Shared Fate and Entrepreneurial Collective Action in the U.S. Wood Pellet Market

Although studies underscore the importance of creating a coherent collective identity in order to legitimate a new market category, strategy and entrepreneurship research is divided on whether and to what degree an entrepreneur will engage in collective action to promote the identity. To reconcile the inconsistency, we introduce the concept of entrepreneurial shared fate—the belief of a focal venture that it and its competitors are bound together by a sense of belongingness and equally experience similar consequences—and explore how external threats can influence the degree of shared fate. We conceptually distinguish between communal and individual threats and propose that communal threats will increase, whereas individual threats will decrease, shared fate. We also explore boundary conditions that strengthen and weaken the main effects of perceived communal and individual threats on collective identity promotion. Empirically, we examine venture identity framing in response to forest-conservation activism in the U.S. wood pellet market. Implications for research on new market categories, collective identity, optimal distinctiveness, and forest management are discussed.

Between Detachment and Disgust

Funerals are occasions for grief, if the dead person was close. But they are also reminders of our own mortal condition and invitations to contemplate it. Especially when the dead person was not close, a funeral service and an ensuing trip to the graveyard are often meditative times, providing powerful signals about our own future, stimulating fear or bringing hidden fear to the surface. They create, all too often, a volatile emotional condition in which we may be susceptible to some of fear’s less savory neighbors, other painful emotions (anger, envy, disgust) that may pollute our relationship with others. But the reminder of a shared fate might also have more benign consequences (as Rousseau thought), encouraging a kind of egalitarian compassion, an awareness of a common human condition that transcends class and wealth and even religion, bringing people together.

Civility and Shared Fate: Social Studies Teaching as Teaching for Belonging

In response to the violence of our era and the vast movement of people around the globe, the author argues that effective social studies education should include an understanding ourselves within communities of shared fate collectively building strategies of civility. Through conceptual analysis, the paper supports arguments that citizenship education should be grounded in communities of fate, rather than a sense of shared identity as a member of a particular country. Shared fate is the idea that our lives are intertwined with others in ways we perceive and ways we cannot. Civility is elaborated as concrete strategies that support or make possible broad participation in the demos. Looking at citizenship through the lens of communities of shared fate changes how we think about belonging and our responsibilities to one another in our shared world. The author provides examples of early career educators’ moral commitment to teaching from a perspective of shared fate and as well as their concerns to link the conceptual work to concrete practices within elementary school classrooms.

Historical Memory and the Identity of Places: Approaches to War in Works by Énard and Rastello

In this article we will examine the form taken by memories of the war in Yugoslavia during the 1990s in the novel Zone (2008) by Mathias Énard and in the collection of documentary prose La guerra in casa (1998) by Luca Rastello. Our aim is to show that in both works, albeit in different ways, the memory of violent historical events opens up a new approach to the identity of places according to which the identity of this place is not imaginable except in relational terms. Whilst in eyewitness accounts from the collection La guerra in casa, places and geographical areas are redefined only in the categories of “within” and “outside”, of “over there” and “over here” (places where people had direct experience of war and violence and those where people remained at that time outside it), in Énard’s novel they have a more fluid identity. The “here” and the “there” tend to be more entwined because of their shared fate; at the same time also history is represented as a network: individual and collective experiences, the past and the present, the historical and the mythical dimensions often intersect.

Learning How to Hope

This chapter moves from a broader discussion of quality citizenship education and developing trends among youth to looking specifically at how hope and democratic habits might be taught in schools and civil society. It includes a call to develop communities of inquiry, nurture communication and deliberation, foster criticality and dissent, cultivate imagination and storytelling, view citizenship as shared fate, and build trust. It describes classroom practices and activities that can foster habits of hope, as well as opportunities to employ related skills and dispositions of citizenship. It extends this education beyond schools and youth into adults and civil organizations, where larger impact on today’s democracy may be made.