Isla Kapasi

University of Leeds · Division of Management

Aim-The paper aims to contribute to understanding the experiences of those who are self-employed, living in poverty and claiming welfare benefits in the UK. The UK welfare system-as in other developed nations-is designed primarily to support those on low incomes. This includes those who are in work and in the UK there are specific top-up entitlemen...

This paper explores the entrepreneurial motivations of older entrepreneurs, specifically the importance of affective motivations and the influence of family and personal wellbeing on older entrepreneurs’ decisions to start-up and their subsequent business model choices. Departing from the extant literature examining the effects of family on firm an...

Microbusiness owners face significant challenges in accessing, acquiring and controlling resources, including human resources. This research examines the resource value(s) gained by microbusiness owners when they engage in a temporary human resourcing strategy using interns. Qualitative, information-rich, narrative interviews with microbusiness own...

Purpose This paper aims to explore experiences of poverty in the enterprise amongst people with a disability or long-term health challenges. This paper departs somewhat from established wisdom about economic or financial drivers of enterprise by exploring why a disabled individual would start and continue to operate in a business where that busines...

This paper builds on previous studies that explore entrepreneurship from a critical realist morphogenetic perspective, and incorporates the neglected aspect of how agential reflexivity shapes entrepreneurship. Using the morphogenetic framework and its typology of reflexive modes, we analyse 78 work and life histories gathered from Sri Lanka with th...

The rigour-relevance divide remains a longstanding concern for the entrepreneurship field. In this article we elucidate the practice of “we” in entrepreneurship scholarship and propose a means to encourage and realise it. Our contribution is in the combination of reflection (content reflection, process reflection, and premise reflection) and design...

Initial business creation motivations, for example those classified as push or pull, have been shown to have a relationship to the outcomes achieved by a business. This research explores this relationship with a sample of low-income outcome entrepreneurs.

This paper examines the motivations of home-based business owners and the intersection of these with the idealised ‘self’ and neoliberal values.

This article presents a theory of venturing using a critical realist approach. Venturing is presented as an outcome of reflexive engagement between individuals and circumstances, where opportunity is perceived in relation to some idiosyncratically defined value. Traditionally, venturing has been considered as necessarily involving financial value o...

Purpose Home-based business (HBB) literature identifies variation in the sector, such as differences in technology use, knowledge capital. It also asserts HBB may have specific value for specific groups of business starters. Despite this diversity, HBB is treated as one conceptualisation, as a single business model. Consequently, our knowledge is b...

Research and policy on in-work poverty is focused on those who earn low wages in employment. We know little about how poverty is experienced by those who are self-employed, despite the evidence that lowest incomes are associated with this work context. There is a policy rhetoric that business start-up and entrepreneurship are a means of gaining emp...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the perceptions and perspectives of students with regards to self-determined learning in an entrepreneurship education (EE) context and its potential contribution to employability. Design/methodology/approach This research used a mixed-methods approach with a sample of 25 students currently attendi...

Electronic performance monitoring (EPM) has played an important role in per-formance assessment in many different work settings. Our literature view on EPM (1978-2016) resulted in a total of 95 articles on EPM. Based on our review of this literature, we briefly outline our observations regarding the findings on EPM to date. We identify three pertin...

Motivation is the set of forces that initiate behaviour and determine its scope and direction; predominantly this has been understood from an agency perspective. However, these forces can be mediated by aspects such as gender and cultural factors among others. This article seeks to enhance general research on entrepreneurial motivation by exploring...

Purpose Leadership theories have moved from viewing leadership as an innate trait, towards models that recognise leadership as a social construction. Alongside this theorisation, gender and leadership remain of considerable interest, particularly given the under-representation of women in leadership positions. Methodological approaches to understan...

This paper details a qualitative exploratory study of rural home-based businesses. Little is known about the formation or operation of home-based businesses in rural areas despite their high incidence rate. In-depth cases are presented and, by employing a methodology designed to elicit rich narratives, the stories of eight participants are told. Em...

During 2005–2006 entrepreneurship students in several UK universities completed a survey about their background and career intentions. This paper reports, eight years on, on a follow-up study with ten of these participants, with the aim of exploring the students' intentions and subsequent actions since graduating. Using a qualitative methodology, t...

Entrepreneurship research principally focuses on business growth. This focus valorizes the masculine and marginalizes other interpretations. Consequently, entrepreneurship is restricted to a phenomenon that is rare in the diverse business world. The leadership literature proposes that entrepreneurship may not be as masculine as we assume anyway. Ou...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report the experiences of researchers seeking to undertake mixed methods longitudinal research in the entrepreneurship discipline. In this research, the methodology was thoroughly planned and measures were taken to ensure longitudinal feasibility of the project. This is not what ultimately happened though....

Home-based businesses are increasing in number throughout Western economies. One of the benefits of a home-based business is asserted to be improved work-life balance, yet there is little empirical evidence to support this assertion. Using a qualitative methodology, this paper explores the work-life balance in eight home-based businesses in the UK....

Introduction Figures from the Department of Business, Innovation & Skills report that home-based businesses (HBBs) contributed £284 billion to the UK economy (reported in Enterprise Nation, 2009). In Mason et al.'s 'mapping' of businesses across the UK they report that over a third are run as HBBs, with 36.7 percent of Scottish businesses run in th...

The paper details an exploratory study of home-based business in rural areas. Four in-depth cases are presented and, by employing a methodology designed to elicit rich narratives, the stories of the four participants are told. Various themes emerge from the narratives, including those relating to motivations and the realities of operating a rural h...