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This paper investigates how early venture entrepreneurs engage in socially embedded practices to resource their firm. We contribute to an emerging literature that calls for a shift in perspective from 'resource' as an object to 'resourcing' as a practice. This shift entails a focus away from whom entrepreneurs know toward how they engage with their venture's social contexts. Through the analysis of an in-depth longitudinal case study of a life-science venture, we show that social resourcing practices are more reminiscent of a creative coping with ambiguous and ever-changing environments over time than of 'heroic' strategizing. We explore how entrepreneurs mobilize and creatively combine their social resources at hand, seek resources through engaging with other practice nets, negotiate differences between practice nets, and reflectively adapt their resourcing practices toward emerging resource contexts in ways that we describe as 'riding the practice waves' of social resourcing.

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The change from modernity to postmodernity has seen a dramatic increase in the use of goods and consumption both to gain and display meaning. Similarly, through the change towards the postmodern consumers are forever trying to balance the differentiating and integrating aspects of their behaviour in order to achieve a relationship with the society within which they exist. It is the authors' theory that much of this expression of differentiation and integration is achieved through consumption. Briefly, this paper puts forward a model for the analysis of consumption as an expression of the self (individualistic consumption) and as a system of meaning enabling linkage to social tribes (tribalistic consumption). Furthermore, the authors apply this framework in a semiotic analysis of The Simpsons. By examining the consumption and meaning of goods in a popular television show, an indirect reflection of modern society and the centrality of goods to meaning are highlighted.