Susan S. Harmeling

When Contingency is a Resource: Educating Entrepreneurs in the Balkans, the Bronx, and Beyond

The research project described in this paper began as an inductive field study of entrepreneurship education in two very different settings—a university in war–torn Eastern Croatia and an entrepreneurship program in inner–city high schools in the United States. It evolved into a study of the two unlikely entrepreneurs who founded these education initiatives. Through a detailed counterfactual analysis of the narratives on the programs’ founding and evolution, we offer compelling evidence for the role of contingency in the entrepreneurial process. We present an inductive conceptual framework of responses to contingency based on entrepreneurs’ beliefs about agency and environment and conclude with implications of this research for entrepreneurship education.

Re‐storying an entrepreneurial identity: education, experience and self‐narrative

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the ways in which entrepreneurship education may serve as an identity workspace.Design/methodology/approach – This is a conceptual/theoretical paper based on previously completed empirical work.Findings – The paper makes the connection between worldmaking, experience, action and identity.Practical implications – The paper furthers understanding of entrepreneurship education and its potential effect on the identity of participants. It stresses the importance of offering entrepreneurship education participants the opportunity to take entrepreneurial action. It has implications for the existing state of entrepreneurship education, e.g. the focus on business plans in the absence of an exploration of the identity of participants.Originality/value – The paper is an original exploration of the linkage between entrepreneurship education and identity and has implications for both pedagogy and practice.

Best address: the use of innovative marketing in the real estate industry

Purpose – This paper seeks to explore the successful entrepreneurial marketing communications done by a small, residential real estate firm, Best Address® LLC, in Washington, DC (USA). The goal of the study is to develop an understanding of best practices used by this firm that can translate into marketing tactics used by other small businesses.Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative research was conducted to investigate the tactics used by Best Address® LLC along with an extensive academic literature search to provide support for the studys findings.Findings – The service quality portrayed by the firms marketing communication efforts were examined and the key tactics used by this firm were categorized into three areas that fall in line with previous research on successful entrepreneurial marketing strategy. This paper concludes by presenting a theoretical model that conceptualizes service quality as a function of the marketing communications efforts executed by a firm in hopes of guiding entrepreneur...

Entrepreneurship and Human Progress: Contingency as a Resource

The author defines entrepreneurship as the process through which ‘private obsession’ fulfils ‘public need’ (Rorty, 1989, p 37). Adopting this definition as a starting point, narratives are used to illustrate how all the different types of ‘entrepreneurs’ – business people, social entrepreneurs, leaders of political movements – use both personal and historical contingency as resources to fulfil human needs in the public marketplace. This perspective helps to reconcile recent debates in the academic community about both the nature of entrepreneurial opportunity and the problem of embedded agency in institutional entrepreneurship. Throughout the paper, pragmatist philosophy provides theoretical support for this depiction of the entrepreneurial process guiding and shaping a dynamic human landscape.