Abstract
Resourcing the Start-Up Business, the new book by Jones, Macpherson and Jayawarna is the third in the Routledge ‘Masters in Entrepreneurship’ series published in association with the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship. This series of books is designed to provide detailed but accessible texts for students, and the latest instalment by Jones et al. fits the bill. The book is well written and provides a brisk introduction to the topic of resourcing the start-up enterprise.
The book focuses on the period from start-up to around the 12-month mark of a business’s existence. The authors are clear in setting out their interest in a dynamic entrepreneurial learning perspective on the start-up process, drawn from Cope (2005), whereby entrepreneurs must learn from their experiences if they are to build successful enterprises. The 12 chapters span a little over 200 pages, making the book a relatively quick read. Each chapter seeks to build the reader’s understanding step-by-step, starting with the book’s conceptual underpinning before progressing through entrepreneurs’ skills, the importance of networks and social capital, the nature of different resources and how they are acquired over time, before the challenges of growing a business are discussed. While the majority of the book is focused at the level of the entrepreneur and their business, the authors also include an interesting chapter on the important area of policy related to enterprise start-up, and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) more generally.
The authors describe the principal concepts clearly and use recent, relevant references to give a sense of contemporary research debates. The use of 10 case study companies, described at the start of the book, illustrate key points in the text. Establishing the background details of these businesses from the outset means that they can be drawn on briefly throughout the book to explore key points without distracting unduly from the thrust of a chapter or section.
Running through the text as a core theme is the idea of learning from experience in relation to resource acquisition and use, complemented by bootstrapping and bricolage. The consistency of core themes through the chapters helps to orient the reader to the authors’ perspective, and acts as a broad framework for understanding the materials being presented. Despite the multiple authorship, the book is written in an even and consistent style, contributing to its readability.
The only time the book’s flowing style breaks down is in Chapter 3 (‘Learning to be an entrepreneur’), during which the authors set out their views on course design and discuss students’ learning. The chapter feels as though it has been written for educators; students are discussed as though they are not the book’s target readership: for example, ‘any well-planned course should provide students with an opportunity to learn about themselves and the extent to which they have the attributes … to become entrepreneurs’ (p. 38), and ‘Such encounters can be formal elements of a module in which students are expected to engage in group-work’ (p. 39). While in terms of what is said is not very contentious, the style and content of this chapter is out of place in a student-oriented textbook.
Having read the book, and acknowledging its focus on start-up businesses, I wondered whether students might benefit also from reading a chapter on business mortality. The high rates of start-up business mortality are noted in passing very early in the book. Given that business failure is a common outcome for start-up businesses, which can leave business owners with problems of resourcing debts and outstanding liabilities, this might have made an interesting theme for further discussion.
The book feels particularly well-suited to undergraduates studying at Stage 2 or Stage 3, or postgraduate taught students taking classes in entrepreneurship. As an introductory text, the book will sit well alongside some formal lecturing or other means of developing and expanding some of the ideas discussed in the text. In-class support also could help to address an occasional tendency in the book to drop in a name or concept without developing the point or explanation. For example, on p. 40 it is stated that ‘the work of French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu is the basis of a recent attempt to locate entrepreneurial learning within the context of a multi-layered relational framework’. However, readers are not told specifically those elements of Bourdieu’s work which are drawn on by Karatas-Ozkan and Chell (2010), or how or why they are used. However, such criticisms are relatively minor, and this well-written and clearly structured textbook can provide a useful complement to students’ broader studies into entrepreneurship.