Just one Damned Thing After Another: Towards an Event-based Perspective of Entrepreneurship

Although events such as the global financial crisis, natural disasters, or the COVID-19 pandemic have large impacts on entrepreneurship, the literature lacks a differentiated analysis of such events. This editorial highlights the importance of events which are discrete and bounded in space and time, unexpected, and strong enough to produce change that can lead to subsequent events. An event based approach is well suited to integrate context and time to predict entrepreneurial activity. We provide a more systematic description of events, their characteristics, and causal mechanisms to allow more holistic and generalizable analysis of the role of events in entrepreneurship.

The Legitimization Effect of Crowdfunding Success: A Consumer Perspective

Based on legitimacy and consumer inference theory, we examine when, how, and why past crowdfunding success influences the perceptions and behaviors of consumers. Across five studies (four controlled experiments and one field experiment), our findings demonstrate that a young venture’s past crowdfunding success enhances consumers’ perceptions of its cognitive legitimacy. This “legitimization effect of crowdfunding success” leads to positive outcomes with respect to purchase intentions, brand attitudes, and consumers’ willingness to recommend young ventures to others. These effects are robust across different product categories. However, our findings also reveal that these positive effects occur exclusively for young ventures, whereas they disappear or even reverse for established ones.

Looking Back To Venture Forward: Exploring Idea and Identity Work in Public Failure Narratives

Business failure often leads entrepreneurs to craft public narratives. Taking a performative storytelling perspective of such narratives, we investigate how entrepreneurs jointly reevaluate their ideas and identities, and how this relates to their subsequent career paths. We theorize that the stories entrepreneurs tell shape who they become, changing not only how others see them but also how they see themselves. This broadens theoretical understanding of how failed entrepreneurs navigate their transition to a diverse array of subsequent careers, including different forms of serial entrepreneurship (same industry; new industry) and exit (startup employee; established business employee; exit with reentry).

A System Justification Theory of Entrepreneurial Attitudinal Change During a Crisis

Entrepreneurship resilience during a crisis is an important research area. However, prior research has not examined cognitive antecedents of entrepreneurial resilience. Using the 2014 oil price crisis in the Middle East as a natural experiment, we draw on system justification theory to understand why and how entrepreneurs differ in the extent of their attitudinal changes toward corruption. We find foreign entrepreneurs substantially increased their willingness to engage in corruption whereas local entrepreneurs did not. Among foreign entrepreneurs, corruption willingness increases more among those from countries where corruption is not the norm, than those from more corrupt home countries.

In the Eye of the Storm: Entrepreneurs and Well-Being During the COVID-19 Crisis

In this paper, we examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the well-being of entrepreneurs. We surveyed a representative sample of Swedish entrepreneurs and wage employees at different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey data, combined with register data, show that the COVID-19 outbreak has a negative effect on the well-being of entrepreneurs in terms of increased perceived stress. However, this negative effect is weaker for entrepreneurs who feel younger than their chronological age and entrepreneurs who are geographically distant from the epicenter of the crisis.

The End of Resilience? Managing Vulnerability Through Temporal Resourcing and Resisting

We induce a first-person conceptualization of entrepreneurial resilience. Our seven-year, two-study ethnography shows that entrepreneurs enact resilience as a four-step process of managing vulnerability: they richly experience episodes of adversity, self-monitor across episodes, reassess personal thresholds and reconcile challenges with coping skills. Entrepreneurs manage vulnerability by (1) modifying ( stretching and shrinking) objective time and (2) changing their subjective experience of time as working with or against the clock through temporal resourcing or temporal resisting. We extend the theory and practice of entrepreneurial resilience by elaborating the interplay of objective and subjective time in managing vulnerability in recurrent and unprecedented crises.

Positioning, Articulating, and Crafting Conceptual Articles on Entrepreneurship

Conceptual articles are important for theory building but the special challenges of developing conceptual articles on entrepreneurship has not been fully considered. We begin to fill this gap by discussing the nature of conceptual articles on entrepreneurship, particularly those geared for publication in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. We introduce three dimensions of the entrepreneurship discipline—uniqueness, relevance, and multiplicity—and discuss how they can affect the positioning of conceptual articles and the articulation of their contribution. We also enumerate some basic principles for crafting good conceptual articles and present guidelines based on our discussion.

The Entrepreneurial Story and its Implications for Research

Research is not merely report-writing; it also involves elements of storytelling. In this essay, we reflect on two narrative archetypes in entrepreneurship research: the stories of entrepreneurship as a road to salvation and means to emancipation. We outline a framework to analyze research from a storytelling perspective, apply this framework to identify implicit assumptions and methodological biases in mainstream research, and discuss how a storytelling framework can be used to generate alternative stories. We argue for a more empirically grounded research agenda that continues the development of entrepreneurship research into a rich and diverse field.

Is There Opportunity Without Stakeholders? A Stakeholder Theory Critique and Development of Opportunity-Actualization

How can stakeholder theory contribute to opportunity theory? We suggest that stakeholder theory affords appropriate theoretical lenses for grounding the opportunity-actualization perspective more firmly within the real-world constraints of business venturing. Actualization departs from a strong focus on entrepreneurial agency to conceptualize how pre-existing environmental conditions determine what entrepreneurial action can achieve. We explain that stakeholder theory can strengthen the outward-looking orientation of actualization by (1) bringing the entirety of stakeholders centre-stage, beyond a narrow focus on market stakeholders, and (2) stressing the importance of noneconomic considerations for the actualization of economic opportunities. Our theorization culminates in the concept of ‘strategic opportunity thinking’ (SOT). We conceptualize SOT as a way of protecting entrepreneurs from the blind-to-stakeholders mindset that either sleepwalks them into the territory of non-opportunity or prevents them from the actualization of real yet difficult-to-actualize opportunities in the absence of stakeholder-centric thinking.

When Shooting for the Stars Becomes Aiming for Asterisks: P-Hacking in Family Business Research

As a side-effect of increasing publication pressures, academics may be tempted to engage in p-hacking: a questionable research practice involving the iterative and incompletely-disclosed adjustment of data collection, analysis, and/or reporting, until nonsignificant results turn significant. Prior studies in entrepreneurship-related disciplines carry the implicit notion that p-hacking is predominantly an issue in top-tier journals, where incentives to do so may be highest. This study investigates p-hacking in the family business literature, a research field with roots in the broader entrepreneurship and small business literatures, and in which discourse increasingly takes place in both dedicated field journals and in the top-tier outlets in entrepreneurship and management. Analyses of p-values published in these field- and top-tier journals allow for a comparison of the prevalence and correlates of p-hacking at these different levels of prestige. The findings suggest that p-hacking is an issue of substantial—and statistically indistinguishable—magnitudes in both field- and top-tier journals. We further observe negative correlations of female authorship and employer prestige with p-hacking, where the latter is stronger in field versus top-tier journals. Implications of these findings, their limitations, and some suggestions going forward are discussed, with particular attention for the promise of preregistration and registered reports.