Entrepreneurship & Regional Development

Informed by contributions of Professor Alistair Anderson to the social perspective of entrepreneurship, rooted in social relationships and social capital, this article examines how members of an online community collectively interpret and negotiate the challenges of pursuing entrepreneurship alongside parenthood. This article adopts a multi-staged research design, incorporating netnography, partic...

Blockchain technology is expected to have many far-reaching effects on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial activity. In this paper, we explore blockchain technology from the perspective of vulnerable entrepreneurial ecosystems. Specifically, we look into how blockchain technology is affecting six domains of entrepreneurial ecosystems identified by prior researchers: policy, finance, culture, supp...

We explore the experiences of LGBT* ethnic minority entrepreneurs, their changing locations and their entrepreneurial activities. Using a unique mixed-method approach which collected empirical data from Germany and the Netherlands, the paper combines an ethnographic fieldwork of intersectional entrepreneurs, community activists and policy-makers with an original survey with LGBT* customers. Our fi...

How can cryptocurrency gain legitimacy in the eyes of users? Drawing upon the theories of institutional uncertainty and legitimacy, we propose a process model in which legitimacy for cryptocurrencies acquired at the market level via rhetorical strategies (i.e. evasive action) will reduce uncertainty in the formal institutional environment. This reduction in institutional uncertainty will beget...

The practice of ‘academic entrepreneuring’ here signifies a scholar’s innovative, integrative and persistent mode of pursuing and integrating a university’s three tasks, those of doing research, teaching students and performing outreach activities. The success of academic entrepreneuring is conditioned by the individual’s and the university’s ability to become recognized as a legitimate and truste...

Research on business incubation has been dominated by studies exploring university-industry technology transfer and high technology accelerators. Less is known about Business Incubation Centres (BICs), specifically, how their formal and informal structures may impact upon client development. Drawing on concepts from the community of practice (CoP) literature and organizational culture, we explore...

Social enterprises are often characterized by the vision and drive of an individual founder. We challenge this by taking inspiration from Alistair R. Anderson’s arguments that social entrepreneurship is better understood as enacted within a social context. We move beyond linear conceptualizations to consider a more nuanced, contextually informed picture, where understandings of what it...

Studies on the intersection between women’s education, motivations for entrepreneurship, and the structural constraints women face in Sub-Saharan Africa are scarce. In this study, we analyse the influence of education level on how women entrepreneurs in Uganda define business success. To this end, a total of 109 female agribusiness entrepreneurs were interviewed. The results firstly...

Building on Alistair Anderson’s work, this paper proposes transforming enterprise education to deeply address questions of sustainability, social justice and hope in our time of multiple and complex crises. New pedagogies, practices, vocabularies and connections help us to enact crises in entrepreneurial, ethical and creative ways, enabling us to remain hopeful in the face of...

Intrapreneurship is critical for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in that it enhances innovation and organizational performance. This study details how intrapreneurship develops in subsidized relative to unsubsidized SMEs. We build on behavioural additionality research, as these studies examine changes in firm behaviour that occur after the firm receives public support. Prior studies focu...

Drawing on self-leadership theory, this study investigates the influence of rewards, – classified as natural rewards and material rewards, – and of prosocial motivation on the crowds’ willingness to contribute to social entrepreneurial crowdfunding. Data was collected from a tailor-made crowdfunding campaign. Survey results from 208 respondents confirmed that the expectation of natural rewards is....

This paper engages with the concepts of ‘populism’ and ‘activism’ in entrepreneurial storytelling in order to explain how entrepreneurship may be both an individual and a collective endeavour. Through a case study of a moose park, we show how entrepreneurs move back and forth between individualism and collectivism with what seems to be little forethought....

This research uses hierarchical linear modelling to test the KSTE in a developing-country context. By trying this theory on a different setting as is usually studied, we attempt to identify boundary conditions, expanding this theory’s understanding. Results show the low effectiveness of this theory in a developing economy, suggesting that additional dimensions are needed to...

This article explores if and how the entrepreneuring efforts of an endogenous NGO can entrepreneurially empower widow necessity entrepreneurs living in extreme poverty in a rural area of Northern Ghana. In reconceptualizing necessity entrepreneurship as engagement in necessity contexts, three main context specific actions and processes were foregrounded: values-based action focus, upskilling by bo...

This article, in an act of transmutation or world-making, replaces a workshop that was envisioned between one of the authors and Alistair Anderson. It takes the form of a dialog with one of his main co-authors to retrospectively and analytically explore the collective work of Alistair on ‘embeddedness’. We find that Alistair initiated a scholarly...

Entrepreneurship has been both celebrated and critiqued in terms of its ability to assist women in developing countries to overcome the constraints of patriarchy, with recent views acknowledging its potential for incremental, dialectical change. This is particularly true for women entrepreneurs in contexts where Islamic gender relations are practiced, which can pose certain limits to...

In this article, we introduce the special issue on entrepreneurship and embeddedness. We do so by providing a brief overview of existing research on the topic focused on three important conversations related to process, context and theoretical foundations. The overview highlights essential contributions from extant research and suggests that expansion and advancement in the research...

I am a Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Liverpool Management School (ULMS). Externally, I am a Consulting Editor for the International Small Business Journal(ISBJ), a Co-Editor for the journal, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development (ERD), ESRC Peer Review Committee Member, External Examiner for the Doctoral Programme at Lancaster University Management School and a Visiting...

This paper aims to extend the theoretical foundations of entrepreneurship education by integrating several of the most relevant lessons from Anderson’s contribution into current conceptualizations. We identify three main dimensions of Anderson’s work useful for our purpose: conceptualization of entrepreneurship; network and social capital as mechanisms to explain entrepreneurship as a socially emb...

Migrant entrepreneurship has been acknowledged in the literature to be a dynamic and diffused phenomenon that characterizes local systems within European countries in the form of ethnic economies. The aim of the paper is to investigate the phenomenon of ethnic quasi-enclave industrial sub-clusters within industrial districts and to analyse social capital within the economic and...

A generalized belief in entrepreneurship as a source of economic growth ensures sustained interest in the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) concept, capturing the attention of governments and regional authorities. This has generated a plethora of public policies aimed at creating and developing EEs, frequently without solid theoretical and empirical foundations for its design, with consequent policie...

Based on the works of Alistair Anderson, this article explores entrepreneuring in the context of entrepreneurial families prior to, and following, the death of a leading family member in business. Until now, literature has suggested that the loss of a leading family member may bring complexity and chaos to ongoing entrepreneurial efforts. Drawing on a...

In this research note, we further Alistair R. Anderson’s argument that an atomized view of entrepreneurship as an economic function provides limited understanding of what it is to actually do entrepreneurship. We take the stance that entrepreneurship, as a process, is born of social context. What it is to be and what it is to...

his paper employs a practice perspective to understand the hanging-together of networking and production practices in small craft-food businesses. Based on a case study from a rural region of Germany, we explore how practices are held together by teleoaffective structures and socio-material arrangements, pointing to the role of machines as nodes in networking and production...

The purpose of this paper is to add a contextual understanding of care ethics to the nascent literature on ethics in social entrepreneurship. To this end, an interpretive study of social bricoleur entrepreneurs in rural India is presented and the constitutive effects of the enactment of care ethics are articulated. First, this enactment is examined...