ENTREPRENEURSHIP THEORY AND PRACTICE
SPECIAL ISSUE CALL FOR PAPERS
THE STARTUP WORKFORCE
Guest Editors
James Bort, DePaul University (United States)
Veroniek Collewaert, Vlerick Business School & KU Leuven (Belgium)
Yuval Engel, University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Evy Van Lancker, Ghent University (Belgium)
Johan Wiklund, Syracuse University (United States)
OBJECTIVES AND SCOPE
The startup workforce represents a distinct and consequential stakeholder in entrepreneurship that has been systematically understudied relative to founders and funders (Bort, 2025; Cardon et al., 2026). Early insights from the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies revealed how organizational changes within startups disproportionately impacted long-tenured employees (Baron et al., 2001). This pioneering work laid the foundation for understanding how startups differ from established firms in their approach to human capital, including fundamental aspects such as compensation, staffing, and performance management (see also Cardon & Stevens, 2004 for a review).
Contemporary research has deepened our understanding of the unique dynamics between startups and their employees (Engel et al., 2023; Van Lancker et al., 2023). Whereas early research identified demographic patterns, illustrating that startup employees tend to be younger and more risk-tolerant (Ouimet & Zarutskie, 2014; Roach & Sauermann, 2015), recent work has uncovered more nuanced dynamics. For example, experienced employees often join startups when they have partners with stable careers (Manchester et al., 2023), but can also command wage premiums as firms grow (Burton et al., 2018). Startup employees are drawn in by passionate founders (Lewis & Cardon, 2020), opportunities for greater freedom and responsibility (Sauermann, 2018), and the potential for significant financial upside (Hand, 2008). Startups have a limited reputation as an employer which makes recruiting a challenge (Kim & Pergler, 2025); however, there is evidence that talented individuals prefer startups in some contexts (Roach & Sauermann, 2024). As such, startups tend to recruit through previous affiliations (Brymer & Rocha, 2024) and when proximal, these relationships can increase firm performance (Rocha & Brymer, 2025).
Despite the allure of building a startup alongside founders and crafting unique roles (Bort, 2025;
Van Lancker et al., 2023), nascent firms have specific recruitment challenges (Tonoyan et al., 2025) and are generally more challenging places to work (Canales et al., 2025). Startups tend to have underdeveloped human resources functions (Van Lancker et al., 2022), leading to managerial and socio-structural challenges that ultimately trickle down to the employee (Bort et al., 2025; Kacperczyk & Campero, 2025). Scaling a startup’s operations is difficult (Lee & Kim, 2024), and employees’ growing pains are difficult to suppress during times of rapid expansion (Genedy et al.,
2024), leading to the accumulation of various forms of organizational ‘debt’ (Engel et al., 2023)
as the costs of growth outweigh the startup’s ability to absorb them. In sum, the startup context
challenges traditional assumptions about employee-organization relationships, demanding new
theoretical frameworks that can advance both entrepreneurship and organizational scholarship.
For the purposes of this special issue, we define the startup workforce as the non-founding individuals who contribute labor to the creation and development of an early-stage venture. This workforce includes, but is not limited to, those under formal employment. As such, the workforce also encompasses contractors, fractional executives, agencies, platform and ghost workers, and other non-standard labor that contributes to venture creation alongside payrolled employees. It is, however, distinct from founders and external stakeholders (e.g., investors, board members, customers) who do not work inside the venture. In practice, the boundary between the earliest
employees and founders may be fuzzy, and we welcome work that interrogates how this boundary is drawn, contested, and made consequential.
We approach the startup workforce as a relational phenomenon rather than a static population of employees inside a firm, one that spans individuals, firms, and the institutional environments in which startups are embedded. This framing invites contributions that take power, voice, and regulation seriously, and that use the distinctiveness of the startup context to export ideas back to adjacent fields.
Scope and Expectations of Submissions to the Special Issue
This special issue aims to advance understanding of the startup workforce by bringing together researchers from fields such as entrepreneurship, organizational behavior, human resource management, economics, and sociology. We welcome contributions from any disciplinary tradition, provided they engage substantively with the startup workforce. Theory borrowed from adjacent fields is welcome when it does genuine explanatory work for startup workforce phenomena; it is not welcome when it provides labels for statistical relationships without specifying the mechanisms through which those relationships operate in the entrepreneurial context.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
• Employee motivations and retention across venture stages;
• Recruitment, employer branding, and the role of prior affiliations in startup hiring.
• The influence of early employees on organizational culture, routines, and strategic direction.
• compensation structures, equity arrangements, and evolving psychological contracts.
• Workforce well-being, occupational stress, and founder-employee emotional spillovers.
• The impact of hybrid and remote work on startup employment dynamics.
• The opportunities and adversity of AI in light of startup employment and work ethic, and workforce diversity, inclusion, and the role of HR professionalization in early-stage ventures.
We further invite contributions on worker voice, collective action, and power asymmetries in startups, including unionization, whistleblowing, hustle culture and exploitation, equity and vesting disputes, and the dark side of founder–employee relations; the regulatory and institutional environment of startup employment, including non-compete enforcement, worker classification, equity taxation, and visa regimes, with particular interest in designs that exploit exogenous policy variation; non-standard and hybrid labor forms, including contractors, fractional executives, agencies, platform and ghost work, and globally distributed teams; post-startup career trajectories, including employee mobility, alumni networks, and entrepreneurial spawning after exit, acquisition, or failure; the scaleup transition and its workforce implications, including when and how a startup workforce ceases to be one and how HR professionalization reshapes the employment relation; and AI-native ventures as a new organizational form, where a small number of humans operate agentic systems and the category of “workforce” is itself reconstituted. We also welcome work on startup workforces outside North America and Western Europe, including emerging-economy, informal, and cross-border contexts.
We encourage authors to let the phenomenon guide the theory rather than the reverse, and to export ideas from the startup context rather than just import them from other fields. Consistent with ETP’s editorial direction (Wiklund, forthcoming), we evaluate submissions on the alignment between research question, research design, and data quality. An important research question about the startup workforce, paired with a design capable of answering it and data of sufficient quality to support credible conclusions, matters more than theoretical novelty or conceptual sophistication. We value work that not only explains mechanisms but also clarifies what the evidence means for the choices founders, employees, and investors face in practice.
We highly encourage empirical papers that illuminate convincing causal mechanisms (see Maula et al., forthcoming for additional guidance), whether through quasi-experimental designs, longitudinal panel studies, field experiments, qualitative process tracing, ethnographies, or mixedmethods research. We are equally receptive to computational approaches and studies that leverage novel data sources: linked employer-employee datasets, platform data, administrative records, and other unconventional sources can open windows into startup employment dynamics. Multi-method approaches that triangulate findings across different research designs are especially valued. For studies relying on distal sources such as archival or census data, we expect authors to demonstrate how the theorized mechanisms are reflected in the measurement architecture, not merely inferred.
Consistent with ETP’s 5I framework for data quality (Maula et al., forthcoming), we evaluate data by fitness-for-purpose rather than by representativeness alone, and we welcome work that invests in novel infrastructure and integrates multimodal sources, such as platform traces, linked employer-employee registers, audit-style field experiments, and AI-assisted data collection with transparent disclosure. We particularly welcome designs that exploit exogenous variation in the policy environment of startup employment, such as changes in non-compete enforcement, worker classification rules, equity-compensation taxation, or visa regimes, to identify causal effects on recruitment, retention, mobility, and venture outcomes.
Given the nested nature of the startup workforce, multi-level theoretical approaches and research designs are appreciated; the interplay among individual employees, founder-employee dyads, teams, organizations, and broader labor markets represents fertile ground for contributions that capture the complexity of startup employment. Studies that pre-register hypotheses, share replication materials, or otherwise embrace open-science principles are valued and will be recognized during the review process. We also welcome direct and conceptual replications, robustness and multiverse analyses, informative null findings, and Registered Reports-style submissions with pre-reviewed designs (see Fellnhofer et al., 2026).
What this special issue will not consider. While the special issue welcomes empirical, theoretical, and mixed-method contributions, the rapid development of AI-based tools has fundamentally changed what it means to produce a conceptual contribution (see Wiklund, forthcoming). As such, purely review-oriented papers and conceptual pieces that primarily synthesize existing ideas without empirical grounding are less likely to be competitive; however, field-defining theoretical contributions that advance understanding beyond what existing work has established will be considered.
Timeline for the Special Issue
1. Extended abstracts due for participation in May workshop: December 31, 2026
2. Special issue editorial workshop for invited participants based on proposals (hosted in United States)*: May, 2027
3. Special issue editorial workshop for invited participants based on full papers (hosted in Europe)*: November, 2027
4. Full papers invited for submission: January, 2027
5. Academy of Management PDW: Summer, 2028
*Attendance at the workshops is not required for consideration in, nor does it guarantee acceptance for, the special issue. For the U.S. workshop, the organizers will provide local room and board for all invited participants. Subject to additional available funding, further financial support may be provided, with priority for doctoral students.
Submission Process. Authors interested in participating in the April 2027 workshop should submit a short proposal (max 800 words) by December 31, 2026. The proposal should describe the research question, the proposed or completed research design, and the data or data access strategy.
We seek original, unpublished work that moves the scholarly conversation forward. Contributions may draw on prior work, but the submitted proposal must reflect significant development beyond it.
Proposals should:
• Include a title
• Not exceed 800 words, excluding references, tables, and figures
• Use single spacing and 12-point font
• Format references in APA style
Based on these proposals, the guest editors will invite selected authors to participate in the first editorial workshop in May 2027. A second workshop will be organized in November 2027, with a submission deadline for full papers on August 30, 2027. Participation in the workshops is not required for consideration in, nor does it guarantee acceptance for, the special issue, but authors who attend will receive developmental feedback on their work. Participants may thus choose to participate in the May or November workshop, both workshops or neither.
Submissions of workshop proposals and questions about the special issue can be directed to James Bort at jbort@depaul.edu.
References
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