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Entrepreneurial pursuits are all situational and relative. Business opportunities come and go based on many fluid factors. Those factors are also multidimensional, as market pressures and demands, skills of entrepreneurs, resources of entrepreneurs, and environmental factors make each opportunity and execution strategy unique. Since every entrepreneurial venture is essentially a one-of-a-kind enterprise, each startup is a chance for the entrepreneur to express their unique vision, values, and goals. Philosophers would recognize this exercise as existential in nature. This paper explains how reading existential literature provides inspirational heroes for entrepreneurs seeking to build companies that stand out from their peers. The paper provides an overview and history of existentialism and then applies it to entrepreneurship. The paper is conceptual and provides a brief overview of existentialism and explains how it relates to entrepreneurship. It provides a collection of existential writings that relate to entrepreneurship. Guidance for reading and applying the literature is given. Existentialism is a subject that has not been covered in the entrepreneurship literature. Thus, the paper introduces this popular philosophical perspective to the entrepreneurship literature. The authors hope to create interesting discussions between philosophy and entrepreneurship scholars.

The philosophical roots of existentialism can be found in the writings of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. Sartre used existentialism to frame the social and political issues of the day after World War II and Camus helped popularize the philosophyʼns focus on individualism and personal freedom. Existentialism provided justification for challenging public officials and regimes and was embraced again by public administrators and citizens frustrated by the failures of foreign and domestic policies in the 1960s and 1970s. Today existentialism and transcendentalist phenomenology remain strong alternatives to empiricism as a methodology in the study of human behavior. They provide a philosophical basis for determining and applying ethical standards, as well as a basis for encouraging public administrators to address major societal problems rather than being overly focused on management technique and administrative process.

This article aims to develop a conception consisting of insights from complexity theory and additional notions from Weick's sense‐making theory and existentialism for examining organization behaviour.

This paper carries out a literature review of Karl Weick's theory of sense‐making and some notions from existentialism to discuss the possible contributions to complexity theory and with this a further comprehension of organizational behaviour.

Four existential conditions, namely death, freedom, existentialism and meaninglessness, give a further comprehension of Weick's concept of equivocality. Equivocality is an important input for organizing processes. The complexity of organizing processes is an object for examining organizational behaviour from a complexity scientific standpoint. The authors argue that the concept of equivocality and with this the states of equilibrium in an organization can be approached with examining the states of the mentioned four existential conditions.

An important point of application for change managers in an organization is equivocality. The increase of equivocality will lead to a shift in the state of equilibrium in which new themes will emerge and corresponding organisational behaviour. The level of equivocality is due to the presence of existential fears. Hence, change managers should focus on existential themes and anxieties in an organization to advance emergent change.

New in this paper is the usage of notions from existentialism to elaborate Weick's conception of sense‐making. Also this paper discusses the possible contribution of this elaboration to research of organisational behaviour from the perspective of complexity theory.

Among the major problems identified by Organisational Behaviour Scientists in Africa today are those of a highly organised formal and a highly centralised management of organisation crushing the Organisation‐Man under the dead weight of uniformity. Formal organisations have become large and complex and highly organised, and the basis of their organisation is production efficiency. In this system, an Organisation‐Man is essentially looked upon as a producer and, because the formal organisation in which he is carrying on his role is so vast and complicated, personal relations seem to have lost all meanings. Formal organisation is relatively affluent. The output of goods is enormous, but entrepreneurs, and sometimes management continues to exploit the situation in their own interest, and the Organisation‐Man is engaged all the time in nothing but the exacting task of trying to, or worrying in order to, improve his economic status. The Organisation‐Man has to remain so busy in the pursuit of his vocation that he hardly gets time to look within himself and think of the quality of his life pattern. Meeting each other in factory or workshop or a crowd, commuting or agitating, he finds himself more and more isolated and alienated from the formal organisation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how leadership can better respond to a crisis. It aims to integrate ideas from existentialism into a discussion of how leadership could develop and provoke debate.

A review of the literature on leadership, crisis management and existentialism was adopted for the preferred research methodology.

This paper identified a gap in the literature on leadership in an exigency and offered an alternative to the technical-rationalist conceptions of leadership behaviour.

Reference is made to the benefits of counselling for leaders following a crisis.

This paper is an original contribution to the work on leadership. Through the concept of exige-stential leadership, this paper integrates ideas taken from existentialist philosophy, to provide a new way of conceptualising leadership in an exigency.

The purpose of this paper is to pave avenues and stimulate further research on the intersection of existentialism and tourism. This is done by presenting the overview of the topical areas that have greatly contributed to existentialism and connecting them to contemporary tourism issues.

The paper is structured by topical areas that received significant treatment from existentialists and are deemed relevant to the contemporary tourism research and practice. It starts with the discussion of authenticity and anxiety and then proceeds to the issues of alienation, death and mortality. It ends with a review of the sections on freedom and religion. In the conclusion, broader issues related to existentialism and (urban) tourism are discussed.

Aside from existential authenticity/anxiety and alienation, other existential categories (mortality, death, freedom and faith) are employed in a manner that is limited, superficial or not employed at all. The potential for tourism research lies in shifting the focus from a common tourist to special populations and hosting communities and service providers, as well as in investigating existential dimensions of city experiences of both tourists and residents.

This is the first paper to exclusively and explicitly discuss the links between existential philosophical categories and tourism research. It is hoped that tourism scholars extend these ideas and assess their relevance across non-European and culturally and religiously diverse contexts.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

Considers that of the three ideologies – materialism, existentialism and constructivism – that materialism is the least scientific. Believes that it has caused the greatest harm by virtue of political control. Sees existentialism as more hostile to science but with its negative impact limited to theology and literature, whilst constructivism is considered anti‐scientific and may, via its influence on education, be the promoter of “the new slavery”. Discusses these assertions through consideration of scientific methodology evolving five principles which are applied to each of the three ideologies introduced.

Sound administrative theory and research may ultimately provide the knowledge whereby administrative leaders in education can function most effectively. Such knowledge will never tell us, however, whether it is desirable to take a particular administrative action in any society at any time. Thus, an administrator should understand his personal philosophical foundations and value system, and do his best to construct a philosophical position that is as consistent and logical as possible. Five such positions, reconstructionism, experimentalism, idealism, realism, and existentialism, can serve as guidelines. Each position, whether it is basically progressivistic or essentialistic, has a reasonably distinct approach to the nature of reality, educational aims and objectives, and the educative process. The development of language analysis as philosophy's most important contribution to man is discussed briefly. A self‐evaluation check list has been developed, which may be employed by an administrator to assess his present philosophy of educational administration.