Entrepreneurialism and Society: Consequences and Meanings: Volume 82

Why is the quality of innovation-driven entrepreneurship seemingly declining? We argue the growing Entrepreneurship Industry and the way it has transformed entrepreneurship as an activity are important, under-appreciated explanations. By leveraging the Ideology of Entrepreneurialism to mass-produce and mass-market products, the Entrepreneurship Industry has made possible what we term Veblenian Entrepreneurship. This is entrepreneurship pursued primarily as a form of conspicuous consumption, and it is fundamentally different from the innovation-driven entrepreneurship that it emulates and superficially resembles. Aside from lowering average entrepreneurial quality, Veblenian Entrepreneurship has a range of (short-run) positive and (medium- and long-run) negative effects for both individuals and society at large. We argue that the rise of the Veblenian Entrepreneur might contribute to creating an increasingly Untrepreneurial Economy. An Untrepreneurial Economy appears innovation-driven and dynamic but is actually rife with inefficiencies and unable to generate economically meaningful growth through innovation.

Although economic and entrepreneurship scholars have argued that high income inequality has a positive impact on entrepreneurship by increasing the incentives for high quality human capital to take entrepreneurial risk and by enabling talented entrepreneurs to accumulate and reinvest capital into new businesses, we suggest that the relationship between economic inequality and entrepreneurship may be more complex than initially indicated in light of recent research on the topic of social trust and entrepreneurship. We propose that income inequality is likely to have a curvilinear effect on entrepreneurial activity. Although moderate levels of inequality can increase entrepreneurial activity, very high levels of inequality will begin to reduce rates of entrepreneurship due to diminished generalized social trust in the community. Lower generalized social trust decreases the sharing of information and resources leading to fewer entrepreneurial opportunities, and as a result, lower levels of entrepreneurship.

This paper offers new conversations on entrepreneurial ecosystems as contested communities through a critique of extant work that relies uncritically on social capital. It offers new directions for theorizing and studying entrepreneurial ecosystems guided by a critical perspective of social capital (i.e., arriving from several intellectual traditions including political economy, intersectionality, critical race theory, and feminisms). In doing so, the paper offers insights around how continued structural and relational inequalities based on gender, race and/or immigrant status within the domain of entrepreneurship can be brought to the forefront of ecosystem frameworks. Doing so produces new approaches to the conceptualization and study of entrepreneurial ecosystems as more than sites of economic activity between and among actors, but rather it allows for consideration of how being differentially embedded in social structures matters for entrepreneurship. Differences in social structures within ecosystems reflect broader societal patterns and analyzing them can yield insights about the configuration of institutions. To understand the complexity of how different institutional configurations may lead to different forms of entrepreneurial ecosystems, it is necessary to have different conceptual starting points on social capital (informal) and exchange relationships (formal) as foundational aspects of entrepreneurial activities. Consequently, the paper provides these new analytic starting points, thus providing better explanatory and empirical power to demonstrate how and why inequalities persist in entrepreneurship.

The common good refers to contextual conditions that contribute to human wellbeing and flourishing, such as prosperous communities and environmental sustainability. In this paper, we consider how entrepreneurship impacts society by investigating the generalized outcomes of social entrepreneurship on the common good. From a qualitative study of ten large and profitable social enterprises in the United Kingdom, we theorize how social entrepreneurship contributes to the common good in the short and long term. We also conjecture how some commercial practices undermine the common good and further, explain how the common good performs as a conceptual anchor for social entrepreneurship.

We advance entrepreneurship research by developing a theoretical model of how founding teams form. Our neo-Carnegie model situates nascent founders in particular network-structural milieus, engaging in aspiration-driven search for and evaluation of prospective co-founders. The formation of co-founding ties between nascent founders can be divided into four theoretical steps, which we label activation, evaluation, approach, and reciprocation. Successful founding team formation is a consequence of mutually favorable evaluations by nascent founders in a multi-sided matching process. Nascent founders with higher and less flexible aspirations are more likely to undertake distant search for co-founders by seeking referrals, forming ties with strangers, and forming new ties to social foci where they might meet potential co-founders. Churn in newly formed founding teams emerges as a consequence of shifting dominant coalition dynamics in the founding team caused by organic venture evolution and intentional changes in strategic direction. Our theoretical model provides new insights on the formation pathways of founding teams, their initial task and relational resource endowments, and initial team dynamics.

Motivated by the need to reflect upon the role of entrepreneurship in the economy and society, we seek to understand entrepreneurship as having the potential to “produce” new possibilities for living when departing from a critical awareness. We consider existing critical entrepreneurship research as necessary but insufficient in adequately bringing about new perspectives of entrepreneurship as it often tends to be a position “against entrepreneurship,” discrediting the phenomenon from the many possible values it may invoke. We suggest affirmative critique (Dey & Steyaert, 2018; Weiskopf & Steyaert, 2009) to “turn critique into creativity,” thus making critique productive and exploring how actual transformation (e.g., alternatives) can be invoked when adopting such a stance.

The universal “promise of entrepreneurship” has gone far beyond the borders of countries where it emerged. Education systems might play an important role in this process by legitimizing entrepreneurship related myths, principles, and social hierarchies. Surprisingly, against the literature on the role of education in producing and allocating human capital, entrepreneurship education development on organizational, national, and global scale is only emerging as a theme of mainstream academic discussions. This paper applies multi-level approach to get insights on what role might higher education have in promoting global “entrepreneurial culture,” with a focus on post-Soviet countries. We analyze supra-national initiatives, national policies, leading universities’ practices, and the actual characteristics of entrepreneurship education programs in these universities. Our results suggest that drivers of entrepreneurship education development in national higher education systems of post-Soviet countries are not only the “concrete” and “technical” institutional factors on the national level, but also the broader cultural environment. Though institutional environment in post-Soviet countries does not always objectively meet high international standards we found many cases when official policy documents state goals related to teaching entrepreneurship in higher education and there are concrete programs devoted to entrepreneurship education sharing largely similar “entrepreneurial” worldviews. We also found that the actual perceptions and strategies of the actors directly involved in entrepreneurship education practices demonstrate much higher similarity than formally declared education policies in the related countries.