This article explores the work performance of sustainability-driven entrepreneurs in order to be able to provide better learning settings in higher education for sustainability-driven entrepreneurship (SDE). Sustainability-driven entrepreneurs are actors who initiate and successfully implement sustainable innovations in pursuit of social and ecological objectives in addition to economic ones as the basis of their organizational strategy. SDE suggests an action-oriented process view and emphasizes the nexus of individuals and opportunities. This article argues that competencies as well as deeper levels of knowledge regarding values and worldviews are key dimensions constituting SDE. For the implementation of sustainable action strategies, key competencies as well as opportunities are essential for enabling work performance. For this qualitative–explorative study, 48 semi-structured interviews were conducted with entrepreneurs and managers from enterprises and non-profit organizations pursuing sustainable strategies and activities in their economic ventures in five European regions: Vienna, Gothenburg, Brno, Bolzano and Vechta. The findings have a number of implications for study programmes in higher education institutions aiming at developing student competencies as well as deeper levels of knowledge regarding values and worldviews, and fostering performance for SDE.

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This article analyses the relation between European economic crisis and immigration. It does so by analysing the establishment of migrants’ entrepreneurship activities in Italy, and by looking at how these activities unravel subjects’ agency in confronting constraining socioeconomic conditions and restrictive immigration laws. In this perspective, entrepreneurship should be understood as a possibility for transforming a person’s own incorporated cultural capital into a resource and, consequently, into an opportunity for self-created work performance. Interpreting entrepreneurship as a personal response of migrants to the economic recession offers a new perspective in the existing literature on migrant entrepreneurship. Crisis, in this paper, is not seen as an abstract and supernatural phenomenon leading and controlling the capacity of individuals to act, but is understood as a constructed set of meanings comprising social interactions and relationships and consolidated within public discourses. This study is based on a qualitative-explorative research approach and was carried out in South Tyrol, Italy. For the data collection, different qualitative methods were used: narrative interviews, informal discussions and semi-structured interviews. Data analysis was based on the coding processes described within the Grounded Theory. As the results show, crisis as such represents, on the one hand, a critical moment of transition or transformation of normality and the constituted ways of acting and thinking and, on the other hand, it is perceived as a new opportunity to change individual behaviour and to initiate innovative counter-strategies that will maintain a person’s capacity to act even in critical personal and structural situations. Nevertheless, showing resilience, which is powerful and leads to change, depends not only on personal motivational forces but also to given opportunity structures.

This article links the personal use/meaning of information and communications technology for refugees and asylum seekers with their visibility/invisibility in public spaces. More precisely, it gives insights into how the personal and public spheres of asylum seeking interrelate when discussing connectivity. In doing so, I discuss the following research questions: How is connectivity embedded in refugees and asylum seekers’ everyday practices? And in addition, in which ways does this personal dimension interact with the public (structural level), given their increased presence in public spaces? In order to respond to the research questions, a qualitative-ethnographic approach was chosen for this study by adopting different research methods: Participatory observations, semi-structured interviews, expert interviews, and document analysis. Such an approach is fundamental to avoid a media-centric analysis without accounting for offline contextual lives, power relations, and experiences. As the results show the meaning of connectivity within the asylum experience raises a public as well as a personal dimension. As such the meaning of the Internet is based on the agency of asylum seekers given restricted access to public spaces and social support offline. Thus, the results reveal that both Internet access and experiences of transnationalism/displacement constitute and configure connectivity. Following this line of argument, connectivity widely compensates for the spaces of action, spaces of learning, spaces of interaction, and spaces for information that are missing offline, in the process of emplacing themselves in a new environment.

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