This article introduces a special issue on 'Fiction and the Entrepreneurial Imagination' with three main objectives. First, it provides a brief overview of existing scholarship related to the use of literature in management and entrepreneurship studies for readers unfamiliar with this perspective and its methodologies. Second, it reviews the ten articles included in the special issue, summarizing how they tackle key challenges in entrepreneurship research. Various literary forms - drama, poetry, novels, and music - offer insights into the complex nature of entrepreneurship by exploring the essence of possibility, the intricacies of path dependence, the formation of founder identity, and the influence of personal values, place attachment, and gender. These articles advocate for diverse perspectives on emancipatory entrepreneurship and encourage a more nuanced vocabulary to describe entrepreneurial actions and emotions. Together, these contributions highlight the role of imagination in shaping entrepreneurial paths. Finally, we suggest how literature can enhance entrepreneurship scholarship in ways that other perspectives and methodologies might not achieve.

Previous efforts to integrate culture and gender into a comprehensive theoretical framework for family support in entrepreneurship have fallen short. This study aims to clarify the influence of gender and culture on family support for women entrepreneurs in a patriarchal society. We use a qualitative approach, conducting 25 semi-structured interviews with Chinese women entrepreneurs who reflect on support from 81 family members. By conceptualizing family support and employing ideal-type analysis, we create a family-to-entrepreneurship support matrix that outlines four ideal types of family support for entrepreneurship. Our findings advance the literature by offering a more multidimensional view of family support, moving beyond simple categories to include three additional dimensions: family members' approval (none or yes), their background (entrepreneurial or non-entrepreneurial), and their cultural embeddedness. Additionally, we highlight the role of individual family members - such as spouses, parents, and in-laws - in supporting entrepreneurship, which is often overlooked and provides deeper insights into the diverse roles family members play in women's entrepreneurial journeys.

This editorial examines entrepreneurship in rural areas, advocating for renewed interest due to global transformations, such as climate change and inequality, that challenge the traditional focus on urban-led economic growth. This article highlights the essential role of rural entrepreneurship in promoting sustainability, creating social value, and building resilience, thereby extending the field beyond mere economic development. We discuss the four articles in this special issue, emphasizing local resourcefulness, embeddedness, diverse value creation, and complex entrepreneurial agency in rural contexts. The editorial concludes with a call for rural entrepreneurship research to address pressing issues, such as regional inequalities, climate concerns, and social justice, while acknowledging the political realities of rural societies.

This teaching exercise explores David McClelland’s book The Achieving Society (1961), to suggest that McClelland’s “need for achievement” is an act of the imagination generated through “apperception” rather than a characteristic or trait of individuals. The exercise is useful for exploring the history of the “need for achievement” construct by having students write and analyze stories based on materials used in McClelland’s original research. The chapter provides: (1) an overview of “need for achievement” as a characteristic of certain kinds of children’s stories, (2) a way to elicit stories that may meet “need for achievement” criteria, (3) a process to evaluate these stories for “need for achievement,” and (4) and exploration of the ways entrepreneurs and others talk about entrepreneurship. This chapter ends with a suggestion that viewing “need for achievement” as an act of imagination impacts teaching entrepreneurship as a way of thinking about individual agency rather than as a personality characteristic.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.