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Entrepreneurship has long been recognized as a key socioeconomic activity that is essential for regional economic development. Entrepreneurship research in developing countries often uses macro level or meso level analyses of large surveys to examine institutional constraints and enablers of entrepreneurial activities, which can mask fascinating insights on day to day practices.This book reveals insider perspectives of the everyday struggles of Tanzanian and Zambian entrepreneurs by distinguishing institutional constraints and enablers, and sustainability practices as responses to those opportunities and barriers. The book contributes to existing literature by providing entrepreneurs from sub-Saharan Africa the opportunity to illustrate how their institutional context influences their sustainability practices at the micro level. Written for scholars of Business and Entrepreneurship, this book showcases how entrepreneurs use creative and bricolage methods to implement sustainability practices that contribute to social and environmental well-being.

The compact linear accelerator for research and applications (CLARA) is an ultrabright electron beam test facility being developed at STFC Daresbury Laboratory. The ultimate aim of CLARA is to test advanced free electron laser (FEL) schemes that can later be implemented on existing and future short-wavelength FELs. In addition, CLARA is a unique facility to provide a high-quality electron beam to test novel concepts and ideas in a wide range of disciplines and to function as a technology demonstrator for a future United Kingdom x-ray FEL facility. CLARA is being built in three phases; the first phase, or front end (FE), comprises an S-band rf photoinjector, a linac, and an S-bend merging with the existing versatile electron linear accelerator beam line; the second phase will complete the acceleration to full beam energy of 250 MeV and also incorporate a separate beam line for use of electrons at 250 MeV; and the third phase will include the FEL section. The CLARA FE was commissioned during 2018, and the facility was later made available for user experiments. Significant advancements have been made in developing high-level software and a simulation framework for start-to-end simulations. The high-level software has been successfully used for unmanned rf conditioning and for characterization of the electron beam. This paper describes the design of the CLARA FE, performance of technical systems, high-level software developments, preliminary results of measured beam parameters, and plans for improvements and upgrades. © 2020 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.

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.

If we are to develop an adequate understanding of those forms of loss and grief that are not directly connected with death, one important aspect of social life that needs to be considered is social justice—or, more specifically, social injustice. This chapter therefore explores the significance of discrimination and oppression and their relationship with loss and grief. The primary focus is on discrimination and oppression associated with race and ethnicity, but there are strong parallels with other forms of inequality, such as sexism and ageism. The aim is to highlight a number of key issues that connect discrimination and oppression on the one hand with loss and grief on the other, with a view to contributing to a fuller understanding of the complexities involved.

Understanding experiences of and responses to anxiety is foundational to developing robust theories of entrepreneurial behavior. Using open-ended, vignette and graphical elicitation interviews with 77 entrepreneurs, we inductively investigate the experience of and coping responses to anxiety during the entrepreneurship process. We develop a comprehensive and dynamic goal-striving model to explain experiencing and coping with entrepreneurial anxiety by integrating empirical findings with appraisal and control theories. In doing so, we theorize that entrepreneurial anxiety is endogenous to a cyclical conception of goal-striving, such that various sources of anxiety make sense only in consideration of the goals, standards or values to which they pertain. In this regard, entrepreneurs’ coping responses influence four different points of an iterative goal-striving cycle—an insight that moves beyond problematic static and binary coping classifications.

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.

PurposeEntrepreneurship research in the context of developing countries has typically investigated the ways in which culture, politics or economic institutions prohibit or enable entrepreneurial activities using macro-level surveys and deductive designs. In contrast, the purpose of this paper is to take a micro-institutional perspective to study these three institutions influencing entrepreneurial activities in such a context.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis is based on inductive, qualitative field data from a challenging institutional environment, Tanzania. This includes two focus groups, one with experts and one with entrepreneurs; and 24 individual interviews with entrepreneurs.FindingsEntrepreneurial activities in Tanzania are not constrained only by bureaucracy and arbitrary enforcement, access to capital, competition and consumer spending, but also by language barriers, negative media portrayals and gender disparity. In their favour, recent trade policy, opening up of borders and changing gender relations, has led to more opportunities, but just as important are traditional festivals, marital gift-giving and familial support. Entrepreneurs respond to institutional constraints in many creative ways, including undertaking entrepreneurial strategies, developing inner strength, joining associations, giving back to communities and skilfully managing relations with authorities.Originality/valueThe fine-grained discussion of the findings of this study specifically contributes to theory by illustrating the constraining and enabling role of under-represented institutions, such as festivals and marriages, as well as entrepreneurial creative responses that define everyday entrepreneurial life in a developing country.

Deliberate self-harm (DSH) involves a physical act with the intent of harming the self. There are many precipitants to this behavior, with dissociation receiving increasing attention. The current study examined the quartile risk model for predicting deliberate self-harm, which proposes that four quadrants of dissociation (low normative, high normative, low clinical, and high clinical) represent varying levels of risk for engagement in DSH. The model posits that quadrants one and three (low normative, low clinical), protect against engagement in deliberate self-harm. Quadrants two and four (high normative, high clinical), represent an increased risk of engaging in DSH. The current study also investigated the association between shame and deliberate self-harm. College students (

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...

Well-being is a concept which can connect together a number of important ideas that have a strong resonance for professional education and practice across the human services. This can critically include considerations of illness, crisis, and loss. Such acute moments in individuals’ lives can be examined through their precipitating events, coping mechanisms, and responses. This article explores some of the dimensions of well-being and how they facilitate a greater understanding of illness, crisis, and loss. These deliberations are then exemplified through a focus on alcohol and other drug use.

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.

Entrepreneurship is widely recognized to play a crucial role in transitioning societies towards sustainability, yet sustainable ventures often have difficulty in attracting talented management employees that are necessary to scale their sustainable opportunities. This study examined 19 qualitative interviews with three interview groups (human resource managers of sustainable ventures, recently hired employees at sustainable ventures, and management professionals looking for employment opportunities) to explain the impediments of attracting management talent and what competitive advantages sustainable ventures may have in the labour market. We discuss how these findings have theoretical and practical implications for scholars and sustainable entrepreneurs by drawing out a number of ways that sustainable ventures may attract management professionals.