Oliver Mallett

• BSc, MA, PhD
• Professor at University of Stirling

This paper explores the identity work practices of Thai Sikh businesspeople. We focus on two important social-identities in participants’ self-presentations -- those derived from religious (Sikh) and Western business discourses -- and identify powerful tensions in their hybrid identity work. Conducting discourse analysis on identity work practices...

The enterprise culture is a pervasive socio-historical discourse. This article adopts a narrative identity work approach to explore how individuals may exert agency to make sense of and negotiate with the structuring features of such discourses. Older entrepreneurs are an interesting case through which to explore these processes because ageing is p...

In this article, we explore the dynamic, indirect effects of employment regulation through a qualitative study of three medium-sized enterprises and their ongoing, everyday employment relationships. We analyse how employment regulation is enacted through employment relationships and how its effects are negotiated by owner-managers and employees. Wh...

In this theoretical article we propose an approach to the spatial implications of homeworking derived from the work of social theorist Henri Lefebvre. By highlighting the processes involved in the inherently contested and (re)constructed nature of space in the demarcated home/work environment we draw on Lefebvre to suggest a collapse of this demarc...

This paper presents in-depth qualitative research on three small professional service firms whose owner-managers sought to introduce greater degrees of formality in their firms’ working practices and employment relationships. We focus on humour as an ambiguous medium of informality, yet viewed by owner-managers as a tool at their disposal. However,...

This paper adopts a moral economy framework to analyse the unique and collective experience of remote work during the UK pandemic lockdowns. Through analysis of qualitative interviews with workers based at home during periods of lockdown, we explore how this offered workers a new opportunity to evaluate a particular type of work extensification exp...

Enterprise policy, which seeks to stimulate start-ups and support small businesses, attracts significant investment from government and shapes the context for entrepreneurs. Researchers have begun to study the processes underlying the formulation of enterprise policy. However, accounts of how competing interests seek to influence enterprise policym...

Purpose This research paper generates new insights into the challenges of implementation in women’s enterprise policy. It argues that organisations involved in policy implementation need to be understood as operating in a context of institutional pluralism and answers: How do organisations involved in the implementation of women’s enterprise policy...

The chapter explores the experience of late career self-employment. We adopt an intersectional perspective to theorise the precarity experienced by older self-employed women and provide insights into the societal and organizational structures and norms that shape ageing in employment and everyday life. We illustrate our arguments through three biog...

In this chapter we seek to take up the challenge to reframe HRM in SMEs. We do this by considering employment regulation as a management challenge for small firms. We take a ‘management challenge’ approach to explore how advancing understanding of HRM in SMEs, particularly in small firms, might not only relate to the development of HR knowledge amo...

This chapter focuses on the challenges of entrepreneurship and change facing small enterprises. Developing Stinchcombe’s liability of newness concept to recognise the persisting and reoccurring liability of newness for small enterprises, Wapshott and Mallett develop insights into the challenges of entrepreneurship and change. They argue that, in re...

This article analyses the experiences of self-employed older women. Developing an intersectional reflexivity approach, our analysis shows how older women negotiate their concerns in relation to gendered ageing and realize self-employment. Our study reveals three practices: ‘Expressing the self’, ‘Exploring learning’ and ‘Embracing solidarity’. We c...

Purpose The purpose of this paper, a “thought piece”, is to consider the everyday realities of homebased working and the implications for work during a global pandemic and beyond. Design/methodology/approach The authors present a conceptual framework for considering the domestic sphere as a social space and apply this framework to consider the exi...

This chapter examines the interactions of formal and informal forms of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) business support, characterised as interactions within an ‘enterprise industry’. An analysis of the interactions revealed in the existing literature for different forms of business support develops a new conceptual framework for understand...

This introduction to the Special Issue sketches out some potential areas for collaboration and innovation in the various domains of entrepreneurship education and the entrepreneurial university. It introduces the articles included in the Special Issue and briefly describes how they provide valuable insights into the variety of forms of collaboratio...

This article presents an autobiographical account of an older woman’s lived experience of self-employment. Little is known about women who experience ongoing self-employment into their 50s and beyond. Shoshanna’s personal narrative describes her experiences and the challenges she has faced as she reflects upon her attempts to grow and sustain her b...

Topic: The paper examines in detail a major government inquiry into the role of small businesses in the British economy. The Bolton Committee has been credited with a significant role in the emergence and development of government policy towards small businesses in Britain. Applicability to the conference theme: The formation of business support po...

The effects of regulations on SMEs have garnered significant political attention internationally yet, in the academic literature, these effects remain contested. This article presents findings from a systematic literature review of qualitative evidence on the effects of regulation on SMEs. We set out the strengths of qualitative approaches in relat...

Report based on literature review for Dept for Business Energy & Industrial Strategy.

Most programmes contain one or two modules that are very unpopular with students. These ‘problem subjects’ are often core modules considered by academics to provide important foundation knowledge, for example statistics and research methods modules or subjects requiring a different knowledge base to the rest of the programme. This paper critically...

Significant doubts persist over the effectiveness of government policy to increase the numbers or performance of small and medium-sized enterprises in the UK economy. We analyse UK political manifestoes from 1964-2015 to examine the development of SME policy in political discourse. We do this by analysing how the broadly-defined category of ‘SME’ h...

This e-special issue focuses on employment relations in the context of ‘small business revivalism’ and an ‘enterprise culture’ that has sought to establish a so-called ‘entrepreneurial economy’. Economic restructuring and other political, social and economic changes in the 1970s and 1980s led to an increase in the number and prominence of small and...

Generally, the adoption of identity to understand organisations and develop organisation theory has been taken up unproblematically. This is in contrast to other areas of study such as ethnicity where questioning identity has a longer and more powerful tradition (see, for example, Gleason, 1983; Brubaker and Cooper, 2000). Identity and Capitalism b...

Retirement reaches back into working lives in practical forms such as pension planning as well as the creation of assumptions and expectations around what older people want from paid work and for how long, creating a powerful context of pending retirement. This chapter focuses on two longitudinal, detailed case studies to explore the everyday lived...

Well-managed employment relationships can be a secret to business success, yet this factor is relatively poorly understood when it comes to small and medium-sized organizations (SME’s). Written by active researchers with teaching experience, this book brings together the fields of entrepreneurship and human resource management for the first time, p...

The demands of not only starting but building a business commonly invoke the independence, risk-taking and dynamism associated with entrepreneurs. However it can be argued that, as enterprises grow, mature and become more established, the role of everyday business management requires a different set of skills, or areas of emphasis, from those assoc...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are politically popular (just try finding a politician who will say anything against these businesses) but, while parties of different colours have involved themselves in attempts to support SME start-up and growth and to encourage entrepreneurship, the success of such interventions has often disappointed....

Enterprise and entrepreneurship are frequently constructed within political discourse in terms of economic growth and prosperity. In the UK, for example, the cross-party political consensus on the value of ‘the entrepreneur’ ensures that this hegemony is rarely questioned. Instead, claims about the creation of economic growth and prosperity through...

The academic literature widely acknowledges changes and variation in the practices of small firms but only a small amount of empirical work has explored the processes through which HRM practices undergo change. Research has tended, instead, to examine the presence and effectiveness of HRM in small firms and often viewed this in terms of a deficit m...

This article critically analyses intersubjective negotiation in the context of the small firm employment relationship. Such employment relationships are acknowledged as largely ad hoc, contested and negotiated, producing mutual adjustment between owner-managers and employees. It presents detailed qualitative empirical material from three small prof...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can be deceptively complex organisations to manage. This complexity can raise a broad range of challenges (Huang and Brown, 1999), central to which are issues relating to owner-managers, employees and the employment relationship. The International Small Business Journal (ISBJ) has played an important role i...

Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's approach to narrative identity and a longitudinal case study of a graphic design firm, this paper explores identity work provoked by organisational changes for one group of knowledge workers, graphic designers. The approach to identity work developed in this paper illuminates how these knowledge workers use narrative to me...

In this paper we develop Paul Ricoeur’s approach to ‘narrative identity’ to explore questions of complex and conflictual identity work in organisations. We read Ricoeur’s self-reflexive conception of narrative mediating between two ‘poles’ of identity within his discussion of a threefold, hermeneutic process of mimesis involving prefiguration, conf...