Critical research and entrepreneurship: A cross‐disciplinary conceptual typology

in International Journal of Management Reviews (2022)

Critical perspectives of entrepreneurship have gained increasing traction over the last two decades. The transformative potential of critical research resides in challenging some of entrepreneurship ... [more ▼]

Critical perspectives of entrepreneurship have gained increasing traction over the last two decades. The transformative potential of critical research resides in challenging some of entrepreneurship research’s epistemological, ontological and theoretical assumptions, with a view to offering a range of alternatives. Critical research in entrepreneurship has remained fragmented, however, due to its heterogeneous theoretical lineages and compartmentalized and niche interests. Addressing this situation, our objective is to intensify the space of critique in entrepreneurship research by offering a theoretically-informed typology that delineates different manifestations of ‘criticalness’. Our overarching contribution is to advance a typology distinguishing four ideal-types of critical entrepreneurship research based on its evaluative emphases (referred to as ‘valence’) and the meta-theoretical assumptions informing its critical operation (called ‘paradigmatic orientation’). By demonstrating the variegated political, ethical and ideological interests and preoccupations that critical studies serve within different management sub-disciplines, the typology provides a conceptual vocabulary for making sense of and synthesizing critical perspectives across scholarly boundaries. Also, it helps to reposition understandings of critique as gestures of negativity by stimulating a greater appreciation of the generative potential of critique and the theoretical and philosophical possibilities that this can bring to our scholarly community. [less ▲]

OECD Report : The Missing Entrepreneurs 2021: Policies for Inclusive Entrepreneurship and Self Employment

Report (2021)

The Missing Entrepreneurs 2021 is the sixth edition in a series of biennial reports that examine how public policies at national, regional and local levels can support job creation, economic growth and ... [more ▼]

The Missing Entrepreneurs 2021 is the sixth edition in a series of biennial reports that examine how public policies at national, regional and local levels can support job creation, economic growth and social inclusion by overcoming obstacles to business start-ups and self-employment by people from disadvantaged or under-represented groups in entrepreneurship. It shows that there are substantial untapped opportunities for entrepreneurship in populations such as women, youth, the unemployed, and immigrants and highlights the need for more differentiated government entrepreneurship policies that respond to the specific barriers they face. The report includes an assessment of the impact of COVID-19 across these populations of entrepreneurs and the effectiveness of the policy response. It also contains thematic policy chapters on microfinance and leveraging the potential of immigrant entrepreneurs. These chapters present the range of current policy actions in EU and OECD countries and make recommendations for future policy directions. Finally, the report contains country profiles for each of the 27 EU Member States that identify for each county the major recent trends in entrepreneurship by women, youth, seniors and immigrants, the key policy issues and the recent policy actions. See section on Luxembourg country profile. [less ▲]

Ethnography: A Much-Advocated but Under-Used Qualitative Methodology in Published Accounts of Family Business Research

in de Massis, Alfredo; kammerlander, Nadine (Eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods for Family Business (2020)

In parallel with the growing interest in qualitative research methods in family business, many family business scholars advocate greater use of ethnographic methods to advance the field further. This ... [more ▼]

In parallel with the growing interest in qualitative research methods in family business, many family business scholars advocate greater use of ethnographic methods to advance the field further. This endorsement rests at least on two arguments. On the one hand, there is a need to widen, extend, or deepen our perspectives to better understand the ‘boundary crossing’ nature of families in business. On the other hand, the majority of the proposals to extend ethnographic research aim to tap into important but still under-explored complex tacit processes of family firms. However, we found that ethnographic research in family business settings remain scarcely published. This chapter reviews a set of family business studies that have used ethnographic methods, and which have been published in business and management journals in order to examine their orientations, main findings, techniques adopted, and epistemological/ontological stances. Looking forward, we end this chapter with a brief discussion on how the practice of ethnography is changing with reference to visual and virtual applications of ethnographic principles. [less ▲]

The tacit knowledge of entrepreneurial design: interrelating theory, practice and prescription in entrepreneurship research’

in Journal of Business Venturing Insights (2019), 11

An important challenge facing entrepreneurship researchers is the “three-body” knowledge problem of how to use “theoretical knowledge” to produce “prescriptive knowledge” that communicates the “practical ... [more ▼]

An important challenge facing entrepreneurship researchers is the “three-body” knowledge problem of how to use “theoretical knowledge” to produce “prescriptive knowledge” that communicates the “practical knowledge” of situated practice to students and practitioners of entrepreneurship. We argue that a contribution can be made to solving this problem by theorizing practical knowledge as the “know-how” to do a situated entrepreneurial practice. “Know-how” is a cognitive “capacity to act” that prescribes for a practitioner how to produce a type of outcome in a range of circumstances. This “know-how” can potentially, therefore, be reconstructed theoretically as explicit micro-prescriptive guidelines for third-party practice. To exploit this connection between practical knowledge and prescriptive knowledge, however, we first need to overcome the problem that “know-how” is largely tacit in the moment of real-time forward-looking practice. In other words, the practitioner is not directly aware of their tacit “know-how”, or “tacit knowledge”, at the time of practice. In this article, we explore the contribution design theory can make to empirically eliciting, and conceptually inferring, the real-time “tacit knowledge” of entrepreneurial practice as a precursor to producing micro-prescriptive knowledge. [less ▲]

'This business is not for sale': insights into the transfer intentions of family firms in Luxembourg

Speeches/Talks (2018)

In this talk some insights are presented about the reported findings on the transfer intentions of family businesses in Luxembourg

Testing the discrimination hypothesis for female self employment migrants in the UK

in IAFFE (Ed.) Books of Abstracts (2017, July 01)

We propose a comparative analysis of migrants in both sectors (employment and self-employment) exploring the gender earning discrimination hypothesis. Using individual micro data from the British ... [more ▼]

We propose a comparative analysis of migrants in both sectors (employment and self-employment) exploring the gender earning discrimination hypothesis. Using individual micro data from the British Household Panel Survey (1991-2008), we estimate wage equations for employed and self-employed migrants and find that, contrary to our expectations, the average earnings gap in self-employment is almost double compared to the employment sector. This finding reveals that self-employment leads migrant women to an even more precarious and vulnerable position in terms of financial means and economic power. In addition, we explore the determinants of these gaps using the econometric procedure of the decomposition (the Blinder-Oaxaca) model. We find that the variables that explain the gender gap in the employment sector are mostly observable individual characteristics like education or migration duration, confirming the human capital theory, whereas in the self-employment sector, this gap is more due to unobservable individual characteristics. Through our work, we show that including the gender perspective into migration analysis has implications for policy makers enabling them to evaluate these processes from a more social (rather than individualistic) dimension. [less ▲]

The practice of artifactual design in entrepreneuring

Presentation (2017)

In this presentation we consider the implications of conceptualizing entrepreneurial as the practice of artifactual design. The concept of design draws attention to the interdependence of agency and ... [more ▼]

In this presentation we consider the implications of conceptualizing entrepreneurial as the practice of artifactual design. The concept of design draws attention to the interdependence of agency and material artifacts in the entrepreneur's ability to overcome (or not) the constraints of embodied practice and the contingent environment. We develop a conceptual understanding of how the entrepreneur extends the spatio temporal reach of entrepreneurial agency by embedding entrepreneurial purpose in various artifactual forms - forms which then contextualist subsequent activity. In this process also, the future is created as multiple actors create, enact, test, modify, transform and implement these artifactual forms through embodied practice. [less ▲]

Re-thinking culture in family business: A twelve-year review

Scientific Conference (2016, June 29)

This paper reviews the literature that relate to culture and values in family business during the past twelve years. Six themes are revealed: definitions of culture; values and orientations ... [more ▼]

This paper reviews the literature that relate to culture and values in family business during the past twelve years. Six themes are revealed: definitions of culture; values and orientations; organizational culture in family business; family culture as determinants for organizational culture; national culture as determinants for organizational culture; and, products of culture in family business. Drawing from a sociological perspective, we argue and elaborate that the current scholarship are based on problematic assumptions where culture is defined based on its ‘coherence’ and ‘sharedness’, and that values are assumed as the core of culture. To direct future research, we draw our attention to the position of ‘practice’ in the production of culture, the explanation for cultural change and stability, and the potential ways of knowing through ethnography and narrative. We conclude by arguing that critical stances towards culture are needed to advance our scholarship and that cultural perspectives hold the power to contribute not only for the family business field but also for the wider social sciences. [less ▲]

Navigating the growing field of entrepreneurship inquiry: successionist and relational modes of theory development

in Fayolle, Alain; Riot, Phillipe (Eds.) Rethinking Entrepreneurship: debating research orientations (2016)

Reflecting the energy and enthusiasm of a growing multi-disciplinary field, entrepreneurship inquiry has generated a profusion of research practices associated with understanding and fostering ... [more ▼]

Reflecting the energy and enthusiasm of a growing multi-disciplinary field, entrepreneurship inquiry has generated a profusion of research practices associated with understanding and fostering entrepreneurial attitudes, behaviours, environments, processes, structures and discourses. The research output that has been generated poses both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity concerns the possibility of combining multiple perspectives in new and innovative ways (Pittaway, 2011). The challenge concerns the problem of navigating the navigating the complex landscape of entrepreneurship research output (Murphy, 2011). The problem of field navigation persists because the criteria that has been used to differentiate research output, such as ontological and epistemological positions, explanatory foci, levels of analysis and research methods, are elements in the theory development process, that are neither mutually exclusive nor directly comparable. We propose, therefore, that the challenge of field navigation can be addressed by grouping and comparing entrepreneurship perspectives in terms of modes of theory development. In this article, we discuss how actions, contexts and outcomes are universal units of theory building and that causal relationships between actions, contexts and outcomes are organized temporally in the sense that they are related either successively or contemporaneously. [less ▲]

Qualitative research practices and family business scholarship: a review and future research agenda

in Journal of Family Business Strategy (2016), 7(1), 8-25

In spite of various calls for a wider application of qualitative research in the family business field, it is our contention that the full potential of qualitative inquiry is not being fully realized ... [more ▼]

In spite of various calls for a wider application of qualitative research in the family business field, it is our contention that the full potential of qualitative inquiry is not being fully realized. Part of the reason for this relates to the tendency to promote methods choice and diversity rather than addressing the foundational questions and processes which underlie qualitative research choices. These tendencies obscure attention to the reasons why researchers choose qualitative methods and the kinds of foundational issues about family businesses that are brought to light through qualitative research. To address this, we undertake an analysis of the most-cited articles using qualitative methods from an annotated bibliography of family business studies. From this, we identify the strengths and weaknesses of extant qualitative studies in family business research and argue for the need to re-orientate calls in family business research towards the foundational questions (rather than methods) that underline qualitative inquiry. [less ▲]