Journal of Business Venturing Insights最新文献

This paper explores the deterioration of self-worth in entrepreneurship. Using a 15-month participatory action research in the North of England, we found mismatches between expectations and experiences at three interacting levels—purpose, autonomy, and achievement—which surface as entrepreneurs reflect on execution, performance, and fulfillment experiences. Mismatches materialize as incongruence between the ideal states under pursuit and the actual experiences, which compound leading to a diminished sense of control, direction, and worthiness, which in turn further fuels a cycle of negative emotions, involving anxiety, isolation, shame, and guilt. We discuss implications for entrepreneurs’ mental health.

Prior research indicates the importance of entrepreneurial responses to external crises. This article theoretically extends the concept of self-efficacy to the task domain of entrepreneurial response to crisis situations. Crisis response efficacy is conceptualized as a task-specific (perceived) efficacy, a CEO's beliefs in their firm's skills, knowledge, and readiness to respond effectively to an external crisis – dealing with crisis impacts and responding entrepreneurially to pursue opportunities. We further theorize that crisis response efficacy mediates the relationship between several antecedents and entrepreneurial responses to crises and that the nature of the response varies with the crisis stages. We provide a preliminary empirical illustration of the utility of crisis response efficacy as a construct.

Addressing the growing need for nuanced understandings of entrepreneurial contexts, this article presents a multifaceted pragmatic framework for scrutinising the ‘field of entrepreneurship’ and its associated dynamics. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of practice and the institutional logics perspective, we introduce the concept of the field as a mid-level analytical lens—positioned between micro and macro perspectives—that captures the complex interplay of agency and structure in entrepreneurial activity. Our conceptualisation of the field enables the dissection of structural logics and actor dispositions, alongside the institutional processes that shape the entrepreneurial landscape. In response to calls for innovative methodologies in entrepreneurship research, we propose a combined analytical approach to unpack the layered complexities of entrepreneurial contexts, from individual actors to broader institutional influences. The utilisation of this ‘field of entrepreneurship’ concept, with a particular focus on field dynamics, serves as a pragmatic analytical unit, contributing to the broader discourse by balancing simplicity, accuracy, and generalisability. This research consequently offers a novel methodological avenue for exploring what facilitates or impedes entrepreneurial activity within varying contexts.

Theory and evidence on human capital suggest that those with more resources have more opportunities to advance their careers. However, entrepreneurship in developing countries may depend more on individuals' resourcefulness than resources. In this article, we investigate the proposition that those who are endowed with more resources from their parents are less resourceful and, therefore, less likely to become entrepreneurs. Our study is situated within the context of China's one-child policy so that we can address concerns that the relationship between the number of siblings one has and the propensity for entrepreneurship is endogenous to parental preferences and fertility conditions. Consistent with this proposition, we find that those with more siblings are more likely to become entrepreneurs. Also, more parental resources and influence weaken such a relationship. While the one-child policy was set up as a means of population control, an unexpected consequence was a diminished propensity for entrepreneurship.

It is intuitively appealing and common in the literature to describe social ties as one large category that represents multiple constructs which have similar relations across operationalizations. However, that approach does not capture the nuance in the literature and might obscure notable differences between subjective and objective network tie measures, and how those differences extend to relations with venture-level outcomes. Drawing upon novel objective measures of network ties derived from analyses of entrepreneurs’ Gmail data, we offer an empirical assessment of subjective social ties relative to objective social ties. In examining how those assessments relate to multiple metrics of venture performance, we look at both subjective and objective measures. We find that objective network measures predict overall subjective (but not objective) venture performance at an average of r = .31 (for network size) and r = .29 (for network engagement). We delve into the implications of our work, and discuss how future research can progress more effectively and efficiently with an eye towards the practical usefulness of our findings for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship service organizations.

Entrepreneurship is the study of ordinary people doing extraordinary things: outliers in society, seeing and enacting new venture opportunities, while most others do not. Historically, the field of entrepreneurship has been dominated by competing homogeneity and heterogeneity perspectives. Extending current heterogeneity trends in the domain, this article builds the case for the benefits of examining the exceptional of the exceptional: entrepreneurs that produce extraordinary results. We argue that outlier entrepreneurs are not aberrations or empirical nuisances to be explained away or “fixed” through statistical wizardry. Rather, in most entrepreneurship phenomenon, those extremely high performing and disproportionately influential cases are “the goal” of entrepreneurship, and exactly where valuable theory-building potential lies. Building on several growing conversations in entrepreneurship research, we introduce why some phenomenological domains share characteristic potential for generating important insights using an outlier approach and present a set of methodological tools to tackle them.

Most variables in entrepreneurship are not distributed normally. Instead, they are characterized by positive skew and heavy tails featuring influential outliers. Yet, this fundamental asymmetry in entrepreneurial endeavors is rarely discussed in entrepreneurship education, which often oscillates between highlighting everyday entrepreneurs and high-growth ‘unicorn’ startups while overlooking the distributional context for these extremes. Therefore, this paper explores whether students accurately comprehend the non-normality that pervades entrepreneurship. We conducted two studies wherein undergraduate business students at a large, public university in the Midwest US estimated entrepreneurial performance. We elicited students' estimates of the range of performance exhibited by entrepreneurs using a real-world vignette and performance data for an online learning platform. By providing empirical evidence that students may carry largely inaccurate assumptions of performance distributions, this paper highlights the paradoxical risks of excess entrepreneurial entry on the one hand and missed opportunity on the other.

Entrepreneurs eventually face the inevitable in which they must exit their firms. Some choose the entrepreneurial exit path of selling to an unaffiliated individual or company. This type of exit can arise due to a variety of reasons, including life situations, strategic reasons, or other interests. The process of selling a small, privately held company, oftentimes facilitated by business intermediaries, typically begins with introducing the company to potential acquirers through confidential marketing that provides just enough information to pique interest while also preserving the anonymity of the entrepreneur or business. One important element included in the marketing of a business is the entrepreneur's reason to sell. Due to the potential information asymmetry present in the sale of privately-held businesses, this study proposes that the reason for sale, referred to in this study as the communicated exit purpose, sends varying signals to potential acquirers impacting the perception of the business opportunity and acquisition price at exit. Utilizing an archival dataset from a popular business-for-sale website, our analysis shows support that the price at exit is affected by the communicated entrepreneur's reason for exit. A separate experiment and qualitative study provide further insight into the acquirer perceptions of the business opportunity based on the stated reason of entrepreneurial exit. Our paper concludes with strategies to assist entrepreneurs regarding the disclosure of reasons for exiting.

In many academic circles, promotion and tenure decisions are often driven by the quality of the candidate's research portfolio. In entrepreneurship, as in other disciplines, we tend to judge the quality and impact of our research based on publication in a select few top journals. In our paper, we investigate the incorrect inferences that result from using Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and other rankings as proxies to assess an article's scholarly quality and impact. In doing so, we hope to better understand any discrepancies between journal quality as measured by these proxies and individual article citation rates within both top and non-top entrepreneurship journals. Our results, based upon the average number of citations, show roughly 61% of the top four journals being misidentified as high quality (Type 2 error) and 22% of the remaining journal articles being misidentified as not high quality (Type 1 error). We illustrate the variability within the top entrepreneurship journals that further reinforces the importance of evaluating each article based on its individual merits rather than relying solely on proxies of quality. As such, we avoid neglecting the potential impact and value of articles that may not conform to traditional measures of quality.

Spiritual capital serves as a unique resource that can contribute to entrepreneurial action. This paper develops the concept of religious social capital, as a distinct component of spiritual capital, and theorizes its role in motivating and supporting entrepreneurial action. This is important because individuals with religious affiliations are often deeply embedded within a religious community yielding strong and unique forms of social capital; and social capital in general is well established as a key driver of entrepreneurial action. The paper then elaborates the distinctive structural, cognitive and relational dimensions of religious social capital, and theorizes distinctive mechanisms by which these enable effective entrepreneurial action through community attention and community spanning.