Knowledge that Transforms

Business families directly participating in political roles have considerable influence in various countries. We explore political business families’ unique economic and social characteristics through a social embeddedness lens. We build a comprehensive dataset of Chilean business families and identify their direct political participation from 1989 to 2020. We find limited support for economic features tied to political participation, whereas social characteristics, such as nationally rooted origins, religious affiliations, and family generation, are shared features of political business families. We extend the literature by analyzing how business families with greater social embeddedness act as legitimate representatives of the big business class in the state.

Intermittent exporting (repeatedly exiting and reentering foreign markets) is often associated with the initial stages of internationalization. However, some small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), including family firms, pursue an intermittent exporting strategy beyond the initial stages. Drawing on a refinement of the behavioral agency model (BAM) and real options reasoning, we theorize that a high level of family involvement in SMEs is positively associated with intermittent exporting. We also argue that this relationship is moderated by Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and board members with a foreign background. We test our hypotheses using a unique longitudinal dataset of Swedish SMEs in the manufacturing and retail industries.

Strategic human capital literature assumes founders mobilize human resources from the market. Social capital research shows that relying on nonmarket sources, such as ethnic communities, for resources results in distinct ways of organizing business activities in immigrant and nonimmigrant firms. Based on a field study, I found that the impact of sourcing human capital from the market versus the ethnic community on business model designs and evolution can be better understood by examining the nature of control firm owners exert over employees and the network segmentation dynamics of subgroups within a community. The study expands on strategic human and social capital research, identifying two boundary conditions for entrepreneurship literature.

Although much has been made about heroic entrepreneurs, there is recent interest in less glamorous forms of entrepreneurship. The least glamorous is dirty entrepreneurship. In this study, we used an inductive approach and a sample of entrepreneurs engaged in dirty plastic recycling businesses to develop an intersectionality model of entrepreneurs’ dirty recycling businesses. This inductive study offers new insights into how individuals’ intersectionality pushes them into dirty entrepreneurship, how they approach their businesses, and who they stigmatize. Interestingly, individuals’ dirty place and caste push them into dirty entrepreneurship that collectively cleans the environment despite not intending to do so.

Product development in innovation-driven industries often fails. Although such failures cause new ventures to struggle to raise follow-on investments, some overcome this challenge. Why? Synthesizing insights from the research on signaling and social evaluation theory, we identify how certain resources can mitigate the risk of funding termination for new ventures despite product development failure. Through a longitudinal study of 254 venture capital-funded biotechnology ventures, we show that internal quality signals decrease in their effectiveness while industry endorsement signals increase in their effectiveness as quality signals over time. Our findings contribute to the literatures on entrepreneurial failure, entrepreneurial resource acquisition and signaling.

Researchers are divided on whether shareholder agreements (SAs) improve or hurt firm value. We offer family firms as a context where SAs add value and explain why; SAs limit “superprincipal” agency conflicts between family owners and other family members. A panel of French firms and a second study of French Initial Public Offerings show shareholders value SAs more in family than in nonfamily firms. Among family firms, SAs add greater value when weak governance undermines family owners’ resistance to other family members’ demands. Our study helps reconcile competing theory about SAs and distinguishes superprincipal conflicts from other family-firm agency problems.

Unlike traditional investing, where decisions follow a clear financial calculus, it is unclear how and why funders support hybrid ventures. To address this question, we analyze the varied priority that investors place on social impact versus financial returns and draw on categories theory to argue that different priority orderings associate with different perceptions of how hybridity aligns with different investment goals. Results show that funders who prioritize financial goals react positively when they perceive a venture exhibits greater hybridity, whereas funders who prioritize social impact do not. Our findings contribute to research on impact investing, hybrid organizations, and categories theory.

Entrepreneurial energy, the level of energetic activation that a founder feels for building their venture, is an important indicator of a founder’s well-being. Changes in entrepreneurial energy have wide-ranging consequences for both founders and their ventures, yet much remains to be learned about how and why such fluctuations might occur, as well as the role of social dynamics in influencing fluctuations in entrepreneurial energy. To investigate these questions, we draw on longitudinal data from 38 founders, developing a dynamic model of entrepreneurial energy. Our study contributes to research on entrepreneurial energy and well-being, as well as energetic activation more generally.

This study proposes a hybrid model of initial trust formation that highlights the role of social categorization and its interplay with both institutional trust and the individuating information about the party. Using data on 1,474 corporate venture capital (CVC) investments in European ventures and a case-control research design, we find that ventures more likely form initial CVC ties with investors whose parent companies are located in countries considered more trustworthy. This effect is weaker but does not disappear when social defenses safeguard ventures from misplacing trust and when there are social ties between CVC investors and ventures’ independent VC investors.

This study investigates how venture capitalists (VCs) balance upside potential and downside risk across investment stages. Drawing on the attention-based view, we propose a situated attention mechanism—that is, the investment stage represents a situational consideration affecting VC’s attention allocation to different risk dimensions. We argue that varying staging situations drive VCs to prioritize upside potential in the initial stage yet downside risk in the subsequent stage. As such, VCs may initially favor a risky project, but subsequently devalue it. We further propose that these effects are contingent on number of VCs on market, start-up maturity, and VC attention constraints. Our empirical results support our predictions.