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Oral history collections can offer a wealth of detailed information for entrepreneurship researchers. The stories that entrepreneurs tell provide researchers with insight into both perspective and into substantive issues of entrepreneurial behavior. The life stories of entrepreneurs offer students of entrepreneurship insight into both the explicit and the tacit knowledge of working entrepreneurs.

This chapter uses a historical lens to analyse the role of governance institutions in shaping enterprising places using the context of the English city of Coventry in the early to late Middle Ages. Using historical documentation as an empirical method, this chapter examines the formation, evolution, growth, maturation, decline of institutional structures, related governance mechanisms and their interactions with other institutional influences that shaped the entrepreneurial nature of the city and its economy. The chapter discusses aspects of success, failures and discontinuities that beset the entrepreneurial landscape of the city and draws parallels to some contemporary developments in UK’s entrepreneurial governance.

The chapter is underpinned by a research methodological approach that is historical and processual in nature and relies on historical documentation including archival sources of empirical material and other published data which have not previously been studied in the context of entrepreneurship and public governance. The research method and approach addresses a methodological and conceptual void in extant entrepreneurship literature.

The empirical findings from archival sources of data and their analysis sheds a new interpretive light on the nature of enterprising places as a combination of continual historical synergies in the specific context of Coventry. The chapter specifically focuses on the role of merchant and craft guilds as a unique presence in the entrepreneurial landscape of Coventry in the early to late Middle Ages and their contribution as powerful institutional and governance forces in shaping the city’s economic history. The guilds and associated governance institutions exercised and enacted multiple economic, legislative, regulatory, civic, municipal, socio-cultural and religious roles and left a strong imprint on the city’s economic destiny that endured for several centuries. Through the interpenetrative influences of these guilds with other political, royal and religious institutional structures of their day, the economic history of the city and its enterprise was woven together in a fabric of cooperation, discord and power struggles. The historical analysis provides a powerful narrative in charting this story and draws parallels to ongoing struggles in contemporary developments in Coventry’s entrepreneurial governance and leadership.

The chapter contributes a historic and contextually enriched sensibility in understanding the entrepreneurial and economic history of Coventry as viewed through the lens of institutional interactions and provides a valuable study that draws parallels between the past and the present. It provides a historically informed approach in understanding the current context of the nation’s local and regional economic policies and attempts to understand how enterprise and enterprising places thrive and sometimes struggle to survive within such a landscape.

The chapter is a unique take on the analysis of entrepreneurship and institutional governance of a city’s local economy in that it takes a historical perspective of issues that animate current public discourse. A historical approach to studying entrepreneurship provides a longitudinal and macro perspective to studying ideological debates that shade contemporary economic, political and socio-cultural governance. The analysis draws interesting parallels to the power discourses and dynamics and ideological conflicts that shaped institutional influences across centuries that impacted upon the city’s economy and use that as a backdrop to comment upon contemporary developments in the policy landscape viewed as an articulation of a political-ideological agenda. The analysis provides and calls for a greater application of historical sensibilities in governance and entrepreneurship scholarship in order to glean valuable lessons.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a theory of sovereign entrepreneurship, which is a special kind of political entrepreneurship.

This paper uses qualitative methods/historical survey.

Sovereignty is rooted in self-enforced exchange of political property rights. Sovereign entrepreneurship is the creative employment of political property rights to advance a plan.

Because a polity’s constitution is determined by its distribution of political property rights, sovereign entrepreneurship and constitutional change are necessarily linked. The author illustrated how sovereign entrepreneurship can be applied by using it to explain the rise of modern states.

In addition to studying instances of sovereign entrepreneurship in distant history, scholars can apply it to recent history. Sovereign entrepreneurship can be especially helpful as a tool for doing analytic narratives of low-n cases of political-economic development, especially when those polities attract interests for being “development miracles.”

This paper uses treats sovereignty as a political property right.

The aim of this paper is to offer agent‐based modelling (ABM) as an alternative approach to advance research in entrepreneurship. It argues that ABM allows entrepreneurship researchers (i.e. the designers) to find better ways in generating entrepreneurial outcomes by understanding alternative histories and examining a plausible future.

This paper begins with an overview of ABM, and discusses the shared conceptual foundations of entrepreneurship and ABM as the motives for the adoption of ABM as an appropriate methodology to study entrepreneurship. It offers a roadmap in using ABM approach for entrepreneurship research and illustrates this using a contemporary research question in entrepreneurship: the study of success/failure in business venturing.

This paper suggests the shared foundations between ABM and entrepreneurship as the basis for bringing the methodology and research domain closer. It offers a roadmap for advancing entrepreneurship research using agent‐based simulation approach and explains the contribution of ABM to further advance entrepreneurship research.

This paper addresses the methodological gap in entrepreneurship research and develops the argument for a wider adoption of ABM simulation approach to study entrepreneurship. It bridges the gap by examining the possibility of formalizing entrepreneurship processes by grounding an agent‐based model on empirical facts and generally‐accepted foundations of entrepreneurship. It offers a contribution to the literature by showing that ABM is a useful and appropriate methodological approach for entrepreneurship research in addition to the conventional variance and process approach.

Entrepreneurship and family businesses are fundamental factors in economic activity since, through the generation of new ideas, it is possible to generate new businesses that trigger employment, innovation, and economic growth. Recently, an emphasis on seeing both research streams from a kaleidoscope perspective has given new insights into the development and evolution of this area. Thus, exploring the differentiation between true and false entrepreneurs seems vital for today's efficient allocation of resources. A theoretical model is proposed, including micro, meso, and macro analytical spheres, adding the behavioral aspects that determine whether a person is a true or false entrepreneur and the effects that can have on the business. To observe the viability of the approach, the case of an enterprise, called “family business S,” is examined. Specifically, the results show the feasibility of applying the analytical proposal to observe the positive and negative behaviors of the family business. In the case of S, these are false entrepreneurs, given that free time and unemployment were the main reasons for starting the company, but they lacked the will and long-term vision. Also, a novel view on how to diagnose a real entrepreneur for taking over a family business is proposed, where a clinical history approach might help in the succession process.

This special issue of Chinese Management Studies aims to focus on entrepreneurship in China by addressing a variety of topics. The purpose is to provide some insights for entrepreneurship research based on the context of China as a representative emerging economy.

Review and reflection.

The research presented in the eight articles that constitute this special issue concern different topics, including entrepreneurship in the Chinese historical context, entrepreneurship in the context of networks and relationships and entrepreneurship in specialized industries. These articles provide valuable contributions to theory construction in entrepreneurship research for emerging economies, not just for enterprises in China but also for people and ventures around the world.

Developing an indigenous understanding of the opportunity for entrepreneurship research in an emerging economy such as China, we would argue, is only the beginning for the research work based on the historical context, networks and relationships, and specialized industries that could boom in the wide open workspaces of the developing world.

The studies published here provide valuable contributions to theory construction in entrepreneurship research, as well as some basic ideas for concept definition and structural comparison in entrepreneurship research in other different domains.

Taking as reference a sample of around a hundred biographical materials on entrepreneurs in Mexico and Colombia, the purpose of this chapter is dual. Both to show the relevance and varied modalities that the biographical approach has enjoyed in business history research since the 1990s, and to display the intrinsic potential this modality of scholarship entails for entrepreneurship endeavors. In particular, it discusses the prospects to incorporate this body of empirical works into the large Latin American audience attending undergraduate, graduate and executive education programs in business, economic history and related fields. The chapter is organized into three sections. The first two are devoted to illustrate relevant patterns in the entrepreneurial trajectory of individuals and entrepreneurial families studied in each of the two countries under consideration. The last section identifies some conceptual issues that may impact current debates on Latin American business development as exemplified in recent business and economic history journal venues and scholarly conferences.

The purpose of this research paper is to explore the decline of subsistence entrepreneurship in a “Scottish Fishing Community”, namely the village of Gourdon in Kincardineshire, Scotland over a 60‐year period.

Presents the material in a historical perspective, as remembered by two persons who lived through the experience. Using two ethnographic accounts the paper reconstructs a vivid picture of a thriving form of subsistence type entrepreneurship, in a bygone era, when enterprise was more closely bonded to community activities, the work ethic and pride.

This paper narrates a dramatic story relating to the economic decline visited upon a living community by the forces of market change affecting multiple income streams. In this tale, there are no heroes or villains, as is normal in narrative accounts, merely victims of changing circumstances and changing patterns of social action.

The results of this research paper have obvious limitations, because of the methodology employed, and because of the limited number of respondents interviewed. However, socio‐historical studies such as this have their place in developing an understanding of entrepreneurship as enacted in individual communities.

This paper tackles an under‐researched area of rural entrepreneurship using narrative methods which bring the subject to life.

This chapter studies the tourism cluster of Majorca and its connection with collective entrepreneurship. To this end, the authors review the history of four world leading Spanish hotel companies, from their beginnings, in Majorca, in the 1950s, to their internationalization, in the 1980s and 1990s: Barceló, Meliá, Riu, and Iberostar. This allows us to identify common patterns of behaviour among them over time, which in turn illustrate the dynamics of the tourism cluster and the role played by its context. This qualitative and historical research allows us to make the following contributions: first, in line with other studies in the economic history of Spanish tourism, the four cases support the identification of Majorca as a tourism cluster. Second, the authors highlight several important characteristics of the island which reinforced and strengthened the cluster and boosted collective entrepreneurship, through an intense flow of information between the companies. Third, the authors illustrate coopetition as the key nature of the relationship between the clustered companies in a simultaneous process of competition and cooperation. Finally, the authors show how the strength of the tourism cluster, in Majorca, drove the companies to replicate the same dynamics and structures abroad.