Knowledge that Transforms

Family firms face significant challenges in professionalizing their management, while the professionalization effects on the firms’ performance are unclear. Drawing on stewardship and agency theories, we theorize and test the effects of family ownership and professionalization on firms’ financial performance and sustainability (environmental, social and governance) reputation. Using a large-scale management practices dataset of both public and private companies in the US, UK, Germany, and France, we find that family firms outperform nonfamily ones in terms of both financial performance and sustainability reputation, and professionalization helps strengthen such positive effects. We theorize that this is because professionalization can address agent opportunistic behaviors, while enhancing steward behaviors unique to family firms. The findings contribute to the literature on family business governance and professionalization.

We examine the decision process of individuals evaluating whether to support an entrepreneurial endeavor. Such decisions are made by individuals under conditions of ambiguity and equivocality. Therefore, it is nearly impossible for resource providers to adopt a purely rational evaluative process in assessing a venture. Building on insights from sensemaking and social and cognitive psychology, we elaborate a theoretical model combining sensemaking, intuition, and deliberation to account for how entrepreneurial support decisions are made. The model reflects individual and social factors that impact this decision process and provides a basis for understanding entrepreneurial support decisions across diverse actors and contexts.

Social enterprises (SEs) that receive early stakeholder support for their dual economic/social missions risk losing moral legitimacy when stakeholders assess them for social impact and find it lacking. We present a process model that begins at the “fork in the road” of stakeholder assessment and shows that when SEs continue to focus on primary stakeholders at the expense of secondary stakeholders impacted by the firm, they risk losing moral legitimacy and broader stakeholder support. Our model shows the process by which SEs can leverage their moral imagination and develop capabilities to generate long-term stakeholder support and sustained value creation.

In desperation for survival, the Cuban government legalized limited forms of self-employment in the fall of 1993, and the Paladar industry (in home restaurants) was born and their numbers proliferated. For the next 25 years, the state oscillated between legalizing entrepreneurship to outright forbidding it; yet, the paladares thrived. This work explores and documents how different stakeholder evaluations of legitimacy of an entrepreneurial endeavor change over time and how these endeavors shape stakeholder’s evaluations of legitimacy. Utilizing archival data, in addition to firsthand interviews with various stakeholders, this paper documents key stakeholder evaluations of legitimacy in an endeavor’s context, the differences in these evaluations, how they change over time, and how these endeavors responded to and shaped these conflicts. The endeavors in our context shaped stakeholder views of legitimacy in ways that enabled them to gain access to the resources they needed to survive and prosper. This work brings a nuanced understanding of how stakeholders evaluate the legitimacy of entrepreneurial endeavors in contexts that are changing and emerging and how these evaluations are co-created in an iterative process between stakeholders and the endeavor.

Extending earlier critiques, I suggest that continued use of Shanian discovery and Alvarez-Barnean creation views and their respective standpoints on “opportunities” would constrain future entrepreneurship research. Instead, I suggest venture creation be recognized as the field’s true core, with or without the opportunity concept. Within a big tent of venture creation research, researchers with different knowledge interests and varying convictions regarding the roles of agency and structure in venture creation can partake in our most valuable contribution to the broader domain of economic and organizational studies: insights into the journey from non-existence to existence of new ventures.

Strategic entrepreneurship integrates the fields of strategy and entrepreneurship to consider firms’ simultaneous engagement in opportunity- and advantage-seeking behaviors to create wealth. Since its conceptualization in the early 2000s, the study of SE has gained considerable momentum. At the same time, some scholars criticize SE and question its comprehensiveness as a way to understand the strategic application of entrepreneurship. We present a comprehensive review and integration of research related to the study of SE as a construct, theoretical model, and research domain. In doing this, we offer a research agenda across these different approaches to the study of SE.

We explore how entrepreneurial passion’s effect size varies across measures and operationalizations. The role-based measure outperforms the dualistic measure on some outcomes but not on performance. The role-based measure’s IPF and IC dimensions are strongly correlated, and so are its three domains, putting its theoretical assumptions in question. Scholars often use it against the guidelines, although the obtained effect sizes do not drop. The dualistic measure is more effective when the original questions are used and when entrepreneurship-specific targets are mentioned. Yet, its focus is not positive feelings per se. The search for an ideal passion model should continue.

Knowledge created outside the firm, but within the same region, is a key enabler of high-growth firms. This paper develops an entrepreneurial ecosystems conceptual framework focussing on knowledge spillovers and regional absorptive capacity, to account for interregional differences in high-growth firm rates. This is tested using panel data from 378 regions in Great Britain. Knowledge creation (SME-engaging and research-intensive universities, innovative firms) and knowledge spillovers (primarily through vertically related industries) reveal to be of key importance. Other key regional enablers of high growth firms pertain to entrepreneurship culture, talent, intermediate services, networks, finance and demand growth.

Research on entrepreneurial crowdfunding has focused limited attention to the role of category in investors’ decisions. We examine the legitimacy spillover effect of projects within the same category of industry on the focal project’s fundraising. We decompose category legitimacy into two types—stable versus transient—and investigate their distinct effects on fundraising. Our dataset, derived from 31,767 projects on Kickstarter from 2010 to 2020, confirms the spillover effect of category legitimacy on entrepreneurial fundraising. Furthermore, the spillover effect of stable legitimacy is much stronger than that of transient legitimacy, and this effect weakens when entrepreneurs have greater past successes.