Entrepreneurial Agency Research Articles

Fatal attraction: A systematic review and research agenda of the dark triad in entrepreneurship

Using meta-analytic techniques, relations among the Dark Triad personality traits – Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy – were examined in relation to outcomes associated with two different stages of the entrepreneurial process: entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurial performance. From 39 independent samples (N = 11,819), we found that Machiavellianism positively relates to entrepreneurial intention (rc = 0.16) and negatively relates to entrepreneurial performance (rc = −0.22), narcissism positively relates to entrepreneurial intention (rc = 0.24) and entrepreneurial performance (rc = 0.09), and psychopathy positively relates to entrepreneurial intention (rc = 0.17) and negatively relates to entrepreneurial performance (rc = −0.10). Amid conflicting empirical results and theoretical viewpoints, we leverage our findings to present an exploration into how and why the Dark Triad personality traits relate to the initiation and performance of entrepreneurship. We interpret the existing literature through the lens of Nietzsche's will to power and propose that power acquired over others (domination) is likely to be as viable a predictor of entrepreneurial agency as power removed from others (emancipation). Limitations to the primary studies included in our review are thoroughly examined, and we offer direction for future research.

Entrepreneurial Opportunities of Refugees in Germany, France, and Ireland: Multiple Embeddedness Framework

Recently, the entrepreneurial potential of refugees has received growing attention from scholars and policymakers. However, the literature on refugee entrepreneurship suffers from the fragmentation of previous research findings, which has been mainly attributed to the fact that refugees have heterogeneous backgrounds. Tackling this challenge, this study conceptualized the framework for the multiple embeddedness of refugee entrepreneurs by applying and extending the concept of mixed embeddedness. Based on 50 semi-structured interviews with refugee entrepreneurs who relocated to Germany, France, and Ireland, we identified six patterns in which refugees’ multiple embeddedness and their actions as entrepreneurial agencies interacted to develop entrepreneurial opportunities: (i) value creation with homeland resources, (ii) acting as transnational middleman minorities, (iii) integration facilitation, (iv) qualification transfers, (v) homeland-problem solving, and (vi) creative innovation. This study contributes to the literature on refugee entrepreneurship by considering multiple contexts in which refugees can be embedded in and by elaborating on the interactions between opportunity structure emerging within the multiple embeddedness, actions, and capabilities of refugees as entrepreneurial agencies.

Women’s Entrepreneurship in the Global South: Empowering and Emancipating?

This paper addresses the following questions: Are women entrepreneurs empowered by entrepreneurship, and critically, does entrepreneurship offer emancipation? Our theoretical position is that entrepreneurship is socially embedded and must be recognized as a social process with economic outcomes. Accordingly, questions of empowerment must take full account of the context in which entrepreneurship takes place. We argue that institutions—formal and informal, cultural, social, and political—create gendered contexts in the Global South, where women’s entrepreneurship is subjugated and treated as inferior and second class. Our thematic review of a broad scope of the literature demonstrates that in different regions of the Global South, women entrepreneurs confront many impediments and that this shapes their practices. We show how the interplay of tradition, culture, and patriarchy seem to conspire to subordinate their efforts. Yet, we also recognize how entrepreneurial agency chips away and is beginning to erode these bastions, in particular, how role models establish examples that undermine patriarchy. We conclude that entrepreneurship can empower but modestly and slowly. Some independence is achieved, but emancipation is a long, slow game.

Arts and cultural entrepreneurship

The topic of arts and culture in entrepreneurship holds great interest to scholars from many disciplines and to policymakers keen on “Creative Class” development and revitalizing local communities. Much research has explored the role of cultural amenities and milieu in fostering entrepreneurial activity. Having artists and cultural sector workers around provides fertile ground for entrepreneurship. Yet when one looks beyond the highly aggregated correlations and case studies of entrepreneurial artists, research on the roles played by arts workers and the creative sector as entrepreneurial agents remains underdeveloped. This special issue advances the entrepreneurship literature through a collection of articles that explore the entrepreneurial roles, natures, and practices of artists. These articles address fundamental questions about the roles of creativity, entrepreneurship, and psychology as well as more applied questions about the use and implications of online crowd funding platforms and how arts entrepreneurs adapt to their experiences and environments. The excellent work by the contributors to this special issue contributes to the literature with rigorous scholarship and set the stage for more to come.

Negotiated Agency in the Face of Consumption Constraints: A Study of Women Entrepreneurs in Subsistence Contexts

Millions of women entrepreneurs in subsistence contexts face consumption constraints while embedded in strongly patriarchal social institutions. In these contexts, the place for women is believed to be within the home as homemakers and not in the market as entrepreneurs. Yet these women are able to overcome gender-based institutional barriers and engage with the marketplace as entrepreneurs as a way to overcome consumption constraints. The authors conducted a longitudinal qualitative study of women entrepreneurs in low-income neighborhoods of Chennai, India, to understand (1) what motivates women to overcome the gender-based institutional barriers to entrepreneurial action and (2) how they can overcome the “iron cage” of institutional norms to initiate and sustain entrepreneurial action. The findings help the authors theorize the process of negotiated agency and elaborate on the microprocesses that underlie its enactment. Substantively, they demonstrate how consumption constraints in poverty trigger entrepreneurial agency among low-income women. The authors build on the findings to offer welfare-enhancing policy recommendations.

Relational Practices for Boundary Work: Complexity, Liminality, and Knowledge Arbitrage

In this article, we investigate to role of frontline workers who are responsible for enabling the delivery of primary care within a marginalized tribal community in Northwestern India. Our ethnographic study of these frontline medic counsellors helps to illuminate how these entrepreneurial agents actively create, negotiate and manage activities between multiple boundary conditions including those of primary healthcare facilities and the local community, social and gender boundaries within the community, and professional boundaries within the clinical domain. Our findings reveal how this female corps of medic counsellors have engaged configurational boundary work to improve the efficacy of a community health initiative. In so doing, they have also gained significant influence within the professional clinical domain and also within their respective communities. This configurational boundary work can be understood as a set of relational practices by which boundary of the community is drawn into the highly institutionalized domain of the clinic, and the boundary of the clinic is drawn into the social and cultural domain of the community. These relational practices identified through our analysis are: a) empathizing, b) buffering, c) facilitating, d) co-opting and e) improvising. Our resulting conceptual model contributes to extant knowledge across a number of dimensions, particularly research on: i) the practices of agents working within and across multiple intersectional conditions; ii) research on how configurational (as opposed to competitive or collaborative) boundary work can be used towards common goals, and iii) middle-status groups can expand jurisdictional authority and enhance legitimacy and status by drawing upon and leveraging knowledge from different domains.

Chances and challenges of African entrepreneurial activity in times of crisis

ABSTRACT This special issue looks in new ways at the relationship between small-scale entrepreneurship, economic (and political) crisis, and the outcomes of neoliberal market economy in African countries. In other words, it studies entrepreneurial activities particularly of young people in crisis situations in contemporary African economic contexts through close-to-the-ground ethnography and an anthropological perspective. The contributions examine from the vantage point of the specific circumstances in their country – Rwanda, Kenya, Cameroon/South Africa, Southern Algeria, Burkina Faso, Nigeria – how young people work on their futures as entrepreneurial agents navigating between local settings, governmental regulations and (global) market relations.

What Makes an Entrepreneurship Study Entrepreneurial? Toward A Unified Theory of Entrepreneurial Agency

Calls for greater contextualization have been powerful in motivating research and knowledge creation about entrepreneurship. However, unless counter-balanced with attempts to identify the field’s conceptual core, these efforts have the potential to devolve into hyper-contextualization, exposing the field to fragmentation, loss of consensus, and possible disintegration. We identify five elements of entrepreneurial agency common across eight subcommunities of entrepreneurship but emphasized differently in each. By conceiving of entrepreneurship as structural transformation, we explain why some agents succeed at transforming social structures via entrepreneurial action. We conclude with some first steps toward the development of a unified theory of entrepreneurial agency.

“Who is an entrepreneur?” is (still) the wrong question

The idea that there exist undiscovered entrepreneurial endowments fell into disfavor after Gartner's (1988) “‘Who is an entrepreneur?’ is the wrong question”. However, a resurgence of the “question of the entrepreneur” suggests that advances in genetics research may be the key to discovering what makes entrepreneurs distinctive. This paper draws from Wittgensteinian philosophy to offer a novel critique regarding the search for differences between entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs. We explain that the idea that entrepreneurs are different gains credence through misleading forms of language that 1) encourage the illusion of some causal interplay between opportunities and potential entrepreneurs, and 2) overshadow the contingent nature of entrepreneurial action. We sidestep misleading forms of thought to suggest that ontological reflection on the nature of entrepreneurial agency shows why we will never discover some “entrepreneurial gene”. Equally important, this Wittgensteinian critique demonstrates the limits of empirical research for problems that fundamentally require conceptual attention – not more determined effort or advanced research methods.

Sustainability of waste picker sustainopreneurs in Pakistan’s informal solid waste management system for cleaner production

This study aims to advocate for the acknowledgment of the services of invisible hands that do pro-environmental work, despite living in post-conflict trauma themselves. These “accidental sustainopreneurs” earn a living while helping societies become more sustainable. Their work for both upstream manufacturers and downstream consumers serves as a stepping stone toward the introduction of cleaner production across waste value chains in developing countries. They have positive effects on multiple recycling sectors, and their transition to formal, integrated solid waste management is the objective of this study. Inductive qualitative research design is employed to examine how these entrepreneurial agents work in unpredicted ways to create value for society while being stigmatized by focusing specifically on the case of waste picker sustainopreneurs registered with the Water and Sanitation Services in Pakistan (WSSP). The findings of this study suggested that a whopping 99% majority of such workers pretend as if none of their kind exist, possess dual identities, and are stigmatized due to refugee backgrounds. Using the social construction of stigma lens, their identities have been stigmatized amidst their burden of complementing the work of local MSWM authorities. In addition, the findings regarding unpredictable weather patterns, lack of assets, seasonal shocks, uncertain policies, rules of business, and the exploitative subletting of waster picker jurisdictions are reported. This study provides a more thorough understanding of their self-organized work context, an understanding of policies, and the higher survival skills and immunity levels of these workers, even in the absence of safety equipment and measures. This study demonstrates how self-organizing, low-tech, informal solutions can act as a foundation toward cleaner productions and environmental sustainability.

Craft beer sector collaboration in North East Scotland: The role of individual success

Our understanding of craft brewing is beginning to grow and a key theme to emerge from this artistic and intrinsically creative sector is the dependence on collaboration between entrepreneurial agents. In the North East of Scotland, the growth in craft beer is also recognised to come from a deep rooted collaboration, as a reaction to and in resistance of large mainstream competition. However, one such enterprise, BrewDog, has grown to achieve global reach to rival that of the large-scale brewers the craft scene sought to challenge. We consider what this unprecedented success means for the remaining collaborators in the local craft beer sector. Our findings point to a shared optimism and possibility of achievement among the craft brewers, aided by BrewDog’s success. However, the nature of collaboration is anchored more in community embeddedness and shared responsibility for market development, rather than in business growth and success replication. While the craft scene acknowledges the inspirational success of ‘one of their own’, strategic drive comes from more localised relations and a desire for independence. This has implications not only for craft beer but also on how collaboration among entrepreneurs sustains in respond to success from within the group.

‘I’m my own boss…’: Active intermediation and ‘entrepreneurial’ worker agency in the Australian gig-economy

Platform firm in the gig-economy are disrupting work as a social practice, production systems and recasting capital-labour relations. This qualitative study examines worker agency in the Australian food-delivery sector; a segment where platforms actively intermediate both product and labour markets. Within this sector, worker agency poses a potential challenge to platform-organisations; however this study reveals how these platforms’ work organisation and market regulation constrain agency potential. Shaped by the work’s spatio-temporal features, organisational fixes and institutional context, it is shown how food-delivery workers, transiently attached to the labour market, predominantly engage in ‘entrepreneurial agency’ – a low-level agency expression aimed at materially improving individual conditions and aligning with, rather than challenging, platforms’ business models.

Strategic Planning and Performance of Small Medium Enterprises: Evidence From Lagos State, Nigeria

This study examines the strategic planning and its effect on small and medium enterprises performance in Lagos state, Nigeria. Specifically, the study evaluates the level of SMEs operators’ involvement in strategic planning, determines the factors influencing SMEs to adopt strategic planning in their operations, examines the perceived contributions of strategic planning in SMEs Performance, identifies the challenges facing the implementation of strategic plan in SMEs and also examines the effect of strategic planning on SMEs performance. A survey of four hundred and seventy (470) Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) were randomly selected from one thousand nine hundred and sixty- five (1,965) that registered with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry in Lagos State. Data were sourced via a structured questionnaire, while analysis of data was performed with the aid of frequencies, percentages, factor analysis and ordinary least square method of estimation. Results reveal that the majority of SMEs operators do not aware of the strategic planning process in their respective business organizations and their enterprises did not prepare enough for the formulation and implementation of the strategic plan. Furthermore, results also reveal that organizational complexities, scarce firm resources, new technology and environment dynamics in business operations influenced their adoption to strategic planning, while the presence of an effective strategic plan could facilitate good performance of SMEs via better decisions, customer satisfaction, increased capacity, and identification of problems, chance of success, better solutions, competitive advantage, and market recognition. Results show that inadequate resources, lack of experts and difficult to align organizational culture and strategic plan are the major challenges facing the implementation of a strategic plan in SMEs. Subsequently, the study recommends that entrepreneurial development agencies, as well as the government of Nigeria, should organize training and seminar for SMEs operators on the introduction and formulation of strategic planning. Hence the SME operators will have a full understanding of the industry in which it operates so as to cut an edge for the enterprises. Keywords: Strategic Planning, SMEs, Organizational Complexities, Firm Resources, Environment Dynamics DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-8-02 Publication date: March 31 st 2020

The Potential of Collective Intelligence and Crowdsourcing for Opportunity Creation

Digital technologies inherently change entrepreneurial processes and outcomes. One theoretical perspective that aims at explaining both is the creation view of opportunities, which proposes iterative social interaction between entrepreneurs and interested stakeholders and the evolutionary nature of opportunities as idiosyncratic. While the discussion on the phenomena of crowdsourcing is scarce in entrepreneurship research on opportunity (co-) creation, it provides enormous potential for the field. Within this paper, we focus on providing a theoretical rational for why and how collective intelligence and crowdsourcing as concrete mechanism works for improving the entrepreneurial cognition process. The paper shows that entrepreneurs can leverage collective intelligence to objectify opportunities by starting a sense making process, persuading interested stakeholders, and mobilising external resources, thus limiting the cognitive constraints and bounds of entrepreneurial agents. We thus contribute to the discourse about how opportunities emerge from interactions between entrepreneurs and their social environment and provide an agenda that may guide future research in the field of digital entrepreneurship.

The potential of collective intelligence and crowdsourcing for opportunity creation

Digital technologies inherently change entrepreneurial processes and outcomes. One theoretical perspective that aims at explaining both is the creation view of opportunities, which proposes iterative social interaction between entrepreneurs and interested stakeholders and the evolutionary nature of opportunities as idiosyncratic. While the discussion on the phenomena of crowdsourcing is scarce in entrepreneurship research on opportunity (co-) creation, it provides enormous potential for the field. Within this paper, we focus on providing a theoretical rational for why and how collective intelligence and crowdsourcing as concrete mechanism works for improving the entrepreneurial cognition process. The paper shows that entrepreneurs can leverage collective intelligence to objectify opportunities by starting a sense making process, persuading interested stakeholders, and mobilising external resources, thus limiting the cognitive constraints and bounds of entrepreneurial agents. We thus contribute to the discourse about how opportunities emerge from interactions between entrepreneurs and their social environment and provide an agenda that may guide future research in the field of digital entrepreneurship.

People, Place, and Connections: Black Cultural Center Staff as Facilitators of Social Capital

Black cultural centers (BCCs) have served students on college campuses across the country for over 50 years, but empirical research about the benefits they offer Black students, beyond examples referenced in the conceptual and historical literature, remains limited. As the relevance of BCCs has come into question given financial constraints, more diverse student bodies, and a shift to discontinuing race-specific cultural centers in favor of multicultural centers, rigorous studies about their contributions are needed. Through an ethnographic approach, this investigation explores how a BCC site and its staff act as institutional, cultural, and entrepreneurial agents by facilitating the development of social capital among Black undergraduate students. They do this by (a) serving as conduits for campus services that struggle to reach Black undergraduate students, (b) strategically coordinating resources and relationships among Black organizations to meet the needs of the Black community, and (c) collaborating with peer cultural/identity centers to streamline efforts.

Human agency, entrepreneurship and regional development: a behavioural perspective on economic evolution and innovative transformation

ABSTRACT An emerging position within theories of entrepreneurship and regional development concerns the role of human behaviour. This paper argues that the type and nature of human agency related to entrepreneurship is a significant factor in explaining the capacity of regions to achieve economic evolution through renewal and innovative transformation. It is argued that regional economic ecosystems are a primary result of the agency of a particular cadre of individuals; with the nature of these ecosystems being contingent on the underlying culture and institutional environment within a specific region. Furthermore, it is proposed that the confluence of group-level culture within a city or region and the personality psychology of individuals within these places results in a psychocultural environment that creates certain forms of human agency determining the nature of entrepreneurship. Similarly, the propensity towards entrepreneurial agency will be at least partly determined by the nature of the underlying regional economic ecosystems, especially with regards to apparent opportunity and economic returns. Drawing on these insights, the study outlines the implications for policies that seek to support entrepreneurship at the regional level, while also identifying future research required to further effective policy intervention.

A Microenterprise Initiative Among Newly Resettled Refugees in a City of the U.S. South: Challenges, Successes, and Lessons Learned

AbstractThis study analyzes the strengths and challenges of a microenterprise program developed for refugees in a city of the U.S. South region. By offering a microfinance loan of about $4,500 per client, the microenterprise program, run by a nonprofit resettlement agency (RA), hopes to provide economically poor and newly resettled refugees, who have no credit history with banks, with low‐interest loans and business training needed to get integrated into their new environment, become economically self‐sufficient, and contribute to the local economy. Nevertheless, the limited resources, dramatic shifts in new refugee policies, and the business, language and cultural integration skills that need to be learned by the newcomers present challenges that the microentrepreneurs and the RA are trying to overcome. Using semistructured interviews and ethnographic observations, information was collected from about three‐dozen in‐depth interviews between summer 2016 and spring 2017. Data from these interviews explicate the role of personal entrepreneurial agency and structural support by the RA. The study also highlights lessons learned by the RA and offers suggestions for the future. Thus far, most of the refugees who participated in the program have started microbusinesses that help them support their families and provide new services in the community where they live. They are also repaying their loans on time, in 95 percent of the cases.

Entrepreneurial Agency and Institutional Change in the Co-Creation of the Global Hotel Industry

This paper examines entrepreneurial agency and institutional change by exploring Conrad Hilton’s role in shaping the global hotel industry. Our analysis presents fresh insights regarding how entrep...

Institutional work in the maintenance of regional innovation policy instruments: evidence from Wales

ABSTRACTThis paper contributes towards growing interest in the role of actors and agency in regional innovation policy processes. While entrepreneurial agency has begun to be explored, the paper broadens this focus to include actor roles in the maintenance of regional innovation policies over time. Drawing on the concept of institutional work, and evidence from Wales, it finds maintenance to be a process of strategic care, involving interplay between structural factors promoting durability, and normative and deterrence practices at the regional level. These practices, it suggests, can contribute towards stability and persistence, but with mixed effects over time.