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This chapter combines insights from organizational theory and the entrepreneurship literature to inform a process-based conception of organizational founding. In contrast to previous discrete-event approaches, the conception argues that founding be viewed as a series of potential entrepreneurial activities – including initiation, resource mobilization, legal establishment, social organization, and operational startup. Drawing on an original data set of 591 entrepreneurs, the study examines the effect of structural, strategic, and environmental contingencies on the relative rates with which different founding activities are pursued. Results demonstrate that social context has a fairly pervasive impact on the occurrence and sequencing of founding processes, with one possible exception being the timing of legal establishment.

Studies consistently find regions dense in concentrations of similar firms to be fecund sources of new firms of the same kind. This pattern persists even in industries with negative returns to geographic concentration. Why do these patterns persist? On the one hand, social networks may constrain entrepreneurs’ opportunities, making it difficult to mobilize resources in more attractive locations. On the other hand, nascent entrepreneurs may systematically misperceive opportunities in such a way as to lead them to continue founding attempts in overcrowded regions. To distinguish between these two processes, we analyze a unique set of data on television stations that contains information on both attempts to start new stations, as well as successful foundings. Our exploratory analysis suggests that nascent entrepreneurs do consistently misinterpret information related to population dynamics. These patterns could easily contribute both to industrial agglomeration and to the fragility of Red Queen dynamics. We discuss the implications of these results both for future research and for public policy.

Social enterprises (SEs) have become important new actors in solving grand challenges in a VUCA world. Nevertheless, International Business (IB) research has paid little attention to them. To address this gap, we draw upon a comparative case study of two SEs: one addressing poverty and the other tackling ocean plastics pollution. Our analysis uncovers two issue-specific internationalization paths: a multi-local path and a born-glocal path. On the basis of the findings, we re-conceptualize internationalization in the context of SEs as an ongoing, issue-specific process of social impact scaling through bricolage, global optimization, and local integration. We conclude by offering suggestions for further accounting for SEs in the IB research agenda.

In this paper, we draw from our own empirical data on worker organizing and identify important concepts that bridge social movement (SM) and industrial relations (IR) theory. In a context of traditional union decline and a surge of alternative types of worker mobilization, we apply SM and IR concepts related to the mobilizing structures and culture to cases of labor organizing via worker centers and community–labor alliances in the United States and China. From an analytical perspective, we argue that the field of SMs and IR can both benefit from this type of cross-discipline theorization.

We examine how the ability of one actor to gain access to resources controlled by another depends on two factors: (i) the number of mutual acquaintances connecting the prospective lender and borrower and (ii) the scarcity of the resources in question. We argue that the incentives to renege on an agreement grow as the resources being traded become increasingly scarce. Mutual acquaintances, however, dampen these incentives, and therefore become more important to facilitating exchange as demand for the good of interest rises. Our analysis of qualitative and quantitative evidence from a study of senior partners at an international consultancy supports these propositions.

This chapter examines the processes of entrepreneurial network and capital formation at a university-based incubator. Incubators could help overcome start-up firms to gain access to entrepreneurial networks and credibility with external stakeholders, by supporting the entrepreneurial processes including the acquisition of variety of capitals and resources. However, the actual evidence on the effectiveness of incubators as a policy tool for business support has been rather contested. This chapter makes a contribution to the entrepreneurship literature by addressing the underlying processes of incubation as a key factor critical to achieve accelerated firm growth at the university-based technology incubator. Drawing on interviews and survey of start-up firms at a university-based incubator, co-evolution of business models with capital mobilisation and re-combination of resources is illustrated. The chapter concludes by arguing that more detailed processes and trajectories of ‘soft starter’ business model would contribute to the understanding and development of policy support for entrepreneurial processes.

The “Battle in Seattle” has been credited with giving birth to a new, more radical phase in transnational social movement organizing; yet evidence suggests it may be misleading to speak of “global” social movements. In Seattle in 1999, the contribution of transnational movement organizations was quite modest compared with that of conventional, nationally based interest groups that focused on local resource mobilization and ideational preparation. This suggests that the basis of the new “global” social movements may be the well-established process of resource mobilization by which organized interest groups provide support for local activist communities.

Recent research has challenged traditional views of the 1920s-era Ku Klux Klan in the United States. Case studies have shown that the movement appealed to a broad middle-class constituency and advocated a range of popular reforms. These findings have stimulated a provocative debate over whether the movement represented a mainstream “civic populism” or a more racist reaction to change. Here, I review the recent debate and show how the new data are consistent with current sociological models of collective action. Comparing studies of Klan mobilization in several cities, I argue that the movement was both populist and racist, combining processes of contemporary urban racial and class formation. From this perspective, I suggest, the 1920s Klan highlights a critical moment in the development of racial and class identities in 20th century urban America.

This chapter will examine the interplay among actors who took part in the process of consensus building towards a post-2015 education agenda via different channels of global governance, including both formal and informal channels.

Most of the forums and entities established as part of the global governance structure are composed of representatives from UN or UNESCO member states, civil society organizations (CSOs) and UN agencies. However, each of these categories has diverse constituent groups; representing these groups is not as straightforward a task as the governance structure seems to assume. Therefore, based on interviews and qualitative text analysis, this chapter will introduce major groups of actors and their major issues of concern, decision-making structure, mode of communication and relationship with other actors. Then, based on an understanding of the characteristics of the various channels and actors, it will present the structural issues that arose during the analysis of post-2015 discourse and the educational issues that emerged as the shared concerns of the ‘education community’. While most of the analysis to untangle the nature of discourse relies on qualitative analysis of texts and interviews, the end of this chapter will also demonstrate the trends of discourse in quantitative terms.

What was the post-2015 discourse for the so-called education community, which in itself has an ambiguous and virtual existence? The keywords post-2015 and post-EFA provide us with an opportunity to untangle how shared norms and codes of conduct were shaped at the global scale.

Institutions have the capacity to constrain and regulate behavior. Social problems and their remedies are not exempt from this reality. Consequently, actors attempting to ameliorate pressing problems must do so within the existing frameworks of acceptable and unacceptable paths toward justice. The current study combines the institutional theory and social movement literatures to highlight how this dilemma affects the resource mobilization process. Elites control resources critical to solving social problems. Yet, they often benefit from the very institutional arrangements that have led to a social problem’s emergence. This contradiction then requires those seeking to alleviate social problems to construct a narrative that will simultaneously entice elites to give without challenging elites’ institutional position. The paper empirically investigates the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the United Negro College Fund’s (UNCF) efforts to gain support from the Rockefeller family and its foundations between 1928 and 1954. A comparative historical analysis of correspondence records identifies the critical differences that led to the UNCF receiving millions in support from Rockefeller interests while the NAACP was routinely denied funding.