In this paper we propose two conceptual developments in understanding entrepreneur motivations and their effects. First, we argue that entrepreneur motivations develop dynamically in relation to career, household and business life courses. Second, we conceptualize how motivation and life courses develop interactively. We present an exploratory test of these ideas. In a sample of enterprise programme participants, we identify motivation profiles employing more robust cluster analyses than hitherto presented: our profiles are termed reluctant, convenience, economically driven, social, learning and earning, and prestige and control entrepreneurs. We then demonstrate statistical relationships between motivation profiles at a particular phase in the business life course (early establishment) and career and household life course factors. Motivations are also related to business resources, behaviour and performance. This initial confirmation of our conceptual claims suggests that further testing is warranted.

This paper provides a transdisciplinary critical review of the literature on maternity management in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), embedded within the wider literatures on maternity in the workplace. The key objectives are to describe what is known about the relations that shape maternity management in smaller workplaces and to identify research directions to enhance this knowledge. The review is guided by theory of organizational gendering and small business management, conceptualizing adaptions to maternity as a process of mutual adjustment and dynamic capability within smaller firms' informally negotiated order, resource endowments and wider labour and product/service markets. A context-sensitive lens is also applied. The review highlights the complex range of processes involved in SME maternity management and identifies major research gaps in relation to pregnancy, maternity leave and the return to work (family-friendly working and breastfeeding) in these contexts. This blind spot is surprising, as SMEs employ the majority of women worldwide. A detailed agenda for future research is outlined, building on the gaps identified by the review and founded on renewed theoretical direction.

We explore how socially embedded life courses of individuals within Britain affect the resources they have available and their capacity to apply those resources to start-up. We propose that there will be common pathways to entrepreneurship from privileged resource ownership and test our propositions by modelling a specific life course framework, based on class and gender. We operationalize our model employing 18 waves of the British Household Panel Survey and event history random effect logistic regression modelling. Our hypotheses receive broad support. Business start-up in Britain is primarily made from privileged class backgrounds that enable resource acquisition and are a means of reproducing or defending prosperity. The poor avoid entrepreneurship except when low household income threatens further downward mobility and entrepreneurship is a more attractive option. We find that gendered childcare responsibilities disrupt class-based pathways to entrepreneurship. We interpret the implications of this study for understanding entrepreneurship and society and suggest research directions.

Using data from a longitudinal study of working-class participants on a youth enterprise start-up programme in the UK, we examine whether programmes aimed at disadvantaged groups enable parents to combine business trading with childcare responsibilities. Business planning and programme selection practices ignored childcare, rendering it a solely private matter, invisible to public scrutiny. Yet this childcare barrier became both a cause and a consequence of business failure. Participants' experiences of combining trading and childcare varied by gender. All mothers and one father had complex strategies for synchronizing trading and childcare responsibilities. However, these strategies soon collapsed, 1 contributing to business closure. Most fathers relied on the children's mother to organise and conduct continuous care but this was dependent on fathers becoming breadwinners through profitable trading which was not achieved. There is growing policy recognition of the importance of the childcare barrier to paid work for lower income families and for selfemployed women in the UK. However, despite recent initiatives, severe constraints remain for working class parents to start and manage a business.Several implications for policy are discussed.

Emerging research demonstrates that structural social capital facilitates the resource acquisition of entrepreneurs residing in multiply deprived areas. However, their usage of relational and cognitive social capital that translates to accessible resources is not well understood. We contribute to knowledge and comprehensively examine effects of structural, relational and cognitive social capital taken together on the resource acquisition of entrepreneurs residing in multiply deprived areas. Results from a national survey of entrepreneurs residing in multiply deprived areas across England show that large networks, bonding ties, trust, reciprocity, obligations and expectations, and shared language and codes facilitate their resource acquisition. Also, we demonstrate that they are reluctant or unable to bridge social distance and adopt narrative storytelling. Furthermore, the results indicate that entrepreneurs residing in multiply deprived areas in the most deprived regions suffer from less resource acquisition.