Abstract
The reach and influence of social media for personal, professional, or organisational purposes has expanded exponentially over the past two decades. Social media offers both much potential and great peril. When used effectively, positive outcomes are often immediate and sometimes beyond imagination. Conversely, when misused, the results can be disastrous. In between, however, many people and firms, disappointingly, find efforts inconsequential.
Editors Schjoedt, Brännback, and Carsrud identified that nascent research about how ‘social media impacts entrepreneurial behaviors’ remains quite fragmented. In response, the editors organised the second volume of Springer’s Exploring Diversity in Entrepreneurship series to succinctly articulate and compellingly substantiate aspects of entrepreneurs’ use of social media which merit future research. Understanding Social Media and Entrepreneurship: The Business of Hashtags, Likes, Tweets, and Stories compiles the work of 25 scholars, across 10 chapters and 236 pages, into a well-organised book, featuring four sections (entitled Parts), each with a minimum of two chapters. While each chapter is referenced thoroughly, the book expressly seeks to stimulate future research rather than exhaustively review existing literature. The very timely and readable collection (1) details and justifies specific topics ideal for future entrepreneurship research; (2) offers practical frameworks, valuable empirical data, and intriguing case examples to guide informed inquiry; and (3) provides a foundation to expeditiously synthesise extant research, with emphasis on opportunity over accomplishment.
The three chapters in Part I, ‘Social Media in Entrepreneurship Research: Where Are We?’ quickly introduce readers to the book’s structure and key points of emphasis. Beyond well-documented online presence, branding, and marketing communications benefits, Bauman and Lucy, in Chapter 2, challenge readers to consider how social media drives and shapes novel entrepreneurial opportunities. The chapter specifically contrasts ‘platform business models’ with traditional input-output value chains (i.e. Porter, 1985), examines knowledge management and digital entrepreneurship, explores new funding models, and suggests research opportunities arising from changing consumer behaviour in the sharing economy. Part I closes with an empirical piece (Chapter 3) by Nikou, Brännback, Orrensalo, and Widén about entrepreneurs’ digital information literacy and the noteworthy influence of peers on online source selection – a prime research avenue. Given limited firm size and strong reliance on founders, individual cognitive bias, skill, and choice models have significant influence on entrepreneurial decisions, actions, and outcomes.
Part II, ‘Social Media in Entrepreneurship Research: Where Have We Been?’ opens with a compelling conceptual framework by Mumi (Chapter 4) which establishes the antecedents of participation by individuals and firms on social media and the consequences to these parties. Mumi connects the model to effectuation theory, which reflects the innovative and clever ways in which entrepreneurs pursue aspirations with their available capital resources. In Chapter 5, Sullivan and Bendell explore the potential entrepreneurship impact of how social media usage differs by gender, raising numerous promising future research questions. Part II concludes with Sareen, Kidney, and Cooney’s idea-provoking interview analysis which reveals sixteen key insights about how entrepreneurial teams use social media channels to cultivate opportunities.
The volume’s third Part, ‘Social Media in Entrepreneurship Research: Where Do We Go Internationally?’ dedicates two chapters to potential global business research avenues. Datta, Adkins, and Fitzsimmons explore social media influencers in the United Arab Emirates and raise cross-cultural considerations that warrant study. In Chapter 8, Hurmelinna-Laukkanen, Haapanen, and Holma more broadly aggregate five case studies of Finnish firms to show while social media is low-cost and far-reaching, numerous challenges face small firms’ internationalisation. The summary interviews with high-ranking managers at the case firms should spark researcher curiosity about entrepreneurs’ social media practices and potential qualitative and quantitative data sources.
The book logically concludes with ‘Social Media in Entrepreneurship Research: Where Could We Go?’ (Part IV). Chapter 9 by Baccarella, Scheiner, and Diehlmann is arguably the most distinctive in the book. The trio eschews the normative expectation of successful enterprises to explore how the bedevilling ‘dark side’ of social media manifests itself in the interaction of entrepreneurs’ motives, moral disengagement, and unethical behaviour, bringing to light the outsized influence of human frailty in small firms. Such an entrepreneurship research compendium would be incomplete without a chapter focused on family business dynamics. Fittingly, the book concludes with Firfiray and Gomez-Mejia’s presentation of the research prospects of the unique social media effects in family businesses. The chapter is integrative in the sense that such family enterprises provide a robust context to study how the affordances of visibility, persistence, editability and association enhance socioemotional wealth.
Social media has rapidly revolutionised the world – transforming information flows, personal relationships, and business practices. New platforms and global access ignite entrepreneurial opportunities, begetting much new promising research territory. Understanding Social Media and Entrepreneurship offers an extraordinary return on readers’ time. Regardless whether one is novice to the research domain or quite accomplished, this book will inform and inspire future inquiry. Each chapter provides references to much background reading, specific addressable research questions, as well as credible frameworks and compelling examples. The resulting stream of future publications is limited only by ingenuity and imagination of researchers – quite apropos for the topic of entrepreneurship in the digital era.