People face adverse events in a variety of forms. Some individuals are resilient to adverse events in that they are able to maintain positive functioning while others experience considerable disruption. In explaining heterogeneity in resilience, research has emphasized people's resource endowments and pre-adversity organizing prior to the adverse events as well as people's cognitive and behavioral responses to such events. Therefore, for most resilience studies, adversity is an event. Although it is critically important to understand resilience to these short-to mediumterm adverse events, there is a need to understand resilience over an extended period. In this regard, we focus on Palestine refugees who were born in refugee camps and as adults have known nothing other than being a refugee. When it comes to substantial and persistent adversity, entrepreneurial action likely plays a central role in resilience to such adversity. To explore these relationships, we conducted an extensive data-collection effort over 15 months on refugee entrepreneurs (in refugee camps and not in camps), including 110 interviews. We find the importance of direct, indirect, and recursive relationships among actions (i.e., entrepreneurial action and integration activities), multiple identities, and resilience outcomes under conditions of substantial and persistent adversity. Furthermore, we find important differences between refugee entrepreneurs who live in refugee camps and those who live outside these camps-differences in affiliation, language use, and social capital development-which enable those refugee entrepreneurs living outside the refugee camps to achieve resilience outcomes not accessible to those living inside the camps. Overall, this study makes a number of contributions to the entrepreneurship literature. First, research has investigated resilience in terms of resources, endowments, and capabilities before an adverse event. The implicit assumptions in this research are that capabilities matter and that adversity has a beginning and subsides over time. In this study, we focus on resilience outcomes in the context of refugees facing substantial adversity over a substantial period and extend the capability argument of resilience in the following ways: (1) the "social" capability for resilience, not as an endowment but created through activities that build a social basis for resilience outcomes, (2) social integration activities are initiated and facilitated by engaging in entrepreneurial action with non-similar others, and (3) resilience outcomes help individuals both engage in integration activities and build a social capability of resilience. Therefore, in the context of substantial and persistent adversity, refugee entrepreneurs need to act in order to build (rather than simply deploy) their social capability for resilience outcomes. Second, resilience has been explored as either a process or as an outcome. In this study, we find that resilience outcomes are both a consequence and an antecedent of entrepreneurial action-a mu...
In this paper, we contribute to the understanding of how entrepreneurs can deploy their values to enable joint action of heterogeneous stakeholders. Such an understanding forms a critical endeavor to tackle grand challenges adequately. Building on sensegiving research, we conducted a single-case study of an entrepreneurial initiative that tackles gender inequality in Lebanon which has been successful in mobilizing heterogeneous stakeholders who ordinarily would not collaborate with each other. We find that the values of the founders were pivotal for the initiative's success as those values activated latent values of stakeholders through processes of contextualization and enactment. We subsume these processes under the label value-driven sensegiving. As a result of value-driven sensegiving, heterogeneous stakeholders could make sense of the founders' aspirational vision and the role they could play in it, which paved ways for tackling grand challenges collaboratively. Our study provides insights into the centrality of values for mobilizing heterogeneous stakeholders across boundaries. Therefore, it contributes to the body of work on sensegiving, societal grand challenges, and new forms of organizing.
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