Julia Rouse

Entrepreneur motivations and life course

In this paper we propose two conceptual developments in understanding entrepreneur motivations and their effects. First, we argue that entrepreneur motivations develop dynamically in relation to career, household and business life courses. Second, we conceptualize how motivation and life courses develop interactively. We present an exploratory test of these ideas. In a sample of enterprise programme participants, we identify motivation profiles employing more robust cluster analyses than hitherto presented: our profiles are termed reluctant, convenience, economically driven, social, learning and earning, and prestige and control entrepreneurs. We then demonstrate statistical relationships between motivation profiles at a particular phase in the business life course (early establishment) and career and household life course factors. Motivations are also related to business resources, behaviour and performance. This initial confirmation of our conceptual claims suggests that further testing is warranted.

The financing of disadvantaged entrepreneurs: Are enterprise programmes overcoming the finance gap?

Purpose – This paper asks whether enterprise programmes are overcoming the finance gap faced by their disadvantaged participants. Specifically, the paper seeks to assessthe level of finance invested by participants on a leading UK enterprise programme, the New Entrepreneur Scholarships (NES).Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on a postal and e‐survey of participants on a leading UK enterprise programme, reporting on 472 respondents. Three capital structure variables (personal investment, external private investment and grants) are employed to analyse the importance of various types of funding in NES businesses. These figures are compared with published data about use of different types of finance, including principal sources of funding, in UK start‐ups. Descriptive statistics of perceptions of under‐capitalisation, and needs for additional funding, are also reported.Findings – NES Scholars make significantly lower start‐up investment than is typical in UK small businesses, particularly in terms...

The gendering of entrepreneurship: theoretical and empirical insights

Purpose – This extended Editorial outlines the genesis and theoretical interests of the Gender and Enterprise Network from which this special issue of the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research emerged. In the call for papers, researchers were asked to employ existing gender theories to explore entrepreneurship. The theories and empirical insights presented in the five papers are summarised and compared. Key directions for future work are outlined. Design/methodology/approach – Articles in the special issue include cross-national studies, multi-level analyses drawing on qualitative and quantitative methods, longitudinal analysis and feminist research. The Editorial explores methodological challenges, including how to encourage cross-national collaboration, research the circumstances in which entrepreneurship is gender liberating and embed gender theory in research on male entrepreneurship. Findings – A comparison is made of the findings from the papers in this special issue, to draw...

Because It's Worth It?: Education Beliefs among Young People and Their Parents in the United Kingdom.

The expansion of post–16 education in the United Kingdom makes young people more dependent, and for longer, on their parents. Generational change has been so great that parents with no history of postschool education are now expected to support children while they study. Some parents adhere to a working-class belief in selfsufficiency through employment. Others are taking an increasingly instrumental approach, believing that investment in education must pay dividends in job prospects. This article examines young people’s pathways between education and work and explores the motivations and pressures underlying choices about which path to take. It identifies uncertain transitions where choices are revised and pathways changed. The research finds that parents have increased power to affect their children’s transitions and that young people without parental support are severely disadvantaged. This study of parental support for transitions in youth involved interviews with young people and their parents in two contrasting English towns.

Young Adults, Partners and Parents: Individual Agency and the Problems of Support

Although young adults in the United Kingdom increasingly defer economic independence, they are still ‘adult’ in other respects. Family and household formation often occur before economic independence is achieved. Parents have increased power to influence their adult childrens early partnership behaviour, by providing or withholding economic support. In the face of social change, however, parents are faced with a dilemma in deciding what to support. Some adapt their beliefs to formulate new and defensible criteria of ‘respectability’, either in a planned way, or in response to a critical event. In others, parents attempt in vain to enforce outdated normative beliefs. Successful partnership formation and a positive parent–child relationship in young adulthood both depend on flexibility in parenting. The ESRC-funded study of parental support during transitions to adulthood involved in-depth interviews with 70 young adults (aged 16–25) and the parents or stepparents of 30 of these, in two areas of England.

Life course pathways to business start-up

We explore how socially embedded life courses of individuals within Britain affect the resources they have available and their capacity to apply those resources to start-up. We propose that there will be common pathways to entrepreneurship from privileged resource ownership and test our propositions by modelling a specific life course framework, based on class and gender. We operationalize our model employing 18 waves of the British Household Panel Survey and event history random effect logistic regression modelling. Our hypotheses receive broad support. Business start-up in Britain is primarily made from privileged class backgrounds that enable resource acquisition and are a means of reproducing or defending prosperity. The poor avoid entrepreneurship except when low household income threatens further downward mobility and entrepreneurship is a more attractive option. We find that gendered childcare responsibilities disrupt class-based pathways to entrepreneurship. We interpret the implications of this study for understanding entrepreneurship and society and suggest research directions.

Investigating the Social Capital and Resource Acquisition of Entrepreneurs Residing in Deprived Areas of England

Enterprise policy in England has focused extensively on funding and training aspiring entrepreneurs residing in deprived areas. These policy initiatives have been directed at increasing the capabilities of entrepreneurs residing in deprived areas without knowing about their social capital and access to resources. This study is based on a survey of entrepreneurs that have completed the New Entrepreneurship Scholarship training programme across the nine regions of England. The findings suggest that social capital helps explain the acquisition of resources entrepreneurs residing in deprived areas need to develop a new venture. However, there seems to be an overreliance on bonding ties for resource acquisition. Too much bonding can lead to redundant resources and ‘getting by’ and may limit growth. In light of these findings several recommendations are developed for the coalition governments Local Enterprise Partnerships policy and the future funding of entrepreneurship initiatives in deprived areas.

Structures of Exclusion from Enterprise Finance

Business start-up is promoted to the labour-market disadvantaged internationally. This policy increasingly draws on the concept of social inclusion. In this paper we define ‘enterprise inclusion’ policy as situating the chance to start a viable business as a right and supporting the multiply disadvantaged to overcome strong barriers to enterprise. We draw on the resource-based view of entrepreneurship to argue that viable business ownership is contingent on access to resources. We explore how access to a primary business resource—start-up finance—relates to intersecting social disadvantages. We report a complex pattern of financial exclusion. Rather than supporting the concept of interconnecting yet separate social divisions, as argued under social inclusion theory, this supports a class-based interpretation of exclusion from enterprise finance. New research and policy agendas are outlined.

Opportunity or dead end? Rethinking the study of entrepreneurial action without a concept of opportunity

This article has two objectives: to critique the dominant opportunity discovery and creation literatures and to propose a new, critical realist–inspired analytical framework to theorise the causes, processes and consequences of entrepreneurial action – one that needs no concept of opportunity. We offer three reasons to support our critique of opportunity studies. First, there are important absences, contradictions and inconsistencies in definitions of opportunity in theoretical and empirical work that mean the term cannot signal a clear direction for theorising or empirical research. Our central criticism is that the concept of opportunity cannot refer simultaneously, without contradiction, to a social context offering profit-making prospects, to particular practices and to agents’ subjective beliefs or imagined futures. Second, a new definition of opportunity would perpetuate the conceptual chaos. Third, useful concepts to capture important entrepreneurial processes are readily available, for instance, combining resources, creating new ventures and achieving product sales, which render a concept of opportunity superfluous. Instead, we conceptualise entrepreneurial action as investments in resources intended to create new goods and services for market exchange emergent from the interaction between agential, social-structural and cultural causal powers.

Engaged or Activist Scholarship? Feminist reflections on philosophy, accountability and transformational potential

Van De Ven’s Engaged Scholarship is becoming institutionalised in the academic profession. His argument that research is radically under-used and more likely to be employed if practitioners engage in shaping research questions and processes is convincing. Nevertheless, Engaged Scholarship has been little critiqued. This article draws on feminist critical realist ontology to compare its philosophy, accountability and transformational potential with a method more familiar to feminism: Activist Scholarship. Engaged Scholarship is found to be underlaboured by a positivist ontology and strong social constructionist epistemology, skewed to the interests of power holders and unlikely to transform underlying social relations. Drawing on Activist Scholarship’s partisan accountability to the marginalised and commitment to collective action, but retaining the possibility of change by engaging power holders, we propose Engaged–Activist Scholarship, a method underlaboured by feminist critical realism, pluralist in its methodology, ambidextrous in its audience and accountable to transforming oppressive contexts.