Nascent academic entrepreneurs and identity work at the boundaries of professional domains

Higher education institutions promote academic entrepreneurship through organizational arrangements such as innovation programs, incubators, and accelerators aimed at implementing the third mission of the university. While research has examined how these multi-professional arrangements support entrepreneurial efforts, less is known about their individual level implications which emerge as researchers are exposed to different professional values and practices. This article draws on a longitudinal qualitative study on an innovation program to investigate through what kinds of identity processes nascent academic entrepreneurs construct their professional identities and how as part of these processes they position themselves in relation to different professional domains. The analysis demonstrates three identity construction processes (hybridization, rejecting hybridization, and transitioning) and their associated identity work tactics (compartmentalizing, protecting, and reframing) at the boundaries of professional domains. Our contribution is in demonstrating how nascent academic entrepreneurs’ identity construction processes are influenced by internally and externally oriented identity work and their interactive dynamics. Moreover, the findings advance our understanding of how individuals can purposefully mould the fluidity of domain boundaries through identity work by making boundaries bridgeable, impermeable, or permeable. These findings have value for those developing organizational arrangements for the promotion of academic entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial identities.

Entrepreneurial influencers and influential entrepreneurs: two sides of the same coin

PurposeDrawing on push and pull entrepreneurship theory, this research investigates how and why social media users become social media influencers (SMIs), a specific type of digital entrepreneur.Design/methodology/approachAdopting a phenomenological perspective and following a process approach, a total of 35 semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted with SMIs of different ages, follower numbers and associated with diverse areas of expertise. Subsequently, via interpretative analysis of interviewees' narratives and reasons for becoming SMIs, relevant motivations and events were uncovered and described.FindingsThe findings showcase two types of SMIs: “Entrepreneurial Influencers” and “Influential Entrepreneurs”. Their motivations and the path they followed on their entrepreneurial efforts were also uncovered. Finally, based on these findings, a new entrepreneurial motivational driver is proposed.Practical implicationsPublic entrepreneurial incentive policies should consider SMIs as a specific type of would-be entrepreneurs with some advantage in terms of prominence and reputation, which might help them to successfully initiate and consolidate traditional entrepreneurial activities.Originality/valueThis paper is among the first to examine SMIs from an entrepreneurial perspective, contributing to the nascent digital entrepreneurship literature.

Journalism ethics with Foucault: Casually employed journalists’ constructions of professional integrity

This article examines how journalists in non-permanent employment respond to their growing precarity. It is based on in-depth interviews with freelance journalists and interns who find that their working lives increasingly require entrepreneurial efforts. To work towards continuous access to journalistic work, these casually employed journalists engage in self-management and self-branding. To be able to make a living, they subsidize their income with work for clients outside of journalism that frequently offer better working conditions than news organizations but pursue narrow, strategic goals. The article develops a typology of non-journalistic work that illustrates that some non-journalistic jobs, but not others, cause these precarious news workers to defend their journalistic professional integrity. Furthermore, the study introduces Michel Foucault’s notions of the ‘entrepreneurial self’ and the ‘ethical self’ to interpret the different registers of professionalism between which journalists move today, identified as counter-, conforming and coping subjectivity. Thereby, the article uses a novel conceptual lens to make sense of resilience and change in journalistic professional identities under conditions of precarity.

Jamaican cultural symbols as transethnic artifacts: How black immigrant vendors construct boundaries of racial consciousness at a Caribbean festival

This study demonstrates how black immigrants strategically deploy symbols of nationality within the context of black spaces to construct a politics of solidarity, rather than ethnic distance, with African Americans and other blacks. It draws from the ethnographic data of black craft vendors at a Caribbean festival and shows the way Jamaican cultural symbols become transethnic artifacts – racialized objects that could be adopted by black people from a range of ethnicities to signal black diasporic consciousness. This study reveals that black immigrant vendors construct boundaries of racial consciousness through transethnic artifacts in three overlapping ways: (1) by explicitly connecting Jamaica to Africa instead of privileging the Caribbean; (2) creating boundaries based on black racial consciousness instead of shared ethnicity; and (3) by prioritizing psychic income, the non-economic returns on their entrepreneurial efforts. This article argues that, within the context of the festival, the symbols that black immigrants wield to signal nationality are neither inconsequential forms of symbolic ethnicity nor are they anti-African American distancing mechanisms, but are, instead, transethnic artifacts that facilitate black place-making. This process reveals the way black immigrant vendors forge diasporic meanings of blackness, rather than foster black ethnic exceptionalism.

Charlie Gladstone, rentier or entrepreneur? A case study of contemporary ‘Aristocratic Enterprise’

Context, including social class is an emerging topic of interest in entrepreneurship studies. According to prevailing orthodoxy, to be upper-class is to be anti-enterprise. Aristocrats are defined through their ownership of land and rentier status and portrayed as conservative being focused on stewardship of their estates, rather than engaging with enterprising activities. This case challenges this traditional perception arguing that aristocrats can pursue an entrepreneurial approach to stewardship in contrast with traditional, low-risk, estate management. The focus is upon aristocrat Charlie Gladstone to explore this phenomenon. Charlie is both rentier and serial entrepreneur who engages his entrepreneurial efforts on the economic reinvigoration of his estates and expanding portfolio of entrepreneurial ventures. The case demonstrates that the enriched human, social and economic capital available to the upper-class can be exploited in an entrepreneurial manner.

Anyone Can Improvise

The concept of improvisation and the “Jazz Model” for Entrepreneurship as a gathering of creative minds with the goal of creating a new outcome is frequently used in the entrepreneurship literature. Especially the unique setting of a jazz jam session exemplifies a successful model of group creativity. Herzig and Baker (2014) identified seven factors that guide jam sessions and Belitski and Herzig (2018) transferred and exemplified these factors to various business entrepreneurship models. This case study traces the entrepreneurial efforts of Jamey Aebersold, David Baker, and Jerry Coker, the ABC’s of jazz education who developed the foundation for teaching materials and curricula worldwide. Furthermore, this case study demonstrates the entrepreneurial mindset of these three innovators as a result of their training in the jazz idiom and suggests strategies for entrepreneurship education.

Designing Women

This study of over 12,000 women inventors in Britain, France, and America reveals new insights about gender and creativity, and about incentives and institutions for innovation. Women tended to specialize in improvements of consumer final goods, the look and feel of existing items, and design-oriented products at the boundaries of art and technology. While their creativity was often directed toward improving family welfare within the household, many of their contributions proved to be valuable in the market for inventions. Family firms provided an important conduit that overcame social obstacles to their entrepreneurial efforts. By contrast, women were significantly less likely to be awarded prizes for their innovations, so it is not surprising that they typically opted not to participate in administered systems.

Implementation of Public-Private Partnership in The Russian Federation

The evolution of relations between the institutions of state and entrepreneurship in developed and developing countries at various stages of economic development has proved that their constructive interaction is a critical factor for successful socio-economic development. The constantly increasing gap between the needs and requirements of the population to public services, infrastructure, and budget constraints have resulted in the development of state-business partnership structures. The transforming role of the state in the economy necessitates the importance of finding alternatives to direct regulation of economic processes. One of them is the institute of public-private partnership (hereinafter referred to as PPP), which allows attracting additional resources to the economy, redistributing risks between the state and the business sector, directing entrepreneurial efforts to address important social and economic goals and objectives while maintaining the powers and functions of the state. Foreign experience shows that the implementation of PPP projects ensures significant cost savings.