Counternarrative perspectives on entrepreneurial action

The field of entrepreneurship is characterized by a narrative landscape that informs the focus of our research and the explanations we offer. These narratives, ranging from the entrepreneur as a hero to entrepreneurship more broadly as a path to salvation, provide an important but ultimately limited and sometimes misleading account of entrepreneurial phenomena, overshadowing their inherent complexity, heterogeneity and context specificity. This dissertation addresses selected dominant narratives found in entrepreneurship research and explores counternarratives to provide a richer, more nuanced understanding of entrepreneurial phenomena. The four essays in my dissertation show that entrepreneurs are not as promotion-oriented as is often assumed, that innovation in firms may have a dark side in the form of presenteeism, that entrepreneurship is often insufficient as the sole solution to grand challenges, and that the bright and dark sides of entrepreneurship are inherently interconnected and mutually constitutive. Entrepreneurs are often portrayed as promotion-oriented actors driven by progress and growth. In Essay I, drawing on Regulatory Focus Theory and analyzing 129 semi-structured interviews with ten entrepreneurs over the course of a year, I show that entrepreneurs change their regulatory strategies and tactics in response to provisional sensemaking and reframing of critical events. While the literature on regulatory focus in entrepreneurship has predominantly focused on entrepreneurs’ regulatory dispositions, I extend this view by arguing that entrepreneurs recursively shift their regulatory focus at strategic and tactical levels and that an ability to “zoom in and out” enables them to do so. Thus, while entrepreneurs often have a promotion disposition, they nevertheless dynamically and recursively regulate their goal-striving at strategic and tactical levels despite the discomfort associated with vertical regulatory misfit, i.e., a misfit between the regulatory disposition and the strategies and tactics employed. Entrepreneurial action within firms leads to innovation and the benefits that come with it, including revenue growth and competitive advantage. Innovation is therefore often seen as a necessity for the growth and long-term survival of firms. In Essay II, building on Job Demands-Resources Theory and analyzing 3563 computer-assisted telephone interviews with the most senior person responsible for employee health and well-being in 2947 firms in the UK, I uncover a potential dark side of innovation in firms, namely the increased probability of employees working when ill. I also find that investing in activities that benefit employee health and well-being weakens this relationship. In Essay III, I argue that there is an implicit panacea narrative in entrepreneurship research that presents entrepreneurship as the ideal solution to the world’s most complex problems, such as abject poverty and climate change. Structural Injustice Theory cautions us not to be overly optimistic about entrepreneurial solutions because many complex problems have underlying structural conditions, including informal power structures that allow some to dominate while others are marginalized and that require the collaboration of many actors over time to effect structural change. While entrepreneurship can indeed play a role in enabling such change, its potential to do so alone is limited. I propose an agenda for future research to explicitly incorporate Structural Injustice Theory into entrepreneurship research. Shepherd (2019) has pointed out that research on entrepreneurship has predominantly focused on its positive attributes and effects and neglected its darker sides. Building on Dialectical Critical Realism (DCR), I argue in Essay IV that the bright and dark sides of entrepreneurship are interconnected and mutually constitutive when analyzed from the perspective of context, processes, relationships and transformative praxis. Using the example of spatial disparity and entrepreneurial ecosystem development, I show how DCR can help analyze phenomena with inherent tensions and contradictions, like the dark and bright sides of entrepreneurship, and propose an agenda for future entrepreneurship research based on DCR. Overall, this dissertation responds to recent calls for more research that counternarrates entrepreneurial action (Brattström & Wennberg, 2022; Kibler & Laine, 2024) in order to capture its inherent heterogeneity and diversity.