No abstract

No abstract

The enormous scale of suffering, breadth of societal impact, and ongoing uncertainty wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic introduced dynamics seldom examined in the crisis entrepreneurship literature. Previous research indicates that when a crisis causes a failure of public goods, spontaneous citizen ventures often emerge to leverage unique local knowledge to rapidly customize abundant external resources to meet immediate needs. However, as outsiders, emergent citizen groups responding to the dire shortage of personal protective equipment at the onset of COVID-19 lacked local knowledge and legitimacy. In this study, we examine how entrepreneurial citizens mobilized collective resources in attempts to gain acceptance and meet local needs amid the urgency of the pandemic. Through longitudinal case studies of citizen groups connected to makerspaces in four U.S. cities, we study how they adapted to address the resource and legitimacy limitations they encountered. We identify three mechanisms—augmenting, circumventing, and attenuating—that helped transient citizen groups calibrate their resource mobilization based on what they learned over time. We highlight how extreme temporality imposes limits on resourcefulness and legitimation, making it critical for collective entrepreneurs to learn when to work within their limitations rather than try to overcome them.

Entrepreneurial action can be directed toward identifying, generating, and exploiting potential business opportunities that can cause harm to others. Over and above the “rules of the game” of the economic system, we theorize on destructive entrepreneurial actions that result from entrepreneurs’ impaired regulation of their decision making. Specifically, we build on the entrepreneurial action literature and draw on regulation theories of goal attainment and moral disengagement to develop an impaired-regulation model of destructive entrepreneurial actions. This model contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by providing new insights into (a) why some entrepreneurs are more susceptible to engaging their ventures in destructive entrepreneurial actions, (b) everyday entrepreneurs (the “who”) engaging in destructive entrepreneurial actions (i.e., the “how” and “why”), and (c) when and why some entrepreneurs respond to their destructive entrepreneurial actions by becoming repentant do-gooders while others grow into serial offenders.

No abstract