Entrepreneurship: A Challenging, Fruitful Domain for Ethnography

Briody, Elizabeth K.; Stewart, Alex

doi:10.22439/jba.v8i2.5846

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Further, they have limited access to events for visibility and little to offer potential investors (Drover et al, 2017; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001). They typically lack formal offices to where scholars can conduct substantial real‐time observations to collect data (Briody & Stewart, 2019). Most of their work is multi‐sited, taking place behind screens and in communal spaces (Giudici et al, 2020).…”

Section: Methodological Challenges For Nvc Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fulfilling the process promise in new venture creation research: The ethnography/accelerator approach

Dumont

2024

Strategic Entrepreneurship

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Research SummaryCollecting fine‐grained, longitudinal data to study new venture creation (NVC) is critical but empirically challenging given the partly invisible, collective, and highly discursive nature of NVC. This article offers the ethnography/accelerator approach as one powerful solution to this problem. This approach theorizes the implications raised by the invisible, collective, and highly discursive nature of NVC as challenges of accessibility, multivocality, and reflexivity. It provides a framework articulating these challenges with key ethnographic insights to advance data collection and theory building, before discussing five implications of this approach for NVC research and providing recommendations and points of caution.Managerial SummaryExplaining how to create, organize, and operate a new venture is critical but raises important methodological challenges. Early‐stage ventures have no operating history, the stakeholders collaborating with entrepreneurs are geographically dispersed, and entrepreneurs' stories are often examined uncritically. The ethnography/accelerator approach suggests overcoming these challenges by using business accelerators as a research setting to apply ethnographic methods and collect reliable data. It provides guidance for enabling the full‐time immersion of the researcher into this setting, allowing the collection of finely‐grained data capturing the day‐to‐day practices and interactions at the heart of new venture creation and the views of the entrepreneurs, mentors, investors, policymakers, and the like playing a pivotal role in this process.

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Section: Methodological Challenges For Nvc Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fulfilling the process promise in new venture creation research: The ethnography/accelerator approach

Dumont

2024

Strategic Entrepreneurship

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“…Several methods now lend themselves to this program from the methodological toolkit of Economic Sociology and neighboring fields. On a micro level, “entrepreneurial ethnography” (Briody & Stewart, 2019; Newth, 2018; Thompson & Illes, 2020) and “design ethnography” (Vinck, 2003) can serve to understand the co‐evolution of innovation processes and its institutional context as it happens (Hoholm & Araujo, 2011). By a more general argument, in all effect, STS is the quintessence of ethnographic approaches to the constitution of society and of technology (Knorr‐Cetina, 1983) and not only the discourse on “valuation” is strongly driven by participant observatory approaches (cf.…”

Section: Investigating Innovation With Economic Sociologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Principles of an economic sociology of innovation

Reale

2024

Sociology Compass

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Although innovation is a core element of capitalist dynamics, it turns out that, to date, there is no coherent Economic Sociology of innovation, leaving the discipline oblivious to explaining fundamental economic dynamics. Nor has the enormous importance of novelty and innovation in current societal transitions evoked a corresponding research program in Economic Sociology, meaning that Economic Sociology struggles to grasp contemporary societal change. The article reviews the rather disparate diversity of approaches that could speak to a remedy, stepwise assembling and integrating them to establish the principles of an Economic Sociology approach to innovation. First, resonating with ‘embeddedness’ as the core paradigm of Economic Sociology, it spells out the embeddedness of innovation processes in social institutions. Next, it reviews innovation in relation to the diversity of normative, cultural‐cognitive, regulative, and relational institutions, carving out the relevance of the combination of institutions in ‘fields.’ It then determines ‘valuation’ as the overarching mechanism of how institutional frameworks interact with innovation processes. Eventually, discussing ‘institutional work’ as a major property of institutional frameworks, it raises awareness for the mechanisms of the ‘co‐evolution’ of institutions and innovations.

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“…Among anthropologists, this preoccupation with, and search for, newness has not gone unnoticed. Not least in business anthropology, a broad range of publications on creativity (Moeran and Christensen 2013;Moeran 2014), innovation (Lex 2016;Mikkelsen and Vangkilde 2021), and entrepreneurship (Briody and Stewart 2019;Pfeilstetter 2021), as well as related themes -such as design (Murphy 2016;Smith et al 2016), anticipation (Vangkilde 2015;Garsten and Sörbom 2021), and futures (Salazer et al 2017;Brandt and Vangkilde 2023) -have come out in the past decade. While some of these publications focus on the relevance and contributions of anthropology in processes of actively and strategically generating newness, others are more interested in critically uncovering the cultural imaginaries and socio-political processes underlying attempts to bring forth "the new."…”

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confidence: 99%

In Search of Newness

Vangkilde,

Breslin,

Lex

2023

jba

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In the past decades, it has been hard to ignore that a key characteristic of business is an unmistakable preoccupation, perhaps even obsession, with newness. In all corners of business, newness -along with its many allied notions such as creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, all of which are centered around newness in one way or another -is considered to be absolutely critical for survival. "Create/Innovate or die. This is the takenfor-granted 'truth' in the social, political and economic context in which we currently live," as Emma L. Jeanes (2006:127) emphasized almost 20 years ago. While certain business activities are not, of course, supposed to be all that creative (after all, most business organizations do not aim for creative accounting, for instance), the message and the rhetoric have been very clear for decades now. A much-quoted statement, for instance, came from Gary Hamel who, back in 1999 under the headline "Bringing Silicon Valley Inside," made the significance of innovation and entrepreneurship evident to all readers of the Harvard Business Review:Face it: out there in some garage, an entrepreneur is forging a bullet with your company's name on it. Once the bullet leaves the barrel, you won't be able to dodge it. You've got one option: you have to shoot first. You have to out-innovate the innovators, outentrepreneur the entrepreneurs (1999:72).

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Entrepreneurship: A Challenging, Fruitful Domain for Ethnography

Abstract: Entrepreneurship: A Challenging, Fruitful Domain for Ethnography

Cited by 8 publications

References 14 publications

Fulfilling the process promise in new venture creation research: The ethnography/accelerator approach

Fulfilling the process promise in new venture creation research: The ethnography/accelerator approach

Principles of an economic sociology of innovation

In Search of Newness

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