Venturing Off the Beaten Path. Three Close-Ups of Identities and Motivations In and Around Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is on everyone’s lips. Unsurprisingly, its ever-growing popularity is reflected in an array of heterogeneous scholarly discourses. One of the longest-standing, most vivid debates centres around efforts to understand how and why entrepreneurial journeys unfold the way they do. Particularly, recent calls have emerged for exploring the relations and interactions between people, spaces, and analysis levels when individuals embracing entrepreneurship try to answer – for themselves and their nascent enterprises – questions around ‘who they are’, ‘what they do’, and ‘why they do what they do’. This doctoral dissertation, through its three articles, tries to take on this broader, increasingly nuanced entrepreneurial horizon, moving back and forth between the public stage and the more personal behind-the-scenes of entrepreneurial journeys. In this sense, leaving the security of the predictable, beaten tracks might lead to re-imaging some of what we believe venturing to be, and, simultaneously, to discovering new paths worth ad-venturing onto. The three articles, thus, cover different settings, time spans, and core businesses to present an articulated reflection of ventures and venturers’ identities and motivations.