Entrepreneurship research increasingly recognises that place is shaped by the everyday actions of economic actors. Yet, we still know relatively little about how the small-scale actions of individual microbusinesses reshape local places. Starting from a relational conception of place as process, this article examines how microbusinesses contribute intentionally and in harmony to the transformation of local places. We combine Emirbayer and Mische’s temporal-relational conception of agency, which recognises entrepreneurial action as a contextually embedded process, with constitutive approaches to performativity that highlight how microbusiness actions gradually remake place. The findings of our 18-month ethnographic study of a small town in the United Kingdom, which combines interviews, diaries and field observations, show how visible, materially grounded microbusiness practices operate performatively, signalling aspirational futures and reshaping expectations for local places. Underpinned by processual theories of temporal-relational agency and performativity, our analysis identifies an entrepreneurial process, through which mutually reinforcing effects of individual, projective entrepreneurial actions by microbusinesses accumulate over time and space to transform the town. Theorising this process as ‘aggregate agency’, we contribute to place-based entrepreneurship research by revealing how microbusinesses make incremental transformative contributions to local places through uncoordinated yet, converging individual actions, commanding a processual understanding of both entrepreneurship and place.
Governments and non-governmental organisations commit substantial resources to a range of business support interventions for small firms and entrepreneurs. A substantive body of research has investigated such support interventions over recent decades. While important progress has been made, the literature remains fragmented, and critical questions and long-standing concerns remain unaddressed. This article develops a research agenda around access, design, and impacts, focusing the impacts dimension on questions of effectiveness. We also bring attention to novel themes around start-up mobility, artificial intelligence, and risk aversion, which we believe have important implications across the domains of business support research. Consequently, we advance ongoing business support debates and invite new inquiry that can inform the development of more effective and accessible business support interventions.
Over the past two decades, the International Small Business Journal (ISBJ) has played a pivotal role in shaping scholarly understanding of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) growth. This commentary presents a systematic literature review of 92 ISBJ articles published between 2004 and 2023, examining geographic coverage, theoretical foundations, methodological approaches, growth measures, and thematic trends. Our analysis reveals areas of consolidation and knowledge gaps, including limited attention on the regions beyond Western advanced economies, family and mid-sized firms, the entrepreneur's role, AI and digitalization, the contingent nature of growth, new theoretical perspectives, weak integration of institutional contexts, and the dominance of outcome-centric views of growth. Moving beyond gaps internal to articles in the ISBJ, we consider these patterns in light of the broader entrepreneurship and management literature and outline research avenues accordingly. In doing so, we aim to reinforce the ISBJ's role in advancing a more integrative and future-oriented agenda for SME growth research.
This article investigates how emotion regulation strategies such as reappraisal and suppression shape formal leadership emergence in egalitarian and homogeneous new venture teams (NVTs). Drawing on expectation states theory, we propose a multilevel model where emotion regulation influences formal leadership emergence indirectly via perceived social status, with team status conflict acting as a boundary condition. A two-wave field study of 243 entrepreneurship students across 49 teams reveals that individual disposition to suppress emotions reduces social status perceptions and indirectly hinders formal leadership emergence, while reappraisal shows no significant effect. However, the indirect effect of suppression on formal leadership emergence is conditional on the team status conflict. The findings advance theory on status cues as a foundation for hierarchical structure and subsequent formal leadership emergence within NVTs. We show that social perceptions are influenced by response-focused emotion regulation strategies, rather than by internal cognitive reappraisal strategies, illustrating the importance of context in understanding the interpersonal consequences of emotion regulation. We also introduce team status conflict as an under-investigated conflict phenomenon in NVT literature.
