This article presents a collection of essays on African Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research for Sustainable Development, authored by young scholars from the 2024 PhD Winter School at Bern University of Applied Sciences. To help harness the transformative power of innovation and entrepreneurship for sustainable development, the five essays explore necessary change on multiple levels - including the institutional, ecosystem, industry, and individual levels - as well as key concepts such as social entrepreneurship and affordable innovation. Collectively, they emphasize the importance of contextualized research in entrepreneurship and innovation. This multi-voice article serves both as a call to action and a collaborative platform for PhD students from Africa and Europe to jointly generate new insights into how entrepreneurship and innovation can contribute to sustainable development in Africa. The collection is framed by an introduction and conclusion written by the editors of the multi-voice article.

Entrepreneurship scholarship faces challenges related to diverse populations, striving to balance inclusivity with the recognition of unique entrepreneurial identities. Applying optimal distinctiveness theory, we explore the relationship between belongingness and uniqueness in entrepreneurship research. Catalyzed by Bakker and McMullen's 2023 article on inclusivity in entrepreneurship, we utilized natural language processing to examine responses about inclusive entrepreneurship from 29 scholars dedicated to marginalized populations. Findings suggest that employing varied research methods and integrating structural and epistemological considerations can enhance our understanding of entrepreneurial heterogeneity. We advocate for entrepreneurship research that values individual experiences while promoting inclusive practices, highlighting the need for evolving scholarly paradigms to reflect entrepreneurial differences.

Entrepreneurship scholars have become increasingly interested in new collaborative spaces—such as incubators, makerspaces, and coworking spaces—that support entrepreneurial ventures. However, limited attention has been paid to entrepreneurs’ embodied capacity to transform these collaborative spaces into places for entrepreneuring. In response, we propose a phenomenological perspective to advance theorizing on how entrepreneurs “do place” by experiencing and shaping the meaning, affective content, and materiality of their workplace in specific ways. Based on a longitudinal qualitative study of a coworking space in Paris, we identify three regimes of entrepreneur’s place-making: (a) collectively negotiating place-meaning, (b) manipulating place as a site of practical use, and (c) place-based identity forming. Our contribution is threefold. First, drawing on a diverse literature on phenomenology, and recent practice-based research, we argue that a dual focus on the embodied experiences and practices of entrepreneurs enables a more granular understanding of how collaborative spaces are enacted as “places-of-entrepreneuring.” Second, we show how “places-of-entrepreneuring” emerge from the skillful interweaving of different regimes of place-making. Third, we recommend that owners of collaborative spaces proactively promote place-making “by design” by encouraging entrepreneurs to become active producers, rather than passive users, of their work environments.

How contexts shape organizational phenomena has long been a focus of management and organization studies (MOS), as has how actors influence contexts. This paper deepens this debate using a rhythm perspective, developed against the backdrop of entrepreneurship research, which has made context a priority but not fully clarified how entrepreneurial agency alters contextual conditions. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis , we argue that the everyday provides a privileged vantage point for understanding how contextual forces permeate entrepreneurship and, conversely, how they are affected by it. Specifically, we theorize that the everyday forms a diverse and shifting symphony of rhythms, and suggest that entrepreneurial agency includes the transformative capacity to shape these rhythms to create tangible value. We refine our theorizing through the example of the Brukman textile factory, an entrepreneurial squat taken over by its former workers. The vignette explores how agency is enacted through the cultivation of moments of rupture ( arrhythmia ) and moments of rhythmic harmony ( eurhythmia ). Our contribution is to develop a rhythm perspective to spark new ways of thinking about context, agency, and transformative change. While our theorizing is rooted in entrepreneurship research, we identify ways in which it can stimulate MOS more broadly.

Social enterprises play an increasing role in providing employment opportunities for disabled people. This paper examines the implications of social enterprises’ market-based approach to disability inclusion, which is characterized by viewing disability as an asset rather than a limitation. Taking our inspiration from critical disability scholars who have pointed out that inclusion agendas produce disability as a distinct social reality, we use a performative lens to examine how social enterprises variously “do disability,” for instance, by defining where the potentials of disabled people lie and how best to promote them. Drawing on an ethnographic study of Magic Fingers, a Nepal-based enterprise that employs blind people as massage therapists, we identify entrepreneurial “doings” of disability that were guided by ideals of empowerment but that ultimately produced new and subtle forms of exclusion. By closely examining the case organization’s founding phase, as well as its practices of advertising, recruitment, and day-to-day management, we show how Magic Fingers commodified disability in novel ways, reinforced the notion of disability as a negative condition that must be “overcome” through work, and introduced new market-oriented evaluative distinctions between “more able” and “less able” disabled individuals. By exploring and evaluating these effects, this paper draws attention to the ways in which social enterprises, while challenging deficit-oriented representations of disability, can paradoxically solidify disability as something profoundly “other.”

A topic of growing interest in entrepreneurship research is how entrepreneurial ventures address grand challenges. This literature, we argue, tends to produce a panacea myth by suggesting that entrepreneurship is the universal remedy for existing social and environmental ills. Starting from the claim that the persuasive power or ‘stickiness’ of the panacea myth depends not only on what it explicitly says (in terms of ideas and beliefs) but also on what it leaves out, we suggest that the exclusion of explicitly political and holistic explanations of grand challenges such as Iris Marion Young's theory of structural injustice, which we use as an illustrative example, precipitates a ‘constitutive absence’ whose mythic function is to sanitize the image of entrepreneurship as the preferred solution to grand challenges. In an effort to denaturalize the panacea myth, we first identify three ‘figures of thought’ – coined ‘extrapolation fallacy,’ ‘political agnosticism,’ and ‘positive acculturation’ – that define the content of the panacea myth while simultaneously excluding theoretical concepts and frameworks, such as structural injustice, that conceptualize grand challenges as structural, multidetermined, and inherently political problems that are not necessarily amenable to stand-alone entrepreneurial approaches and solutions. Second, to loosen the grip of the panacea myth, we suggest rethinking entrepreneurship research in terms of who is involved, what methods are used, and how we talk about it. Taken together, these tactics create an opening in entrepreneurship research for a more complexity-sensitive and political understanding of grand challenges that cultivates a more humble and realistic depiction of entrepreneurship's problem-solving capacity.

Responsible business conduct (RBC)—the corporate activities and initiatives that proactively address corporate involvement in human rights, environmental, and governance threats—has become an increasingly used means to counteract and prevent adverse effects of global businesses. Unlike other business sectors whose adverse impacts and RBC efforts (or lack thereof) are well documented, a comprehensive understanding of the state of commodity trading (CT), has been missing. In response, this paper uses a multidisciplinary literature review to provide an integrative understanding of the current state of research on the relationship between CT and RBC. Based on a review of 131 articles, we advance a granular understanding of the current and prospective role of commodity traders in RBC by grouping extant research into three overarching themes: (1) industry self-regulation and co-regulatory initiatives, (2) government-led regulatory initiatives and policy responses, and (3) company-level management strategies impacting RBC practices. In addition to illustrating the themes through existing research and identifying gaps along the overarching themes, we use our literature review to suggest avenues for future research. The paper’s overarching contribution is, first, to synthesize previously fragmented findings into a coherent framework of CT and RBC. And second, to offer guidance on how scholarship in this important domain can be developed into a more mature, legitimate and practical stream of research.

Crowdfunding has been identified as an apt mechanism for financing social enterprises' projects and ventures. While the academic literature has offered detailed analyses of specific elements and success factors of social entrepreneurial crowdfunding, we argue that this research endeavor is getting 'too narrow too early.' Specifically, we claim that the dominance of quantitative studies based on publicly available data and the lack of conceptual clarity have produced many detailed but isolated findings that do not combine to form a comprehensive understanding of social entrepreneurial crowdfunding. This points toward the importance of a relational ontology that conceives of the relations between the elements and success factors of social entrepreneurial crowdfunding identified in extant research as more fundamental than the entities themselves. As a path forward, we use this paper to offer a more integrative understanding of social entrepreneurial crowdfunding that theorizes how social entrepreneurs utilize crowdfunding platforms to create value for their ventures and stakeholders. Drawing on previous research on social entrepreneurial crowdfunding and various additional bodies of literature, we conceptualize four social entrepreneurial personae – fundseeker, networker, buzzmaker, and crowdsourcer – that describe the different ways social entrepreneurs use crowdfunding, what their goals are, what specific tactics they use, and what problems they might face. Apart from offering a more holistic understanding of the inner workings of social entrepreneurial crowdfunding, this paper aims to point out future research directions that will help us maintain the relevance and 'promise' of our field.

Critical perspectives of entrepreneurship have gained increasing traction over the last two decades. The transformative potential of critical research resides in challenging some of entrepreneurship research's epistemological, ontological and theoretical assumptions, with a view to offering a range of alternatives. Critical research in entrepreneurship has remained fragmented, however, due to its heterogeneous theoretical lineages and compartmentalized and niche interests. Addressing this situation, our objective is to intensify the space of critique in entrepreneurship research by offering a theoretically informed typology that delineates different manifestations of 'criticalness'. Our overarching contribution is to advance a typology distinguishing four ideal types of critical entrepreneurship research based on evaluative emphases (referred to as 'valence') and the meta-theoretical assumptions informing its critical operation (called 'paradigmatic orientation'). By demonstrating the variegated political, ethical and ideological interests and preoccupations that critical studies serve within different management sub-disciplines, the typology provides a conceptual vocabulary for making sense of and synthesizing critical perspectives across scholarly boundaries. Also, it helps to reposition understandings of critique as gestures of negativity by stimulating a greater appreciation of the generative potential of critique and the theoretical and philosophical possibilities that this can bring to our scholarly community.

Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings includes abstracts of all papers and symposia presented at the annual conference, plus 6-page abridged versions of the “Best Papers” accepted for inclusion in the program (approximately 10%). Papers published in the Proceedings are abridged because presenting papers at their full length could preclude subsequent journal publication. Please contact the author(s) directly for the full papers. Why Entrepreneurship Overlooks Structural Injustice: Biases, Blind Spots & Paradigmatic AssumptionsJan Keim, Susan Müller and Pascal DeyJan KeimBern U. of Applied Sciences, Susan MüllerBern U. of Applied Sciences and Pascal DeyBern U. of Applied SciencesPublished Online:24 Jul 2023https://doi.org/10.5465/AMPROC.2023.15364abstractAboutSections ToolsDownload CitationsAdd to favoritesTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail AbstractEntrepreneurship is often associated with positive attributes such as innovation and economic growth. In recent years, however, researchers and practitioners have increasingly recognized the "dark sides" of entrepreneurship. Despite the growing recognition of the negative impacts of entrepreneurship, the concept of structural injustice has been largely overlooked in the field. Structural injustice refers to deeply ingrained and systemic forms of inequality that disproportionately affect marginalized groups. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by examining the role of entrepreneurship in perpetuating and mitigating structural injustice. Our hypothesis is that five paradigmatic assumptions prevalent in the entrepreneurship community, as well as a lack of appropriate tools, methods, and curricula, contribute to this omission. To address this issue, we propose three corrective actions. First, we propose strengthening critical thinking skills in entrepreneurship education by encouraging students to critically examine the assumptions and values underlying entrepreneurship and the potential indirect consequences of their actions. Second, we recommend that entrepreneurship research takes a more holistic view by applying different research methods, promoting multidisciplinarity, and considering the potential consequences of innovation and entrepreneurial activities in funding programs and measuring firm-level success. Finally, we suggest reconsidering the role of prosocial entrepreneurship, which is currently viewed as a panacea for solving today’s most pressing ills. Overall, this paper represents an important first step in incorporating structural injustice into the discourse on entrepreneurship.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Vol. 2023, No. 1 Permissions Metrics in the past 12 months History Published online 24 July 2023 Published in print 1 August 2023 InformationCopyright of Academy of Management Journal is the property of Academy of Management and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder’s express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.KeywordsAOM Annual Meeting Proceedings 2023AOM Boston 2023Entrepreneurship

Purpose That social franchising programs induce favorable outcomes is readily taken for granted, albeit lacking robust empirical support. Addressing this situation, this paper takes a closer look at a fractional social franchising program in the public health-care sector in Vietnam to better understand how such programs work. This paper aims to expand the nascent body of empirical research that has examined the inner workings of social franchising programs from the perspective of clients by focusing on the health professionals who work there. Design/methodology/approach Using an exploratory qualitative research design, the authors conducted 25 semistructured interviews with health professionals of a fractional franchising program called Sisterhood, which introduced reproductive health and family planning services into existing health facilities in Vietnam. Interviews were triangulated with Sisterhood’s internal documents as well as with publicly available reports. Findings The analysis highlights two pathways through which the social franchising program brought about positive change. On the one hand, the analysis suggests that many of the positive outcomes reported by public health professionals were consistent with the stated goals and measures used by the Sisterhood program, providing evidence that improving the quality of health care for disadvantaged communities can be achieved through careful design and execution. On the other hand, the analysis revealed beneficial outcomes that were outside the scope of the Sisterhood program and, in this sense, “unexpected.” Specifically, the paper sheds light on unintended knowledge spillover effects in which nonfranchised health professionals began to adopt new practices and principles introduced by the social franchising program. Originality/value The paper taps into a largely under-researched phenomenon – fractional social franchising – from the perspective of health professionals. Unpacking how the social franchising program created favorable outcomes, some by design and others by accident, the paper opens new empirical and policy insights into how social franchising can improve public health in hard-to-reach communities in the global South. Based on the findings, the authors argue for the intentional promotion and institutionalization of knowledge transfers from franchised to nonfranchised health facilities to reinforce and scale up the positive impact of social franchising. The authors conclude by emphasizing the need for future research to adopt a complexity-sensitive approach that accounts for the dynamic, nonlinear adoption pathways social franchising can take. Such an approach is essential to uncover the beneficial outcomes that can result from social franchising programs but cannot be readily predicted by program design.

Prior research on meaningful work has identified a variety of resources that are available to people at work, including membership, association, and a sense of belonging. However, as digital technologies have made work more location-independent, the ground for meaningful work is shifting. This begs for a closer examination of how the loss of a stable place to work impacts meaningfulness in the context of new work arrangements. Building on the central tenet of humanistic geography that meaningful work always requires a place for its realization, we present a qualitative study of coworking spaces to explore the intertwinement of work, place, and meaningfulness. Putting participants’ experiences and affective attachments at the center of our inquiry, we distinguish two forms of place-involvement: Being in place and doing place. While both are expressions of the existential spatiality of meaningful life and work, ‘being in place’ gives expression to how people bond with places of work affectively and socially to navigate the insecurities associated with location-independent work, while ‘doing place’ includes human practices geared toward creating the spatial conditions in which meaningful encounters and work can flourish. We discuss the implications of our theorization and its contribution to the literature on meaningful work and coworking. The paper concludes by reflecting on the ethical responsibility for meaningful work under conditions of location-independent work.

The term 'social innovation' has come to gather all manner of meanings from policymakers and politicians across the political spectrum. But while actors may unproblematically unite around a broad perspective of social innovation as bringing about (positive) social change, we rarely see evidence of a shared vision for the kind of social change that social innovation ought to bring about. Taking inspiration from methods that recognise the utopian thinking inherent in the social innovation concept, we draw upon Erik Olin Wright's concept of 'real utopias' to investigate the moral underpinnings inherent in the public statements of Ashoka, one of the most prominent social innovation actors operating in the world today. We seek to animate discussion on the moral principles that guide social innovation discourse through examining the problems that Ashoka is trying to solve through social innovation, the world they are striving to create, and the strategies they propose to realise their vision.

In the context of recurrent economic crises, ‘alternative’ models of economic organising such as social enterprise offer compelling examples of utopian imageries of a better future ‘to come’. Social enterprise qua utopia implies not only that alternative ways of being and co-existence are desirable, but that there is often a disjuncture between the desirable futures such utopian imaginaries project and the extent to which they are actualised or even actualisable in practice. The UK, which has long been considered the most conducive environment for social enterprise activity, offers a fertile ground to study this tension between utopian imagination and empirical actualization. Drawing from three large-scale research projects focusing on the social economy in Scotland and the North of England, this paper explores the link between social enterprise as a political program and as lived material practices unfolding under conditions of extreme resource scarcity caused by austerity measures. Our findings reveal that whatever utopian impulse social enterprise might contain, it is constituted, in the last instance, in the movement between ideas and everyday life, i.e. the aggregate of mundane practices, routines and experiences. Attentiveness to the precariousness instigated through austerity measures, such as social budget cuts, the key contribution this paper makes is to jettison approaches that treat social enterprise as a context-independent and totalizing ideal that divorces its utopian potential from the everyday practices through which this potential is being realized.

I will use the liberty that comes with writing an afterword to reflect on whether the binary opposition between for or against, as well as the implicit understanding of critique as a purely oppositional gesture, still has purchase in contemporary critical entrepreneurship scholarship. While it is no secret that I wholeheartedly identify with the critical entre- preneurship community, this chapter takes it upon itself to argue that critical research could reach a dead end if it continues to reduce its mis- sion to an antagonistic confrontation with (a however defined) main- stream of entrepreneurship research. At the heart of this contention is the realization that the mainstream of entrepreneurship research has changed so much in recent years that it has become superfluous to conceive of critique solely as an act of pure negativity (Noys 2012). Thus, given how entrepreneurship is studied and theorized today in mainstream entrepre- neurship scholarship leads me to purport that being against—in the oppositional sense of the term—is hardly appropriate for leading our critical enterprise into the future. Using the first part of this short reflec- tion to delineate and challenge the prerogative interpretation of critique as oppositional engagement with mainstream research, this leads me, in a second step, to ponder the possibility of an alternative interpretation of critique based on Chantal Mouffe’s (1999, 2013) notion of agonism. I thus use the article by Olaison and Sorensen (2014) on entrepreneurial failure to exemplify the potential inherent in agonistic critique.

This article contributes to on-going research on social business models by establishing a link with arguably one of the most salient global challenges we are confronted with today: economic exclusion. We conceive of economic exclusion broadly as a lack of access to salaried employment, finance, or essential goods and services. Addressing how and to what extent social business models can alleviate economic exclusion, we first review and synthesize various bodies of literature on grand challenges and social business models to unpack the constitutive factors of economic exclusion and the constraints social businesses face in their attempts to alleviate them. Based on these insights, and inspired by former works, we draw up a typology of 12 ideal-type social business models. In doing so, we illustrate how each model operates, based on the specific configuration of business model elements required to overcome the relevant barriers underpinning economic exclusion. The main contribution the paper makes is to advance a typology of ideal-type social business models covering the diverse constraints pertaining to economic exclusion. In concluding, we reflect on this contribution, its limitations and avenues for future research.

Critical approaches have gained increasing traction within entrepreneurship research. While critical studies have contributed to entrepreneurship research by challenging its foundational epistemological, ontological and theoretical assumptions, critical research as a whole has remained fragmented due to its heterogeneous theoretical lineages and its compartmentalized and niche-like nature. Addressing this situation and drawing from different social science literatures, a theoretically-informed typology sketching dimensions of ‘criticalness’ is outlined based on two continua: an ‘evaluative stance’ and ‘paradigmatic orientation’. This gives rise to a multi-dimensional conceptual typology with 4 classifications of ‘critical’ research: These classifications are presented as: skeptical versus affirmative; foundational versus postfoundational and are elaborated by the placement of exemplary contributions from studies of entrepreneurship that take a critical stance or are critical in orientation. Our contribution is to advance entrepreneurship research by stimulating new ways of understanding this subject matter and for offering a conceptual vocabulary that draws connections between previously fragmented critical perspectives. We also identify areas of critical research that are underexplored providing opportunities for future research.

This article makes a case for paying greater attention to how informal relationships between government officials and civil society practitioners impact processes of public value creation. Drawing on data from a five-year qualitative longitudinal study, we illuminate how civil society practitioners deviate from the formal objectives of social enterprise policies in order to create what they see as having public value. Through a process of theory elaboration, we demonstrate how government officials' wilful ignorance of, or informal collaboration in, such deviance, precipitates forms of public value that are consistent with wider political objectives. Our analysis adds nuance and granularity to the debate on public value by drawing attention to the arcane ways it may be informally negotiated and created outside of the public sphere. This opens up new empirical and theoretical opportunities for understanding how deviance and ignorance might be symbiotically related in processes of public value creation.