Jennifer E. Jennings

Extending women’s entrepreneurship research in new directions

The dramatic expansion of scholarly interest and activity in the field of womens entrepreneurship within recent years has done much to correct the historical inattention paid to female entrepreneurs and their initiatives. Yet, as the field continues to develop and mature, there are increasingly strong calls for scholars to take their research in new directions. Within this introduction to the special issue, we expand upon the reasons for this call, describe who responded, and summarize the new frontiers explored within the work appearing in this and another related collection. We conclude by delineating new territories for researchers to explore, arguing that such endeavors will join those in this volume in not only addressing the criticisms raised to date, but also in generating a richer and more robust understanding of womens entrepreneurship.

Worlds Apart? Rebridging the Distance Between Family Science and Family Business Research

This article demonstrates how the combined approaches of informed pluralism and disciplined integration can help rebridge the distance between the seemingly disparate academic worlds of family science and family business. The authors establish the need for such a resynthesis by documenting trends within family enterprise research from 1985 to 2010. The analysis vividly illustrates not only the increased dominance of publication outlets and theoretical perspectives associated with business but also the near disappearance of those associated with family. In light of these trends, the authors suggest that renewed attention to integrating ideas from the two disciplines is likely to enrich both. To illustrate this claim, this study combines concepts from long-standing theories within the family science literature (structural functionalism and symbolic interactionism) with those from predominant perspectives within the family business literature (agency theory and the resource-based view). The outcome is a series of provocative yet relevant potential new directions for each field.

Gender and entrepreneurial self-efficacy: a learning perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the four major factors known to contribute to self-efficacy in general (enactive mastery, vicarious experience, physiological arousal and verbal persuasion) can help account for observed differences in the entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) of young women and men, in particular. Design/methodology/approach – The authors adopted a two-stage design, which included collecting data from 222 university students via an online survey followed by a quasi-experiment involving an opportunity evaluation task. Findings – The findings demonstrate that the significantly lower ESE of the young women in the sample was attributable to their lower level of prior entrepreneurial experience, their lower level of positive and negative affect towards entrepreneurship and their higher likelihood of receiving failure feedback due to their actual performance on an opportunity evaluation task. Research limitations/implications – Given the importance of understanding w...

Living the Dream? Assessing the “Entrepreneurship as Emancipation” Perspective in a Developed Region

This paper seeks to stimulate additional research on the entrepreneurship–as–emancipation perspective. We extend extant work by specifying the practices within developed regions from which entrepreneurs arguably pursue liberation and then developing hypotheses pertaining to the incidence, determinants, and outcomes associated with departure from such norms. Our survey findings offer evidence to question not only the prevalence with which entrepreneurs in such contexts deviate from the status quo, but also the characteristics of those who enact greater departure. On average, women are not more likely to do so; moreover, they tend to be less satisfied overall when they do deviate highly.

Is It Better to Govern Managers via Agency or Stewardship? Examining Asymmetries by Family Versus Nonfamily Affiliation:

This article examines whether agency or stewardship is the more effective form of managerial governance within family firms. Synthesizing arguments regarding the differential tendencies of nonfamily versus family managers and the bifurcated manner in which they are likely to be governed, we propose asymmetric responses to agency versus stewardship mechanisms. Our empirical results provide evidence challenging common assumptions regarding the behavior exhibited by nonfamily versus family managers and the mechanisms by which each is governed. Although our findings also provide evidence of response asymmetry, they nevertheless point to the greater effectiveness of stewardship over agency governance irrespective of a manager’s family affiliation.

The Strategic Positioning of Professional Service Firm Start-Ups: Balance Beguiles but Purism Pays

How do new professional service firms strategically position themselves in fields where developing a favourable external reputation is critical to performance? Are certain positioning strategies more effective than others? This study reveals that most professional service firm start-ups attempt to establish themselves by pursuing a strategy of moderate divergence from a fields institutionalized practices. Those that do so, however, do not perform as well as those that either conform more closely to these institutional prescriptions or depart more radically from them. In other words, balance beguiles but purism pays.

6. Should women go into business with their family partner

This study investigates outcomes pertinent to a growing yet underinvestigated subcategory of female entrepreneurs: the ‘copreneurial women’ who operate businesses with their spouse or significant other. In North America, copreneurship represents a sizeable and increasing segment of the small business sector. Ruef et al. (2003), for example, found that over half (53 per cent) of the multimember founding teams in their US sample were comprised of married couples or cohabiting partners. In Canada, more than twothirds (68 per cent) of the country’s dual selfemployed couples were in business together in 1998 (Marshall, 1999). Indeed, copreneurial firms have been touted as the fastestgrowing segment of not only familybased businesses (Gardner, 1991) but also the small business sector as a whole (Eggertson, 2007). Despite their increasing prevalence, surprisingly limited academic research has been conducted on copreneurs. This oversight is likely attributable to the individualistic orientation that permeates both the entrepreneurship literature in general (as noted by Gartner et al., 1994) and women’s entrepreneurship research in particular (as identified by Ahl, 2006). Although work on entrepreneurial teams is starting to appear (for a review see Blatt, 2009), this, too, tends to ignore the impact of spousal relationships on team dynamics and outcomes. This is so even within studies examining such constructs as sex composition (Godwin et al. 2006), family membership (Ucbasaran et al., 2003) or cohesion and conflict (Ensley et al. 2002). Ruef et al.’s (2003) investigation represents a notable exception, but its focus was on the factors that influenced the initial composition of entrepreneurial founding teams rather than the subsequent outcomes. Those interested in knowing whether married couples or cohabiting partners who run businesses together experience different outcomes (for

Looking in the Other Direction: An Ethnographic Analysis of How Family Businesses Can Be Operated to Enhance Familial Well-Being:

While much family business research has examined how family ownership affects businesses, this paper raises a question consistent with enquiries in the latter direction: How can family firms be operated to enhance the well-being of owning families and their members? We address this question by analyzing ethnographic data collected from an “extreme case” of both family enterprising and familial well-being: Hutterite colonies in Western Canada. Our findings suggest three enterprise-level strategies and three task-level practices that strengthen family member satisfaction and family system effectiveness.

Introduction: a framework for studying the ‘double embeddedness’ of business enterprising

Over a decade ago, Aldrich and Cliff (2003) called for a ‘family embeddedness’ perspective on entrepreneurship research, urging scholars to consider how familyrelated factors impact—and are impacted by—venture creation processes and outcomes (see also Rogoff and Heck, 2003). As noted by Sharma, Melin, and Nordqvist (2014), the reciprocal influence of family and business has been of even longerstanding interest within the family enterprise literature, arguably constituting the field’s distinctive focus. While research in both areas has progressed rapidly, knowledge of the myriad ways in which the families and firms of ownermanagers affect one another is far from complete. In the entrepreneurship literature, empirical studies consistent with the family embeddedness perspective remain relatively rare (for examples see Eddleston and Powell, 2012; Gras and Nason, forthcoming; Powell and Eddleston, 2013; Zellweger, Sieger, and Halter, 2011). And even in recent reviews of the family business literature, the need for greater attention to family variables is a dominant refrain (Danes, 2014; James, Jennings, and Breitkreuz, 2012; McKenney, Payne, Zachary, and Short, 2014; Yu, Lumpkin, Sorenson, and Brigham, 2012). Paralleling the call for increased consideration of familyrelated factors is that for an enhanced appreciation of the broader economic, institutional and cultural environments in which business enterprises are also embedded. Within the entrepreneurship literature, the latter appeal is a salient if not primary theme cutting across numerous essays (for example, Ucbasaran, Westhead, and Wright, 2001; Welter, 2011; Zahra and Wright, 2011; Zahra, Wright, and Abdelgawad, 2014) and special issues of academic journals (for example, Bruton, Ahlstrom, and Obloj, 2008; Jennings, Greenwood, Lounsbury, and Suddaby, 2013; Krueger, Liñán, and Nabi, 2013). It is also a key raison d’être of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) initiative. Within the family business literature, the need

Charting the Collective Interest in Collective Entrepreneurship: An Integrative Review

The collective entrepreneurship phenomenon has received fragmented theoretical consideration across multiple domains. Our paper represents an initial attempt to explore the multiple discourses arou...