindingsInvestigating the play of metaphors in Epsilon, it is shown how the firm's environment is created; a pre‐condition for understanding how entrepreneurial opportunities are created. It is shown how use of metaphor, understood as a mode of interpretation, is taking place over time, and how it is part of a relational, context‐dependent process.Research limitations/implicationsThe present study provides new ways of understanding the use of metaphor in the entrepreneurial process. It also indicates the need for a continued focus on language use in the entrepreneurial process. One limitation is that not all aspects of metaphor use are investigated.Practical implicationsThis research can help to influence practitioners to pay more attention to the use of metaphors, not only as a tool for creative thinking or the questioning of embedded assumptions, but also as a mode for interpreting, structuring and producing images of the environment and the organisation.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to development of influences from the linguistic turn to entrepreneurship studies by exploring metaphor theory. One result of this focus on language is an increased sensitivity to metaphor use in the entrepreneurial process.

Definitions and explanations of the entrepreneurial process occur frequently in entrepreneurship literature. Often "entrepreneurial process" and "process of new venture formation" are used as synonyms. However, this book will not adopt this definition, as the new venture or enterprise formation represents only a section of the entrepreneurial process. Many of the explanations are derived from phase or life-cycle based models. In a simplified study of an ideal case, the entrepreneurial process comprises all functions, activities and actions which are associated with the recognition of an entrepreneurial opportunity, its evaluation and corresponding development of a business idea, as well as with writing a business plan, establishing an organization and founding of the enterprise itself, taking into account the required resources, ensuring the viable market establishment of the enterprise and the achievement of growth (opportunity exploitation) [Katz/Gartner (1988); Shane/Venkataraman (2000); Brush (2001); Allen (2003)]. Note that the process to establish a venture in the market place involves substantial sector heterogeneity – the steps which are necessary for establishing a restaurant business will differ considerably from those required for founding a high-tech start-up. [A good discussion of industry-specific entrepreneurship, e.g., in the technology domain, is offered in Dorf/Byers (2008)]

Scott A. Shane is a professor of economics and entrepreneurial studies in Case Western Reserve University of the United States, and has published significant works that display superior conceptual acumen as well as empirical and methodological sophistication. His research covers virtually all major aspects of the entrepreneurship phenomenon: individuals, opportunity, organizational context, environment, and entrepreneurial process. Scott A. Shane has made outstanding contributions to entrepreneurial research and won the 2009 Global Entrepreneurship Research Award. In this paper, we introduce Scott A. Shane’s main academic ideas and academic contributions to Chinese entrepreneurial researchers based on English literature. The content of the paper is showed as follows. First, we introduce Scott A. Shane’s research paradigm of entrepreneurial process. Using ideas of Austrian economics school, Scott A. Shane defined the field of entrepreneurship research as the scholarly examination of how, by whom, and with what effects opportunities to create future goods and services are discovered, evaluated, and exploited. Consequently, this field involves process research of discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities. Scott A. Shane creatively proposed the entrepreneurial process research paradigm of individual-opportunity nexus for entrepreneurial opportunity discovery, evaluation and development. Second, in terms of theory foundation, Scott A. Shane laid the foundation of process research paradigm of the individual opportunity nexus on market process and divided private knowledge of Austrian school. The entrepreneur discovery theory of market process in modern Austrian school consists of three key interrelated analytical concepts: （a）the entrepreneur role; （b）the role of discovery; （c）adversarial competition. According to Hayek’s divided knowledge theory, an entrepreneur’s knowledge is individual, situational and implicit, and such rich personal knowledge means potential creativity, helping the entrepreneur discover and exploit opportunities. So based on Austrian school’s ideas, Scott A. Shane created a conceptual framework of entrepreneurial research, induced scholars to concern with three sets of research questions about entrepreneurship: （1）why, when, and how opportunities for the creation of goods and services come into existence; （2）why, when, and how some people but not others discover and exploit these opportunities; （3）why, when, and how different modes of action are used to exploit entrepreneurial opportunities. Third, Scott A. Shane is a uniquely complete entrepreneurship scholar. He has made substantial contributions to the field of entrepreneurship. They can be summarized as follows: （a）he has strongly influenced what we view as central aspects of entrepreneurship, and has been a leading figure in redirecting the focus on entrepreneurship research itself; （b）he has influenced how we view entrepreneurship phenomenon by making full arguments and presenting theoretical insights; （c）in particular, he has emphasized the need to consider variation in the opportunities alongside the characteristics of those individuals who pursue them, as well as the matching of individuals and opportunities; （d）he has contributed to how we conduct entrepreneurship research; Scott A. Shane has been a forerunner of examining relevant units of analysis that are difficult to sample, designing entrepreneurial process research, processing data, and introducing sophisticated analytical methods; （e）he has laid the theory foundation of entrepreneurship and promoted the development of entrepreneurship.

Empirical research documents that overconfidence has a strong impact on investment decision. In this experimental study using a within-subject design and entrepreneurial process, we detail this relationship by introducing a stage of identification (initial knowledge about the entrepreneurial opportunities to invest in) and evaluation (forecasts to be made) before the investment decision. We also examine the role of expertise by comparing a group of entrepreneurs (320 Tunisian entrepreneurs) and a group of students (70), control in the role of risk aversion, and implement different measures of overconfidence (miscalibration in two formats – the BTA effect and the illusion of control). Our results show that no differences were observed between entrepreneurs and students in the degree of overconfidence. However, overconfidence seems to determine decisionmaking in a different way across the two groups. Concerning students, we observed that overconfidence influenced general tasks such as identification of the entrepreneurial opportunities but when it came to investing, risk aversion had a major effect. In contrast, entrepreneurs were strongly influenced by their overconfidence. For them, it mainly affected specific tasks (evaluation and investment choices) but, surprisingly, risk aversion had no effect on investment decision. Our results suggest that introducing an entrepreneurial opportunities in the decision process is an aid to understanding the differences between experts and novices. Original Research Article British Journal of Economics, Management & Trade, 4(12): 1889-1904, 2014 1890

Understanding what drives startup survival is of high interest for entrepreneurship research. We develop a dynamic entrepreneurial process model of early entrepreneurship that includes key input factors of nascent firms, namely the entrepreneurial founding team (EFT), entrepreneurial opportunity, external financing and traces changes in quarterly intervals. Based on a hand-collected sample of 2670 observation on 538 early stage ventures from both Europe (252) and Latin America (286), we jointly analyze the effect of EFT and entrepreneurial opportunity quality on startup survival. Further, we explore external financing by venture capitalists as a mediator mechanism through which EFT and entrepreneurial opportunity influence startup survival. Our paper contributes to the individual-opportunity nexus theory by disentangling the effect of both actor and non-actor input factors for entrepreneurial success and to the entrepreneurial process perspective by analyzing their influence over time. Our findings show that the relevance of EFT and entrepreneurial opportunity shift throughout the development of a startup: EFT becomes gradually less important and entrepreneurial opportunity becomes more important as the startup matures. Further, both effects are partially mediated by external financing.

Recent entrepreneurship research has suggested that opportunity development takes place as entrepreneurs move through the stages of intention formation, opportunity recognition, opportunity evaluation, and opportunity implementation. One major issue with this staged approach is that it is unclear how individuals make sense of such an entrepreneurial opportunity. Using a sensemaking approach (variation-selection-retention or VSR), this thesis develops a theoretical framework aiming to understand the cognitive processing of the transition between entrepreneurial opportunity and entrepreneurial action. Here, entrepreneurial opportunity is further developed once an entrepreneurial action has been realised. The theoretical framework is subsequently employed to analyse the role of home-country culture on decision-making leading to action, which ultimately develops opportunity. Using interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA), this study provides a detailed examination of the lived experience of nine (9) Vietnamese entrepreneurs in the UK. IPA is suitable for answering the research question: How do Vietnamese entrepreneurs develop opportunity through their cultural lens during immigrant entrepreneurship? Four cultural values of Vietnamese neo-Confucianism are identified in the literature review: fragmented, uncritical, suspicion-oriented, and stability-seeking (or FUSS). The findings propose that each cultural value dominantly affects a particular VSR stage driving entrepreneurial action. This research contributes to the literature and practice by (1) confirming action as resembling opportunity development regardless of the stage of the entrepreneurial process (Dimov, 2007), (2) promoting the link between culture and entrepreneurship viewed under the cognition-behaviour perspective (Kerr & Coviello, 2020), and (3) supporting a shift in entrepreneurship research to the context of less accessible and less visible ethnic minority groups such as the Vietnamese community in London (Bagwell, 2018).

PurposeAlthough extensive governmental efforts have taken place to promote entrepreneurship in Iran, based on global entrepreneurship monitor report, the rate of perceived opportunities among young people, especially those with university education, has dropped. Since the perceived entrepreneurial opportunities are the first and most important step in the entrepreneurship process, this study identified the factors affecting the entrepreneurial opportunity recognition in Iranian higher education.Design/methodology/approachThe statistical population included 127 senior undergraduate students in all majors of agriculture at Ilam University. The sample size was determined by using the Krejcie and Morgan’s (1970) sampling table to be 100 senior undergraduate agriculture students at Ilam University, Ilam province, Iran, selected through a stratified random sampling technique.FindingsThe results showed that the perceived entrepreneurial opportunity among students was moderately low. According to structural equation modeling, the alertness, human capital, social capital and environmental support variables had a positive and significant effect on the entrepreneurial opportunity recognition.Research limitations/implicationsRegarding the research implications, the present study, with providing and testing a model for developing the entrepreneurial opportunity recognition among students in a developing country (Iran) with diverse cultures and values, has improved the literature of entrepreneurship in higher education.Practical implicationsBased on results instructors in higher agricultural education can use active teaching and learning methods, such as creating ideas, experiential and service learning, teamwork and practical work, critical thinking and problem-solving in education. Also, financial, technical and consultative support of instructors and managers in agricultural colleges to implement, launch and commercialize agricultural students' entrepreneurial ideas and projects is needed.Originality/valueThe findings indicated the importance of alertness, human capital, social capital and environmental support on the entrepreneurial opportunity recognition among students. Findings showed that ecological approach could be used to develop students' entrepreneurial opportunity recognition.

PurposeBased on the theory of identity, this paper aims to examine the centrality role of entrepreneurs’ identity in the prevalence of the entrepreneurial process in online platforms. Identity is a kind of internal energy that stimulates the neurons of entrepreneurs. Thus, leveraging identity effectively in the digital business cycle is a global challenge of paramount importance.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses a quantitative approach, specifically the covariance-based structural equation modeling method, to examine data collected from a sample of 153 entrepreneurs operating on social media platforms.FindingsThe findings highlight the positive impact of social media on entrepreneurs’ identities, revealing three distinct identity types: digital identity, social identity and entrepreneurial identity. However, only entrepreneurial and social identities emerge as significant factors in sustaining the entrepreneurial process. Entrepreneurs operating on online platforms strive for recognition as entrepreneurs while also cultivating trust-based relationships with social media users. This recognition and trust contribute to the overall success of their entrepreneurial endeavors.Research limitations/implicationsIdentity centrality in the entrepreneurial process presents itself as a highly sophisticated tool to help young entrepreneurs on social media platforms to identify, construct and even harmonize the different identities they may adopt to adapt to the challenges and opportunities of entrepreneurship. In fact, social media provide several opportunities that foster entrepreneurial aspirations and provide a fertile ground for shaping entrepreneurs’ identities, ensuring the success of their entrepreneurial ventures. The emerging generation of entrepreneurs should prioritize cultivating their entrepreneurial and social identities while maintaining an acute awareness of the importance of having a coherent and relevant online presence.Originality/valueThe results of this study significantly elucidate the mechanisms governing identity formation and its dynamics’ influence on the development of entrepreneurship on social media.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about a shift in entrepreneurial opportunities in the United States. In this paper, we proxy entrepreneurial processes by examining housing prices in different regions of the United States. Housing prices capture the movement in people, tax dynamics, and behavioral preferences for equity ownership in different regions and over time, all of which were drastically impacted by COVID-19. We examine all US equity crowdfunding offerings starting with the very first offerings in 2016 Q2 until 2021 Q1 based on data from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The data indicate that regional housing prices post-COVID-19 are a strong predictor of the number of equity crowdfunding campaigns and the amount of capital raised. Moreover, the impact of housing price changes on crowdfunding is more pronounced among more prosperous regions. The housing price effect is robust to numerous controls and consideration of outliers.

COVID-19 brought about a shift in entrepreneurial opportunities and in the United States. In this paper, we proxy entrepreneurial processes by examining housing prices in different regions of the United States. Housing prices capture the movement in people, tax dynamics, and behavioral preferences for equity ownership in different regions and over time, all of which were drastically impacted by COVID-19. We examine all U.S. equity crowdfunding offerings starting with the very first offerings in 2016 Q2 until 2021 Q1 based on data from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The data indicate that regional housing prices post-COVID-19 are a strong predictor of the number of equity crowdfunding campaigns and the amount of capital raised. The impact of housing price changes on crowdfunding is more pronounced among more prosperous regions. The housing price effect is robust to numerous controls and consideration of outliers.

The recent infusion of digital platforms into different aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship has supported digital entrepreneurship; however, the altered entrepreneurial processes are yet to be explored. This chapter aims to explore the role of digital platforms as external enablers in the entrepreneurial processes. It focuses on digital platform-based startups of Pakistan and draws on entrepreneurial bricolage theory to understand the enabling external resources. The authors followed multiple qualitative case study approach and collected data through semi-structured interviews from six startups operating solely on digital platforms, 1) XYLEXA, 2) Toycycle, 3) PaakHealth, 4) DadaJee.com, 5) Qurbani App and 6) PriceOye. The findings show that entrepreneurial process is a continuous process. Digital platforms have made entrepreneurial processes less bounded i.e., the products and services keep on evolving even after they have been endorsed to the end user. Moreover, platform-based startups having limited resources can pass through the entire entrepreneurial process by combining available resources efficiently and effectively. Entrepreneurial bricolage helps as a catalyst in successfully developing and exploiting the opportunity with existing resources.KeywordsDigital platformsEntrepreneurial processesDigital entrepreneurshipEntrepreneurial bricolage theoryExternal enablers

Our research examines the sustainable entrepreneurial process and focuses on the identification and exploitation of sustainable opportunities. Some scholars consider opportunities as objective phenomena that need to be discovered. In this entrepreneurial process, known as causation, entrepreneurs first decide on the objectives to be achieved and then select the resources needed to achieve them. Other researchers argue that opportunities are created and cannot exist without the actions of entrepreneurs (Baker and Nelson, 2005; Sarasvathy, 2001). The entrepreneurial process is then said to be effectual in which entrepreneurs focus on the resources and means at hand to choose the possible effects that create opportunities. The objective of our research is to answer the following question: how do responsible entrepreneurs identify and exploit opportunities in responsible entrepreneurship? Do they adopt effectual or causal behaviours to identify and exploit sustainable opportunities? Using a qualitative multiple-case methodology, we traced the entrepreneurial process of six cases of sustainable new ventures. Our results show that responsible entrepreneurs not only adopt effectual and causal behaviours, but also demonstrate behaviours that are unique to them given the sustainable nature of their activities. We thus propose a model that describes the process of identifying and exploiting sustainable opportunities.

Contingency as an entrepreneurial resource: How private obsession fulfills public need