The governance of entrepreneurial community ventures: How do conflicting community interests influence opportunity exploitation?

Abstract

Participatory governance is upheld as a fundamental organizing principle in community entrepreneurship. This paper brings new insights from a case study that investigated how governance structures, processes, and practices, and divergent community interests influence community venture opportunity exploitation. We find that while community stakeholder governance enables community participation and accountability, the interests of the majority triumph over the minority in determining opportunity exploitation. Adopting supplementary governance mechanisms of multistakeholder advisory committees and community engagement process reporting would enable minority interests to be acknowledged and communicated, and increase accountability by acknowledging conflicting views about opportunity exploitation.