Trenton A Williams

Brigham Young University - Provo Main Campus | BYU · Department of Business Management

Disaster events threaten the lives, economies, and wellbeing of those they impact. Understanding the role of emergent organizations in responding to suffering and building resilience is an important component of the grand challenge of how to effectively respond to disasters. In this inductive case study we explore venture creation initiated by loca...

Research on crisis management and resilience has sought to explain how individuals and organizations anticipate and respond to adversity, yet—surprisingly—there has been little integration across these two literatures. In this paper, we review the literatures on crisis management and resilience and discuss opportunities to both integrate and advanc...

An important and underexamined topic in the growing literature on community-embedded organizing concerns situations in which dramatic shifts in the environment require the time-sensitive re-establishment of both communities and organizations to address urgent needs. We conduct a qualitative study of emergent community-organization trajectories in t...

Research on identity has provided key insights into the challenges individuals experience when their professional self-concept is disrupted. However, there has been little to no consideration of the fact that individuals’ sense of how they are viewed and defined by others—their construed image—is also a key dimension of the professional self, one t...

Entrepreneurial resourcefulness is a concept that resonates with practitioners and scholars alike from a diverse set of theoretical and empirical backgrounds. Despite the prevalence and promise of this concept, the literature on entrepreneurial resourcefulness is fragmented and lacks cohesion in how it is labeled, conceptualized, measured, and depl...

Persistent war is an increasing reality for millions of people worldwide. War contexts create a wide range of problems, but paradoxically may fuel some entrepreneurial activities. This inductive, qualitative study explores how an entrepreneurial ecosystem was launched and sustained amid an ongoing civil war despite repeated setbacks, disruptions, a...

Social entrepreneurship continues to grow as an impactful phenomenon in the world and as a rich stream of research. Given this exciting growth, there is value in proactively exploring how social entrepreneurship scholarship can thrive and ‘seize the moment’ as it matures. This special issue solicited papers at the intersection of strategy and socia...

Empathy is a primary driver of social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial action. However, empathizing individuals can arrive at different conclusions about what targets need. This variance in entrepreneurs’ empathy for targets is important because it will help explain the type of interventions they initiate to help targets and the production of a...

Plain English Summary There are different ways organizations make the most out of a surprising challenge to enhance performance, adjust, and pivot for new opportunities. The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged organizations in different ways—some experienced near-exponential increases in demand, whereas others saw their entire business evaporate overn...

Given the importance of theorizing about an entrepreneurial phenomenon, we seek to highlight the common challenges of entrepreneurship papers’ theorizing and offer suggestions for how we (as a community of scholars) can address these challenges to develop more robust and impactful entrepreneurship papers to advance the entrepreneurship field. Speci...

Despite the increasing interest in studying the concept of resilience in entrepreneurship, existing research often fails to account for stressors that induce entrepreneurs' need for resilience and coping efforts. By arguing the need to study stress, resilience, and coping together to understand how entrepreneurs build resilience in the face of adve...

Focusing on the organizing practices by which vulnerable individuals are exploited for their labor, we build a model that depicts how human traffickers systematically target impoverished girls and women and transform their autonomous objection into unquestioned compliance. Drawing from qualitative interviews with women forced into labor in the sex...

Entrepreneurship and organization theory can both benefit from a mutual exchange to theorize on a number of topics. One such topic is organizational responses to adversity. In this paper, we theorize by abstracting across highly contextualized papers on entrepreneurship's role in responding to adversity and propose that entrepreneurial action, such...

What measures are SMEs most likely to take in order to make ends meet in the face of a “black swan” external shock? That is the question we explore in this study, drawing upon unique data from 456 SMEs in the midst of an unfolding crisis. Our findings demonstrate how SMEs acted immediately by deferring investments, reducing labor costs, reducing ex...

Entrepreneurship and organization theory can both benefit from a mutual exchange to theorize on a number of topics. One such topic is organizational responses to adversity. In this paper, we theorize by abstracting across highly contextualized papers on entrepreneurship’s role in responding to adversity and propose that entrepreneurial action, such...

Chile is experiencing its worst economic and social crisis in decades, which is adversely impacting entrepreneurs and SMEs. Chile’s Economic Development Agency is seeking to support recovery efforts by reorienting its entrepreneurship programs and ecosystem support capacity. What makes the reorientation especially challenging is the need to ensure...

In response to societal grand challenges, professors have unique opportunities to be changemakers, repurposing their expertise to deploy relevant, timely, practical, and research-backed knowledge for the betterment of communities. Drawing on scholarship on post-crisis organizing, entrepreneurial hustle and social entrepreneurship, we provide a firs...

In this paper, we problematize the growing literature on hybrid organizing to demonstrate that research on hybrids and entrepreneurship can benefit from considering the degree of hybridity in organizing the exploitation of potential opportunities for the creation of both economic and social value. Recent work has moved beyond discrete categorizatio...

DOWLOAD BOOK FREE HERE: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4138/Spontaneous-VenturingAn-Entrepreneurial-Approach In Spontaneous Venturing, Dean Shepherd and Trenton Williams identify and describe a new approach for responding to disaster and suffering: the local organizing of spontaneous, compassionate, and impromptu actions—the rapid emergence of...

The growing number of studies which reference the concept of mission drift imply that such drift is an undesirable strategic outcome related to inconsistent organizational action, yet beyond such references little is known about how mission drift occurs, how it impacts organizations, and how organizations should respond. Existing management theory...

Self-employment can be stressful and its long-term effects on individual health could be significant; yet, the physiological outcomes of self-employment related stress remain under-explored. Drawing on allostatic load as a long-term biological consequence of physiological wear-and-tear and an indicator of stress response, we use three different stu...

Suffering comes in many forms that significantly impact organizations' operations and performance. As a result, recent research on compassion organizing seeks to explain how efforts to notice, feel, and respond to suffering create organizational (and societal) benefits. Widespread suffering can be generated by natural disasters, which in turn can t...

Venture creation generates value in a variety of forms both for the entrepreneur him or her-self and the venture's stakeholders. Recent research explores entrepreneurial action as a vehicle for personal transformation and development for the individual, especially as it pertains to overcoming adversity. We build on this emerging literature by explo...

Although individuals often value work identities, sometimes events threaten these identities, creating a situation in which people struggle to overcome the identity threat. Building on the theories of identity and escape from self, we develop a "rock bottom" model of generating a new positive work identity. Specifically, individuals who eventually...

Learning from Entrepreneurial Failure provides an important counter-weight to the multitude of books that focus on entrepreneurial success. Failure is by far the most common scenario for new businesses and a critical part of the entrepreneurial process is learning from failure and having the motivation to try again. This book examines the various o...

Overall, the book builds on and extends our research over the last decade or so on the topic of learning from failure. Our research on this topic began with Shepherd (2003) and continues to this day (i.e., papers published in 2014 and 2015 and in press). The book covers (1) the failures of projects, businesses, family businesses, and even college f...

This article outlines a mixed method approach to social network analysis combining techniques of organizational history development, inductive data structuring, and content analysis to offer a novel approach for network data construction and analysis. This approach provides researchers with a number of benefits over traditional sociometric or other...

Judgment and decision-making research has a long tradition in management and represents a substantial stream of research in entrepreneurship. Despite numerous reviews of this topic in the organizational behavior, psychology, and marketing fields, this is the first review in the field of entrepreneurship. This absence of a review of entrepreneurial...

Judgment and decision making research has a long tradition in management, and represents a substantial stream of research in entrepreneurship. Despite numerous reviews of this topic in organizational behavior, psychology, and marketing, this is the first review in entrepreneurship. This absence of a review of entrepreneurial decision making is surp...

There is much to be learned about how venture creators generate non-economic value for themselves, especially in the aftermath of a surprising and disrupting exogenous shock. Drawing on theory of organizational emergence and the research on resilience, we test a venture creation model of resilience following a potentially traumatic event.

In contrast to models of compassion within existing organizations, this grounded theory study examines how ventures emerge relying on localness and community in direct response to “opportunities” to alleviate suffering in the aftermath of a natural disaster. While a natural disaster is a surprising disruptive event devastating a local community, th...

Although the number of prisoners has risen globally, educational efforts to help them return to society as productive members have yielded only mixed results. We propose that entrepreneurship education might be particularly valuable for prisoners because self- employment as an occupational career path can help overcome potential employers’ discrimi...

Although the number of prisoners has risen globally, educational efforts to help them return to society as productive members have yielded only mixed results. We propose that entrepreneurship education might be particularly valuable for prisoners because self-employment as an occupational career path can help overcome potential employers' discrimin...

Although there is widespread acknowledgement of the importance of learning from failure in R&D project settings, most organizational members find doing so to be quite difficult. Despite the opportunity to learn from failure, organizational members face a number of obstacles to doing so. In this inductive case study we explore the process by which a...

Although extant studies have increased our understanding of the decision of when to terminate a project and its organizational implications, they do not explore the contextual mechanisms underlying the link between the speed at which a project is terminated and the learning of those directly working on the project. This is surprising because percep...