Purpose To understand how small and micro businesses experience benefits from regulation, and to explain why benefits are experienced unevenly.Design/methodology/approach Adopting an inductive, interpretive methodology, a sample of 23 UK-based business owners was interviewed about their responses to regulation, data being analysed thematically.Findings Despite the challenges experienced responding to dynamic change represented by Covid-related regulations, businesses experienced three forms of benefits: operational, strategic and re-evaluative. These findings were analysed through the dynamic capabilities framework, specifically sensing (operational), seizing (strategic) and reconfiguring (re-evaluative). Further, analysis identified that business attributes of spatial fixity and business model elasticity mediated the experience of benefits within a context of greater regulatory control.Originality/value The benefits of regulation experienced have not been theorised in detail previously, and the empirical evidence and analysis presented contribute to an ongoing conversation about the responses of smaller businesses. The article shows that benefits emerged not despite the regulation that often posed difficulties to businesses, but through it. This article's theoretical contribution connects the micro experience of business response to regulation with the macro regulatory context and offers a mechanism for understanding the contexts and attributes of why some businesses benefit and others do not, showing how regulatory constraints can enable benefits. The analysis extends dynamic capability theory by identifying increased regulatory control through a shift in governance paradigm as a mechanism for new sensing, seizing and reconfiguring responses, with businesses' capabilities being mediated and constrained by the two attributes.

Researchers primarily focus on the formal practices used by event organisers to establish temporary spaces like Host Event Zones, characterised as a unilateral process that ignores community interests. Yet little research investigates both the formal and informal interactions between stakeholders. Interviews with London 2012 senior organisers after the ‘fog of organising’ has lifted – and without political pressure to toe-the-line – reveals how two-way dialogue was facilitated through various communicative mechanisms, from ‘road shows’ to more inclusive Olympic Organising Committee meetings. This counters previous arguments and contributes new knowledge by revealing – and more accurately representing - how event zones are co-created through negotiation between the event and community. Consequently, scholars should be wary of extrapolating from formal practices on paper and interrogate the more complex and messy informalities of planning to improve veracity of claim(s).

Olympic event zones are characterized as being intensely formally regulated during live staging periods, producing exclusionary environments blamed for sidelining host community interests. Yet, our findings contradict what scholars perceive to be inflexible formal regulations, and, the regulator's ability to take informal action. By interviewing and drawing on the experience of 17 regulators during London 2012 we identify how regulators simultaneously oscillate between modes of regulatory formality and informality, straddling what is referred to as the "formality–informality span." Our application and theorization of these concepts critiques existing explanations of how regulation is enacted in mega-sporting events, providing new insights into the way organizers balance regulatory demands and potentially opening up new emancipatory policies and more equitable outcomes for host communities.

Our paper throws new light on how entrepreneurial leverage is achieved in Olympic Transit Zones. Specifically, we investigate: i) contextual features enabling and constraining ‘immediate leveraging’ efforts, ii) tactics deployed to leverage, and iii) how local-entrepreneurs encouraged visitors to connect and interact with localities. We deployed a walking-methodology and interviews with local-stakeholders during Rio 2016 to do this. Findings indicate that less securitised and regulated Olympic Transit Zones allowed entrepreneurs to leverage spaces they would be typically excluded from, whilst simultaneously producing spaces that encouraged greater dwell-time for visitors to interact with local-culture and traders. We draw on concepts of liminality, liminoidal and communitas to explain these contrary findings and suggest how future events can foster such environments.

How do we use the Other to make sense of who we are? A common assumption is that people positively affirm social identities by excluding an inferior Other. This article challenges that restricted notion by focusing on the variation and situational fluidity of alterity construction (othering) in identification work. Based on an ethnographic study of a change project in a public hospital, we examine how nurses, surgeons, medical secretaries, and external management consultants constructed Others/otherness. Depending on micro-situations, different actors reciprocally differentiated one another horizontally and/or vertically, and some also appropriated otherness in certain situations by either crossing boundaries or by collapsing them. The article contributes to theorizing on identification work and its consequences by offering a conceptualization of the variety of othering in everyday interaction. It further highlights relational agency in the co-construction of social identities/alterities. Through reciprocal othering, 'self' and 'other' mutually construct one another in interaction, enabled and constrained by structural contexts while simultaneously taking part in constituting them. As such, othering plays a key role in organizing processes that involve encounters and negotiations between different work- and occupational groups.

Third-party funding of academic research has grown rapidly in its scope and impact. However, several forces demand greater attention to potential opportunities, challenges and threats of third-party research funding. Adopting a historical approach rooted in Anglo-Saxon academia, we discuss what third-party research funding means for European business researchers, which opportunities and tensions arise, and how to best manage them in the interest of the diverse stakeholders of our field. Finally, we introduce the six papers in this special issue and how they move the conversation on third-party research funding forward. The evidence base provided here is composed of a rich blend of empirical data, reflections on personal experience and conclusions drawn from formal mathematical models. As a result, the collection of papers offers a kaleidoscope of the state-of-the-art of research on third-party funding of academic business research in Europe. The insights emerging from these six papers collapse into a clear overall picture with each paper contributing a distinct jigsaw piece, a picture we present and discuss in this paper.

In this paper, we explain how and why collective emotions enable institutional creation work. Based on an ethnography in Limonade, a Haitian community affected by the 2010 earthquake, we identify social practices that elicit collective emotions through the creation of new institutions across the three disaster recovery phases. Our study's key insight is that new institutions converge collective emotions such that they in turn justify ongoing, as well as motivate engagement in new, institutional creation work practices. Theorizing from our findings, we develop a generative model that describes the justifying and motivating function of collective emotions in the establishment of embedded institutions. In conclusion, our paper advances theory on collective emotions in institutional work and generates implications for post-disaster management practice.

In this study we explore the decision of employee-founders to initiate ventures that benefit their parent organization with innovative solutions. Based on a study of physician-founders in the UK’s National Health Service, we find that their engagement and extent of identification with the parent are important factors in this decision. We leverage qualitative and quantitative data including a novel scale of beneficial interdependence. Our findings have implications for spin-out research, the drivers of new venture performance, and the changing role of physicians in the healthcare field.

How, if at all, does financialisation affect small firms that have no direct exposure to capital markets? This article argues the need to address this lacuna empirically, conceptually and politically drawing on research from a qualitative longitudinal analysis of UK small businesses in bio-business and film and media sectors. We identify three potential conduits through which financialising principles and practices may be perceived, translated and resisted for owners, managers and staff. More broadly, the article argues that financial relations should figure more prominently and move from their relatively marginal location into the heart of socio-economic analysis of small firms. As such, the research connects with and extends an important social science tradition of research on managerial control in small firms to include issues of financialisation and financial governance.

This article addresses the empirical relationship between masculinity, hegemony and entrepreneurial identity as a largely neglected debate; this omission is addressed by outlining how 10 enterprising men who own and run small businesses perform, in the Goffmanesque sense, a style of ‘entrepreneurial masculinity’ in front of each other during their leisure lives when they meet as a local entrepreneurial fraternity in a semi-rural pub. By so doing, we expand upon prevailing ideas about how male actors perform entrepreneurial identity and develop ethnographic accounts of how gender, entrepreneurship and identity projection culturally intersect.

Previous research on age and entrepreneurship assumed homogeneity and downplayed age-related differences in the motives and aims underlying enterprising behaviour. We argue that the heterogeneity of entrepreneurship influences how the level of entrepreneurial activity varies with age. Using a sample of 2,566 respondents from 27 European countries, we show that entrepreneurial activity increases almost linearly with age for individuals who prefer to only employ themselves (self-employers), whereas it increases up to a critical threshold age (late 40s) and decreases thereafter for those who aspire to hire workers (owner-managers). Age has a considerably smaller effect on entrepreneurial behaviour for those who do not prefer self-employment but are pushed into it by lack of alternative employment opportunities (reluctant entrepreneurs). Our results question the conventional wisdom that entrepreneurial activity declines with age and suggest that effective responses to demographic changes require policy makers to pay close attention to the heterogeneity of entrepreneurial preferences.

Little is known about the effect that cultural media has in influencing attitudes and behaviours towards entrepreneurship. In addressing this research gap this article employs a neologism – ‘entre-tainment’ – briefly defined as televisual media that stage and perform entrepreneurship for entertainment purposes. This study surveyed university students to test three hypotheses which examine the relationship between perceptions of ‘entre-tainment’ and entrepreneurial intent (multiple regression model using ordinary least squares). The findings conclude that there is a positive relationship between the skills that students believe they ascertain when they watch ‘entre-tainment’, and entrepreneurial intention. Furthermore, the social legitimacy that they attach to this cultural media has a similar positive effect. Finally, the greater the social legitimacy attached to ‘entre-tainment’, the stronger the relationship between perceived skills and entrepreneurial intention. The analysis focuses on the broader implications of these findings of potential effects of entre-tainment in transmitting narrow messages of what it means to behave entrepreneurially.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to argue that the production of past workplace and organizational ethnographies needs to be better understood in their historical context. Design/methodology/approach – A programme of research work on the history of workplace and organizational ethnography is proposed, and a historiographical discussion outlines the purpose, scope and means by which such a project might be realised. Findings – The article highlights why organizational ethnographers should understand the history of their research practice. Originality/value – The paper suggests that a serious attempt is made to create a body of historical knowledge about workplace and organizational ethnography. The value of this would be to deepen the contribution ethnographic research makes to organization and management studies, and ensure that continuity and change in ethnographic research practices are better understood.

The research reported in this paper uses life history analyses of Indigenous entrepreneurs to address the following question: How do individuals engaged in entrepreneuring incorporate their experience of government policy into their self-narratives, and what affects are apparent on attitudes towards, and the objectives of, their entrepreneurial activity? Subsequently, the paper makes two contributions to conceptual debates within entrepreneurship and small business studies. Firstly, the paper shows the value of life history methodology narratives in providing insights into entrepreneuring processes over time, particularly in understanding how to evaluate the impact of enterprise animation policies. Secondly, the particular focus upon Indigenous entrepreneurs affords some purchase on recent debates relating to the purpose and potential of enterprise policies aimed at those defined as socially and economically excluded [Blackburn, R., and M. Ram. 2006. Fix of fixation? The contributions and limitations of entrepreneurship and small firms to combating social exclusion. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development 18, no. 1: 73–89]. The paper's findings show that life history analysis has an important role to play in developing our understanding of entrepreneurship as a process. Moreover, evaluations of enterprise policy should pay more attention to temporally extensive impacts on individuals over their life course, and not limit evaluative efforts to programme specific factors.