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The purpose of this paper is to aim at assessing the impacts of the embedded nature of ethnic Chinese businesses on the management of business failure in China ventures.

Upon reviewing the key literature on ethnic Chinese transnational business ventures and, in particular, the concept of embeddedness, the paper proceeds with a description of the data based on ethnographic research among ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs in both Singapore and Malaysia and a brief portrayal of the development of their investments in China since the 1980s. In subsequent sections the empirical findings are first presented and then analyzed. The conclusions reflect on the changing nature of the embeddedness of the ethnic Chinese in diverse but shared legacies.

The experience of business failure in China contributes to a reorientation among the ethnic Chinese towards both their national communities and each other – and finally affects their transnational business strategies. This process of re‐embedding identity is intertwined with the diverging ethnic politics of the Singaporean and Malaysian nation states and results in the redefinition of a shared identity.

While the literature on the ethnic Chinese business community is focusing on those factors that are conducive to business operations, little attention has been paid to the manners in which business failure is dealt with. In this paper, business failure will be investigated in terms of the impact emanating from the embeddedness of ethnic Chinese businesses in complex economic, social‐cultural, and political configurations.

The aim is to identify the potential for establishing successful businesses operations or institutions emanating from returnees' mixed embeddedness in post-conflict Cambodia.

This explorative study of the two largest groups of returnees, the Cambodian French and the Cambodian Americans, compares these two categories through a review of literature on Cambodians in the USA and France and primary fieldwork data obtained through open interviews with Cambodian returnees in Cambodia.

Cambodian French and Cambodian American returnees show different entrepreneurial dispositions and hence play different roles in the Cambodian economy. While the all-embracing welfare system in France incapacitated both the self-sufficiency and community building among Cambodian diaspora, the market-driven model of social services in the USA induced the Cambodian diaspora with a commercial orientation. While both categories initiate institutional and business ventures, their contribution to social change in Cambodia is modest. Among the returnee entrepreneurs, the Chinese Cambodians seem to be most successful in their business ventures irrespective of their diasporic background.

The emerging scholarly interest in “immigrant transnationalism” tends to focus in particular on identity issues. Contrastingly, this article focuses on economic aspects of “immigrant transnationalism” in terms of its “mixed embeddedness” in both home and host country economies.

Several types of entrepreneurship with a societal purpose coincide in Sweden today, some stemming from older domestic traditions, others being more recent foreign influences. This paper aims to interrelate social, civic, community, and other entrepreneurships in search of a more unifying concept of societal entrepreneurship for Sweden and beyond.

As part of a larger study, Swedish researchers and practitioners promoting some kind of entrepreneurship with societal purpose, are interviewed and asked for examples and literature references. Altogether 176 actors are identified and 59 are interviewed. The main distinguishing factors between different discourses of entrepreneurship are accounted for as well as results from workshops where actors representing different discourses partook.

Seven societally oriented entrepreneurship discourses are distinguished, with different foreign or domestic origins. Key characteristics for interrelating different discourses are the type of actor (individual and/or collective) and purpose (social/ecological and/or economic) emphasized in a discourse. Interactions documented from workshops indicate a potential in unifying different entrepreneurships within a widened understanding of societal entrepreneurship.

The field of entrepreneurship emphasizing societal utility is fragmented with many parallel discourses. The conceptual analysis and empirical findings imply that there is potential in a more unifying concept. Furthermore, in the limited Swedish setting, collective dimensions of entrepreneurship stand out. This nevertheless implies that collective engagements into entrepreneurship of any kind are worthy of more research and recognition.

Implications are primarily limited to societal entrepreneurship within uncontested welfare states, such as Sweden, where most established societal needs are taken care of through taxes utilized by a public sector. Societal entrepreneurship in such a setting becomes a mechanism for renewal and experimentation.

The paper is original in its approach to identifying and interrelating current discourses in Sweden.

Responding to recent pleas both to critically analyze and to conceptually advance social entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the political “unconscious” operates in the narration of social entrepreneurship and how it poses a limit to alternative forms of thinking and talking.

To move the field beyond a predominantly monological way of narrating, various genres of narrating social entrepreneurship are identified, critically discussed and illustrated against the backdrop of development aid.

The paper identifies and distinguishes between a grand narrative that incorporates a messianistic script of harmonious social change, counter‐narratives that render visible the intertextual relations that interpellate the grand narration of social entrepreneurship and little narratives that probe novel territories by investigating the paradoxes and ambivalences of the social.

The paper suggests a minor understanding and non‐heroic practice of social entrepreneurship guided by the idea of “messianism without a messiah.”

The paper suggests critical reflexivity as a way to analyze and multiply the circulating narrations of social entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that there is a clear distinction between using public funds and non‐public funds for development cooperation.

The paper describes initiatives in development cooperation that the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) has taken in collaboration with partners in the private sector.

With their partners in the private sector and local partners in developing countries, the KIT is producing at viable costs for willing markets.

The paper provides a privileged, insider's view into working entrepreneurially in developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the inhibiting factors of partnership creation between social entrepreneurs in the business, government, public and non‐profit sector.

This paper examines four cases of social entrepreneurship in the start‐up phase. Each case is studied in real time, for a period of two years.

The empirical research reveals that partnership creation for social enterprises between a social enterprise and organizations in various sectors is inhibited by conflicting interests and diverging speed of on one hand and by the conflicts that originate from the opportunity‐seeking behavior of the social entrepreneur and the risk avoiding behavior of the organizations. While the social start‐ups that managed to neutralize such inhibitors succeeded, the start‐up enterprises that did not manage to do so failed.

While, there is a sound body of knowledge of the factors that inhibit the more traditional single and cross‐sector partnerships, relatively little is known about the factors that inhibit the partnerships between social enterprises and organizations in the business, public, government, and non‐profit sectors in society.

The paper aims to answer how important institutional actors, such as academic researchers, consulting firms, and foundations, are tracing the boundaries of social entrepreneurship (SE) and how they justify SE as a legitimate form of social purpose organization.

The paper employs a discourse analysis methodology.

The paper finds traces of the legitimacy issues in the literature on non‐profits and, based on this, argue that a new institutional domain is being constructed. The paper concludes that in this new domain not only is the use of market‐based initiatives seen as a legitimate means of funding a social mission, but also it has now become the normative way and one that is promoted by consultants and foundations concerned with social entrepreneurs and their initiatives.

This paper highlights the developing norms of SE.

The purpose of the paper is to propose a shift from the ideal of immersion to a practice of “committed localism” in the ethnographic study of relational work in the post-bureaucratic and service-based economy.

The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork following management consultancy projects in a hospital and a manufacturing company in Denmark. The approach was predicated on committed attention to the everyday of consultancy work activities and associated relational dynamics. This involved being present at the client sites, observing and listening in concrete situations of interaction and engaging in conversations with the multiple actors involved, both external consultants and members of client organisations.

The paper shows how “committed localism” was practiced in the ethnographic study of management consultancy as it is relationally accomplished in and through concrete situations of interaction between consultants and different actors in client organizations and the associated meaning production of the involved actors.

The paper develops the notion of “committed localism”, originally introduced by George Marcus, into a methodological concept to challenge the conventional ideal of immersion as the hallmark of “proper” ethnography. Such a shift is particularly pertinent for the ethnographic study of relational processes involving multiple actors occupying different positions in the temporary social spaces of contemporary workplaces.