Anecdotal evidence suggests that younger individuals have driven a recent shift toward mission-driven entrepreneurship, but systematic investigation of this claim is lacking. Using the 2024 Entrepreneurship in the Population (EPOP) survey, we document intriguing patterns related to the mission orientation of microbusiness owners across the age spectrum in the United States. The propensity of younger entrepreneurs to be mission-oriented is significantly greater than for older entrepreneurs; we find no curvilinear evidence, unlike prior studies using other data. Furthermore, among mission-oriented entrepreneurs, younger individuals are more likely to pursue integrated missions that combine social, environmental, and/or community domains; older mission-driven entrepreneurs tend to be specialists with a single mission domain. Finally, among specialists, “social” missions decline with age while “environmental” missions increase, suggesting an intriguing age-mission tradeoff.
This paper asks why some actors take up entrepreneurial practices while others, sharing the same opportunity space, do not. We address the question through an Entrepreneurship as Practice (EaP) lens, using Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) activity among U.S. college athletes as a case study. The framework draws on legitimate peripheral participation and the elements that hold social practices together. It introduces peripheral friction, a condition in which the materials, competencies, and meanings required for peripheral entry are constituted in mutually reinforcing ways that raise the threshold, especially when those elements rest on a single practitioner. The concept explains why rich, situated learning and early peripheral involvement may fail to deepen into market-facing participation within athletes' limited eligibility window. The paper then shifts from explanation to prescription, developing designed legitimate participation, a prescriptive framework specifying how collaborative structures can reconfigure these elements, reduce friction, and enable participation.
Women entrepreneurs face a double bind when performing emotions. Showing emotions associated with femininity, such as care, vulnerability, and embodied experiences, may align with women's role expectations but contradict those of entrepreneurial role expectations. Yet, suppressing such emotions also invites penalties for violating gender expectations. While existing research has extensively investigated gendered role incongruity and strategies to mitigate bias, it has not examined how emotions are involved in performing these roles. Thus, less is known about how women entrepreneurs navigate this double-bind tension through emotional performance, especially in contexts where emotions are deemed important. This study addresses this gap by examining how women in Femtech navigate the double-bind tension through various emotional performances on LinkedIn, a platform where actors enact masculine-coded behaviors. Using multimodal analysis of 80 highly representative LinkedIn posts, we identify three strategies for navigating the double bind through emotional performances. The study reveals that, rather than being bound and restricted by the double bind, women in Femtech work through it to make feminine-coded emotions visible, receivable, and legitimate within gendered entrepreneurship discourse. This study contributes to gender and entrepreneurship research by showing how women in Femtech actively navigate the entrepreneurial double bind through multimodal emotional performances.
Crowdlending investors must decide not only whether a borrower is worthy of funding, but also whether that borrower is likely to honor a financial obligation over time. Although prior research shows that entrepreneurial narratives shape funding decisions, less is known about whether the motivational values expressed in those narratives predict subsequent repayment behavior. Using archival data from 386,539 loan narratives on the Kiva platform, we examine how expressed motivational values relate to both funding success and loan delinquency. Drawing on Schwartz’s higher-order value framework, we classify narrative expressions of self-transcendence, self enhancement, openness to change, and conservation using an LLM-assisted approach. We find that all four motivational value expressions increase the likelihood and speed of funding. Yet these same signals differ in their diagnostic validity: self transcendence and openness to change are associated with lower delinquency, whereas self-enhancement and conservation are associated with higher delinquency. Our findings reveal a divergence between persuasive and performance-predictive narrative signals in debt crowdfunding, showing that the values that help entrepreneurs mobilize capital are not always the same values that signal reliable follow-through. The study contributes to entrepreneurial storytelling and signaling theory by clarifying when motivational narratives function as persuasive appeals and when they provide diagnostically valid information about borrower reliability.
Entrepreneurial pitching has attracted growing scholarly attention, yet most research enters the story late: at the moment of presentation rather than in the preparatory labor that precedes it. Drawing on an organizational autoethnography of pitch preparation in Central Asia, this paper opens the black box of pitching by tracing how three differently positioned practitioners – a marketing agency, a strategic consultant, and an economic anthropologist – co-constituted a pitch deck for a CSR project oriented toward an anticipated but absent bank evaluator. The paper proposes the concept of ‘valorization alignment’ to capture the project through which divergent evaluative logics are provisionally ordered within a shared sociomaterial artifact, held in justifiable tension, and oriented toward an anticipated external evaluation regime. Three tasks that structure the project are identified: anticipatory formatting (crafting for the absent), legitimacy re-weighting (negotiating internal credibility), and relational mediation (holding difference in tension). Extending Leins' concept of ‘narrative authority’ from a single professional community to a multi-practitioner constellation, and Boltanski and Thévenot's ‘sociology of justification’ from synchronic compromise to iterative, materially mediated process, the paper contributes to Entrepreneurship-as-Practice (EaP) by relocating the analytical site: from pitch performance to pitch production, thereby showing that entrepreneurial legibility is crafted internally before it is publicly enacted.
Entrepreneurship-as-Practice has advanced situated understandings of entrepreneuring but has paid limited attention to how policy texts shape entrepreneurial orientations prior to situated enactment. Drawing on a practice-based critical discourse perspective, I analyse Brazil's National Common Curricular Base (BNCC), the national curriculum framework for basic education. I argue that the BNCC speaks the language of entrepreneurship while its underlying logic aligns more closely with entrepreneurialism. The analysis identifies three discursive-normative moves: legitimating competence, action and problem-solving; defining performance and knowledge mobilisation as evidence of learning; and projecting work, life projects and future planning as horizons of schooling. I contribute to EaP by showing how policy texts legitimise some forms of agency while backgrounding structural, collective and socio-pedagogical conditions.
Entrepreneurial activity is inherently oriented toward the future, yet we know relatively little about how entrepreneurs enact the future in their everyday practices. To overcome this gap, this study focuses on entrepreneurial pitching as a situated site of future-making practices where entrepreneurs perform possible futures in the present. Through an ethnomethodological multimodal conversation analysis of 14 video-recorded pitches, the study explores how future-making practices are enacted through bodily movements, voices, emotions, artefacts, and interactions during live pitching. Four interrelated future-making practices are identified: (i) materialising futures, (ii) collapsing time, (iii) projecting momentum, and (iv) moralising futures. The study contributes to research on entrepreneurship-as-practice and future-making by providing empirical insights into how entrepreneurial futures are enacted and made recognisable and accountable in real time. The study also contributes to the growing literature on entrepreneurial pitching by theorising it as a site where socially available future-making practices are enacted. Finally, the study makes a methodological contribution by demonstrating the value of video-based multimodal conversation analysis for capturing the embodied, material, affective and interactional nature of entrepreneurship practice in motion.
Entrepreneurship research on emotions implicitly assumes that entrepreneurs can readily identify and interpret their feelings. However, this capacity may vary widely across individuals. Drawing on the attention-appraisal model of alexithymia, I propose that entrepreneurs high in alexithymia experience greater difficulties at the attention and appraisal stages of emotion processing, which is associated with weaker venture attachment, particularly under high perceived stress, and, in turn, lower venture goal commitment. I test these predictions using two three-wave, time-lagged studies of entrepreneurs in Indonesia (Study 1; n = 191) and the United States (Study 2; n = 216). Across both studies, alexithymia was associated with lower venture goal commitment through reduced venture attachment, and this indirect effect was significant primarily under high perceived stress. The findings extend entrepreneurship research on emotions by showing that emotional experiences do not automatically translate into meaningful sources of information that guide entrepreneurial cognition and behavior. In doing so, this study suggests that understanding how entrepreneurs identify, interpret, and make sense of their emotions may be as important as understanding the emotions they experience.
What can children's fairy tales tell entrepreneurship scholars about why entrepreneurs in different countries think differently? The entrepreneurial cognition literature has established that schemas vary systematically across national contexts, yet has not specified the developmental mechanism through which culturally variable cognitive structures are formed in the first place. This gap is distinct from the well-documented influence of culture on entrepreneurship and from the role of storytelling as a communicative strategy as it concerns the earlier question of how cognitive schemas come to vary cross-nationally before entrepreneurial experience begins. I propose a Cultural Narrative-Cognitive Schema (CNCS) framework as one way of making this question tractable by tracing entrepreneurial schema formation back to its developmental origins in childhood fairy tale exposure. The framework identifies four CNCS components — agency beliefs, risk legitimacy frames, opportunity prototypes, and power-position schemas — each produced through three analytically distinct narrative layers found in children's fairy tales: the folk/oral-regional layer, the nationally canonical literary layer, and the globally distributed media layer. The paper charts what becomes newly thinkable for cross-national entrepreneurial cognition research at this junction and proposes a research agenda for pursuing it.
Māori entrepreneurship has increasingly been examined through culturally grounded research, yet definitions remain fragmented across discussions of identity, cultural values, tribal structures, and wider contextual environments. This paper addresses this gap by developing an initial Māori entrepreneurial framework, informed by Māori and Indigenous entrepreneurship literature and situated within a Kaupapa Māori paradigm and Indigenous Literature Review Methodology (ILRM).The framework integrates three interconnected elements consistently identified across the literature: Māori cultural values, culturally grounded systems, and external contextual environments. Māori cultural values, shape how purpose, responsibility, and success are understood; culturally grounded systems provide the structures and practices through which these values are enacted; and external contextual environments shape the conditions within which Māori entrepreneurship develops and operates.This paper contributes conceptual clarity through a Māori-centred lens, and offers a culturally grounded, relational way of understanding entrepreneurial activity. It also positions Māori culture as the primary lens through which entrepreneurship is best understood. Practically, the framework provides a useful lens for Māori entrepreneurs, policymakers, educators, and support organisations seeking to align initiatives with Māori ways of knowing, being, and doing. As an initial conceptualisation, the framework remains open to further collective review, and refinement across Māori and other Indigenous contexts.
As entrepreneurship education (EE) faces mounting pressure to respond to the socio-ecological polycrisis of the Anthropocene, prevailing human-centred, business growth-oriented pedagogies appear increasingly insufficient. This conceptual manuscript advances a critical posthuman practice approach to entrepreneurship education that foregrounds multispecies relationality, response-ability, and ethical co-becoming. Building on entrepreneurship-as-practice scholarship, and drawing in particular on a critical posthumanist practice approach, we extend emerging calls to rethink entrepreneurship (and EE) beyond anthropocentrism by translating multispecies thinking into educational practice. Drawing on illustrative examples from posthuman and eco-relational pedagogies in higher education we develop a set of propositions for a multispecies entrepreneurship pedagogy to reimagine EE as embodied, situated, and relational, involving both human and more-than-human actors as co-participants.We argue that such a pedagogy can cultivate response-able entrepreneurs oriented toward ecological justice, care, and multispecies flourishing. The manuscript contributes to entrepreneurship-education-as-practice by offering a novel theoretical framing and concrete pedagogical orientations for post-anthropocentric futures.
Entrepreneurial activities are fundamentally future-oriented: actors face future deadlines, make predictions about prospective business opportunities, and may need to accelerate their activities to align expectations for projected outcomes. Yet surprisingly, the future is still often treated as a mere context variable in entrepreneurship research, rather than as actively produced through situated daily activities. This limits our understanding of how entrepreneurial actors engage with tensions that arise when multiple futures coexist, and why coordinating them in their daily work is often experienced as difficult yet consequential. This paper advances a future-making lens on entrepreneurial practices by conceptualizing entrepreneuring as the ongoing enactment of multiple futures in tension through daily practices. I argue that such tensions arise from the simultaneous enactment of incompatible categories of future-making practices. Building on a practice perspective, I develop a conceptual framework that distinguishes three temporal categories of future-making in entrepreneurship and theorizes the temporal coordination practices through which entrepreneurial actors manage emerging tensions. By reconceptualizing entrepreneurship as an effortful accomplishment of the future through practices, the paper opens new avenues for entrepreneurship-as-practice research to study how entrepreneurship is enacted through a nexus of daily practices that make the future.
Local business activity can change when a major local institution gains or loses public status. We study one clear example: when colleges move up or down in athletic division. We treat these moves as public status signals and test whether nearby business outcomes change. Using U.S. business records from 2003 to 2023, we compare places near schools that reclassified with similar places near schools that did not. We examine 11 types of reclassification and four predictions about direction, distance, and football effects. We find upward moves tend to increase local sales and employment more than business counts. Higher-profile moves affect areas farther from campus. Football-related moves have larger effects. Downward moves do not create uniform decline. They shift activity across nearby areas. The results show that visibility shocks can shape local economies.
This study investigates whether equity crowdfunding (ECF) mitigates or reinforces geographic inequalities in investment allocation. Using data from the Broota (now Kria) platform between 2015 and 2016, combined with geo-economic indicators from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), we examine how distance influences investment value. We apply georeferencing techniques and estimate multiple models, including Spatial Autoregressive (SAR) and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR). Although geographic distance is statistically significant, its explanatory power is limited (R2=10.42% in the best-performing GWR model), indicating that location plays a secondary role in determining investment value. The key insight of this study is that equity crowdfunding does not substantially alter the spatial logic of traditional financial markets. Instead of democratizing access to capital, investment patterns remain concentrated around major urban centers, suggesting that ECF investors behave similarly to traditional investors. In addition, we identify distinct investor profiles through clustering techniques (KMeans, DBSCAN, and Agglomerative Clustering) based on socio-spatial characteristics such as average distance, age, education level, and investment value. The results reveal consistent and well-separated clusters (Silhouette up to 0.64), indicating systematic differences in investor behavior across sectors.
Research on entrepreneurial mentoring has documented mentor actions and outcomes, but how mentor-entrepreneur dialogue produces those outcomes is less clear. We argue that mentoring helps entrepreneurs reinterpret difficult situations, leading to clearer judgements and adaptive actions. However, how mentors use, or could use, dialogue to reshape interpretations is still underexplored. To develop this, we draw on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) as a lens. CBT works by helping individuals examine and revise the interpretations driving their distress. Applied to mentoring, these principles can help entrepreneurs manage forms of distress that affect well-being, judgement, or action but do not require clinical treatment. This paper uses CBT to build a standardised process for guiding interpretive change through mentoring dialogue. It proposes two CBT-informed pathways, cognitive and behavioural; specifies ethical boundaries for their use in mentoring; and outlines necessary mentor training. This shifts research from cataloguing mentor functions to specifying actionable intervention pathways, opening new directions for theory and practice.
The opportunity-necessity dichotomy has organized entrepreneurship research for two decades, sorting entrepreneurs into those pulled by opportunity and those pushed by necessity. I argue this framework rests on a flawed assumption: that these categories identify stable types. They do not. Using Markov chain analysis of the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics II (1633 transitions across six years), I show that necessity entrepreneurs are remarkably unstable. Only 52 percent retain that classification from one wave to the next. Fully 38 percent transition to opportunity within a single year. The “both” category is even more fluid: just 2 of 733 entrepreneurs maintained it across observations. These patterns matter because trajectories predict outcomes in ways initial classification cannot. Necessity entrepreneurs who develop opportunity orientations achieve 38 percent emergence rates; those who remain necessity show 23 percent. The dichotomy mistakes a developmental process for a typology. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor moved away from the binary measure in 2019. These data suggest they made the right call.
Drawing on episodic memory theory and affective events theory, we argue that affective experiences influence momentary evaluations of work to the extent that they are cognitively accessible, with temporal proximity playing a central role. Using high-frequency diary data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, we distinguish between general well-being, recent happiness, and short-term affective trajectories. We find that self-employed individuals report higher momentary work-related enjoyment than employees, and that temporally proximal affective experiences exert a substantially stronger influence on momentary evaluations than either general well-being or happiness reported yesterday. Notably, moderately recent experiences do not significantly predict momentary enjoyment, suggesting that accessibility, rather than recency alone, determines which affective experiences shape evaluation. We interpret the COVID-19 context as amplifying variability and emotional intensity in work experiences, thereby highlighting temporal differences in affective accessibility, while the underlying mechanisms are expected to generalize to other dynamic work environments. These findings contribute to research on entrepreneurial well-being by demonstrating that well-being is temporally structured and that proximal affective trajectories play a central role in shaping momentary work-related evaluations.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is widely portrayed as enhancing entrepreneurial decision-making through improved prediction, pattern recognition, and data-driven evaluation. Yet entrepreneurship frequently unfolds under conditions of Knightian uncertainty, where action depends on entrepreneurial judgment about uncertain and evolving futures rather than calculable prediction alone. We theorize how AI-based systems reshape the epistemic conditions under which entrepreneurial beliefs are formed and evaluated. We argue that AI systems are not epistemically neutral: by generating plausibility signals from historical data, they influence which ventures appear credible and worthy of support. We conceptualize these dynamics as AI-mediated plausibility regimes and identify a dual epistemic risk. In generative modes, AI may inflate evaluative confidence beyond what the available epistemic grounding warrants (false positives). In evaluative and screening modes, AI may disadvantage low-precedent but potentially transformative ventures (false negatives). By distinguishing these system classes and their distributional effects, we specify when AI may expand entrepreneurial imagination and when it may narrow entrepreneurial variety.
