Search results

More pluralistic approaches have recently emerged in entrepreneurship, yet the discipline remains disinterested in the ideological influences underpinning its research and teaching practices. Following Louis Althusser’s work on interpellation, the process by which ideology enrols and consummates its subjects, the chapter examines the interpellation of entrepreneurship-as-practice researchers and draws attention to the powerful nature of ideology. Critical reflexivity is put forward as an exercise to explore the researchers’ beliefs and identity and to tease out their relationship with the discipline. Finally, using three autoethnographic accounts, the chapter argues that the boundaries of the entrepreneurship discipline can only be shifted if and when researchers learn to recognise themselves as ‘the person in the mirror’. The reflexive spotlight also allows researchers to spot ideological breaks and engage in acts of ‘ideological resistance’.

This study examines emotionologies (Stearns & Stearns, 1985), that is, attitudes that members of an inter-organizational information systems (IOIS) project hold toward emotions and their appropriate expression and regulation in this project. In order to understand attitudes toward emotions and emotion regulation, we suggest the adoption of the concept of emotion structure, consisting of emotion rules and resources (Callahan, 2004).

To investigate the kinds of emotionologies present in this IOIS development project, we have chosen a qualitative case study approach. Our data consists of 41 qualitative interviews, collected in two phases.

We trace how emotion rules and corresponding emotion regulation strategies change among the sub-groups working in the project throughout their first year of collaborating. We show that organizational actors are skilled emotion managers, whose behavior is guided not only by many collective emotion rules (professional, organizational, social) but also by personal emotion rules. Our findings also suggest the need to critically reflect on certain emotion rules, such as those pertaining to the expression of fear and anger, and their potential positive and negative implications on project work.

We argue that group emotionologies with their professional, organizational, and social emotion rules interact with personal emotion rules, resulting in interesting emotion regulation strategies that often try to minimize emotional dissonance, sometimes at the expense of risking open conflict among project members. With this in mind, one theoretical and practical suggestion is to further explore the potential constructive implications of experiencing and expressing fear in projects.

In this chapter, we present a critical engagement with the methodology that each research team presenting a case study in this book from England, Arab Israel, Northern Ireland, Trinidad and Tobago and the United States adopted.

Education is a cultural project that consists of history, narrative and faith. The Black, Asian Minority Ethnicity (BAME) and senior leaders representing marginalised groups that we talked to in this research all stated that their faith, and religion was central to their service as an educational leader. The faiths represented in our research are Islam, Christianity, Sikhism and no faith where a humanitarian approach is taken. The chapter presents the scientific significance of what values underpin these leaders’ behaviours, and to understand how their values align with legislation, education policy and the values found in Education Governance Systems.

A constructivist comparative analysis approach was adopted to address four research questions. First, how do the senior-level leaders describe and understand how school governance systems and school commissioners empower them to develop school communities as societal innovators for equity and renewal for peace in our time? Second, how do they describe and understand the role mentors, and/or advocates play to support their navigation through the governance systems? Third, to what extent do they believe a cultural change is required to empower them in school communities to Empower Young Societal Innovators for Equity and Renewal for peace in our time? Finally, how can the findings be theorised to generate a theory of knowledge to action through impact strategies within an international comparative analysis framework?

Each of the five international cases collected the narrative biographies of up to 15 superintendents, or chief executive officers of multi-academy trusts of colour. In the Northern Ireland case, eight religiously divided key agents of change were selected as an equivalence for the governance structures in the other five case studies. The total number of senior-level leaders participating in the five case studies was 40.

Each author read their findings through Gross’ (2014) Turbulence Theory and typology to categorise the level and the impact of the challenges the key agents of change need to navigate as they mediate between the governance systems. Gross (2014, p. 248) theory of turbulence is used as a metaphor and states that ‘turbulence can be described as “light” with little or no movement of the craft. “Moderate” with very noticeable waves. “Severe” with strong gusts that threaten control of the aircraft. “Extreme” with forces so great that control is lost and structure damage to the craft occurs’. The chapter identifies the findings were read through the theory of turbulence to reveal the state of the Education Governance Systems and their impact on empowering cosmopolitan citizens to participate fully and freely in societal interactions and cooperation between diverse groups. The authors’ chapters are subject to a comparative analysis that took place at the European Conference for Educational Research Annual Conference in two large seminars (Taysum et al., 2017) in Denmark, further developed by the editors and committed to peer-review.

The pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities is not always successful. On the one hand, entrepreneurial failure offers an invaluable opportunity for entrepreneurs to learn about their ventures and themselves. On the other hand, entrepreneurial failure is associated with substantial financial, psychological, and social costs. When entrepreneurs fail to learn from failure, the potential value of this experience is not fully utilized and these costs will have been incurred in vain. In this chapter, the authors investigate how the stigma of failure exacerbates the various costs of failure, thereby making learning from failure much more difficult. The authors combine an analysis of interviews of 20 entrepreneurs (who had, at the time of interview, experienced failure) with an examination of archival data reflecting the legal and cultural environment around their ventures. The authors find that stigma worsens the entrepreneurs’ experience of failure, hinders their transformation of failure experience, and eventually prevents them from utilizing the lessons learnt from failure in their future entrepreneurial activities. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for the entrepreneurship research and economic policies.

Student mothers on welfare balance three primary “identities” or “responsibilities”: mothering, being a student, and being a welfare participant. Each role or identity is expected to be an individual’s top priority; however, mothers who participated in my research discuss how some days kids must come first, or their schoolwork needed their primary attention, or welfare requirements demanded it. The women in my research examined their stress and the strain of navigating these various “primary” roles and identities. In this chapter, the author explore how mothers who were marginalized by being poor, being student parents in college, and being on welfare managed this struggle. With so few resources – especially so little time or money – participants discussed the juggling act and identity negotiation that they managed on a near daily basis. Mothers explored how this delicate balancing act sometimes fell apart and resulted in burnout, welfare sanctions, failing or dropping classes, or fights with their kids. How is their mothering affected by this balancing act? This chapter explores the women’s experiences from an intersectional lens, and also from a theoretical frame of how women’s human, social, and cultural capital played a role. The women who were active with the grassroots activism were more clear about their role negotiations, how to balance it, and also felt less alone in their struggle. Finally, the implications of this research for social policies are addressed in the conclusion.

Following Philip Selznick’s lead in using pragmatist social science to understand issues of public concern we conducted a study of failed innovation in the commercial construction industry (CCI). We find that social heuristics – collectively constructed and maintained interpretive decision-making frames – significantly shape economic and non-economic decision-making practices. Social heuristics are the outcome of industry-based “institutionalization processes” and are widely held and commonly relied on in CCI to reduce uncertainty endemic to decision-making; they provide actors with both a priori and ex post facto justifications for economic decisions that appear socially rational to industry co-participants. In the CCI – a project-centered production network – social heuristics as shared institutions sustain network-based social order but in so doing discourage novel technologies and impede innovation. Social heuristics are actor-level constructs that reflect macro-level institutional arrangements and networked production relations. The concept of social heuristics offers the promise of developing a genuinely social theory of individual economic choice and action that is historically informed, contextually situated, and neither psychologically nor structurally reductionist.