We're excited and looking forward to your submissions to our special issue!

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Academy of Management Perspectives (AMP)

Entrepreneurialism, Inequality, and Society: Organizational and Policy Implications

Submission deadline: September 30, 2023

OVERARCHING AIMS

Entrepreneurship is now widely viewed as a font of not only economic growth but also social development (Aldrich & Yang, 2012; Markman, Russo, Lumpkin, Jennings, & Mair, 2016; Seelos & Mair, 2005; Thiel & Masters, 2014; Zhang & Li, 2010). The term has expanded into our vernacular, with managers exhorting their subordinates to "become more entrepreneurial" and scholars/policy-makers encouraged to focus on "social entrepreneurship" as a means of solving some of society's most intractable problems (Aldrich, 2011; Bruton et al., 2021). This emergent perspective of entrepreneurs as social benefactors represents a sea-change in contrast to the organizational dynamics, research facilities, and government-led research formerly credited for a world where innovation was at the forefront (Chandler, 1984; Chandler, Hikino, & von Nordenflycht, 2001; Gisler & Sornette, 2009; Oliver & Cole, 2019) Today, entrepreneurs are lauded as the heroic agents of beneficial change (Meyer & Bromley, 2013; Dacin, Dacin, & Tracey, 2011). A key implication is that the phenomenon of entrepreneurship influences social realms far beyond national and organizational institutions, shaping our understanding of what "ought to be" when approaching grand challenges and managing modern organizations. This shift constitutes one of the fundamental trends motivating this Special Issue.

A second motivating trend is the manifest and subtle way in which the pursuit and endorsement of "entrepreneurialism" are linked with increased inequalities in modern society. In recent years, work in economics, sociology, and political science has shown how the engine of growth has slowed and the amount of associated inequality has sped up (Piketty, 2014). Overlaying and replacing the earlier system of managerialism, entrepreneurialism explains and justifies the uneven distribution of rewards in the name of risk-taking performance; indeed, so much so that there is now increased acceptance that those who "have not" have only themselves to blame for their fate (Eberhart, Lounsbury, & Aldrich, 2022). At the same time, entrepreneurialism is reordering the social stratification of society (Putnam & Garrett, 2021). Scholars note that successful firms in this new entrepreneurialism system become near monopolies, which, in concert with incumbent organizations, feed off the entrepreneurial juggernaut to dump capital into financial markets, transforming our perceptions and expectations of established firms and virtual monopolies in the process (Davis, 2010, 2022; Kenney & Zysman, 2019). Those firms that do not succeed become detritus for a new round innovation (Hoetker & Agarwal, 2007; Kroezen & Heugens, 2019). However, like the odds of lightening striking twice in the same spot, that new round may never occur, forcing the burdens of relocations, recapitalization, and retraining on the individuals left "holding the bag" (Nyberg & Wright, 2016). This Special Issue hopes to gain a more transparent understanding of the mechanisms, emerging norms, and new social beliefs of this wider system as the successful disperse their earnings in ways that increasingly decouple the flow of capital into uses discordant to the public interest.

These two fundamental trends are further entwined and torqued by a third: societal disruptions triggered by the increase in geopolitical divisions and continuing waves of the Covid pandemic. These divisions and waves seem to stop and start the engine of entrepreneurialism and create greater fluctuations in the levels and varieties of inequality. Societal disruptions are altering the life experiences of individuals-from the manner and mode of international travel to choosing whether to send one's children to school versus keeping them home while working from home oneself. They have also invited social commentators to question the economic, social, and political arrangements that were previously thought to have enriched the developing world for the last three decades (Adler, 2019; Fukuyama, 2022; Zuboff, 2019). In our view, the emergent social disruptions also provide scholars with a form of natural experiment-albeit an unfortunately dramatic one-for assessing the relationship between entrepreneurship/entrepreneurialism and the social world in terms of workplace ideology, business models, and entwined practice (to name just a few).  

In keeping with the current effort at reassessment, our call in this Special Issue is for studies of the phenomenon of entrepreneurialism as it shapes society, including critical evaluation of policy efforts to promote entrepreneurship, particularly with respect to inequality. Such a call opens up the opportunity to draw upon theoretical perspectives from an array of managerial studies in organization theory, economic sociology, and strategy-as well as in related areas of political science, business history, and social psychology. Notable recent work in this stream includes studies from an institutional perspective investigating how national policies recursively shape the development and norms of entrepreneurialism (Vogel, 2022; Bromley Meyer, & Jia, 2022; Coles Sine Hiatt, 2022), an analysis of how inequality became accepted as a norm in new work relationships (Eberhart, Barley, & Nelson, 2022), and, a comprehensive research agenda concerning the discourse of entrepreneurialism (Caliskan & Lounsbury, 2022). Other recent noteworthy studies have examined how entrepreneurialism has reshaped the norms of organizational misconduct (Palmer & Weiss, 2022), how diversity in social structures matters for entrepreneurship (Ozkazanc-Pan, 2022), and varieties of entrepreneurial motivations (Hartmann, Spicer, & Krabbe, 2022; Rindova, Srinivas, & Martins, 2022).

1.      Scholars are reminded that AMP seeks papers that advance theory and contribute to policy (broadly defined).

2.      We welcome conceptual and qualitative (e.g., narratives, multiple cases) papers, but note that AMP is neither a theory-testing nor a mathematical modeling journal.

SPECIAL ISSUE EVENT

Post-submission: The editors will organize a hybrid Special Issue Paper Development Workshop (PDW) on 25 January 2024 at Audencia Business School. Authors who receive a "revise and resubmit" decision on their submitted manuscript will be invited to attend this post-submission workshop. Participation in the workshop does not guarantee acceptance of the paper in the Special Issue and attendance is not a prerequisite for publication.

SUBMISSION PROCESS

Submission deadline (full paper): The ScholarOne submission portal will be open until September 30, 2023 (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/amp)

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William Schulze
University of Utah
Salt Lake City UT
(801) 585-5588
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