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‘Acceleration’, that is, the performance of activities in ever-shorter periods of time, is a distinctive feature of contemporary organizations and societies that is reflected in, and driven by startups’ attempts to scale up their businesses in ever-faster ways. Although prior research has highlighted that temporary organizing is a key way to accelerate the startup process, little is known about how actors do so. Based on a one-year ethnographic study at a startup accelerator, the authors explore how actors enact temporary organizing to attempt to accelerate the startup process. Their analysis shows that this process involves a plurality of partly conflicting temporal structures. As their study shows, such conflicts invoke tensions that actors live out in their daily activities. The authors identify three temporal practices – sequencing, freezing, and merging – through which actors engaged in temporary organizing enact acceleration in the startup process by reconciling these temporal structures. Their study has implications for understanding time in the expanding literature on temporary organizing and acceleration.

Temporary organisations are time-limited organisations that are created with a deliberate termination point. Temporary organisations can increase flexibility, allow for innovative and transformative activities with less resource commitment, and reflect a ‘Zeitgeist’ of acceleration and time limitation in society. They also give rise to tensions and paradoxes that require new adaptive and coordinative practices. Research on temporary organisations has moved from primarily exploring the distinction between temporary and permanent organisations to using temporary organisations to study a range of phenomena such as temporality, acceleration, identity, and attachment–detachment dilemmas. This volume reflects this new orientation. We map empirical phenomena along the lines of events, projects and networks, and explore three conceptual themes that run through the nine chapters that comprise this volume: (1) temporality in temporary organisations; (2) the interaction between temporary and permanent organisations; and (3) the strategies and practices that temporary organisation develop in response to tensions and paradoxes.

A growing body of literature suggests that unpredictable, resource-depleting shocks – ranging from natural disasters to public health crises and beyond – require the firm to respond adaptively. However, how firms do so remains largely undertheorized. To contribute to this line of literature, the authors borrow from the conservation of resources (COR) theory of stress and the dynamic capabilities perspective to introduce the concept of firm stress – a state of reduced and irregular readiness firms enter into following unpredictable, resource-depleting shocks. Our theoretical model illustrates that firms must punctuate the stress state to adapt by first deploying a retrenchment response, thereby conserving resources and allowing the firm to consider how to best redeploy its dynamic capabilities to adapt. Subsequently, the firm can redeploy its capabilities and adaptively respond in one of three ways: exiting (reconfiguring resources for alternative use), persevering (reconfiguring resources for better use), or innovating (developing new resources). Overall, the authors offer a process model of firm stress and adaptive responses following an unpredictable, resource-depleting shock that paves the way for future research on stress in the strategy literature.

Underpinned by social cognitive and ecological systems theories, this research explored higher education students' entrepreneurial intentions (EI). It begins by exploring how various factors, including entrepreneurship education (EE), entrepreneurial motivation (EM) and entrepreneurial environment (EENV), contribute to the evolution of EI of students. Second, it examines the role of EM as an underlying mechanism between EE-EI and EENV-EI. Finally, this research explores how EENV moderates the EM and EI relationship.

The data were gathered from 366 college students pursuing higher education around India using a convenience sample technique. Partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was applied to SmartPLSv.3.3.9 software to analyze the data.

A direct relationship was found between EE, EENV and EM with EI. Moreover, this research found a partial mediation of EM between EENV-EI and EE-EI paths. Also, the results show that EENV strengthens the link between EM and EI links.

This study offers valuable insights that can guide government agencies and higher education institutions (HEIs) in reshaping the landscape of entrepreneurial education at the university level. This transformation encompasses the integration of work-based learning experiences as a conduit for equipping students with tangible skills and exposing them to the realities of entrepreneurship in the real world.

This research considerably contributes to the current literature on entrepreneurship at HEIs by merging social cognitive and ecological systems theories. This research is a pioneering input to examine the underlying mechanism of entrepreneurial motivation between EENV, EE and EI.