Journal of Business Venturing最新文献

The concepts of ‘scaling,’ ‘scalability,’ and ‘scale-up’ are increasingly used in business research and practice. However, the literature reveals a range of definitions for each, and often, their meanings are only implied. This diminishes the ability to build cumulative and meaningful insight - and conduct research - on each concept. In this editorial, we offer a systematic review that assesses and harmonizes prior definitions of these important concepts. This allows us to define and differentiate between (a) scaling as an organizational process, (b) scalability as an ordinary organizational capability, and (c) scale-up as a phase of organizational development. Complementing and extending existing scholarly work, we develop a rich agenda for scaling-related research in entrepreneurship.

The Internet has transformed economic activities in many important ways over the past two decades. This study examines the role of the Internet in narrowing the gender gap in entrepreneurship. Building on the assumptions that the Internet facilitates information transmission and breaks down information barriers for aspiring entrepreneurs, the study hypothesizes that (a) the Internet narrows the gender gap in the probability of entrepreneurship, and (b) the gender gap–mitigating effect of the Internet is stronger for the more disadvantaged members of society. These hypotheses are tested with six waves of data from the China Family Panel Studies, a nationally representative longitudinal survey series from 2010 to 2020. Empirical evidence based on the analysis of 25,177 individuals confirms that Internet use is associated with a narrower gender gap in entrepreneurship. In addition, the gender gap–mitigating effect of the Internet is stronger for less educated individuals and those who live in regions with a lower level of gender equality. The gender gap–mitigating effect of the Internet is also stronger for informal (rather than formal) entrepreneurship. The Internet appears to have a democratizing effect by facilitating entrepreneurship among the more socially and economically disadvantaged subsets of society.

This paper offers a market-compatible perspective of the emancipatory entrepreneurship of marginalized groups. We identify two dimensions of market-emancipation compatibility that derive from tensions inherent in the emancipatory entrepreneurship of marginalized groups. Ends-compatibility reflects the misalignment of emancipatory outcomes with market outcomes. Means-compatibility reflects the constraint entrepreneurs from marginalized groups encounter in market structures. We engage with these tensions in the context of the businesses, processes, and products that emerge from the entrepreneurship of marginalized groups. We use these tensions to derive propositions that speak to the likelihood emancipatory opportunities develop and that these opportunities are exploited by marginalized groups. With these propositions, we contribute to debates about entrepreneurship's overall emancipatory capacity. Specifically, we contribute a conceptual space in which the market forces that structure entrepreneurial activity and the material realities of venturing from marginalized social positions are incorporated into theorizing and testing entrepreneurship's capacity to enable marginalized groups with respect to structural disadvantage.

Effectuation theory posits that the accrual of disparate resources from various stakeholders is key to opening up transformational opportunities to the effectual venture. Here we aim to theoretically unravel the social exchange processes of the ‘effectual ask’—petitioning resource pre-commitments—pertaining to the so-called ‘crazy quilt’ principle. To do so, we introduce and integrate into effectuation theory's foundational mechanics key insights from social exchange theory (SET), which sees social interactions as mutually beneficial ‘exchanges.’ Revisiting a prior debate, we theorize on the different types of trust, how they distinctly influence the entrepreneurship process (particularly in obtaining resource pre-commitments), and how they are built over time. We also introduce charisma as a key factor in the trust-building process, distinguishing two types of charisma—causal and effectual—as individual-level mechanisms for enabling different types of stakeholder trust and commitment.

Entrepreneurial hustle refers to the urgent and unorthodox actions entrepreneurs use to address obstacles and opportunities under uncertainty. Research examining this construct has been limited by the lack of a valid and reliable measure to capture these actions. Within this paper, we advance the conceptualization of the construct and develop a measure to capture the behavioral tendency to engage in entrepreneurial hustle. We test the nomological validity of entrepreneurial hustle, including key antecedents and an outcome derived from entrepreneurial action theory. Finally, we propose a future research agenda that uses the new measure developed herein.

The primary purpose of this research is to examine the extent to which positioning hybrid ventures as more or less congruent with their category influences perceptions of their legitimacy. To do so, we first introduce and define the notion of a hybrid category as an institutional context which combines two or more dominant institutional logics that both constrain and enable organizational action. We then construct a theoretical framework instantiated within a hybrid category, suggesting that moderate incongruence between a new venture's identity narrative and the expectations most strongly associated with the category will positively influence perceived legitimacy. We further predict specific relationships among dimensions of perceived legitimacy, as well as their downstream effects on an individual's willingness to contribute resources. Across three studies in which we experimentally manipulate congruence with a hybrid category, we find a consistent pattern of support for our hypotheses and reveal a unique benefit for new hybrid ventures who position themselves in a manner that is moderately incongruent with the hybrid category. In addition, our results suggest that moral legitimacy perceptions act as a precursor to cognitive legitimacy perceptions in new hybrid categories.

For more than a century, discussion of the connections between religion and entrepreneurship has pointed to what we would now label questions of identity. Our study of 25 participants in a program in Northern Kenya that aimed to introduce and stimulate capitalist entrepreneurship within extremely poor pastoralist communities shows that differences in participants' religious social identities strongly shaped whether or not they adopted new roles and role identities as capitalist entrepreneurs. This process also shifted the domains in which their religious and collectivist social identities were salient and helped to explain the emergence of important and contested changes in social and economic relations. We contribute to the development of founder identity theory by building research at the intersection of entrepreneurship and religion and at the intersection of entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation.

We consider the influence of inter- and intra-individual team dynamics on entrepreneurial passion change and the relevance of passion change to important outcomes. Drawing on person-environment fit theory, we hypothesize first, that in newly formed teams, the entrepreneurial passion levels of individuals are impacted by their peers' passion (the average passion of their teammates). Second, we expect that individuals' trajectories of passion change are influenced by their perception of fit with the team. Third, passion levels and trajectories are expected to impact entrepreneurial outcomes for both individuals and teams. To examine these temporal dynamics, our hypotheses are tested with data from an accelerator program involving 343 team members nested in 79 newly formed teams. The findings reveal that in new teams, individuals' passion for inventing, founding, and developing are positively (negatively) influenced when teammates have higher (lower) passion for these roles and the association between individual's passion and peers' aggregated passion becomes stronger over time. Over time, positive passion trajectories emerge when an individual perceives higher fit with their team, and entrepreneurial intent is predicted by both (a) end-state levels of individual passion and (b) passion trajectories for inventing and founding (but not developing). Finally, we find that team passion trajectories predict team performance. Implications of these multi-level findings are discussed.