June 25th - 27th, 2014
June 25th - 27th, 2014
Call for Papers This track corresponds with a Special Issue of the International Small Business Journal, included in the conference “INBAM 2014” www.inbam.net, scheduled for Barcelona June 25th - 27th, 2014.
Exploring Entrepreneurial Activity in Context
The deadline for submissions to the dedicated track of the conference is February 15th, 2014. Manuscripts should be submitted via the conference submission system. Informal enquiries on the track and special issue can be forwarded to Jarna Heinonen (
[email protected]), Susan Marlow (
[email protected]) or Esther Hormiga (
[email protected]).
Deadline: February 15th, 2014
There is growing recognition that entrepreneurial activity can be better understood within its context. Entrepreneurship as a phenomenon has been shown to be highly embedded in a range of social, economic, institutional, spatial and cultural contexts. Entrepreneurship, thus, travels through time and place, and respectively the rules for entrepreneurial activity and its outcomes can change dramatically (Baumol 1990) posing challenges to entrepreneurship scholars. Entrepreneurial activity has to a large extent been studied by looking at small and medium-sized, young and owner-managed businesses, i.e. the ‘traditional’ context within which the entrepreneurial activity takes place (Wiklund, Davidsson, Audretsch and Karlsson 2011). This particular context is reflected on the discussion on entrepreneurship so heavily, that on one hand the phenomenon itself has sometimes been put aside in studies focusing on the organisational business context. On the other hand, the complexity, uniqueness and richness of the context has not been paid enough attention to in order to be able to effectively link theory and empirical research objectives and sites to gain a thorough understanding of the phenomenon studied (Zahra 2007). In many studies, analysis of the why, when and how of entrepreneurial activity takes place within a particular context (Welter 2011) whilst the broader context often remains superficially analysed or taken as given. Exploring entrepreneurship in context implies that studies are put into a larger societal and social sciences field as suggested by Blackburn and Kovalainen (2009). Similarly, Zahra (2007) has pointed out the need for greater care and creativity in contextualising entrepreneurship studies to capture the diversity of entrepreneurial activity. Multidisciplinary approaches are needed and theoretical boundaries of the field are
• Entrepreneurial activity does not necessarily imply the creation of new firms or businesses, but can also take place in existing organisations be it public or private ones. Therefore, entrepreneurial activity in existing organisational contexts – i.e. corporate entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship – is also a phenomenon to be studied in different contexts.
to be stretched in order to be able to contextualise entrepreneurial activity. This INBAM track welcomes papers that explore entrepreneurial activity in various contexts. We welcome submissions from disciplinary oriented research as well as interdisciplinary studies of entrepreneurial activity. Both conceptual and empirical work will be considered as well as papers discussing the methodological challenges of addressing contextualization. We would like this track to offer a set of papers that demonstrates innovative approaches to contextualizing entrepreneurial activity as well as theoretical development and empirical examination of many related important topics. We propose a set of special issue topics for guidance although these are not meant to be exclusive to the track (see e.g., Wright and Stigliani 2013; Welter 2011). We would not rule out other important contributions to examining entrepreneurial activity in context: • How different business contexts such as industries and markets influence entrepreneurial activity? How ‘business context’ could be further defined to deepen the contextualisation of entrepreneurial activities (e.g. stages of life-cycles of industries and markets or number and nature of competitors).
• What kind of social contexts might influence entrepreneurial activity and how? The ways in which family, household, network relations, and traditions for example frame entrepreneurial activity are worthy of study. Geographical environments such as countries, nations, clusters also help define types of entrepreneurial activity. How to look at spatial context more in-depth, such characteristics of communities and business locations or entrepreneurship ecosystem? • How does the institutional context such as social attitudes and norms shape entrepreneurial activity? How do policy support and the entrepreneurship ecosystem’ (i.e. environment and stakeholders affecting the local/regional entrepreneurship) evolve and influence entrepreneurial activity? How does the behaviour of the corporate sector affect entrepreneurial activity? • Different contexts may also refer to time and history as important contexts. How does entrepreneurial activity change in time – as a result, for example, of technological developments and increased international trade affect entrepreneurship activity?
• Contextualisation is also a methodological challenge. How to contextualise entrepreneurship and study both causal directions (context influencing activity and vice versa) as well as what are the ways to capture multi-faceted concepts that may cut across levels of analysis? References: Baumol, W.J. (1990) Entrepreneurship: Productive, unproductive and destructive, Journal of Political Economy, 98 (3): 893-921. Blackburn, R. and Kovalainen, A. (2009) Researching small firms and entrepreneurship: Past, present and future, International Journal of Management Reviews, 11 (2): 127-148. Welter, F. (2011) Contextualizing entrepreneurship – Conceptual challenges and ways forward, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 35 (1): 165-178. Wiklund, J, Davidsson, P., Audretsch, D.B., and Karlsson, C. (2011) The future of entrepreneurship research, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 35 (1): 1-9. Wright, M. and Stigliani, M. (2013) Entrepreneurship and growth, International Small Business Journal, 31 (1): 3-22. Zahra, S.A. (2006) Contextualizing theory building in entrepreneurship research, Journal of Business Venturing, 22 (3): 443-452.
