The International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Entrepreneurs are cultural creatures and culture affects how they conceive their opportunities and how they determine and pursue their interests. Understanding entrepreneurship in any particular context thus requires attention to be paid to prevailing cultural beliefs as well as the formal and informal institutions that affect economic behaviour. This paper adopts the important but seldom used approach of focusing upon the tales of entrepreneurship prevalent in a given culture. The authors argue that to get a sense of the economic culture in a particular context, it is crucial to focus on what a culture's success and failure stories tell about how to get ahead. Arguably, this approach is particularly important if the goal is to understand entrepreneurship amongst subaltern/marginalized groups. Using fiction from the former Soviet bloc, where a one-dimensional form of entrepreneurship flourished even within the command economy, and literature from anglophone Africa and the British Caribbean where black entrepreneurship had to contend with brutal colonial rule and post-colonial corruption, this paper highlights how entrepreneurs were influenced by culture in these contexts, and explores the origins of these cultural factors.

This paper uses newspaper articles to construct an account of the meteoric rise and eventual fall from grace of Takafumi Horie, a Japanese Internet entrepreneur. This trajectory is explored through a qualitative methodology that analyses the content of articles in international newspapers reporting key events in Horie's story. Tracking the representation of Horie as the story develops uncovers the ambiguous nature of the concept of entrepreneurship in Japan, where the enactment of entrepreneurship takes place within and at times against the mainstream of significant change in the nature of work in Japan. The paper concludes by linking Horie's story to the temporal construction of the entrepreneur in a social context in which bureaucratic challenge leads eventually to entrepreneurial marginalization through the likelihood of a jail term. Overall, the paper adds to the literature concerning the mutable and contested nature of the term ‘entrepreneur’.

This paper provides a review and rationale concerning the importance of researching entrepreneurship amongst those of minority sexual orientation. Based on emerging theories about, and evidence of, entrepreneurship as a heterogeneous phenomenon, the paper explores the potential contribution that studies of minority entrepreneurship can make to the understanding of diversity, as opposed to universality, amongst entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. In the absence of research on gay entrepreneurship specifically, especially in the UK, the author explores reasons for the silence amongst researchers, including some of the main challenges, namely: variable degrees of minority-status disclosure; a corresponding lack of data about the size of the minority; definition issues; and the potential avoidance of the minority by ‘objective’ scholars. A summary of reasons why entrepreneurship might be an attractive prospect for gay people is provided. The paper also argues that research amongst gay entrepreneurs may prove to be valuable in terms of its potential to contribute to economic advantage both for the minority and for the greater society, and ultimately to increase understanding within the entrepreneurship discipline generally.

This paper deals with the margins of entrepreneurship at which small business owners are working almost on their own with no or very few employees, and where some work for low returns and run firms that lack stability and/or prosperous dynamics. However, even the area of ‘entrepreneurship at the margins’ is a wide field, embracing not only the broad margins of entrepreneurship but also the fluid borders between entrepreneurship and the informal sector on the one side and the labour market system on the other. New firms – even those that are ultimately very successful – may be more or less created in an experimental market and product testing phase, in which business founders are still employed or registered as unemployed before becoming self-employed. In such cases, the practical starting-point of an entrepreneurial existence is part of a fluent continuum of different activities closely connected to the entrepreneur's sphere of dependent work as an employee or job-seeking during a period of unemployment. The paper addresses this area of entrepreneurship within an integrated framework, which combines entrepreneurship analysis with labour market research and studies on social stratification and social mobility. It contributes to the debate on entrepreneurship at the margins by combining selected empirical information on the case of Germany with conceptual ideas of a labour market perspective. The integrated approach highlights some key issues and raises further questions about the field of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs and mountaineers face challenges that share many characteristics distinct from mainstream society and managerial activity: lofty goals, individualistic efforts, risky and highly uncertain environments, and severe resource constraints. A qualitative explication of this analogy is extended with a comparative quantitative examination of shared individual traits (risk avoidance, optimism, flexibility and overconfidence) among mountaineers, entrepreneurs and control subjects. The findings provide support for an entrepreneur–mountaineer analogy, suggesting common themes for the roles of both groups. These results are integrated with previous research on the mountaineering personality to suggest ways by which the two groups could learn from each other. The analogy is then extended beyond the individual level by explicit mapping between entrepreneurs and mountaineers in terms of objectives, strategies, resources and risks faced. This mapping is used to suggest areas of entrepreneurship research that may benefit from the adoption of the analogy perspective.

This paper outlines the relevance of Schumpeter's model and conception of entrepreneurship for political science. While students of politics have studied Schumpeter's views of democracy, his views on entrepreneurship have been neglected by political scientists. Following a brief overview of other definitions of entrepreneurship, Schumpeter's model is presented here. Using the examples of contemporary populist politicians, it is argued that these share many of the characteristics of Schumpeter's entrepreneurs and that the application of his model provides a new perspective on political science.

‘Internet Review’ provides critical commentary on entrepreneurship, small business and innovation information on the Web.