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The purpose of this study was to explore college students’ understanding of sustainability and, specifically, the extent to which students see social justice as being integral to sustainability.

Between fall 2015 and 2017, an online survey study was deployed to students at a Midwestern University in the USA to assess attitudes and concerns about environmental issues and awareness of the university’s activities related to these issues. This analysis included ten assessment items from a larger study, of which 1,929 participants were included in the final sample. A chi-square goodness-of-fit and variable cluster analysis were performed on the included items.

Items such as “recycling,” “economic viability” and “fair treatment of all” were identified as integral to the concept of sustainability, while items such as “growing organic vegetables” and “reducing meat consumption” had high levels of “not applicable” and “don’t know” responses, with differences arising across gender and class standing. Social justice-related items were seen as more distally connected to sustainability.

This study is limited by a non-random sample of students.

College students tend not to recognize the integral nature of social justice or the relevance of food to sustainability, providing an opportunity for universities to better prepare their students for a sustainable future.

Universities might adopt policies and curricula that address these areas of ignorance.

This study is among the first to identify specific areas of college students’ lack of understanding about sustainability.

The purpose of this study is to assess environmental concern at a Midwest university, analyze trends in concern over time and determine the effect of the development of a campus sustainability office.

A multi-question survey was administered through peer-to-peer recruitment from an undergraduate environmental science class each fall from 2010–2017. This exercise was originally developed as a pedagogical exercise on the scientific method.

Over eight years, incoming freshmen have expressed more concern that humans are harming the environment and students also express greater concern as they progress through college.

The first year of the survey (2010) and the year that the lead PI was on sabbatical (2014) saw reduced response rates (∼1%–3% of the student population) compared to 6%–9% of the student population in other years.

Responses to all of the questions in the survey provide guidance for university administrations and sustainability offices about the concerns of the campus community, awareness about campus efforts and support for sustainability activities on campus.

Few studies have been published on students’ perspectives on environmental concern and sustainability activities on university campuses. These data provide an overview of environmental concern, perceived government action and empowerment to action over an eight-year period. This approach is recommended as a technique to teach the scientific method in introductory classes and as a means to collect data about student perspectives on sustainability.

We explore the acceptance of new contingent work relationships in the United States to reveal an emergent entrepreneurial ideology. Our argument is that these new work relationships represent a new social order not situated in the conglomerates and labor unions of the past, but on a confluence of neo-liberalism and individual action situated in the discourse of entrepreneurialism, employability, and free agency. This new employment relationship, which arose during the economic and social disruptions in the 1970s, defines who belongs inside an organization (and can take part in its benefits) and who must properly remain outside to fend for themselves. More generally, the fusing of entrepreneurship with neo-liberalism has altered not only how we work and where we work but also what we believe is appropriate work and what rewards should accompany it.

Despite the importance of the processes by which legitimacy barriers to the emergence of new industries are overcome, direct study of them has been largely absent from the literature. We develop and test a model of how capacities for social action are created and deployed to overcome cultural barriers to new industries. Specifically, we argue that the experience that firms gain in field-relevant activity as well as the development and concentration of ties among those firms generate capacities to overcome the barriers of cognitive and sociopolitical legitimacy. We support this argument empirically by linking measures of these factors with attention to and favorability assessments of the new industry.

We advance entrepreneurship research by developing a theoretical model of how founding teams form. Our neo-Carnegie model situates nascent founders in particular network-structural milieus, engaging in aspiration-driven search for and evaluation of prospective co-founders. The formation of co-founding ties between nascent founders can be divided into four theoretical steps, which we label activation, evaluation, approach, and reciprocation. Successful founding team formation is a consequence of mutually favorable evaluations by nascent founders in a multi-sided matching process. Nascent founders with higher and less flexible aspirations are more likely to undertake distant search for co-founders by seeking referrals, forming ties with strangers, and forming new ties to social foci where they might meet potential co-founders. Churn in newly formed founding teams emerges as a consequence of shifting dominant coalition dynamics in the founding team caused by organic venture evolution and intentional changes in strategic direction. Our theoretical model provides new insights on the formation pathways of founding teams, their initial task and relational resource endowments, and initial team dynamics.

Oral history collections can offer a wealth of detailed information for entrepreneurship researchers. The stories that entrepreneurs tell provide researchers with insight into both perspective and into substantive issues of entrepreneurial behavior. The life stories of entrepreneurs offer students of entrepreneurship insight into both the explicit and the tacit knowledge of working entrepreneurs.

During industry emergence, what we call the proto-industry phase, the lack of agreement about legitimate organizational forms between audiences and firms is a key problem. We develop an ecological model of emerging institutional pressures among audiences and firms during the emergence of new industries to understand these challenges. We develop a theoretical framework that includes mimetic, normative, and coercive pressures, deriving propositions linking them with survival and growth. We use simulation methodology to test these propositions, finding strong support for these predictions. We close by exploring some conclusions and implications of our model for both theory and practice.

One key determinant of entrepreneurial success is entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE), defined as an individual’s confidence in his or her ability to perform entrepreneurial tasks. Whereas previous research has examined how individual and business factors influence ESE, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of entrepreneurs’ social networks upon ESE. The paper examines such relationships for black and white entrepreneurs.

In total, 110 black and white entrepreneurs responded to a survey measuring ESE and critical constructs representing elements of the quality of entrepreneurs’ networks: emotional carrying capacity (ECC) and network ethnic diversity.

The authors found significant, positive relationships between both ECC and network ethnic diversity on ESE for white entrepreneurs but only found a significant positive relationship between ECC and ESE for black entrepreneurs.

While research is clear about the role that ESE plays in entrepreneurial activities, few studies have focused on the factors that improve ESE. In the present work, the authors study the role of context by examining how entrepreneurs’ social networks influence ESE. The authors examine such influences for both white and black entrepreneurs to better understand the implications of ethnicity.

Two hot topics today in the popular press as well as academic literature are international entrepreneurship and corporate entrepreneurship. These topics challenge two traditional notions within those fields: the difficulty of established corporations to be entrepreneurial and the difficulty of entrepreneurs to go global. The current study introduces the concept global corporate ventures, which merges the concepts internal corporate ventures and “born globals.” This concept is developed and illustrated by two examples of global corporate ventures, ING Direct and HSBC Direct, two financial services e‐commerce ventures that have been launched on a global scale.

Is social network analysis just measures and methods with no theory? We attempt to clarify some confusions, address some previous critiques and controversies surrounding the issues of structure, human agency, endogeneity, tie content, network change, and context, and add a few critiques of our own. We use these issues as an opportunity to discuss the fundamental characteristics of network theory and to provide our thoughts on opportunities for future research in social network analysis.