This article contributes to contemporary debates concerning the impact of regulation on small business performance. Reassessing previous studies, we build our insights on their useful, but partial, approaches. Prior studies treat regulation principally as a static and negative influence, thereby neglecting the full range of regulatory effects on business performance. This study adopts a more nuanced approach, one informed by critical realism, that conceptualises social reality as stratified, and social causality in terms of the actions of human agents situated within particular social-structural contexts. We theorise regulation as a dynamic force, enabling as well as constraining performance, generating contradictory performance effects. Such regulatory effects flow directly from adaptations to regulation, and indirectly via relationships with the wide range of close and distant stakeholders with whom small businesses interact. Future research should examine these contradictory regulatory influences on small business performance.
This paper makes a contribution to critical entrepreneurship studies through exploring 'barefoot’ entrepreneur[ing], i.e., the entrepreneurial practices and narratives of individuals who live primarily in marginal, poor and excluded places and contexts. Drawing on Max-Neef’s barefoot economics and a methodology based on the authoring and sharing of microstorias, the article asks how agents in deprived areas of Chile, Argentina, Zimbabwe and Ghana undertake entrepreneur[ing] from the margins or ‘periphery’. The paper challenges us to seek better explanations for how these individuals apply their entrepreneurial practices, discourses, (social) creativity, and novel organisational skills to maintain communal, organisational, familial and personal wellbeing. We conclude that their imaginary, their narratives, and their overcoming of very real challenges as we encounter them through these microstorias, question the predominant conceptualisation of entrepreneurship. We are emboldened to think again about ‘who is the entrepreneur?’ (Gartner, 1988) and what really are the principles and values that should be associated with the concept, the organisation, and the identities of agents involved
In this article we draw upon the philosophy of critical realism to reflect upon and offer a resolution to two issues concerning discovery processes and opportunity development. First, paradoxes in the relationship between opportunity discovery and creativity are identified and explained. Second, the question of how to investigate opportunities is discussed and a solution informed by critical realism is presented, whereby three new types of discovery are identified and defined for empirical investigation. Using critical realism to augment entrepreneurial opportunity theory we propose that discovery processes have significance beyond discovery theory and can be considered revealing for theories of opportunity development more generally. We conclude with conceptual and practical comment on the importance of ontological theorising for entrepreneurship.
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Three dimensions are proposed as a conceptual framework for entrepreneurship education: context, behaviours and process. Entrepreneurship educators have focussed more on the behaviours of entrepreneurs and less on the process of entrepreneurship. In doing so, they have also tended to avoid challenging the context of other disciplines such as marketing. If however we examine important aspects of marketing through the behaviours of entrepreneurs, we find that they do not conform to the standard concepts of marketing as portrayed in widely used learning materials. The increasingly well travelled 'pragmatic' road, which encourages the development of enterprising behaviours and skills, is contrasted with the less travelled 'conceptual' road, where our understanding of the phenomenon of entrepreneurship in contexts such as marketing, is challenged and explained. We suggest that unlike the poet's 'traveller' -who cannot take both roads, entrepreneurship education can benefit most by reaching the fork in the road and taking it. Keywords:entrepreneurship; entrepreneurs; marketing; education; entrepreneurial marketing; word-of-mouth marketing; referrals. D. Stokes and N.C. WilsonNick Wilson is Course Director of Kingston University's Programme of Masters courses in the Creative Economy, and Principal Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management. He has undertaken a range of research and consultancy projects focusing on the creative industries and the creative economy, including projects commissioned by the DCMS, Arts Council of England, and the LDA. His current research interests include developing critical realist theories of entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation and related social processes, and the development of multi-disciplinary learning in creativity and management.
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