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The decision of whether or not to start a new business is a question pondered by many people and something that about .004% of the U.S. population decides to do every month (Kauffman Foundation, 2005). This decision becomes more complicated with the involvement of family members. One would be hard pressed to find any business enterprise without some sort of family influence and involvement at some point in the start-up or ongoing operations of the business. While most entrepreneurship research points to legal, environmental, regulatory, technological, or demographic changes as triggers that spur individuals into action, the role of family influence in new business founding is often overshadowed or not addressed at all (Aldrich & Cliff, 2003).

This chapter assesses the extent to which historical levels of inequality affect the creation and survival of businesses over time. To this end, we use the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey across 66 countries over 2005–2011. We complement this survey with data on income inequality dating back to early 1800s and current institutional environment, such as the number of procedures to start a new business, countries’ degree of financial inclusion, corruption and political stability. We find that, although inequality increases the number of firms created out of need, inequality reduces entrepreneurial activity as in net terms businesses are less likely to be created and survive over time. These findings are robust in using different measures of inequality across different points in time and regions, even if excluding Latin America, the most unequal region in the world. Our evidence then supports theories that argue early conditions, crucially inequality, influence development path.

In this chapter, I describe a project that sought to explore the ‘lived experience’ of a group of children engaged in on- and off-screen play, during an after-school Minecraft Club. Building on established research methodologies, an approach that I called ‘rhizomic ethnography’ was developed to study this complex site of play. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), I demonstrate how this suite of participatory, playful and multimodal approaches, including use of video, comic strips and virtual model making, helped to illuminate the children's collaborative creation of a ‘virtual community’. I explain how employing a range of methods, which often emerged during the process of research, allowed for unexpected meanings to develop and, therefore, afforded new insights into the nature of children's play. Here, I also seek to demonstrate how taking an adaptive and playful approach to research, working in synergy with the research context, could have affordances for examining other examples of children's playful, social interactions.

Experimental evidence for aspects of the broaden-and-build theory actually existed prior to the theory’s introduction to the academic world. Generally speaking, laboratory studies showed a causal effect of positive feelings on thought processes. Across a host of studies, Isen and her colleagues demonstrated a wide range of cognitive outcomes resulting from induced positive emotions, including patterns of unusual thought (Isen, Johnson, Mertz, & Robinson, 1985), flexible thinking (Isen & Daubman, 1984), creativity (Isen, Daubman, & Nowicki, 1987), and receptivity to new information (Estrada, Isen, & Young, 1997).