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Despite recognition of the centrality of emotions in entrepreneurship, little attention has been given to role of emotions in the development of entrepreneurial identity or enactment of entrepreneurial role. The contribution of the chapter is in the development of a dynamic model of the process leading to identification or dis-identification as an entrepreneur. In this chapter, we develop a dynamic model of the process leading to identification or dis-identification as an entrepreneur. We theorize that the driver behind an individual’s decision to become an entrepreneur, and their significant emotional experiences in the entrepreneurial role, influence the likelihood of following an identification or dis-identification cycle. Specifically, our framework proposes that positive emotions strengthen approach motivation and identification with the role, while negative ones foster avoidance motivation and dis-identification. We argue that contextual embeddedness can prompt transition between these two cycles. Our theorization provides new insights into methods of analyzing the role of emotions in the entrepreneurial process, more specifically in the process of entrepreneurial identity crafting. These insights also can be translated into studying the crafting of any professional identity.

This chapter critically evaluates the role of creative identity and how this shapes entrepreneurial identity. The main driver for creative practitioners is one of being ‘creative’, but this is in combination with the factors that support entrepreneurial behaviours, and it provides the narrative for their entrepreneurial identity. The quest to operate successfully as a creative practitioner in the creative industries drives entrepreneurial behaviour. The research examines the relationship between creative identity and entrepreneurial identity and how these two identities intertwine. To respond to this question, the study critically evaluates the concept of creative identity and entrepreneurial identity with fourteen creative practitioners in the UK, working as either chartered architects or freelance photographers. The research employed a qualitative approach and interpretivist ontology. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with the participants. The key finding that highlights the driver for entrepreneurial identity is the quest to operate successfully as a creative practitioner in the creative industries. This quest is underpinned by the desire to be able to express their creative identity, often referred to as a creative ‘voice’. Entrepreneurial identity and entrepreneurial behaviours function as conduits in which creative practitioners channel their primary driver of creative identity. This chapter contributes to the knowledge about creative practitioners’ entrepreneurial identity and creative identity and how these two identities relate to each other.

Drawing on an intersectional perspective on racial, migrant and entrepreneurial identities, this paper investigates the identity work of racial minority entrepreneurs with native-born and migrant backgrounds, confronted to experiences of othering in a White entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The study takes a qualitative-interpretivist approach and builds on six cases of racial minority entrepreneurs in nascent stages of venture development within the Dutch technology sector. The dataset comprises 24 in-depth interviews conducted over the course of one and a half year, extensive case descriptions and online sources. The data is thematically and inductively analysed.

Despite strongly self-identifying as entrepreneurs, the research participants feel marginalised and excluded from the entrepreneurial ecosystem, which results in ongoing threats to their existential authenticity as they build a legitimate entrepreneurial identity. Minority entrepreneurs navigate these threats by either downplaying or embracing their marginalised racial and/or migrant identities.

The study contributes to the literature on the identity work of minority entrepreneurs. The paper reveals that, rather than “strategising away” the discrimination and exclusion resulting from othering, racial minority entrepreneurs seek to preserve their sense of existential authenticity and self-worth, irrespective of entrepreneurial outcomes. In so doing, the study challenges the dominant perspective of entrepreneurial identity work among minority entrepreneurs as overly instrumental and market-driven. Moreover, the study also contributes to the literature on authenticity in entrepreneurship by highlighting how racial minority entrepreneurs navigate authenticity threats while building legitimacy in a White ecosystem.

The aim of this study is to better understand how black women utilize capital to frame their entrepreneurial identities in order to become legitimate and thus challenge institutional norms. To achieve this, the study draws on perspectives on legitimacy, identity and capital and focuses on the well-established wine industry in South Africa.

Using in-depth qualitative data from semi-structured interviews, this study delves into the lived experiences of nine black women entrepreneurs and three stakeholders in the South African wine industry. Such a context is unique because of the aspects of exclusion and segregation of black women. The data were supplemented with associated secondary material and were analysed using the constant comparative technique.

This study reveals dissonance, that is, a misfit, between black women's social identities and their entrepreneurial self-identities in the South African wine industry; the study uncovers that specific capital forms allow framing their identity through heroical self-description, exploiting professionalism and enacting new roles to alter the perception of what is socially legitimate in the wine industry.

This study contributes to understanding by highlighting that black women entrepreneurs in the wine industry rebel against the expectation that they must fit into a predetermined role. The study highlights the relevance of legitimacy, identity and capital theoretical perspectives to study an underexplored context and unpack how black women challenge the barriers that affect their entrepreneurial identities in their quest to become legitimate. The value of this study revolves around revealing the underexplored connection between entrepreneurial identity and legitimacy through actions taken by black women entrepreneurs when reworking the role(s) tied to their social identities. The findings suggest the importance of capital, particularly cultural capital, in how black women entrepreneurs become legitimate in the wine industry. Avenues for further research are offered.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the important process of how entrepreneurial identity is formed and constructed, with the perspective that entrepreneurial identity is social and dynamic, constantly shaped by various life episodes and human interactions, rather than static and unchanging.

This qualitative study comprises 30 in-depth interviews with Chinese immigrants in West Canada. These immigrants had been employed professionals under the “Skilled Workers” immigration category but later became entrepreneurs. None of the entrepreneurs in this study had prior business ownership experience, and many of them said that they had never thought about running businesses until they came to Canada.

A process model of entrepreneurial identity construction is presented. This paper advances the literature on entrepreneurship through the identification of three stages in the development of entrepreneurial identity: identity exploration, entrepreneurial mindsets building, and narrative development.

This study has important implications for the understanding of the exploratory and discovery mode of entrepreneurial identity construction. This study also moves away from the contextual and structural hypotheses as the sole explanations for the high rate of self-employment among immigrant entrepreneurs, and provides a useful starting point for a deeper understanding of the agency of immigrant entrepreneurs.

Women are underrepresented in most university entrepreneurship education (EE) programmes and less likely than men to pursue business venturing as a career. One reason may be the “entrepreneurial identity gap”, whereby female students do not see themselves as successful entrepreneurs. This paper aims to explore the nature of this identity gap and its relationship to entrepreneurial intent and entrepreneurship education.

A set of contemporary, gender-inclusive entrepreneurial attributes was developed using entrepreneurial subject matter experts and tested with 591 university students to explore the nature of the gendered entrepreneurial identity gap.

While masculine stereotypes persist and the entrepreneurial identity gap is larger for female students, results suggest that a more gender-inclusive vocabulary of entrepreneurship is emerging among the student population and an androgynous perception of the idealized entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship education had a positive influence on entrepreneurial intent.

Study findings advance the conversation about entrepreneurial identity, the nature of the gendered identity gap and the role of education in closing that gap. The questionnaire and set of gender-inclusive attributes should continue to be tested beyond student samples.

Based on this study, entrepreneurship education could benefit from more gender-inclusive instructional practices and vocabulary and a broadened definition of what it means to be entrepreneurial. More students – both men and women – will see themselves as entrepreneurs and be inspired to participate in the innovation economy.

This study takes a novel approach to the study of entrepreneurial identity, developing a new set of attributes and contemporary vocabulary around business venturing.

This paper investigates how a new entrepreneurial identity forms in conjunction with prior work-related identities during sponsored self-employment after an emotional job loss.

The authors empirically examine why some dismissed employees failed and others succeeded in transitioning from a wage-earner career via corporate sponsorship to a career as an entrepreneur, investigating how those employees meaningfully constructed (or did not) an entrepreneurial identity.

The authors' findings show that the simultaneous preservation of central attributes of prior work-related identities and the engenderment of new entrepreneurial attributes support the formation of an entrepreneurial identity and that a liminal state, in which people practice entrepreneurship at work, may facilitate identity transition.

This paper demonstrates that the initial entrepreneurial endeavor is based on prior work-related identity and identity congruence between prior work-related identities and a projected entrepreneurial identity is of great importance for the identity transition. However, the authors also show that incongruence may in some cases turn into congruence if entrepreneurs are given the opportunity to experiment with provisional entrepreneurial selves in a risk-free environment (so-called liminal states).

As a result of a plethora of scholarly articles by feminist scholars of entrepreneurship, it is now widely accepted that the notion of entrepreneurship is ideologically skewed towards masculine ideology. Although this body of work has been quietly acknowledged, it has not invoked a reply, or refutation, from male entrepreneurship scholars. Nor has it led to an increase in studies about the influence of masculinity on entrepreneurial behaviour or identity. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to begin to address this by analysing an alternative social construction of entrepreneurship relating to how masculinity influences entrepreneurial identity in print. The data used are text from the thinly veiled biographical novel Cityboy written in an aggressive and unashamedly masculine style. Whilst the focus is not upon entrepreneurs per se, it is upon the male‐oriented entrepreneurial institution that is the “city.”

The methodological approach used in this paper is that of biographical analysis; supported by a supplementary analysis of similar biographies of traders; this is triangulated by photographs downloaded from the internet. This approach allows rich data to be collected from practical sources permitting a comparative approach to be adopted. The approach has obvious limitations but is a practical method.

The results from this empirical study are tentative but illustrate that the socially constructed nature of the “city trader” as an entrepreneurial identity is portrayed as being a manly pursuit; and how such discrimination is inherent within an institutionalised systemic behaviour in which men are encouraged to be risk‐takers and players. This institutionalised “boyish” behaviour is used to build up a masculine identity rooted in Thatcherite enterprise culture. Although no clear conclusion can be articulated because of the subjective nature of the interpretation, links with accepted entrepreneurship theory are drawn. It is thus an exploratory study into the pervasiveness of masculine doxa in constructing entrepreneurial identity. The paper makes an incremental contribution by acknowledging the power of male dominance in shaping entrepreneurial realities albeit the conclusions are mainly drawn from one book.

This paper opens up the field for further studies of skewed masculine entrepreneurial identities under the rubric of the “bad boy entrepreneur.”

In critically discussing and acknowledging the male genderedness of entrepreneurial identity in a particular system, this paper makes a contribution to the understanding of the socially constructed nature of how to tell, understand and appreciate stories which present an entrepreneurial identity. Granted the hero of the story is fictional but the overlaps with the accepted storylines of entrepreneur stories are illuminating. The paper provides another heuristic device for understanding the social construction of gendered entrepreneurial identities, making it of interest to feminist scholars of entrepreneurship and to social constructionists alike.

The purpose of this study is to examine postgraduate students' reflexive narratives about their entrepreneurial passion (EP) experience as a result of their direct participation in a series of hand-selected experiential learning events within the curated identity workspace (IW) of a cross-disciplinary postgraduate entrepreneurship education programme.

This study uses a qualitative exploratory design using interpretative phenomenological analysis with a group of graduate students from a cross-disciplinary postgraduate entrepreneurship education program at an entrepreneurial university.

This study discovers that students’ EP experience is developed through the internalisation of an entrepreneurship learning activity into their personal identity through the harmonisation and reorganisation of their competing micro-identities of professional and entrepreneurial identity, prompting them to create a new identity that enables them to act entrepreneurially without relinquishing their existing professional identity.

This study demonstrates how entrepreneurial education programmes function as an IW and posits a theoretical model illustrating the hidden connections between entrepreneurial activity, personal identity and entrepreneurial learning experience that collectively influence individuals' entrepreneurial behaviour.

Professional service entrepreneurs (PSEs) paradoxically practice their profession in highly institutionalized contexts that require intense socialization, while also enacting another role as an entrepreneur. Activities consistent with entrepreneurship may be unnecessary for – and possibly contradictory with – activities consistent with professional roles. The purpose of this paper is to address the question of how two highly important role identities (professional and entrepreneurial) relate to entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in professional firms.

Using a survey methodology, the authors measure entrepreneurial and professional role identity importance, and PSE’s perceptions of firm-level EO, using a sample of 138 medical practitioners who own and operate their own small-to medium-sized professional practices. In this paper, the authors examine the associations of the importance of these identities, and the relative importance of one to another, with EO.

The authors find that a PSE’s entrepreneurial role identity importance is positively related to the EO dimensions of risk taking and innovativeness, while professional role identity importance is negatively related to risk taking. Additionally, the authors find that the degree of relative importance (centrality) of an entrepreneurial role identity to a professional role identity is related positively to the EO dimensions of risk taking, innovativeness, and proactiveness.

This is a cross-sectional study. As such, the authors examine associations rather than a process. The sample is limited to professional medical practitioners in the USA who own and operate their own practices.

This paper helps to better understand why some professional firms are more entrepreneurial than others. The findings suggest that, even in the conservative context of professional services, the PSEs entrepreneurial role centrality is consistent with the EO of the firm’s strategies.