Prelims

Half title Page

NURTURING MODALITIES OF INQUIRY IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP RESEARCH

Series Page

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP RESEARCH

Series Editor, Volumes 1–6: Gerard McElwee

Title Page

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP RESEARCH, VOLUME 17

NURTURING MODALITIES OF INQUIRY IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP RESEARCH: SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH THE EYES OF THOSE WHO RESEARCH

EDITED BY

DAVID HIGGINS

University of Liverpool, UK

CATHERINE BRENTNALL

Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

PAUL JONES

University of Swansea, UK

AND

PAURIC MCGOWAN

Ulster University, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Emerald Publishing, Floor 5, Northspring, 21-23 Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 4DL.

First edition 2024

Editorial Matter and Selection © 2024 David Higgins, Catherine Brentnall, Paul Jones and Pauric McGown.

Individual chapters © 2024 The authors.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

Reprints and permissions service

Contact: www.copyright.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80262-186-0 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80262-185-3 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80262-187-7 (Epub)

ISSN: 2040-7246 (Series)

Dedication Page

………………………….to my three friends and fantastic (in some areas - J ☺), co-authors thank you so much ……………..x

You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.

Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly. But beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference, never really to be troubled by anything again.

—Samuel Beckett

Contents

About the Editors

David Higgins is a Senior Lecturer with the University of Liverpool Management School, where he teaches and researches in both Entrepreneurship and Executive Education in the university sector. He is an active scholar in the field of entrepreneurship education and learning, hosting over 30 plus publications to date in journals, books, book chapters and conference outputs. He has published his work in journals such as International Small Business Journal; International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business; Journal of Management Inquiry to name but a few, serving as Guest Editor for such journals as International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research and Industry and Higher Education.

Catherine Brentnall is a Senior Lecturer with Manchester Metropolitan University’s Department of Strategy, Enterprise and Sustainability. She is a long-time practitioner in enterprise education and brings strong practice and policy sensibilities to scholarship. Initially developing enterprise through the curriculum in primary and secondary schools her work has been featured as best practice in Lord Young’s ‘Enterprise for All’ government review, in the APPG report ‘An Education System Fit for an Entrepreneur’ and in projects and publications from the EU and OECD. Alongside, and complementing, her practice in the field she developed various independent scholarly activities, writing for conferences, journals and books. Her PhD research involved proposing the concept of competitive enterprise education and using realist evaluation to explore for whom (and what) such activities work well for (or not) and why.

Paul Jones is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the School of Management, Swansea University. He has over 30 years’ experience in the education sector and previously held academic posts at Coventry University, Plymouth University and the University of South Wales. He is an experienced Academic Manager and Researcher and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research, Senior Editor with Information Technology and People and Associate Editor for the International Journal of Management Education. He is also Editor of the Emerald Book Series Contemporary Issues in Entrepreneurship Research. He is a prolific researcher in the fields of entrepreneurial behaviour and small business management.

Pauric McGowan holds the Chair for Entrepreneurship and Business Development in the Ulster Business School. Between 2002 and May 2009, he was the Director of the Northern Ireland Centre for Entrepreneurship (NICENT) based at the University of Ulster. As Director of NICENT, he was responsible for providing leadership in the challenge to embed entrepreneurship in the curriculum across all faculties within the partner institutions of the centre, with particular responsibility for the University of Ulster, and for encouraging a greater practical engagement with entrepreneurial new venturing among staff and students.

About the Contributors

Yosra Boughattas is Associate Professor at the University of Artois (North of France) and a Visiting Professor in the Exeter Center for Entrepreneurship (UK). She launched and directed a Master degree program ‘Entrepreneurship and Project Management’. She teaches a range of modules especially related to management and entrepreneurship. Her research concerns individual and group learning processes.

Katarina Ellborg is Senior Lecturer at the School of Business and Economics at Linnaeus University. In her work, she has adopted a didactical perspective on entrepreneurship education in higher education with a student-centered approach. She has, for example, developed and examined a visual-based teaching exercise in order to explore students’ understandings of entrepreneurship. Her interest in visual methods and interpretative research traditions has also led to explorations of educational tools in general, and illustrations of business models in particular. Her current research also includes entrepreneurship in the cultural field, in which she combines her interests in art and entrepreneurship.

Stéphane Foliard is Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at Jean Monnet University. His research primarily focusses on bank financing for novice entrepreneurs and the field of entrepreneurship education. He has a particular interest in studying the dynamics of student entrepreneurial teams, the entrepreneurial ecosystems and the new forms of entrepreneurship based on purpose and personal values. In addition to his teaching and research responsibilities, he serves as the Vice-President of Jean Monnet University, overseeing entrepreneurship and continuing education initiatives.

Nicole Gross is an Associate Professor at the National College of Ireland. Her research interests lie in technology marketing, especially in healthcare markets, where she looks at market making and market shaping, practice-research, business models and market innovation. Her research has been published in Organization Studies, Business & Society, Marketing Theory, Organization, the Journal of Marketing Management and the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research.

Steve Johnson is Emeritus Professor of Enterprise at Sheffield Business School, Sheffield Hallam University. He has held research leadership positions in three UK business schools, and he was director of a small economic and policy consultancy. Throughout his career he has operated at the intersection of research, practice and policy, working with local, regional and international agencies, including OECD, the European Commission and the UK Commission for Employment and Skills. His most recent publications have explored the role of ‘pracademics’ in business school research and the impact of business and entrepreneurship research on policy and practice. He is passionate about reforming research assessment and career pathways to recognise the diverse contribution and impact of the academic community. He sits on the Research Committee of the Chartered Association of Business Schools and is a Board member of the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

Gabi Kaffka is a Postdoctoral Researcher working for the Strategic Alliance (a collaboration of the Utrecht University, the Academic Medical Centre Utrecht, Wageningen University and Eindhoven University of Technology). In her studies on cognitive development of professionals, she specifically focusses on socially situated, cognitive mechanisms enabling adaptive performance of individuals. In the past, she has worked for the Higher Education Authority in Ireland, and led a Dutch project on development of an interactive tool for building and growing public–private partnerships in regional innovation ecosystems, and was Project Manager of the EU-funded project ‘Evaluation of Entrepreneurship Education Programmes in Higher Education’ yielding the EPIC tool, accessible via heinnovate.eu, for assessment of higher education learning outcomes that reflect development of entrepreneurial thinking and behaviour.

Norris Krueger was Assistant Professor at Boise State University for seven years and Founder/Director of TEAMS, an entrepreneurship program that earned six national and two global best practice awards (including SBA and the Kauffman Foundation). His academic career includes positions as Director at Large for the International Council for Small Business (and member of ICSBs Online Learning Excellence) and twice as an elected Officer in the Academy of Management. He chairs the Global Scholar Development Committee. He has also been External Fellow for the Max Planck Institute for Economics and presently is Senior Research Fellow for the School for Advanced Studies for University of Phoenix (since 2014), as well as Senior Subject Matter Expect at OECD/EU HE Innovate and Entrepreneurship360 (since 2012).

Joanne Larty is Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at Lancaster University Management School, a member of the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business and a member of the Centre for Global Eco-Innovation at Lancaster Environment Centre. Her research focusses on sustainable regional development and entrepreneurship education for sustainability. She has been Co-I, and Entrepreneurship Work Package Lead, on RECIRCULATE, a £7M GCRF-funded circular water economy project in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as Lead Academic on British Council projects on Innovation in African Universities, and Digital Education, with an emphasis on capacity building in entrepreneurial thinking for sustainability.

Sandrine Le Pontois is an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University Jean Monnet-Saint-Etienne (France). Her research interests include the evaluation of the impact of entrepreneurship education, the role of emotions in the entrepreneurial process and the support of entrepreneurs in the ecological transition (Anthropocene era).

Marta Lindvert holds a PhD in Business from Mid Sweden University. She is currently enrolled as Associate Professor at Nord University Business School, Norway. Her research interest is primarily focussed on entrepreneurship and gender, and on how different cultural contexts influence how men and women gain access to resources in different ways. Her research has highlighted preconditions for women’s entrepreneurship in several developing countries, particularly focussing on the role of social capital for women’s resource acquisition. Furthermore, she is interested in entrepreneurship education and its potential to train change agents who can contribute to sustainable development. In her teaching on entrepreneurship and financing, she emphasises aspects of inclusion, ethics and sustainability.

Oliver Mallett is a Professor in Entrepreneurship at Stirling Management School, University of Stirling. He previously worked at Durham University Business School and Newcastle University Business School and, prior to joining academia, spent nearly 10 years working as a civil servant for the UK Department for Work and Pensions. Her research focusses on the sociology of entrepreneurship, principally in terms of the experience of self-employment and employment relationships in small firms. He also researches the context for this activity in terms of enterprise policy and business support.

Héctor José Martínez Arboleya is a Full-Time Professor in the International Business Programme at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua in Hidalgo del Parral, Mexico. He holds a PhD in Geographic Sciences from Laval University in Quebec, Canada. His work has been disseminated in four languages. His most recent work has been published in the Contemporary Issues in Entrepreneurship Research book series. He has conducted quantitative and qualitative research. His research interest includes migrant entrepreneurship, international migration and sustainable rural livelihoods. He is member of the National System of Researchers in Mexico. He is also involved in teaching several master level courses in research methods, diversity, equity and inclusion. He has also had experience as an entrepreneur. In 2021, he obtained the first national place in the Trepcamp for teachers in Mexico with the development of an app to manage natural disasters.

Peter McLuskie is a Lecturer in enterprise and innovation at Keele University Business School. He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Fellow of the International Enterprise Educators Programme and currently a member of the Enterprise Educators UK Advisory Committee. His research interests include enterprise intention, entrepreneurial identity and enterprise education. He has contributed to several high-quality conferences and publications, including the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research and the Institute for Small Business Research and Entrepreneurship.

Trudie Murray is a Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Economics at Munster Technological University (MTU) and a Researcher with MTU’s Hincks Centre for Entrepreneurship Excellence. She is an active member of both MTU’s PACE (Promoting & Accelerating Campus Entrepreneurship) and CPEER (Community of Practice for Entrepreneurship Educators and Researchers) committees. Her research interests include entrepreneurial education within early childhood (preschool) education, sustainable entrepreneurship, inclusive entrepreneurship and small firm innovation.

Nicolai Nybye, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Applied Research in Business and Technology, UCL University College, Denmark, is researching the meaning-making in entrepreneurial processes as these unfold in contexts of both business and non-business education. In this, he investigates more paradoxical evidence of entrepreneurship in curricular education and as extracurricular activities. His research challenges one-size-fits all tendencies in entrepreneurship education to address possibilities and barriers for students to engage with meaning in innovation and entrepreneurship courses and projects. He has wide professional experience from practice in companies, own firm, voluntary work and the academic field as educator and researcher.

Catherine Olphin is a PhD candidate at Lancaster University Management School and a member of the Centre for Global Eco-Innovation at Lancaster Environment Centre. She works closely with Eco-i NW, a £14m research university–business collaboration initiative aiming to promote sustainable entrepreneurship across the north-west of England and is currently working with RECIRCULATE, a circular economy initiative based across sub-Saharan Africa. Her research focusses on questions of place, the transdisciplinary nature of sustainability, university–business sustainability partnerships and the ways in which we assess value and priorities through evaluation of sustainability initiatives.

Piritta Parkkari earned her PhD from the University of Lapland, Finland, in 2019, specialising in the practice-based construction of entrepreneurship. Her doctoral dissertation delved into the promotion of entrepreneurship and explored both the intended and unintended consequences that arise from such efforts. By blending critical and practice theoretical perspectives, she advanced our understanding of how entrepreneurship is constructed. Notably, she conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among student- and other volunteer-led communities known as ‘Entrepreneurship Societies,’ which aim to foster start-up entrepreneurship in Finland. Driven by her passion for developing entrepreneurship education, she has since dedicated her expertise to cultivating diverse practices and fostering a comprehensive understanding of entrepreneurship education. Currently, she works as a Project Researcher at the University of Eastern Finland’s Business School.

Sarah Preedy is a Lecturer in Enterprise at the University of Plymouth. Her research focusses on the role, value and impact of enterprise education; most recently she has explored entrepreneurial learning through engagement in extracurricular enterprise activities and the development of entrepreneurial identity and intention in HE students. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Fellow of Enterprise Educators UK, member of the Enterprise Educators UK Advisory Council and a Certified Management and Business Educator for the Chartered Association of Business Schools.

Katrina Pritchard is a Professor in the School of Management, Swansea University. She is a qualitative researcher who embraces methodological diversity and innovation. She has published widely on topics ranging from digital ethics, ethnography and visual studies to multi-method research in organisation studies across the topics of entrepreneurship, identity, diversity and technology use at work. With Rebecca Whiting, she recently authored Collecting Qualitative Data using Digital Methods (2020, Sage) and with Gillian Symon and Christine Hine, edited Research Methods for Digital Work and Organisation (2021, OUP).

Sandra Milena Santamaria-Alvarez holds a doctoral degree from Newcastle University Business School and Grenoble Ecole de Management. She holds an MBA from Universidad EAFIT and is currently a Professor in the Global Management area at Universidad EAFIT (Medellín, Colombia). Her research interest includes migrant entrepreneurship, migrant transnationalism, migration and international business, international entrepreneurship, territories internationalisation and nonmarket strategy.

Heiko Marc Schmidt is a PhD candidate at Universidad EAFIT in Medellin, Colombia, where he works as a Professor in the Global Management area. His current research focusses on practice and process approaches at the intersection of strategy, entrepreneurship and international business, with a focus on international entrepreneurship and ecosystems. He received previous degrees in Business Administration from NEOMA Business School in Reims, France and ESB Business School in Reutlingen, Germany.

Erno T. Tornikoski is Professor in Entrepreneurship and the Director of the Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Exeter Business School since 2019. His research interests involve the application of psychological and sociological theories, and both qualitative and quantitative methods to entrepreneurship to investigate how enterprising individuals transform entrepreneurial ideas into new value creating activities. He has a particular interest in gestation activities, decision-making logics, the construct of control, and qualitative process studies. In addition, he is exploring new research ideas connecting entrepreneurship with regenerative value creation and community resilience. His research has appeared in Journal of Business Venturing, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Organization & Environment, Journal of Small Business Economics International Small Business Journal, among others.

David Tyfield is Professor in Sustainable Transitions and Political Economy at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, and an Associate Director of Lancaster’s Centre for Mobilities Research. His research focusses on issues of low-carbon transition and ‘ecological civilisation’ in China, especially urban e-mobility and associated infrastructures, which he has been studying since 2007. He has been PI and Co-I on projects from UK Research Councils and the EU worth over £3M. His latest book is Liberalism 2.0 and the Rise of China: Global Crisis, Innovation, Urban Mobility (2018, Routledge) and he is a Co-editor of Mobilities journal.

Caroline Verzat is Associate Professor at ESCP Business School in the Sustainability Department. She teaches social psychology, entrepreneurship and innovation projects. She also has an artistic activity as a painter using collage techniques. Mixing academic knowledge and artistic creativity, she designs educational action-research for the ecological transition.

Robert Wapshott is an Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Haydn Green Institute, University of Nottingham. His research into entrepreneurship and small business management focusses on employment relationships and management practices along with the relationship between smaller businesses and their external environment. With Oliver Mallett, he has explored the development of policy for small firms, most recently in the monograph Small Business, Big Government and the Origins of Enterprise Policy: The UK Bolton Committee, published by Routledge.

Helen Williams is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Management, Swansea University. Her research takes a critical perspective to explore contemporary understandings of diverse identities at work. Her other interests include the use and development of qualitative methods, with a particular focus on multi-modal approaches. Her recent research uses a range of visual and creative methods to investigate how entrepreneurship is constructed and enacted within neoliberal contexts.

Preface

There have been increasing calls for methodological and theoretical variety when researching entrepreneurship and related areas, to mobilise creative ways for developing, generating and analysing empirical data. This requires researchers to recognise and explore how to research through the adoption of a variety of approaches be that deductive, inductive or a plurality of methods and logic. This publication seeks to assist and inspire both existing and future scholars/researchers in the field to make more informed methodological choices and offer tangible evidence of good practice. In so doing, we can more accurately reflect the lives of entrepreneurs and their experiences. As editors, we have openly sought to encourage the development of reflexive articles, both conceptual and empirical, which illustrate the messy, heterogeneous and problematic nature of entrepreneurship research.

A key characteristic of the publication is the different ‘framing’ of questions that enhance theoretical and practical knowledge. Through this publication, we have collectively, both editors and contributors, provided an opportunity for constructively aligning contributions that benefit from the juxta-positioning of rigour with relevance. The publication has drawn contributions from established global scholars to generate topical point of discussions and practice that reflects an international collection of contributions, perspectives and interests, reflecting contributions to the theme of innovative research practices from the field.