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Video research methods provide a powerful yet accessible way for researchers to observe and theorize entrepreneurial phenomena by analyzing entrepreneurship "in motion." Despite the growing uptake of video data in entrepreneurship research, there is no available overview or analysis of current uses of video research methods, which makes it difficult for interested researchers to grasp its value and possibilities. Our systematic review of 142 entrepreneurship research articles published in leading journals reveals three dominant video research methods: (a) videography of entrepreneurship "in the wild" (such as pitching and other naturally occurring practices); (b) video content analysis using entrepreneur-generated videos (such as crowdfunding and archival videos); and (c) video elicitation in "manufactured" contexts (such as interviews and focus groups, experiments and interventions). Building on these studies, we put forward a research agenda for video-based entrepreneurship research that capitalizes on the unique affordances of video to understand the interactional, embodied, material, and emotional nature of entrepreneurial practice.

The idea of “applying theory to practice” is one of the core beliefs at the heart of social work education. It now informs an extensive literature and underpins teaching on theory and methods cours...

In this paper, we use practice theory to expand what is known about entrepreneurial expertise. The study presents evidence suggesting that expertise is accomplished by entrepreneurial team members for and by themselves in ordinary workplace interactions. We discuss four types of expertise that reveal how entrepreneuring practitioners establish and assess knowledge positions given uncertainty constraints, integrate external abstract knowledge into their situation, and reject or replace their lived experiences with abstract knowledge. The study advances theory on entrepreneurial expertise and contributes to the literature of the entrepreneurship-as-practice.

PurposeDespite the gains that have been made by adopting contemporary theories of practice in entrepreneurship studies, the field still lacks a comprehensive practice theory of entrepreneurial learning. In this article, we develop a practice theory of entrepreneurial learning by elaborating on the relations between practicing, knowing and learning.Design/methodology/approachUsing a video ethnography of a two-day “Startup Weekend for Refugees” event in Amsterdam, our aim is to further theorise the relational, material and embodied nature of entrepreneurial learning through analysing video fragments of naturally occurring practices.FindingsOur findings demonstrate that entrepreneurial learning transpires through, and is emergent from, practices and their relations. On the one hand, practitioners learn to competently participate in various practices by sensing, observing and experimenting with the meaning of others' gestures and utterances. On the other, the learning of new opportunities for value creation emerges as practitioners connect various practices to one another through translation.Originality/valueThis article contributes by illustrating and explaining real-time instances of learning to develop a practice theory of entrepreneurial learning. This contributes to the literature by detailing the relations between learning, knowing and practising entrepreneurship, which leads to a novel alternative to existing individual- and organisational-level learning theories.

In this article, we contend that entrepreneurship studies would greatly benefit from engagement with contemporary theorizations of practice. The practice tradition conceives of the process of entrepreneuring as the enactment and entanglement of multiple practices. Appreciating entrepreneurial phenomena as the enactment and entanglement of practices orients researchers to an ontological understanding of entrepreneuring as relational, material and processual. Therefore, practice theories direct scholars towards observing and explaining the real-time practices of entrepreneuring practitioners. Articles in this special issue on ‘entrepreneurship-as-practice’ are discussed and suggestions for future research and scholarship that utilize contemporary theorizations of practice are offered.

The study of future-making – how practitioners make and enact imagined futures – has become a cornerstone for understanding the temporal dynamics of organization, strategy and entrepreneurship. This article investigates the texture of practical knowledge that enables entrepreneuring practitioners to jointly address the challenges inherent to future-making. We conduct a video ethnography of a business modelling programme producing 79 hours of audio-visual recordings. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we unpack different forms of practical knowledge that simultaneously binds practitioners in a web of mutual expectations and establishes modes of thinking and acting for the creation of imagined futures. This contributes to existing studies by demonstrating that the discursive, embodied and material dimensions of future-making are fundamentally entangled within textures of practical knowledge. Consequently, we shift the mode of theorizing towards non-representationalism, which opens up new frontiers for future research to observe, participate and reflect with practitioners on the textures of practical knowledge constitutive of future-making in different circumstances and contexts.

Heeding calls to generate a creative synthesis between business history and organisation studies, this article analyses the emergence, institutionalisation and digitalisation of record pooling practices through the lens of institutional work. By developing an ‘analytically structured history’, this article contributes to the field of business history by demonstrating the value of practice and boundary work as organising categories. Practice and boundary work capture the continuous, recursive relations between structure and agency when constructing narrative explanations. It also contributes to neo-institutionalist history by demonstrating the embeddedness of institutional work – the everyday motivations and actions to revise practices and boundaries are shown to be intimately shaped by the conditions and affordances of historically-situated technologies.

Little is known of the effect of entrepreneurs’ happiness on living standards in the world’s developing countries. This study explores (1) the causal relationship of entrepreneurs’ happiness and living standards; and (2) examines the interaction effects of socio-demographics (i.e. gender, age and education) and happiness on living standards in a developing context: Zambia. Following a qualitative pre-study with local experts, we develop a quantitative survey study including a unique sample of 170 entrepreneurs in Zambia. The analyses show that the entrepreneurs are relatively happy and an increasing level of happiness is related to an increasing standard of living. Moreover, the entrepreneurs’ happiness moderated by age (i.e. being older and happy) and education (i.e. being better-educated and happy) is a strong positive determinant of their living standard. The entrepreneurs’ awareness of the factors conducive to being happy, as well as the practitioners focussing on the social conditions of happiness, is instrumental.

The central role of meaning making has long been recognized in the literature relating to loss, grief and trauma, but its significance in relation to resilience has tended to feature much less. This chapter explores the complex interrelationships between resilience and meaning making. It locates meaning making and, by extension, resilience in a broader sociological context by showing that personal (or “biographical”) meanings need to be understood as part of wider frameworks of meaning—frameworks that have much to do with cultural and structural aspects of wider society. While it is recognized that we each, in a very real sense, create our own meanings; the “raw materials” from which we do so and the patterns we adopt in doing so are rooted in social processes, institutions, discourses and so on.

How does the articulation of a business idea take place? Despite the extent of research on opportunities, there is still a lack of insight into the experience of opportunity pursuit. Opportunity research identifies a gap in understanding the transition between imagined and real structures, from individual aspirations to social structures. Adopting a practice perspective to the pursuit of opportunities implies the individual mind is no longer the sole setting of opportunity pursuit. Instead, we prioritise the practices and underlying activities which drive opportunity pursuit. Taking an enterprise development program as the site of our study, we conduct a video ethnography to observe a group of nascent entrepreneurs as they develop their business ideas. Our study identifies key practices that emerged as participants developed their business idea. The relational, aesthetic and sociomaterial dimensions of these practices implies an alternative perspective to the prevailing individualistic and cognitive impression of how opportunities are pursued.

With this special issue we aim at furthering the entrepreneurship as practice perspective by grounding the broader and contemporary ‘practice turn’ in social science (Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and vo...

The topic of well-being is one that is receiving increasing attention in a number of academic fields and professional disciplines. It is a concept that can be used as a unifying theme to link together a number of important concepts that have significant implications for professional education and practice across the human services. This article explores different aspects of well-being, differentiates well-being from the now-stigmatized term of welfare, and argues that professional education has much to be gained from adopting a well-being approach. It presents well-being as an important basis for addressing issues relating to illness, crisis, and loss.

Dying, death, and bereavement do not occur in a social vacuum. How individuals and groups experience these phenomena will be largely influenced by the social context in which they occur. To develop an adequate understanding of dying, death, and bereavement we therefore need to incorporate a sociological perspective into our analysis. This article examines why a sociological perspective is necessary and explores various ways in which sociology can be of practical value in both intellectual and professional contexts. A case study comparing psychological and sociological perspectives is offered by way of illustration.

Scholars adopting a relational ontology of organisational creativity have shifted attention away from a preoccupation with individual minds towards that which is enacted, emergent, shared, unpredictable and contingent. This article follows suit, yet breaks new ground by reconsidering how the mind plays an active role in unfolding creative interactions by building a bridge between literature on organisational creativity, aesthetics and philosophy of imagination. I draw on English Romanticism to craft a theoretical model of organisational creativity as an aesthetic and relational process of shared imagining. This model demonstrates how organisational members use primary and secondary modes of imagination and creative expression to develop, materialise and share perceptions and images of possible futures. By elaborating on their interplay, this article contributes to literature by theorising an active and generative role of mind that does not have the ontological shortcomings of leading theories. In turn, this has a number of implications for literature on entrepreneurship and organisational creativity in terms of situating and embodying creative thinking, explaining the intentionality and motivation for creative actions, overcoming perceptual differences and changing practices and routines.

There has been an increasing interest in reflective practice in recent years, but the theory base underpinning it remains relatively underdeveloped. We have seen a move away from essentialist ‘technicalism’ to a more constructivist exploratory approach consistent with existentialist philosophy. This paper therefore explores how existentialism can be used as a more sophisticated and wide‐ranging theory base to underpin the future development of reflective practice.

Ethics are, of course, a fundamental part of professional practice. There are different philosophical schools of thought relating to ethics and, although there are often degrees of overlap, they are characterized more by difference than harmony. Among these philosophical schools, one school that has received relatively little attention in the professional literature (and a waning level of interest in the philosophical literature) is that of existentialism. This article outlines some of the main points of ethical theory in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the founders of existentialist thought, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the best known of the existentialist thinkers, as well as other contributors to existentialist thought. Possible developments in existentialist ethical theory since the time of Sartre are also sketched out, and these are linked to contemporary social work concerns.