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The purpose of this chapter is to explore whether and how angel investors’ emotions unfold in the investment opportunity evaluation process as they interact with the social environment. Complementing recent research that has emphasized the financial calculations, we add angel investors’ own emotional arousal to the list of tools that may help them to rate investment opportunities.

Drawing on semi-structured qualitative interviews, we develop a phenomenological analysis of the investment opportunity evaluation process at the level of angel investors’ lived experience.

Our findings indicate that when angel investors use their emotional arousal in evaluating investment criteria, they engage in a developmental process characterized by three elements: subjective validation, social validation, and investment decision.

We illuminate how discrete emotions can complement rational considerations in the opportunity evaluation journey. Capturing the nature of emotion as action oriented, embodied, socially situated, and distributed, we embrace its adaptive socially situated dynamics.

Taking a step toward better understanding of the soft aspects in the relationship development that leads to investments, we hope this study will help not only those entrepreneurs who need funding but also those policymakers who design new incentives that improve the flow of investment into promising new ventures.

We demonstrate how angel investors’ emotions can complement their rational considerations in the investment opportunity evaluation process as they interact with the social environment. Identifying boundary values for the conditions that are necessary and sufficient to advance in the process, we have demonstrated how emotion can serve as a driving or restraining force not only during subjective validation but also during social validation.

The pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities is not always successful. On the one hand, entrepreneurial failure offers an invaluable opportunity for entrepreneurs to learn about their ventures and themselves. On the other hand, entrepreneurial failure is associated with substantial financial, psychological, and social costs. When entrepreneurs fail to learn from failure, the potential value of this experience is not fully utilized and these costs will have been incurred in vain. In this chapter, the authors investigate how the stigma of failure exacerbates the various costs of failure, thereby making learning from failure much more difficult. The authors combine an analysis of interviews of 20 entrepreneurs (who had, at the time of interview, experienced failure) with an examination of archival data reflecting the legal and cultural environment around their ventures. The authors find that stigma worsens the entrepreneurs’ experience of failure, hinders their transformation of failure experience, and eventually prevents them from utilizing the lessons learnt from failure in their future entrepreneurial activities. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for the entrepreneurship research and economic policies.

This chapter explores knowledge practices around the subject of capital punishment. Capital sentencing jurisprudence and certain strands of academic scholarship on the death penalty have certain resonances with recent developments in reflexive cultural anthropology. Using the notion of productive unraveling, this chapter seeks to reinforce relations between these various knowledge practices by conceiving of them as situated on the same ground, already interwoven with one another. This chapter presents itself as both an example of and a call for the development of interconnections between these various kinds of expert knowledges concerning the death penalty.

Since the 1980s, US universities have greatly increased attention given to innovation and entrepreneurship out of a genuine commitment to enhancing American competitiveness. Although regional innovation and entrepreneurship can be enhanced by universities in multiple ways, the primary metrics of “success” remain patenting, licensing rates, and university spin-outs. While these metrics can be a useful proxy for the entrepreneurial university they tend to understate the many important contributions universities, including non-research intensive universities, make to their regional economies. In this chapter, we introduce a framework of capabilities that are essential to nurturing ecosystems of innovation and entrepreneurship at the regional level. We then describe the varied ways in which universities can support the development of these capabilities. Finally, we provide a framework of metrics, which can more comprehensively capture the value that universities represent to innovation and entrepreneurship in their regions.

The Scottish civil justice system is undergoing its most substantive transformation in over 150 years. This reformation will create new judicial bodies, alter the jurisdictional reach of courts, and drastically unsettle what has been, up to now, a highly stable institutional field. These changes have caused pronounced threats to the status of different groups of actors in the field. Our work examines the impact of these threats, and the varying responses among groups of professional actors. In so doing, we detail how intra-professional status differences and uncertainty hindered attempts to maintain threatened institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to report an initial investigation into the role of national citizenship status in relation to leadership and organizational innovation in the context of the United Arab Emirates, an Arabian Gulf country with a workforce in which migrants far outweigh the number of locals.

The authors use grounded theory methodology to gather initial data and reveal potentially appropriate theory for further research into the role of national citizenship as it correlates with organizational innovation.

The dominant themes that emerged were that citizen leaders display high levels of willingness to deviate from organizational schemata to respond to new situations; a preference for focus on the big picture; and low monitoring of subordinates. These findings indicate that citizen leaders experience greater ease in diverging from organizational schemata, suggesting that national citizenship status may afford a freedom that enhances the potential to contribute to organizational innovation.

The issue of national citizenship is clearly one of increasing significance in the global workplace and, therefore, must be added to the academic research agenda given the combination of more frequent worldwide professional migration and the growing imperative of organizational innovation. To this end, the authors suggest potentially useful frameworks for further study.

This pioneering research has applicability to other geopolitical regions with high numbers of migrants in their workforces.

Examines the nature of a relatively new financial service, electronic cash. A qualitative study of students’ use of a specific form of electronic cash, namely Mondex, was undertaken. Attitudes and opinions were sought and the results presented within a theoretical framework of likely adoption. It was found that all students compared the performance of electronic cash with the traditional form of cash. A number of problems were encountered by students in relation to security, speed and complexity of use, although in some situations it was a preferred alternative. Concludes that these issues will need to be addressed but that electronic cash may have advantages in certain situations and that marketing effort should be concentrated on identifying niche opportunities or bundling appropriate services onto the card to provide a relative advantage for increasingly discerning consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to explores the influence of socialization upon the constitution and integration of learning leading to the development of entrepreneurial competence while at university, from the learner perspective. Self-reported learning is analyzed to illustrate ways in which students make use of institutional and social contributions of the university context.

The study investigates entrepreneurial journeys of 18 participants, either currently attending or recently graduated from three universities in three countries with both comparable and distinctive contextual elements. In depth analysis of individual life stories, focusing on self-identified critical incidents, is used to illustrate ways in which students, while at university, develop entrepreneurial competence for current and future practice.

Formal and non-formal learning remain important foundations for entrepreneurial competence development, delivered through designed content-centric structures. Informal learning – particularly mentor supported socialised learning – centring around the learner is key to solidifying learning towards entrepreneurial competence, through know-how and access to resources. The university emerges as an entrepreneurial learning space where students constitute and integrate learning gained through different forms.

Cross-cultural analysis is limited as the paper emphasizes the individual’s learning experience relative to the immediate university context.

Universities play a critical role as entrepreneurial learning spaces beyond formal and non-formal learning. This includes dedicating resources to orchestrate informal learning opportunities and enabling interaction with the different agents that contribute to socialised situated learning, supporting entrepreneurial competence development. Universities need to take responsibility for facilitating the entirety of learning.

Socialised learning in combination with other forms of learning contributes to student development of entrepreneurial competence while situated in the university context.

There is an established international evidence base on supported employment for people with severe and enduring mental health problems, and now a growing evidence base on how to successfully implement this into practice. The process involves substantial organisational development and change, and therefore effective leadership is critical. This article outlines some of the challenges to implementing supported employment services and explores what recent leadership theory could contribute to this process, as the Sainsbury Centre embarks on its Centres of Excellence Programme in England and seeks to build a wider learning community from our partnerships formed through the International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL).

The purpose of this paper is to explore how narrative discourses frames entrepreneurial knowledge – in the form of understandings and meanings – focusing the role of business support in stimulating black entrepreneurship. It reveals the assumptions and values associated with business support from the point of view of the providers – who themselves are categorized as “black”.

A collaborative narrative approach is adopted to locate knowledge of business support within the “life‐world” of black business support providers. The research was conducted at two levels: focus group and narrative interviews.

The paper highlights the ways in which dominant discourses guide as well as constrain the representation of black businesses. Low take‐up of business support is contested. Public‐funded business support programmes are perceived as unwholesome, unwieldy and inherently inadequate in meeting the strategic development needs of black businesses.

Focusing on actual engagement rather than content aspects of the business support policy framework reveals a need for more dialogic research to explore more deeply whether, and to what extent, alternative and new perspectives on supporting black businesses are needed.

The novelty of this paper lies in attempting to unravel the complex processes of business support provision in the context of black entrepreneurship by decoding the narrative discourses used by support providers who are themselves categorized as “black”. Such intrinsic examination of views and beliefs is relatively unique and provides an interesting platform for further research.