Purpose. This conceptual, multi-voiced paper aims to collectively explore and theorize family entrepreneuring, which is a research stream dedicated to investigating the emergence and becoming of entrepreneurial phenomena in business families and family firms. Design/methodology/approach. Because of the novelty of this research stream, the authors asked 20 scholars in entrepreneurship and family business to reflect on topics, methods and issues that should be addressed to move this field forward. Findings. Authors highlight key challenges and point to new research directions for understanding family entrepreneuring in relation to issues such as agency, processualism and context. Originality/value. This study offers a compilation of multiple perspectives and leverage recent developments in the fields of entrepreneurship and family business to advance research on family entrepreneuring.

This article is an introduction to the special issue on 'Entrepreneurship: Cross-National and Cross-Cultural Perspectives'. Besides providing overviews of the six articles published in the special issue, we discuss some of the challenges that arise when scholars explore cross-national and cross-cultural perspectives in entrepreneurship.

This paper theorizes the spiritual processes of community entrepreneuring as navigating tensions that arise when community-based enterprises (CBEs) emerge within communities and generate socio-economic inequality. Grounded on an ethnographic study of a dairy CBE in rural Malawi, findings reveal that intra-community tensions revolve around the occurrence of 'bad events' - mysterious tragedies that, among their multiple meanings, are also framed as witchcraft. Community members prepare for, frame, cope and build collective sustenance from 'bad events' by intertwining witchcraft and mundane socio-material practices. Together, these practices reflect the mystery and the ambiguity that surround 'bad events' and prevent intra-community tensions from overtly erupting. Through witchcraft, intra-community tensions are channelled, amplified and tamed cyclically as this process first destabilizes community social order and then restabilizes it after partial compensation for socio-economic inequality. Generalizing beyond witchcraft, this spiritual view of community entrepreneuring enriches our understanding of entrepreneuring - meant as organization-creation process in an already organized world - in the context of communities. Furthermore, it sheds light on the dynamics of socio-economic inequality surrounding CBEs, and on how spirituality helps community members to cope with inequality and its effects.

This study investigates how members in community-based enterprises (CBEs) engage in processes of co-constructing their collective prosocial identities. Based on an inductive analysis of 27 organizations that were formed explicitly as communities and sought to build alternative forms of production and consumption through innovative ways to pool and recombine resources, we found that all of the CBEs engaged in distributed experimentation that lead to epiphany sense-making. These two approaches triggered and enacted collective processes of shifts in identity or identity persistence. We advance a processual model that identifies approaches for how members of CBEs either embrace epiphanies in identity shifts or limit and react to epiphanies in identity persistence.

The objective of this chapter is to understand innovative processes of resource redeployment taking place during consumption. We label this as consumer entrepreneurship. We define consumer entrepreneurship as the process of sharing and recombining resources innovatively to seek opportunities for self-creating user value. Through the illustration of heterogeneous forms of consumer peer-to-peer sharing, we argue that consumer entrepreneurship: (1) differs ontologically from a view of entrepreneurship as creation of exchange value; (2) bridges the notion, established in marketing studies, of consumers as value creators with the field of entrepreneurship; (3) develops mostly when the process of sharing is regulated informally, based on trust relationships; and (4) thrives as groups of sharing consumers discover and enact their values through the experimentation of multiple forms of product and service procurement. On the basis of these points, consumer entrepreneurship contributes to provide a novel perspective on hybrid organizations, that is, a view of hybrid organizations as everyday spaces where consumers create heterogeneous forms of (utilitarian, social, or environmental) value that they personally use as opposed to reward exchanges. Relative to the current definition of hybrid organizations (Pache & Santos, 2013) and organizing (Battilana & Lee, 2014), we argue that consumer entrepreneurship helps better explain “why, when, and how” consumers increasingly engage in peer-to-peer sharing organizations – a fledging and still underexplored way of organizing consumption worldwide.

The institutionalization of entrepreneurship is undeniably a good thing for the members of the research community, as it implies the legitimization of particular research topics and research practices; the emergence of norms for developing and publishing this research; and the creation of structures that provide employment opportunities and a conducive environment for pursuing research. However, we can also question if this institutionalization is such a good thing when it comes to producing critical, innovative, contextualized, and complex research or when considered from the point of view of non-academic entrepreneurship stakeholders and society in general.

The objective of this bookis to challenge the main research streams, theories, methods, epistemologies, assumptions and beliefs dominating the field of entrepreneurship. In order to achieve this objective, this book comprises six conceptual and empirical contributions, each one unorthodox, controversial, inspiring and challenging. This book was originally published as a special issue of Entrepreneurship and Regional Development.

In this article, we briefly identify three main challenges/issues that should be taken into consideration in the institutionalization of entrepreneurship research: (1) recognizing the complexity of the phenomenon under study; (2) producing interesting, relevant and useful research results for all stakeholders; and (3) developing a critical posture in research. Following the discussion of these challenges/issues we introduce the five contributions to the Special Issue that, in different ways, problematize and challenge mainstream research and approaches. These articles use ‘dissensus discourses’, apply critical, ideological and paradigmatic stances and in some cases underline the importance of contextual factors.

A common theme in entrepreneurship research is that the founder must be committed in order for a new venture to succeed. Although investments of time and sweat equity can indicate commitment, external stakeholders may prefer founders who have made a significant, personal financial stake in their nascent ventures. This personal financial commitment is known as "skin in the game." Founders that invest more of their own money into their ventures signal greater commitment to potential business partners, suppliers, and resource providers.This study examines the amount of personal funds invested by 1,214 nascent entrepreneurs in the United States, between the years of 2005 and 2012. Findings demonstrate that the dollar amount of personal money invested prior to launch does not significantly impact the creation of new firms. However, nascent entrepreneurs that invest larger amounts as a proportion of their net income are more likely to succeed and are less likely to disengage from the process. Personal funds invested as a proportion of net income may therefore be a better measure of future success than the precise amount. This study also shows that the founder's human capital, perceptions of community support, and industry characteristics influence startup outcomes.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between low-wealth business founders in the USA and external startup funding. Specifically, the authors test whether a founders’ low personal net worth is correlated with a lower probability of acquiring funding from outside sources during the business creation process.

Design/methodology/approach– The authors use a double-hurdle Cragg model to jointly estimate: first, the decision to acquire external financing; and second, the amount received. The sample is the US-based Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics II (PSED II). The PSED II tracks business founders attempting to start ventures from 2005 to 2012.

Findings– Receipt of outside financing during business formation is largely determined by the business founder’s personal finances (controlling for human capital, venture type and industry, and whether money was sought in the first place). A higher household net worth results in larger amounts of external funding received. Low-wealth business founders, therefore, are less likely to get external funds, and they receive lower amounts when they do. The disparity between low-and high-wealth business founders is more pronounced for formal, monitored sources of external financing such as bank loans.

Research limitations/implications– Because the study eliminates survivor bias by using a nationally representative sample of business founders who are in the venture creation process, the findings apply to both successful business founders and those who disengaged during the business creation process. The authors offer insights into the sources and amounts of external funds acquired by individuals across all levels of wealth. The authors accomplish this by disaggregating business founders into wealth quintiles. The study demonstrates the importance of personal wealth as a factor in acquiring external startup financing compared to human capital, industry, or personal characteristics.

Social implications– If the ability to acquire external funding is significantly constrained, the quality of the opportunity and the skill of the business founder may be less a determinant of success at creating a new business as prior studies have suggested. Consequently, entrepreneurship (as measured by business formation) as a path toward upward, socioeconomic mobility will be afforded only to those individuals with sufficient financial endowments at the outset.

Originality/value– Unlike prior studies, the data used are not subject to survivor bias or an underrepresentation of self-employment. The statistical model jointly estimates acquisition of financing and the amount received. This resolves selection and censoring problems. Finally, the dependent variables directly measure liquidity constraints in the context of business formation, that is, before a new venture is created. Prior research contexts have typically studied existing businesses, and are therefore not true examinations of conditions affecting business creation.

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary.There is growing recognition that entrepreneurship can be better understood within its context(s). This carefully designed book invites readers to take a journey: from reflecting critically on where the discussion on context and entrepreneurship stands today towards identifying future research questions and themes that deserve the attention of entrepreneurship scholars. This collection draws attention to the research challenges the entrepreneurship field faces by reviewing the many facets of contexts and by reflecting on methods and theoretical approaches that are required in order to contextualize entrepreneurship research. Written by renowned international scholars, the book's leading-edge contributions provide a thorough exploration of how to contextualize entrepreneurship research. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, comprehensive coverage of the entrepreneurship/contexts debate is included, in addition to reading lists and a chapter dedicated to advancing future research avenues. Students and academics interested in context and entrepreneurship will benefit from this far-reaching and forward-thinking book.

Purpose

The purpose of this paper commentary is to explore the intersection of project management and entrepreneurship through a poetic exploration of Flannery O’Connor’s short story: “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Through the use of the Japanese Haiku format, this commentary probes the nature and meaning of “projects,” the importance of goals and their limitations, the influence of context across time, and the role of agency and circumstance in entrepreneurship as denoted by the idea of serendipity.

Design/methodology/approach

Poesis.

Findings

Imagination steers the course. Vision sees the possibility; But the mind’s eye sees through a distorted lens that is always misfit. So the unplanned path becomes the project. Always; Accidents happen.

Originality/value

Project Management: Goals with temporary; Collective action; Entrepreneurship: “Organizing collective Action.” Compromise?

Autobiographies do not form indisputable authorities. They are always incomplete, and often unreliable. Eager as I am to put down the truth, there are difficulties; memory fails especially in small details, so that it becomes finally but a theory of my life.

This is the second in our opinion series, “Perspectives,” in which we invite Artivate’s editorial board members and contributors to respond to open-ended prompts about their position in relation to arts entrepreneurship; how arts entrepreneurship is situated in relation to other disciplines or fields; what problems we are grappling with as scholars, practitioners, teachers, and artists; and what are the research questions we are attempting to answer individually or as a field. This article includes responses from: William B. Gartner, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Copenhagen Business School and California Lutheran University; Joseph Roberts, Director of the Coleman Fellows Program, Associate Professor of management at Webster University, and co-editor of Artivate; and Mark Rabideau, Director of the 21^st Century Musician program at DePauw University.

This article argues for alternative forms of inquiry for exploring aspects of entrepreneurship scholarship that are often unseen, ignored or minimized. The label, ‘The European School of Entrepreneurship’, might serve as a useful rubric for identifying a community of scholars with tendencies towards the following: (1) an interest in the history of ideas that inform entrepreneurship scholarship, (2) a willingness to step outside of the entrepreneurship field, itself, to embrace a variety of ideas, particularly from philosophy and the humanities and (3) a concern for the ‘other’, so as to challenge the unspoken and often unrecognized ‘taken-for-granted’ aspects of what entrepreneurship is and what it might be. Such tendencies are fundamentally different by degree (rather than contrast) from current norms; yet,these tendencies can make a significant difference in current scholarly practice in entrepreneurship, as well as our understanding of entrepreneurial phenomenon.

This chapter is about the context of writing about context. The chapter uses, loosely, ideas from narrative studies to explore facets of scholarship on context in entrepreneurship. While the chapter, in some respects, might be seen as a methods chapter, that is, a chapter on ways to research and write about context, the chapter would be more useful if it is read as an opportunity to consider the context of the context of scholarship, itself. That is, ‘scholarship’, (for example, what is written in this book) is, in itself, a context for writing about context. In such a context, then, one might find it profitable to consider the reader, writer and the text (itself) as aspects of what ‘narrating context’ is. As a way to emphasize the unique contextual aspects of scholarly writing, this chapter utilizes a form that is ‘non-scholarly and non-contextual’ as a way to heighten the sensibility of context in contextualizing entrepreneurship scholarship.

This chapter serves two purposes. First, it makes some tentative steps towards developing the idea of "possibility" as a fundamental characteristic of entrepreneurship. Second, it offers a reflexive discussion, by way of a series of disjointed "notes," of a history of how and why the idea of "possibility" became an idea the author felt worthy of attention. By offering a narrative on how the idea of "possibility" became possible (to the author), the chapter offers insights into how possibilities are generated and developed. The "possible" is the potential to become or do. The history of the idea of the "possible" is a bit squirrely, in that, suffice to say, if one begins with Hume (1739/1968: 32) "That whatever the mind clearly conceives, includes the idea of possible existence, or in other words, that nothing we imagine is absolutely impossible," the idea of the "possible" could be thought of as anything that we could conceive (Yablo, 1993). I would not go as far as that. I put the idea of the "possible" as an indeterminate place somewhere between what can be conceived and what is feasible or practical. I define the idea of feasibility or practicability being the ability to actually accomplish the particular potential imagined: The "possible," then, lies somewhere between the conceivable and the feasible. It should be noted that what is feasible or practical, is itself, indeterminate at the moment one sets out to accomplish a particular possibility.

The goal of this chapter is to offer some thoughts about the nature of the field of entrepreneurship, and particularly about the future of entrepreneurship scholarship. I begin with a recollection of a suggestion I made to students at doctoral seminars in the 1990s that 'all academic research on entrepreneurship could easily be read within a couple of months'. (I was recently reminded of this statement by Daniel Hjorth when I told him I was much behind in my journal reading.) Then, there simply wasn't much scholarship to digest. For example, it is well worth procuring one of the first handbooks on entrepreneurship, Sexton and Vesper's (1982) Encyclopedia of Entrepreneurship, to peruse the topics and to explore the depth of knowledge, then known, on the phenomenon of entrepreneurship. I was a doctoral student who was fortunate to attend the conference upon which the Encyclopedia was based, and it seemed to me that the entire body of entrepreneurship scholars could easily fit in a small sized classroom (which they did for that meeting). As Aldrich (2012) points out in his review and personal history of the entrepreneurship field, the study of entrepreneurship as a scholarly endeavor is relatively young. For example, the Journal of Business Venturing was started in 1985, and therefore reading every issue of the journal in the 1990s (that is, merely 101 volumes of articles) would take less than a couple of days.

This exercise aims to explore the unacknowledged beliefs and assumptions that students have about entrepreneurship in general, and about the characteristics of entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial actions in particular. It is suitable at the beginning of a course (or seminar), as a way to generate discussion about student assumptions and preconceptions about entrepreneurship. The exercise uses drawing as technique to elicit ideas and insights, and thereby engages students in group work when exploring entrepreneurship in an educational context.

This research focuses on “the rhetoric of entrepreneurial practice.” We conducted quantitative and qualitative linguistic analysis of ways that entrepreneurs talk about failure based on 89 usable transcriptions of presentations given at Stanford University between 2001 and 2013. Findings highlight: Entrepreneurs discuss failure as part of the social norm of entrepreneurship. Failure is paradoxically related to success. Entrepreneurs tend to characterize failure as positive and discuss positive failure using temporal (e.g., “fail fast”) and scalable (e.g., “leverage it”) language. Finally, entrepreneurs rarely recount personal stories or anecdotes about failure: they tended to talk in clichés.

What do entrepreneurs do? In a comprehensive and detailed exploration using three perspectives - behavior, practice and process - this Research Handbook demonstrates specific methods for answering that question and provides insights into the implications of pursuing that question.The authors demonstrate a variety of methods including ethnography, autoethnography, participant observation, diaries, social media platforms and multilevel research techniques to delve into the foundations of entrepreneurial behavior. In addition to reinvigorating this long dormant area of scholarship, these chapters provide scholars with the idea that the disparate perspectives on this topic are really headed in the same direction. They also demonstrate the notion that similar tools can be utilized to answer the same type of questions emanating from these different perspectives. The contributors go on to offer insights to a wide range of scholarship on organizations.Entrepreneurship scholars, PhD students, and upper level graduate and undergraduate students who want a current overview on the theories, methods and implications of studying entrepreneurship will welcome the insights explored in this Research Handbook.

This editorial offers ways to develop qualitative studies in entrepreneurship research. We indicate why and how qualitative methods clearly and distinctively contribute to the understanding of current entrepreneurship challenges using examples from the articles in this Special Issue and from other recent qualitative research. We provide a synthesis of the five articles that comprise the special issue on qualitative research in entrepreneurship and conclude by offering practical advice for those seeking to publish insightful and creative qualitative research in entrepreneurship journals. We hope this Special Issue encourages entrepreneurship scholars to pursue opportunities that might enhance qualitative entrepreneurship research.

Scholars stress that family firms are inherently paradoxical, and that tensions, such as tradition versus change, family liquidity versus business growth, and founder control versus successor autonomy, can both inhibit and foster innovation. Further, theorists propose that firms led by paradoxical thinkers are more likely to manage these tensions and fuel innovative behavior. Leveraging family business and organizational paradox literatures, this multi-stage exploratory study develops measures of paradoxical tensions and paradoxical thinking in family firms, and tests these propositions. Findings indicate that paradoxical tensions may stymie innovative behavior, but that leaders' paradoxical thinking is positively related to innovative behavior.

Social transformation is core to the idea of entrepreneurship, yet it plays a minor role in entrepreneurship research. We explore humanistic approaches to change by building on the Schumpeterian perspective of transformation/creative destruction and expanding it in three critical ways. First, we argue that entrepreneurship and history should engage methodologically with transformation 'as a perspective' taken by the researcher or observer. Second, we contend that to explore the process of entrepreneurial transformation historically, it is necessary to engage in a broader conceptualisation of temporality. Third, we posit that to fully grasp transformation, we ought to study not just the reconfiguration of material resources that Schumpeter has proposed but also the immaterial (intellectual and imaginative) re-evaluations that trigger social transformation, thus focussing on the semantics of transformation. The articles in this Special Issue explore entrepreneurship and transformation through these three lenses, making social transformation more central to historical entrepreneurship research.

We use concepts from rhetorical history and mnemonic communities to expand on the notion of “intermarriage” in a family business as the merger of shared histories among family members, nonfamily members, and individuals from other families and suggest that a common mnemonic narrative defines the parameters of the family business rather than the structural properties of the firm or the genetic relationships among family members. Our analysis reveals how fundamental family business practices can be changed when confronted with the intimate knowledge of the rhetorical history of the failure of others.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study different aspects and tensional forces that play a role in the internal and contextual negotiation that takes place within students in the exploration of the possible identity of entrepreneur. It expands the knowledge of how the university context influences student entrepreneurial processes from a multiple identity perspective. The findings are related to discussions of entrepreneurship education.

Design/methodology/approach: A conceptual paper that presents a framework on student entrepreneurial identity sense making that is grounded in a multiple identity perspective. The framework is illustrated by ten narrative cases on student entrepreneurship.

Findings: The framework suggests four different ways students make sense of identity in the process of exploring the entrepreneurial identity along with their university studies. In this process students negotiate between the two identities of “student” and “entrepreneur”, both demanding in time, effort and commitment, and they in different manners struggle with balancing university belonging and entrepreneurial distinctiveness.

Originality/value: The framework serves as a point of departure for discussing the psychological processes and tensions associated with students’ entrepreneurial identity construction, and what it means to entrepreneurship education. It is suggested that universities to a higher degree have to view themselves as psychological institutional moratoriums and thus as platforms of identity explorations rather than deterministic systems preparing students for certain careers to support students in becoming entrepreneurs.

This paper responds to calls for aligning our investigations with a fundamental concern for truth and objectivity through a meta-theoretical analysis of “the question of the entrepreneur”, viz., what explains the empirical puzzle that it is only some and not others to act entrepreneurially under similar conditions. While many entrepreneurship scholars search for the unique constitution of entrepreneurs, a growing contingent of scholars attributes this research enterprise to non-rational factors, such as ideological motives. Our analysis demonstrates that both approaches are logically unwarranted and emerge out of an unreflective engagement with the core puzzle. The mainstream view that entrepreneurs are fundamentally different from non-entrepreneurs emerges as an unreflective solution of the puzzle. Meta-theoretical reflexivity suggests that we already have a more plausible explanation: it is not anyone to exercise a widely held potential because prior to their successful exploitation opportunities are not seen uniformly as real opportunities. We do not need to find some well-hiding “entrepreneurial gene” in order to solve the puzzle; rather, we need to understand how we tend to lose sight of rather commonsensical insights in moments of academic abstraction. Having criticized the puzzle-solving process of mainstream research, we also criticize anti-mainstream critiques for failing to engage constructively with the empirical puzzle. We underscore that valid critiques require that we first engage thoroughly with the reasoning processes underlying a research practice, instead of being dogmatically dismissive – let alone accuse scholarly communities for being ideologically motivated. This study carries a further message of interest to the broader management studies community: closer attention to seemingly “trivial” logical subtleties reveals that we may need novel discoveries less often than we conventionally presume.

There are two battles at the heart of the "opportunity wars": (1) Are opportunities discovered or created, and (2) Should we perhaps abandon the opportunity concept altogether? We argue that the first question is a pseudo-question, made possible by the loose use of "opportunity" in the discovery/creation debate during the last two decades. However, we refrain from going so far as to conclude that the opportunity concept should be abandoned altogether, since we observe that strategy and entrepreneurship scholarship prior to the 2000s made a more meaningful use of the concept. It alluded to the environmental conditions necessary for the actualization of desirable futures and hardly ever questioned the agent-independence of such conditions. Accordingly, we maintain that the opportunity concept should simply exit the blind alley created by the "discovery/creation" distraction and help reorient attention toward the agent-independent sources of opportunity and threat-beyond unrealistically optimistic views of entrepreneurship as an act of "opportunity discovery" and/or "opportunity creation."

Purpose The authors explore the relationship between adolescent behavior and subsequent entrepreneurial persistence by drawing on scholarship from clinical psychology and criminology to examine different subtypes of antisocial behavior (nonaggressive antisocial behavior and aggressive antisocial behavior) that underlie adolescent rule breaking. The intersection of gender and socioeconomic status on these types of antisocial behavior and entrepreneurial persistence is also studied. Design/methodology/approach Using a longitudinal research design, this study draws from a national representative survey of USA adolescents, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997) (NLSY97). Nonaggressive antisocial behavior was assessed with a composite scale that measured economic self-interest and with a second measure that focused on substance abuse. Aggressive antisocial behavior was assessed as a measure of aggressive, destructive behaviors, such as fighting and property destruction. Entrepreneurial persistence was operationalized as years of self-employment experience, which is based on the number of years a respondent reported any self-employment. Findings Aggressive antisocial behavior is positively related to entrepreneurial persistence but nonaggressive antisocial behavior is not. This relationship is moderated by gender and socioeconomic status. Originality/value These findings contribute to research on the relationship between adolescent behavior and entrepreneurship in adulthood, the effect of antisocial behavior, and demographic intersectionality (by gender and socioeconomic status) in entrepreneurship. The authors surmise that the finding that self-employment for men from lower socioeconomic backgrounds involved in aggressive antisocial behavior was significantly higher compared to others may indicate that necessity entrepreneurship may be the primary driver of entrepreneurial activity for these individuals.

There are many thoughts and beliefs about entrepreneurship. This diversity in opinions and concepts may be triggered by the booming interest in entrepreneurship and in entrepreneurs. Journalists, politicians and academics, just to mention a few groups, have greatly turned their focus and attention towards entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. And in the labour market, entrepreneurship has become one of the more attractive options. Entrepreneurship has indeed become a centre of attention throughout society. There are numerous definitions, terms, theories, thoughts, and conjectures on and around entrepreneurship. It is truly a multidisciplinary topic that draws on sociology, economics, management, and psychology, etc. It can therefore often be confusing to study, and exceedingly difficult to gather a coherent set of academic contributions on entrepreneurship. Very different things are investigated under the heading of entrepreneurship. Even when scholars discuss overlapping issues, the used terminology may often be misaligned. Indeed, even the most accomplished experts tend to be confused when debating topics on entrepreneurship. There can easily emerge a misperception and misunderstandings due to the muddy and inconsistent use of terms. Motivated by the need for understanding the differences in the way we perceive and think about entrepreneurship, the CBS Entrepreneurship BiS Platform set out to ask 10 scholars from CBS to offer their thoughts on 5 dimensions with regard to entrepreneurship. In what could best be described as a curiosity-driven relay, these scholars passed the baton over to the next person, resulting in a ‘run’ across departments and varying traditions of thought. They represented the Department of Innovation and Organizational Economics, the Department of Economics, the Department of Strategic Management and Globalization, the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, the Department of Business and Politics, and the Copenhagen School of Entrepreneurship. The five question posed to the interviewees where: 1. What is your understanding of entrepreneurship? 2. What characterizes and entrepreneur as an individual? 3. What does this mean for university education, or education more generally? 4. What is the role and function of entrepreneurship for private companies and the public sector? 5. In what sense is entrepreneurship important for society? The aim of the Baton of Entrepreneurship is to stimulate dialogue and share insights into entrepreneurship research across the internal boundaries of CBS. But the Baton of Entrepreneurship also functions as a means to convey differences and inform about how entrepreneurship can be thought of in different ways. Having said this, it also reveals that the differences across CBS might not be as big as one might expect and that there are profound overlaps representing a potential for cross-organizational interaction on the topic of entrepreneurship. Perhaps this commonality will be the fuel, which allow new discoveries in the field of entrepreneurship to flourish.

Using three theory-based performance criteria as decision attributes, we conducted a conjoint analysis experiment with 105 social venture founder-CEOs to examine their decisions to exit their firms voluntarily. Multilevel regression analysis of founders' choices revealed that various exit preferences were chosen that did not support theoretical prescriptions. While achieving desired social impact was the main influence on founder exit choices, the heterogeneity of exit preferences led us to parcel them into four distinct groups: idealists, traditionalists, realists, and pragmatists. We discuss our contributions to the entrepreneurial exit and social entrepreneurship research literature and list the implications of our results for practice.

Eventually, all founders leave their social ventures either on their own accord or because they are compelled to do so. However, there is a high level of uncertainty over how founder exit decisions are made in these firms. In this thick problem description of founder exit in social ventures, we identify the factors that distinguish the social entrepreneurship context through the founder, firm, and ecosystem perspectives. The influence of these factors on founder exit is elaborated. Based on the insights developed, we propose research questions that future studies could pursue to expand our understanding of founder exit, exit routes, and succession in social ventures.

The chapter reviews several of the most prominent entrepreneurship frameworks to demonstrate that the entrepreneurship field lacks a theory of entrepreneurial behavior. However, each of these existing frameworks would benefit from, and be complemented by, an entrepreneurial behavioral theory. Drawing from multiple streams of research, the chapter offers a preliminary theory of entrepreneurial behavior. Several propositions are offered and new research opportunities are identified.