The current growth literature has stalled over which measures to use in empirical studies, causing a fragmented theory base. This paper claims that there is a third issue that further curbs efforts in developing a better understanding of business growth. Based on a thorough literature review, a quantitative, and a qualitative study, we find that academic scholars and entrepreneurs do not talk about the same thing when they say “business growth.” For practitioners, growth is a more complex phenomenon — with a strong emphasis on internal development — which differs from the simplified conceptualization of growth used in empirical studies.

Research articles on women's entrepreneurship reveal, in spite of intentions to the contrary and in spite of inconclusive research results, a tendency to recreate the idea of women as being secondary to men and of women's businesses being of less significance or, at best, as being a complement. Based on a discourse analysis, this article discusses what research practices cause these results. It suggests new research directions that do not reproduce women's subordination but capture more and richer aspects of women's entrepreneurship.

This research focuses on family-controlled firms as an important type of family firms, and demonstrates how external parties in the governance (ownership and board of directors) can serve as a catalyst for their internationalization. Our framework also embraces the moderating effects of the competitive environmental heterogeneity and past performance on the relationship between external, nonfamily involvement in governance, and internationalization (scale and scope). The hypotheses are tested on a sample of 351 Swedish family-controlled firms. Our findings extend previous research on family firms and their internationalization, especially addressing some of the prior mixed findings, and offers implications for both theory and practice.

We investigate what leads failed entrepreneurs to reenter entrepreneurship by taking a developmental career perspective. Specifically, we hypothesize that the age of failed entrepreneurs has a non-linear relationship with the likelihood of reentering entrepreneurship that follows different career stages (early, middle, and late). The gender of failed entrepreneurs and multiple-owner experience in the failed firm are hypothesized to be moderators of this relationship. We test our hypotheses using a database consisting of the Swedish population, including 4,761 entrepreneurs who failed between 2000 and 2004. Analyzing their career paths over the years following their failure offers support for our theoretical expectations.

Using a human-capital perspective and the similarity-attraction paradigm, we examine the role of general and specific human capital in the decision policies of 114 Swedish loan officers in their assessments of small-business loan requests. We found that human capital characteristics had marginal impact on decision policy contingencies and that specific human capital had no significant influence on the probability of loan approval. However, we did find that the similarity between the loan officers’ human capital and the pplicants’ human capital was a significant indicator of loan approval. The findings offer interesting insight into the heterogeneity of loan decision processes and outcomes and future research opportunities are suggested.

This study examines family firms’ propensity to protect their intellectual property through patents. Building on the mixed gamble logic of the behavioral agency model, we theorize that family ownership has a U-shaped relationship with firm propensity to patent. Specifically, we argue that family firms’ desire to prevent losses of current socioemotional wealth inhibits their propensity to patent until a threshold level of family ownership, beyond which the family’s socioemotional wealth is secured and a greater focus on prospective financial gains attainable through patents is possible. We also suggest that environmental munificence moderates this nonlinear relationship such that a low-munificent environment accentuates the potentially detrimental (beneficial) effects of low-to-medium (medium-to-high) levels of family ownership on patents. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 4,198 small- and medium-sized family firms.

The paucity of research examining family firms engaged with franchising is surprising. We theorize about differences in franchising behavior between family and nonfamily firms and the relative advantages accruing to family firms in this context. We also explore how selection processes tend to lead to family franchisor/family franchisee matches that enable a more effective sharing of complementary resources. The theoretical framework we develop is grounded in the “familiness” of the family firm as suggested by the logic of the resource based view. Additionally, our theoretical analysis extends and complements the frequent use of agency theory as the basis for studying franchising

Understanding the forces that support and inhibit product development (PD) in family firms is central to explaining their long-term success and survival. Our study reveals that social capital and relational conflict among family members do not affect PD directly, as existing theory suggests, but only through the internalization of knowledge among family members. In contrast, family members’ affective commitment to the family firm is so powerful that it has both a mediated and a direct effect on PD. These results differ across generations of the controlling family, therefore offering an extension of existing theories of knowledge and PD in family firms.

We hypothesize that a major macroeconomic crisis triggers four alternative responses among nascent entrepreneurs: disengagement, delay, compensation, and adaptation. We also suggest that commitment and ambition (or “high potential”) moderate these responses. Our most important finding is the relative absence of behavioral crisis responses. However, crises may make high-tech founders become more likely to disengage, whereas the opposite holds for founders far into the process. Our study sheds light on the mechanisms behind aggregate effects of crises on the number and type of start-ups in an economy, and can guide future research on the effect of crises on nascent entrepreneurship.

This study examines the antecedents of different bases of organizational commitment and intention to stay of later-generation family members who are currently working in their family firm. Evidence from 199 Canadian and Swiss firms indicates that when these individuals' identity and career interests are aligned with their family enterprise, they experience affective commitment. Family expectations are associated with normative commitment. Individuals who are concerned about losing inherited financial wealth or who perceive a lack of alternative career paths stay with the family enterprise because of continuance commitment. Finally, individuals driven by desire or obligation exhibit low turnover intentions.

Although research has shown the ability to exit from both successful and unsuccessful ventures is important to founders, families, firms, industries, and overall economic health, exiting from a family firm can be especially challenging. In this paper, we examine exit strategies in the context of the family firm and the family firm portfolio. Drawing upon threshold theory and the socioemotional wealth perspective, we develop a model that provides guiding theoretical explanations for exit strategies. We address two questions: (1) why do family owners develop specific exit strategies, and (2) how do these strategies differ within family firms and family firm portfolios? In doing so, we contribute to family business, portfolio entrepreneurship, and exit literatures.

We study, longitudinally and ethnographically, the construction of legitimacy and identity during the life cycle of an entrepreneurial Internet firm, from inception to death. We utilize organizational scripts to examine how social actors enact identity and legitimacy, maintaining that different scripts, both contested and consent-oriented, become the source of action for acquiring legitimacy and creating organizational identity. We show that scripts enable entrepreneurs and other social actors to invoke a set of interactions within and outside the organization. Scripts construct values and interests, form social bonding and consented actions, and eventually shape and reshape the individual and institutional contexts of identity and legitimacy. We found that the strategic action of organizational members in pursuing and enacting their preferred scripts depends on their position and role in the organization. We observed that the institutionalization of simultaneously competing scripts created a path-dependent process leading to organizational conflict and eventual failure. 

This article introduces the reader to the scope, boundaries, variation, and theoretical lenses of transnational entrepreneurship (TE) research. We discuss issues concerning why, how, and when individuals and/or organizations pursue new business ventures, often in far less attractive environments, while relying on abilities and opportunities stemming from the exploitation of resources, both social and economic, in more than one country. We compare TE with international entrepreneurs, ethnic entrepreneurs, and returnee entrepreneurs. TE is considered from several perspectives: agency, institutional, cultural, power relations, and social capital and networks. We summarize the articles presented in this special issue and outline an agenda for further research.

Heeding calls for contextualizing entrepreneurship research and for greater attention to the role of sector in entrepreneurship research, we conduct a systematic literature review of extant research in agricultural entrepreneurship. Recent and rapid vertical integration and rationalization within the agricultural sector provides a dynamic setting for scholars to investigate entrepreneurship theory and practice. We identify three key contextual dimensions of the agricultural sector: identity, family, and institutions, which provide promising opportunities for future research and the potential to contribute to and extend current theoretical and empirical analyses of entrepreneurship research.

This introduction to the special issue considers past and current research on "Social Capital and Entrepreneurship" to develop a schema and an associated research agenda. With the general goal of establishing social capital as a foundational theory of entrepreneurship, we discuss how future research can utilize social capital perspectives across levels of analysis and contexts to explain a wide variety of entrepreneurship phenomena.

The dramatic expansion of scholarly interest and activity in the field of women's entrepreneurship within recent years has done much to correct the historical inattention paid to female entrepreneurs and their initiatives. Yet, as the field continues to develop and mature, there are increasingly strong calls for scholars to take their research in new directions. Within this introduction to the special issue, we expand upon the reasons for this call, describe who responded, and summarize the new frontiers explored within the work appearing in this and another related collection. We conclude by delineating new territories for researchers to explore, arguing that such endeavors will join those in this volume in not only addressing the criticisms raised to date, but also in generating a richer and more robust understanding of women's entrepreneurship.

The development of firm growth research has been notably slow. In this paper, we argue that a major reason for this lack of development is the impatience of researchers to prematurely address the question of “how much?” before adequately providing answers to the question “how?” On the basis of an extensive review of the literature, we suggest how growth research can advance by changing focus to growth mode (organic, acquisition, hybrid). Toward this end, we provide a research agenda that helps establish the types of questions that growth researchers can ask within this new focus.

We ask whether choices aimed at preserving socioemotional wealth (SEW) represent an asset or a liability in family-controlled firms. Specifically, we consider one major SEW-preserving mechanism—having as chief executive officer (CEO) a member of the controlling family—and hypothesize that this choice is (1) an asset in business contexts, such as industrial districts, in which tacit rules and social norms are relatively more important, but (2) a potential liability in contexts like stock exchange markets, where formal regulations and transparency principles take center stage. The results from our empirical analysis confirm these hypotheses.

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has received substantial conceptual and empirical attention, representing one of the few areas in entrepreneurship research where a cumulative body of knowledge is developing. The time is therefore ripe to document, to review, and to evaluate the cumulative knowledge on the relationship between EO and business performance. Extending beyond qualitative assessment, we undertook a meta-analysis exploring the magnitude of the EO-performance relationship and assessed potential moderators affecting this relationship. Analyses of 53 samples from 51 studies with an N of 14,259 companies indicated that the correlation of EO with performance is moderately large (r = .242) and that this relationship is robust to different operationalizations of key constructs as well as cultural contexts. Internal and environmental moderators were identified, and results suggest that additional moderators should be assessed. Recommendations for future research are developed.

The present study contends that an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between generational involvement –i.e. the number of family generations simultaneously involved in the family firm top management team (TMT) – and corporate entrepreneurship (CE). Drawing on the upper echelons theory, we conceive generational involvement as a proxy of knowledge diversity in multigenerational family TMTs. We argue that while moderate levels of generational involvement stimulate task-related constructive conflicts for CE, increased kinship distance and relationship conflicts led by high levels of generational involvement are likely to undermine this potential advantage by damaging the relational context for CE.

Although knowledge accumulation is dependent upon relationships among constructs being robust across different measurement and sampling decisions, scholars have not sufficiently established such robustness for the construct of firm growth. Focusing on this construct, we conduct analyses on all Swedish firms incorporated during the 1994 to 1998 period (68,830 firms) and track their growth (or demise) over their first 6 years of existence. Although we typically find low shared variance between different growth measures, there is variability such that some measures demonstrate high and/or moderate concurrent validity. These findings have implications for how we delineate the boundaries of firm growth research and accumulate knowledge—when we are comparing apples with apples and when we are comparing apples with oranges.

Evidence-based practice in entrepreneurship requires effective communication of research findings. We focus on how research synopses can “promote” research to entrepreneurs. Drawing on marketing communications literature, we examine how message characteristics of research synopses affect their appeal. We demonstrate the utility of conjoint analysis in this context and find message length, media richness, and source credibility to have positive influences. We find mixed support for a hypothesized negative influence of jargon, and for our predictions that participants’ involvement with academic research moderates these effects. Exploratory analyses reveal latent classes of entrepreneurs with differing preferences, particularly for message length and jargon.

We develop theory about how and when digital technologies enable new venture creation processes. We identify two fundamental properties of digital technologies-specificity and relationality-and develop propositions that link these properties to six enabling mechanisms: compression, conservation, expansion, substitution, combination, and generation. We use the linked properties and mechanisms to determine how and when in the venture creation process-from prospecting to developing to exploiting-digital technologies have enabled start-ups in the IT hardware sector and develop stage-dependent propositions about their sector-level effects. We conclude our theorizing by discussing its implications beyond digital technologies and the IT hardware sector.

This paper sets out to explore contexts for entrepreneurship, illustrating how a contextualized view of entrepreneurship contributes to our understanding of the phenomenon. There is growing recognition in entrepreneurship research that economic behavior can be better understood within its historical, temporal, institutional, spatial, and social contexts, as these contexts provide individuals with opportunities and set boundaries for their actions. Context can be an asset and a liability for the nature and extent of entrepreneurship, but entrepreneurship can also impact contexts. The paper argues that context is important for understanding when, how, and why entrepreneurship happens and who becomes involved. Exploring the multiplicity of contexts and their impact on entrepreneurship, it identifies challenges researchers face in contextualizing entrepreneurship theory and offers possible ways forward.

We investigate factors that influence family business owners' choice between passing ownership within the family or to new external owners. Taking an embeddedness perspective focusing on owner-family structure and involvement, we hypothesize that ownership dispersion, number of potential heirs, multigenerational involvement, and whether the chief executive officer is a family member influence the choice of an internal or external transition of ownership. We build a longitudinal data set from a sample of 3,829 family firms and their ownership transitions. Our theorizing and findings regarding ownership transitions complements the abundant research on management succession and therefore constitutes an important contribution to the literature.

With the purpose of advancing our understanding of portfolio entrepreneurship, we separate the act of entrepreneurship (new entry) from its mode or organizing (internal vs. independent organization). Analyzing a cohort of 2,253 novice and habitual business founders, we find that portfolio entrepreneurship is a common phenomenon and that the majority of portfolio entrepreneurs use the internal mode of organizing. Whether or not business founders subsequently pursue portfolio entrepreneurship is explained by their human capital (education and start-up experience) and social capital (business networks and links with government support agencies). Further, novice entrepreneurs are more likely to organize portfolio entrepreneurship within their existing firms while habitual entrepreneurs more often organize subsequent acts of portfolio entrepreneurship by creating another new independent organization. Implications for entrepreneurship research are discussed.

Resource complementarity increases the potential value of alliances and acquisitions, but the extent to which the value potential of an alliance or an acquisition becomes realized depends on the ability of the firm to discover and conduct productive resource combinations. Using a sample of 319 small firms, we separate domestic from international alliances and acquisitions and show that alliances and acquisitions bring limited benefits to firms unless deliberate effort is devoted to resource combination. These findings help resolve conflicts in the resource-based literature concerning the benefits of alliances and acquisitions.

This article examines two potential causal mechanisms underlying the observed entrepreneurial orientation (EO)–performance relationship. We find empirical support for the notion that EO might be a performance–variance-enhancing strategic orientation rather than a performance–mean-enhancing orientation. With such a conceptualization, performance variance (along with, or instead of, mean performance) and failure take center stage. To address the question of “where to from here,” we discuss a number of research opportunities that we believe are going to make important contributions to the entrepreneurship and strategy literature.

This paper develops an organizational identity-based rationale for why family firms strive for nonfinancial goals. We show that the visibility of the family in the firm, the transgenerational sustainability intentions of the family, and the capability of the firm for self-enhancement of the family positively influence the importance of identity fit between family and firm as well as the family's concern for corporate reputation. We suggest that the concern for corporate reputation leads the family to pursue nonfinancial goals to the benefit of nonfamily stakeholders. We also discuss reinforcing feedback loops in these processes.