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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the aesthetic dimension of entrepreneur poems. The notion of the entrepreneur as storyteller, and the entrepreneur story as cultural genres have become so firmly entrenched in the collective social consciousness that little consideration is given to the existence of other narrative genres, such as business poetry as expressions, or manifestations of enterprising behaviour and indeed identities. Poetry, like art, possesses aesthetic dimensions which make it difficult to theorize and analyze. Indeed, as a genre, poetry seldom features as a heuristic device for better understanding entrepreneurial behaviour or learning. This is surprising because poetry in particular is a wonderfully creative and expressive narrative medium and accordingly, many entrepreneurs engage in writing poetry as a form of creative expression.

In this study the author considers the entrepreneur as poet and from a reading of the literatures of entrepreneurship and aesthetics develops an aesthetic framework for analysing entrepreneur poetry which is used to analyze six poems written by entrepreneurs or about entrepreneurs.

That poetry has value in terms of entrepreneurial learning because of its atheoretical nature it permits listeners to experience the emotion and passion of lived entrepreneurial experiences and to relive these vicariously. In particular entrepreneur poems are a variant form of entrepreneur story devoid of the usual cliché.

There are obvious limitations to the study in that the analysis of six poems can merely scratch the surface and that aesthetic analysis is by its very nature subjective and open to interpretation. The study opens up possibilities for further research into entrepreneur poems, the aesthetics of other non-standard entrepreneur narratives and consideration of the aesthetic elements of entrepreneurship per se. Poetics and aesthetics are areas of narrative understanding ripe for further empirical research.

The paper is original in terms of creating an aesthetic framework used to analyze entrepreneur poems. Indeed, little consideration had previously been given to the topic.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the personal and contextual factors that shape the work experiences of Filipino social enterprise employees by listening to voices within their narratives.

In total, 11 social enterprise employees were interviewed about their work experiences. Using the Listening Guide as a method of analysis, common themes and the multiple voices within the narratives were identified.

Upon analysis, four stories were identified: stories of serving others, stories of providing for family, stories of managing relationships and stories of personal learning. Results show that the experiences and multiple identities of employees evoke the duality and hybridity that characterizes social enterprise organizations. The importance of relationships in collectivist cultures, and the salience of the indigenous concept of kapwa are also discussed.

The use of narratives, and particularly, of voices within narratives as a critical tool to study work experiences is highlighted. Generalizability of results may be limited by contextual factors, such as organization type and country culture.

In this study, the narratives of social enterprise workers from different positions were explored. The voices within their narratives were analyzed and used as a means to understand how they viewed the self, others, and their work in social enterprises embedded in collectivist and developing country contexts.

How do entrepreneurs of the construction business express their vulnerability? Through which narratives? Why and how do they try to cope with the always present risk of their job and with increasingly unstable market conditions which make them more and more vulnerable?

The risk of failing in the construction business is high, especially with the economic, political, and structural conditions that the business is facing, and the weight of the businessmen’s decisions and actions increases. It is only through the passion for their job, by keeping their movements and rhythms of work, and by maintaining good trusted relationships that my informants try to cope with this risk. Through their narratives, they exorcise their fears and show their vulnerability.

Through my informants’ narratives, daily situations and thoughts, I want to challenge stereotypes linked to power and show how despite, or because, of their position of power my informants often feel vulnerable.

Purpose – As a well-recognized qualitative research method, storytelling can help to explain the multilevel and dynamic perspectives in management studies. The authors purposefully chose sustainability stories in the Western context, leadership stories in the Eastern context, and entrepreneurship stories in the West-meets-East context to highlight the benefits of using storytelling in conducting strategy and management research.

Design/Method/Approach – Qualitative research, field research, and comparative analysis.

Findings – Looking through cultural and philosophical lenses, the authors argue that scholars need to pay attention to research contexts when applying storytelling in their fieldwork. Storytelling can help to unpack the contextual factors, especially to disclose dynamics and complexity issues of strategic management phenomena.

Research implications – While storytelling has been widely used in the Western management context, the authors believe we are among the first to suggest that storytelling can become an insightful and fruitful research method in Eastern management and in combined cultural contexts, and hence, they are attempting to potentially help to advance theory development.

Originality/Value – Two applicable conditions for storytelling are discussed, namely, the multilevel/systems perspective and the dynamic perspective, which are illustrated by sustainability, leadership, and entrepreneurship research in both Western and Eastern contexts.

This chapter introduces the concept of ‘inditation’ to the creative industries. The concept builds on an old verb ‘to indite’ and the noun ‘inditing’, meaning ‘to make up’ and ‘to compose’. This chapter attempts to obtain the concept into the actual use of language. The term’s meaning gets adjusted in the sense of a conceptual redesign. Furthermore, this chapter introduces the concept of ‘inditation’ as a process of composing ‘the new’ by creative entrepreneurs. They indite entrepreneurial brainchildren, ‘the new’, as unique outcomes such as artwork, product prototypes, or services. The chapter asks what it means to indite and contributes three autoethnographic examples. It also suggests that inditation could evolve a process-oriented framework for bringing ‘the new’ into the world and outlines further research towards constructing a theory of inditation.

This paper aims to analyze so‐called sustainability, corporate social responsibility or citizenship reports, as artefacts of a compromise between an institutional entrepreneur (IE), the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and companies. Some companies take on this invitation but to which extent the information they produce as a result corresponds to the ideal promoted by the IE?

A sample of ten reports from Canadian companies were analyzed using a combination of deductive and inductive coding techniques. The discourse and pictures were analyzed to identify whether they represent path creation (adherence to the sustainability ideal) or path dependence (the expression of traditional business interests and practices).

The study findings show that companies adopt the sustainability reporting guideline and ideal promoted by IE, but only partially. Path dependence and path creation are in tension, a condition typical of innovative processes according to the actor network theory (ANT) framework. It suggests that the market for sustainability information is under construction.

The value of the paper is that it examines voluntary disclosure of social and environmental performance by companies, using the notion of IE from the neo‐institutionalist theory, as well as the innovation model from the ANT. The originality of the paper also lies in its methodology – particularly the use of a mixed method—including the composition of “poems” with “verses” extracted from the corporate reports.

Crowdfunding campaigns reflect the personality traits of the entrepreneur, influencing the chances of a successful fundraising. In this study, the authors focus on three different entrepreneurs’ personality dark traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Through a text analysis of 338 equity-crowdfunding campaigns in the UK, the authors identified narcissistic expressions used by entrepreneurs in their pitches, and their impact on funding success. The authors found an inverted U-shape relationship between entrepreneurs’ narcissism and the crowdfunding success. On the other hand, entrepreneurs’ psychopathy has a negative linear relationship with crowdfunding success. This study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature, highlighting the importance of displayed entrepreneurs’ personality traits in engaging with crowd investors.

There are increasing influences of stakeholder relationships in the contemporary entrepreneurial knowledge stream to co-create value, in order to jointly confront the market competition. However, current research implies a dichotomy to exist between the awareness of the necessity of stakeholder-centred strategic thinking and the actual implementation of strategies in entrepreneurial practice. The purpose of this paper is to close this gap, in order to understand how entrepreneurs could, strategically and operationally, enhance their stakeholders’ relationships to reinforce entrepreneurial co-creation. Since, co-creation propels innovation; entrepreneurs’ and their stakeholders’ well-being calls for urgent materialisation of the entrepreneurial co-creation concept.

A constructivist approach is applied to support findings to evolve a synthesis from literature to kick-off an academic debate on future research avenues on how to develop a co-creating entrepreneurial mindset.

The findings conceptualise the significance of relevant traditional and contemporary issues of stakeholder relationships and entrepreneurship to structure the entrepreneurial co-creation concept. Ten issues are recognised from the conjoint literature influencing the conception.

These insights will be useful for entrepreneurs to better align their entrepreneurial propositions with their stakeholder relationships to underpin value co-creation. Academics will be able to use these insights as a basis for future research towards entrepreneurial co-creation and are invited to join the debate.

The findings represent an innovative strategic direction towards a better understanding of the significance of stakeholder relationships, pertaining to entrepreneurial development in the contemporary marketplaces, and holistically conceptualise the entrepreneurial co-creation concept.

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games is a post-apocalyptic tale that takes place in a barely recognizable North America. Told in the voice of 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, a citizen of the desperately poor District 12, the reader learns of the government’s method of keeping the deprived population under control. Every year the Capitol demands that each of the 12 districts select, through the means of an unfair lottery system, a boy and a girl to become tributes in the nationally televised “Hunger Games.” Here, with much fanfare, the 24 young participants must fight to the death until only one remains. Full of social commentary, the content of this cautionary tale is an ideal tool for teaching economic content and initiating meaningful classroom discussion.