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This paper adds to the ongoing debate on judgements, opportunity evaluation and founder identity theory and shows that founders vary in their prioritisation and combination of judgement criteria, linked to their respective social founder identity. It further reveals how this variation among founder identity types shapes their perception of distinct entrepreneurial opportunities and the forming of first-person opportunity beliefs.

This study uses a qualitative approach by presenting three business scenarios to a sample of 34 first-time founders. It adopts a first-person perspective on their cognitive processes during the evaluation of entrepreneurial opportunities using verbal protocol and content analysis techniques.

The theorised model highlights the use of similar categories of judgement criteria by individual founders during opportunity evaluation that followed two distinct stages, namely search and validation. Yet, founders individualised their judgement process through the prioritisation of different judgement criteria.

The authors provide new insights into how individuals individuate entrepreneurial opportunities through the choice of different judgement criteria that enable them to develop opportunity confidence during opportunity evaluation. The study also shows that first-time founders depict variations in their cognitive frames that are based on their social identity types as they assess opportunity-related information and elicit variations in reciprocal relationships emerging between emotion and cognition. Exposing these subjective cognitive evaluative processes provides theoretical and practical implications that are discussed as well.

Despite recent advances in research on antecedents of social entrepreneurial intentions, founder social identity has rarely been part of the research effort. This paper aims to investigate how different types of founder social identity affect social entrepreneurial intentions (SE intentions).

This study investigates how different types of founder social identity, such as Darwinians, Communitarians and Missionaries, affect SE intentions. Specifically, this study predicts that entrepreneurs with Darwinian identity would be less likely to form SE intentions, while those with Missionary and Communitarian identities would be more prone to form SE intentions. The hypotheses are tested on a sample of 725 individuals recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Most of the hypotheses, except for Communitarian identity, are supported by the data analysis. The results contribute to the literature on founder social identity and SE intentions and demonstrate that founder social identity is one of the important antecedents of social entrepreneurial intentions.

Two of the hypotheses were supported by the results. Specifically, this study found a positive relation between Missionary founder social identity (its locus of self-definition is “Impersonal-We”) and social entrepreneurial intentions. This research also confirms that Darwinian founder social identity (its locus of self-definition is “I”) has a negative impact on social entrepreneurial intentions.

First, a person’s social identity has been largely overlooked in social entrepreneurship intention literature (Bacq and Alt, 2018; Hockerts, 2017; Zaremohzzabieh et al, 2019). The findings provide the empirical evidence that individual-level antecedents, especially one’s membership in a social group (i.e. social identity), exert a significant impact on the formation of SE intentions. Second, among the two types of founder social identity predicted to have a positive influence on SE intentions, only Missionary identity was found to have such a positive impact. The typical Communitarian locus of self-definition of “Personal We,” is less influential than the self-definition of the typical Missionary locus of “Impersonal We.” This might imply that not all types of feelings of belonging to a community have a positive impact on the formation and development of social entrepreneurial intentions. Finally, this study found that Darwinians are less likely to pursue social entrepreneurship although the definition of Darwinians is close to the definition of traditional entrepreneurs (e.g. profit/opportunity seekers). This may signify that the traditional concept of entrepreneurship may not be enough to explain different types of entrepreneurial motivations (e.g. social vs commercial entrepreneurship).

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has been viewed almost exclusively through the lens of profit-driven firms. However, individuals engage in entrepreneurship not only for economic reasons but also to enrich a community or to advance society. Drawing on upper echelons theory, the purpose of this paper is to address this issue by proposing that founders’ social identities shape the strategic choices of their ventures.

Drawing on the data from 318 founders in the early stages of their entrepreneurial activity, the study applies partial least squares structural equation modeling to empirically test whether founders’ social identities influence their ventures’ EO.

The findings of the current research show that founders whose dominant purpose is the creation of value for others are more likely to launch ventures oriented toward innovation. On the other hand, ventures of founders driven by economic self-interest accept more risk, which leads to higher performance outcomes on the enterprise, community and societal levels.

The study enhances the EO discussion by adding social identity theory as a way to explain different levels of EO in firms and answers the call for more diversity in EO–performance measurement by applying specific outcomes on the enterprise, community and societal levels to investigate whether a firm’s EO leads to the desired outcomes.

Cognitive drivers of opportunity identification and development are important in entrepreneurship. This study examines antecedents of opportunity development among women founders of digital platform start-ups, defined as technology-mediated sites that facilitate user interactions, processing of transactions or other innovative practices. The opportunity identification and development literature framed our exploration of drivers into digital entrepreneurship among women in a middle-income economy, an area under-represented in prior research.

This research uses in-depth interview data with women founders of five digital platform start-ups in South Africa. The authors supplemented primary interviews with secondary data from a global big data site to provide context for how investors are funding women-owned start-ups in the country.

Entrepreneurs’ heightened alertness to opportunity developed from a confluence of factors such as personal values, impatience at the slow pace of change in post-Apartheid South Africa, corporate ennui and building for-profit business models driven by social purpose. Respondents had multiple identities, including gender, culture and generation that influenced their development as entrepreneurs and their adoption of digital platform strategy for start-up ventures.

Multiple factors influence women entrepreneurs during the opportunity identification and development process as they enact the creation of digital platform start-ups. The authors recommend additional research linking opportunity identification and development to gender in emerging markets.

South Africa is witnessing the emergence of women-owned digital platform start-ups that attract risk capital investment. These entrepreneurs are university educated and use prior corporate experience to create growth-oriented companies that government should support.

The study contributes to opportunity identification theory building based on context, specifically how the concepts and strategies can inform new models that include women entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurial identity involves identifying and exploiting opportunities to create value and wealth. Entrepreneurship contributes mainly to a firm’s efforts be exploited in a marketplace. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between the entrepreneurial social identities identified by Fauchart and Gruber (2011) and three primary stakeholders: investors, customers and employees.

Data were collected through online questionnaires from entrepreneurs who had created their own new venture in Spain. The results were analysed using partial least squares technique (PLS-SEM) (Fornell and Cha, 1994) with Smart PLS 3.0 (Ringle et al., 2015).

The results show that the identities defined as Darwinian and Communitarian have a positive effect on profits and growth in sales, which serve to create value for investors and customers. The effect is not significant, however, when these identities are connected to job creation to create value for employees. Further, the multi-group analysis performed shows that this relationship differs significantly based on gender.

The main limitation is that this research does not include relevant stakeholders like sponsors or project managers. The next step is to expand this research to this kind of stakeholders.

The research assists gender entrepreneurial social identity and business performance under the impact on primary stakeholders.

This research has the potential to analyse the entrepreneurial social identities for their contribution to create value and wealth.

The authors’ main contributions are to have based the study on the relationship between entrepreneurial social identity and business performance and their impact on primary stakeholders and to have analysed the differences on gender entrepreneurial social identity and business performance and their impact on primary stakeholders.

This study aims to explore how aspiring entrepreneurs navigate between their own individual self-concept and the organisational identity of the new venture during the process of new venture creation.

The study draws on three cases of aspiring entrepreneurs within a UK-based university incubator in the process of “becoming” entrepreneurs. Semi-structured interviews and secondary data were collected and analysed using a flexible pattern matching approach.

The data illustrated parallel identity and sensemaking processes occurring as the aspiring entrepreneurs navigated towards new venture formation. For the organisational identity process, three key stages were found to occur: referent identity labelling, projection and identity reification. Concurrently the sensemaking process made up of creation, interpretation and enactment were seen to enable identity transitioning mechanisms: cue identification, liminal sensegiving and recognition of formal venture boundaries, which led to the organisational identity being formed.

This study is exploratory in nature thus future research is required to clarify the relationship between identity work practices and the process of creating a new venture (Oliver and Vough, 2020). The paper is limited to successful instances of new venture formation, and though this helped to extricate the identity transitioning stages and mechanisms that have thus far remained implicit within the process of new venture creation, it could be extended to examine entrepreneurs who fail to set up new ventures. This limitation opens avenues for further research on identity formation in failed ventures (Snihur and Clarysse, 2022) and on how entrepreneurs negotiate contested identities (Varlander et al., 2020). Furthermore, entrepreneurs take different pathways to new venture formation (Shepherd et al., 2021) and while this study follows the journey of aspiring entrepreneurs who differed in terms of sector, education and prior entrepreneurial experience (Shane, 2003), future researchers could undertake a more in-depth ethnographic study including the effects of incubator setting and how these can be best supported, as this was outside the original remit of this study. Given the importance of the university incubator (Bergman and McMullen, 2022), its role in the construction of new venture identity is an interesting area for future research.

This study provides a practical contribution into entrepreneurship curricula and incubator training, emphasising the importance of understanding the relevance of the entrepreneur's self-concept in making sense of future venture identities. Through the findings of this study, the importance of cue identification and how aspiring entrepreneurs rely on these to carve out the identity of their budding venture is demonstrated. Incubator spaces may have a role to play in supporting aspiring entrepreneurs to reflect on and interpret feedback (liminal sensegiving) during the venture creation process. Furthermore, both educators and incubator managers need to be aware of the state of in-between-ness aspiring entrepreneurs will face as they carve out the identity of the budding venture. This study enables educators to advise aspiring entrepreneurs that there will come a point on the entrepreneurial journey when they need to emphasise boundary setting between self and organisation to enable organisational identity to be fostered and venture formation realised. This study advises incubator managers to consider whether support around business registrations and creation of business accounts should be provided earlier in the incubation programme to emphasise boundary setting between self and organisation. There is a fruitful avenue for future research to extend the work in this paper to fully understand how this might be taught and practiced in the classrooms.

By extricating the stages of organisational identity formation, often hidden within the new venture creation process, this study has framed new venture creation as a liminal experience and a visible site of identity work. This study presents a process model of the key identity transitioning stages and mechanisms in new ventures, by illustrating how aspiring entrepreneurs' sensemaking influences identity transitions during the process of venture creation.

Mission statements are usually related to strategic management and elements related to the organization's identity. Catholic higher education organizations (CHEOs) identity is based on the Charisma of the founder of the Catholic order or congregation. If in contradiction, it puts their organizational legitimacy at risk. If organizations deviate from their identity, it means a mission drift. Even more severe is when mission statements are misaligned with the identity. In this study, the authors seek better understand the mission drift by the misalignment between the mission statement and the organizational identity of the CHEOs.

The authors examine the mission statements of 112 Catholic CHEOs in Brazil. They used lexical analysis based on descending hierarchical classification and post-factorial analysis. They analyzed the vocabularies of each class extracted from the descending hierarchical classification and determine the presence or absence of the Charisma.

The results indicate that aspects of Catholic identity through the Charisma are manifested in the organizational mission but are not predominant. There is a variation of the mission statements relative to the Charisma of the orders and congregations. A significant part manifests generically. They respond in a similar and isomorphic way or to internal institutional pressures of CHEOs.

The authors empirically identified a mission drift, considering the mismatch between the mission statement and the Charisma. The authors emphasize that for organizational identity to manifest, it should consider the identity that emerges from the founder's Charisma. This influence must appear in central elements of the organizational identity, such as the mission statements.

Social entrepreneurship has played a significant role in reducing unemployment and poverty, fixing other social issues and environmental concerns. Although there is an increasing concern on social entrepreneurship by the public sector, practitioner and scholars, there are still limited studies on predicting the intention to become a social entrepreneur. Thus, investigating social entrepreneurship intention using a systematic literature review (SLR) approach is crucial due to the lack of systematisation and categorisation in this field. Therefore, this study aims to conduct a SLR to identify the antecedents of social entrepreneurial intention (SEI) used by the previous research. In this sense, this chapter carries out a systematic review of the literature on social entrepreneurship intentions. The review is guided by the PRISMA Statement (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses). After the identification and screening process, only 56 articles were qualified for further analysis. This SLR focused on articles that are using quantitative research and in the English language published in Scopus. Although there is no limitation in the timeline, the search string results found that the related articles were published between 2010 and 2020. From the thematic analysis, nine main themes were found. The themes are categorised based on the antecedents of SEI used by previous research. There are nine antecedents found: (1) perceived desirability and feasibility, (2) attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control, (3) prior experience, (4) emotional factors, (5) self-efficacy, (6) personality, (7) support systems, (8) skills and competencies and (9) motivational factors. Further analysis of the themes has resulted in ten sub-themes. This chapter's contribution includes offering a clearer picture of the antecedents of social entrepreneurial intention that is still at its infancy stage. Additionally, this chapter managed to identify the research gaps and proposed future research agenda.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate two competing hypotheses about the relationship between a country’s human rights violation and social entrepreneurship entry.

Using multilevel logistic regression with random effect, this paper tested the hypotheses on a sample of 110,460 individuals in 49 countries using data from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s Adult Population Survey and the Survey of Social Entrepreneurship for the year 2009. This paper takes advantage of the Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Data Project to measure a country’s level of human rights protection.

Human rights are positively related to social entrepreneurship entry. The findings also indicate that public sector expenditure strengthens the relationship between human rights, measured by the judiciary independence and social entrepreneurship entry.

This study contributes to the social entrepreneurship literature by conducting a novel empirical investigation of the direct relationship between a country’s human rights and social entrepreneurship entry.

This study aims to systematize the drivers of nascent entrepreneurship in tourism and to suggest avenues for future research. As a consequence of the pandemic, a reduction in early-stage entrepreneurial activity was reported worldwide. The countries that responded best to this situation were those that fostered entrepreneurship at this early stage, designated as nascent. Hence, research on nascent entrepreneurs requires particular attention.

To address this study’s goal, the authors have examined the development of nascent entrepreneur literature in the last two decades and discussed how the literature on tourism nascent entrepreneurship relates to the mainstream literature in terms of theoretical frameworks. The authors explored specificities of the tourism industry to propose new research avenues to explore the theme of new venture creation in the hospitality and tourism sector.

The authors divided the implication of tourism specificities into main themes: motivations, human and social capital and government and incubators. Several research questions for future research are proposed.

By focusing on nascent entrepreneurship, researchers and policymakers can obtain important insights from projects that have not been implemented, going beyond those that have been successfully undertaken, as aimed at in entrepreneurship research.

This research contributes to the nascent tourism entrepreneurship literature by providing theoretical and empirical research questions to advance existing knowledge in tourism nascent entrepreneurship.