Recent research on entrepreneurial failure has started to investigate the impact of failure on entrepreneurs and how this influences their motivation and willingness to engage in subsequent entrepreneurial ventures. We approach this topic from an alternative perspective, focusing on former entrepreneurs seeking to return to paid work and exploring how their experience of venture failure is perceived and appraised by employers in the recruitment process. Such perceptions matter because employers are gatekeepers to the employment market and thus their appraisals influence how easily former entrepreneurs can re-integrate themselves in the paid workforce. We conducted 30 interviews with employers in growing human-capital intensive companies in Sweden, asking these recruiters about their perceptions of former entrepreneurs and how their evaluations affected their hiring decisions. Conceptually, we frame our study using a process model of stigmatization by nuancing this model with fine-grained analyses of employers’ perceptions and appraisals of applicants’ entrepreneurial failure experiences in the recruitment process. This analysis identifies some of the key conditions that lead employers either to value or devalue an applicant’s experience of entrepreneurial failure, further indicating the implications of this finding for entrepreneurs’ careers and prospects of gaining paid employment.

To advance the discussion on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, we analyze the management literature and examples of advocacy practices inspired by the three DEI logics of moral justice, business case, and power activism. By identifying litigation, self-interest, and coercion as the mechanisms driving change within these logics, we show how the concept of diversity is approached differently in the three logics. Based on this discussion, we explain why diversity has taken precedence over equity and inclusion in both research and practice. We further show how the tensions between DEI logics inform diversity initiatives and exacerbate rather than mitigate bias and inequality. To rejuvenate scholarly and managerial debates around DEI initiatives and address managerial biases to focus on the wrong things, we discuss what could be learned from the rationales of such initiatives, including how one can be fooled into focusing on diversity at the expense of equity and inclusion.

Although academic interest in organizational scaling is growing, extant research has focused primarily on the antecedents and processes, neglecting how employees experience scaling. Drawing on the scale-up, firm growth, and well-being literature, we take an employee perspective to examine the impact of scaling on employee burnout and job satisfaction. Using a sample of 10,908 new venture employees in Sweden, we show that scaling is positively associated with employee burnout, and negatively with job satisfaction. We also show that the link between scaling, burnout, and job satisfaction depends on whether the employee is in a managerial position or has prior new venture experience.

Purpose

In the process of pursuing an entrepreneurial career, the role of the relational institution of the family depends on the economy in which the institutions are embedded. In emerging economies, parents play a more significant role concerning their children’s career in contrast to those in developed ones. In this respect, there is limited knowledge regarding the process of pursuing an entrepreneurial career while simultaneously handling parental relations in a context that does not support entrepreneurship. This paper investigates how parental dynamics influences the process of an individual’s transition to an entrepreneurial career after graduating from a university in a developing country.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper is based on a longitudinal study of 15 graduate entrepreneurs in Ethiopia who were in the process of transitioning to entrepreneurial careers. Data was collected and analysed during a two and a half year period (2018–2020) drawing on 45 interviews with, and observations of, these entrepreneurs, and six interviews with parents.

Findings

The paper identifies patterns of how entrepreneurs embedded with or dis-embedded themselves from their parental relations as they developed their ventures. The findings show that there were shifts in the entrepreneur–parent relational dynamics from the pre-startup phase to the up and running phase. Drawing on these findings, the paper develops a theoretical framework of graduates’ transitioning to entrepreneurship as a process of individuation from parental relations. Further, we find that parents are both the context and the agents in the entrepreneurial process and that the graduates’ pursuit of entrepreneurial careers is instrumental for their individuation process. The findings contribute to the literature on family embeddedness in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship career literature and individuation theory.

Originality/value

Answering the call for research on family embeddedness in entrepreneurship, this paper explores the role of parental dynamics when a family member transitions to an entrepreneurial career after graduating from a university. The study proposes and shows how individuation theory is a relevant perspective for understanding graduates’ transition to entrepreneurial careers.

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 conversation can be accomplished by focusing on dynamic and multilayered conceptualizations of embeddedness and by broadening the theoretical foundations of our research. We also present and position the papers in the special issue within the conversations on process, context and theoretical foundations in entrepreneurship research on embeddedness.

We conduct a comprehensive review of embeddedness in entrepreneurship research. Although the term "embeddedness" is frequently used in this field of study, less is known about the ways in which it is operationalized and applied. Using criterion sampling, we analyse 198 articles in order to investigate how embeddedness is conceptualized and what role it plays in the extant entrepreneurship literature. We categorize our findings based on different phases of the entrepreneurial process (early, mature and exit) and outline the dominant focus and the main conceptualization of embeddedness for each phase. We highlight important learnings for each of the three phases and identify potential areas for conceptual development. Across the phases, we find that embeddedness and context are often used interchangeably. We thus call for construct clarity in the field. In the existing literature, entrepreneurs are generally portrayed as reactive to embeddedness, resulting in a loss of entrepreneurial agency. To remedy this, we introduce the term agencement, which takes into account the relationship between the entrepreneurship and embeddedness. Further, entrepreneurs are found to be embedded in multiple contexts at the same time, and embeddedness can be understood at different levels and to different degrees. To address this complexity, it is relevant to focus on the embedding process itself, acknowledging that it takes place in social interactions including cultural, cognitive, and emotional aspects between contexts and across levels. While the extant literature supports the notion that embeddedness is important for understanding entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs, it does not necessarily support our understanding of how embeddedness takes form or why it takes certain forms. We therefore include a call for future research to turn to process and practice theories.

Building on a socio-emotional wealth lens and gender role theory, we examine gender inequality between siblings in the appointment to the CEO position in family businesses. We also study the impact on firm performance of the appointment of a daughter or a son when they take over the CEO position. Our empirical findings support the argument that daughters are less likely than sons to be appointed to the CEO position. However, this effect is weaker in family firms where the mother holds the CEO position. The difference-in-difference approach shows that family firms where a daughter takes over as CEO outperform family firms where a son takes over. Our findings reveal an important but hitherto not studied gendered dimension of the succession in family firms-sons are favored, but daughters do better. This way our study offers a more nuanced view of the implications of within family CEO succession in family businesses which is important for both research and practice.

We investigate the impact of CEO divorce on firm performance and examine how this relationship depends on the CEO’s life stage and the involvement of the CEO’s family in the firm. Using data from Statistics Sweden covering the period from 2004 to 2014, we tested our hypotheses using a difference-in-difference design on a matched sample of 2,336 firms, most of which are small firms. With our results we contribute to upper echelons theory by showing that CEO divorce negatively affects firm performance, and that this relationship strongly depends on the length of the marriage, the presence of children, as well as whether the CEO’s spouse and children work in the firm. We show that under certain conditions CEO divorce can even have a positive impact on firm performance, in particular in the presence of CEO’s children in the firm.