List of works
Journal article
A train to New Orleans: Creatives, exaptation and community-inspired entrepreneurial action
Published 06/2025
Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 23, e00534
Exaptation, the evolutionary process of originative change, underlies much of creativity and innovation, as skills and knowledge are adapted from serving one purpose to another. In conducting an inductive qualitative field study among 80 street creatives in New Orleans, our key insight is that street creatives learn in community-based gatherings and are able to take knowledge, skills, and traits to other contexts via an exaptation process to enhance their entrepreneurial prospects in the future. Creatives seek out accessible microcosms known for developing artistic, technical, or craft capacities such as community-based gatherings as destinations for their creative journeys. These locations become migration stops for nascent creatives who desire to evolve adaptations that can later be repurposed for more exploitative objectives. To date, researchers have primarily dedicated their efforts to studying the geographies settled by entrepreneurs as final destinations, and little attention has been devoted to the microcosms which creatives journey to as stops to initially develop themselves. Through our inductive field study, we build theory which highlights the value of these overlooked microcosms and the crucial role they play in the creative lifecycle.
•Community gatherings are popular and crucial in the early careers of many creatives.•Community gatherings offer work and experience, but creatives often aim higher.•Exaptation shows how creatives use community events to adapt skills for new ventures.
Journal article
The phantom push: a reevaluation of necessity entrepreneurship
First online publication 04/23/2025
Journal of small business management, online ahead of print
Entrepreneurship research has traditionally been separated into (1) necessity entrepreneurship (NE) and (2) opportunity entrepreneurship (OE). While there has been a great amount of research dedicated to unpacking the nature of opportunities and OE, little attention has been given to the forces that push individuals into NE. Most of the entrepreneurial research regarding NE assumes that economic desires to provide physiological necessities are the only push factors. However, this conceptualization is too restrictive and rules out being recognized as necessity entrepreneurs for most people in developed economies. Through an in-depth qualitative literature review, we identify three types of push factors at work-namely, economic, social, and psychological necessity. We then develop a conceptual model and propositions that incorporate the country context, unmet needs, types of NE, and impact on well-being. We conclude by discussing how NE can satisfy various human needs and the relationship between entrepreneurship and marketplace vulnerability.
Journal article
Published 04/2025
Journal of management, 51, 4, 1547 - 1585
Organizational actors often look to the past to revive practices of the past. A growing body of research suggests that there is opportunity in the past and highlights how dormant or declining industries have been revitalized. We take this line of research a step further by examining how entrepreneurs (reanimators) revive long-since-failed organizations (revenants), a process we refer to as reanimation. Thus, rather than create a "new" venture, many entrepreneurs are turning to revive defunct or "dead" organizations. On the one hand, the act of reviving a dead organization suggests that reanimators perceive value in the failed organization's past; otherwise, why not start something new? On the other hand, theory predicts organizational actors might likely avoid such associations with the past since they are rooted in failure. As such, understanding what elements of an organization's past an entrepreneur retains or discards and how organizational leaders successfully reanimate failed firms is critical to our understanding of entrepreneurship and tradition. During this reanimation process, we observe a fundamental tension between imagination and custodianship. We find that the entrepreneur's ability to resist the urge to leverage their imagination through innovation and instead act as a custodian by honoring the past influences the organization's prospects for survival post-reanimation. Our theorizing offers guidance for understanding the inherent tensions between innovation and tradition in firms with rich histories, the potential downsides of unchecked imagination, and the importance of gaining stakeholder acceptance before exercising the authority to innovate.
Journal article
Relational models and entrepreneurship ecosystems
Published 04/02/2024
International journal of entrepreneurial behaviour & research, 30, 4, 938 - 954
Purpose
Using social relations theory, we argue that entrepreneurship ecosystems must also include relationships such as market pricing, equality matching, authority ranking and communal sharing to be successful and thrive.
Design/methodology/approach
We theorize using Fiske's typology that a successful entrepreneurial system must have certain characteristics to be successful.
Findings
In doing so, we suggest an alternative perspective of the role of exchange relationships in ecosystems which considers both the geographic context and social relationships as equally important ecosystem components. Our contributions include (1) exposing social processes as the explanatory mechanism for exchanges instead of solely market forces, (2) illustrating the role of regional cultural differences in exchanges and (3) emphasizing how entrepreneurs can better realize ecosystem benefits through understanding the methods of exchange in these ecosystems.
Originality/value
Social relationships include a wide variety of different types of resources and exchange mechanisms, so by their inclusion into the entrepreneurship ecosystem literature, a more complete view of ecosystems is possible.
Journal article
Does Social Spending Discourage Entrepreneurship?
Published 01/18/2024
Entrepreneur and Innovation Exchange
The importance of entrepreneurship to the economy is well established. Entrepreneurship drives economic growth and helps to solve society’s intractable
problems, from curing disease to lowering pollution. For this reason, governments have a vested interest in crafting policy that helps entrepreneurs to thrive. Whether to spend less or more is a big part of that decision.
Journal article
Published 08/27/2023
Journal of management studies, online
Understanding how and why firms concurrently compete and cooperate with each other represents an important and growing area of study. This research centres on how firms engage in coopetition. However, this does not account for how much of the modern world works – independently. Through an inductive field study of 80 New Orleans street performers, we explore how and why independent creative workers engage in competition and/or cooperation. In so doing, we advance theory on coopetition by extending its explanations to the individual level. We theorize the well-established nature of creative industries encourages the belief in the need for deviating from the status quo by engaging in creativity and innovation, which we refer to as a trailblazing mindset. At the same time, we find that the accumulation of a long history of creative practices also fosters traditions. We theorize that tradition encourages the belief in the need to act as vested actors, or custodians, by passing work traditions from one generation to the next to allow the tradition to endure, which we refer to as the torchbearing mindset. Thus, torchbearing fosters cooperation while trailblazing fosters competition.
Journal article
Technological Innovation and the expansion of Entrepreneurship Ecosystems
Published 07/01/2023
Review of managerial science, 17, 1789 - 1808
To date much of the entrepreneurial ecosystems literature treated ecosystems as confined geographic locations with definitive boards. However, in the past decades, technological innovation and developments in social relationships (e.g., online platforms, social media, and the sharing economy) have extended and blurred the boundaries of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Thus, current research on entrepreneurial ecosystems often underestimates the reach and impacts of a given ecosystem. To remedy this, we advocate the use of a more holistic approach in modern entrepreneurial ecosystems frameworks which includes social relationships and technology, thus extending beyond geographical barriers. We discuss how technology has dissolved locational barriers and connected elements of ecosystems, how social relationships maximize advantages through greater resource access, and how the entrepreneurship ecosystem now exists on a plane that is both physical and cyber.
Journal article
Straight OUTTA Detroit: Embracing Stigma as Part of the Entrepreneurial Narrative
Published 12/2022
Journal of management studies, 59, 8, 1915 - 1949
Through an inductive field study, we set out to better understand how and why ventures would embrace a non‐core stigma; this is perplexing given that a majority of stigma literature suggests that organizations tend to avoid/disidentify from stigmatized entities. To do so, we study organizational locational stigma, which we define as a label arising from an organization's geographic location that evokes a collective stakeholder group‐specific perception that an organization possesses a fundamental, deep‐seated flaw that deindividuates and discredits the organization. Our findings from Detroit, Michigan reveal that entrepreneurs embrace the locational stigma by taking part in Detroit's underdog narrative and comeback story. Entrepreneurs use the underdog narrative in hope of differentiating their ventures from those in other locations, while they leverage the comeback story to gain access to the resources and in‐group advantages. We thus advance the concept of locational stigma and show how it can benefit organizations.
Journal article
A Guide for Understanding, Publishing, and Building a Career in Entrepreneurship Education
Published 07/2022
Entrepreneurship education and pedagogy, 5, 3, 264 - 278
The following manuscript is a helpful overview for current and aspiring academics that seek to better understand academic research, the publishing process, and building a career in entrepreneurship education. We draw from management literature given the theoretical and practical similarities, and we provide suggestions to entrepreneurship educators as a means of starting a dialogue as opposed to presenting fact. While this guide is not directed toward experienced scholars, it may serve as a helpful review. Publishing in entrepreneurship journals is a worthwhile scholarly endeavor for researchers in a variety of fields and we hope our efforts are helpful to scholars, authors, and entrepreneurship educators.
Journal article
The effects of social spending on entrepreneurship in developed nations
Published 03/01/2022
Small business economics, 58, 3, 1595 - 1607
Understanding how national policy can spur entrepreneurial activity is central to entrepreneurship research. Over the past decade, there has been a limited set of research findings to suggest that social spending may increase entrepreneurship in addition to serving more direct social purposes. We examine the topic through the lens of market failure theory and Austrian economics. In accordance with the Austrian perspective, we theorize that social spending increases the opportunity cost of entrepreneurship, thereby decreasing the attractiveness of entrepreneurship in comparison to salaried employment. Drawing from a sample of 31 developed countries spanning 2004-2011, we investigate the effects of social spending on entrepreneurial attitudes and activity. Our results indicate that country level social spending negatively affects entrepreneurial activity, business ownership, and the public's view of entrepreneurship as a career choice. The findings suggest that social spending may be better suited for addressing social issues compared to spurring entrepreneurial attitudes or activity. Our findings have implications for both the entrepreneurship and national policy literature.