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This study explores municipal leaders' perceptions on strategic human resource management in their local government organization. Previous studies on companies demonstrate that the top manager's perceptions of the importance of human resource management (HRM) for the organization are reflected in the quality of human resource management and its strategic role. The authors are interested in how leaders in municipalities perceive HRM.

The authors interviewed 30 leaders of Finnish municipalities for this qualitative study focused on municipal leaders' perceptions of HRM. The authors applied a discourse analytical approach in the analysis.

The authors recognized four discourses that frame perceptions of HRM: HRM as a strategic weapon, HRM as an underperformer, HRM as a matter of formality and HRM as a cost generator. In addition, the authors recognized that the discourses reflected leaders' self-positioning in relation to the power to impact issues related to HRM. Shifting between distinct roles demonstrated that municipal leaders' emphasis on HRM and its strategic alignment reflects the power relations in the municipality and the attitudes to the importance of HRM.

This study contributes to the academic discussions on HRM in municipalities and provides views on the municipal leader's role and impact on valuing and investing in HRM. From a practical point of view, the study will increase municipal leaders' knowledge of HRM's impact on the performance of the organization and also of the possible means of HRM.

To underline that viewing entrepreneurship in the context of shifting career roles and professional identities, gendered organizational life and in the current societal context regarding working life (ageing, gender discrimination) provides us with new lenses and enables us to perceive the entrepreneurial identity as fluid and emergent.

A female entrepreneur's life‐story collected through a narrative interview is applied in the study. In this paper identities, organizations and societies in change form the basis for entrepreneurship. Treating entrepreneurship as a social process constrained by time and place allows it to gain new meanings and understandings of security, reliability, risk‐moderation that it has not previously seen to possess.

The paper presents the connections of time and place for entrepreneurship; first, by demonstrating how entrepreneurship as a phenomenon reflects the time and place of investigation; second, how time and place are applied as important elements in the individual story presented in the paper, and, third, how readings of time and narrative are applied to make sense of entrepreneurship in the story.

The paper suggests that the social context (different times, places as well as, e.g. different roles, social identities and careers) should more frequently be studied within entrepreneurship research.

By portraying entrepreneurship from the non‐economic and non‐heroic standpoint, and reflecting the social changes that surround it, entrepreneurship is potentially made more accessible for a larger number of people.

The paper refuses the research of entrepreneurs as a general overriding, economic category and the quest for the “Theory of Entrepreneurship”.