William Gartner

• Professor at Babson College

This article maps and integrates research on legacy in family business using a sample of 140 articles. After describing the process of arriving at a corpus of legacy articles, we propose a systematic literature review that summarizes current literature based on five overarching questions: (a) What is legacy? (b) Who sends and receives legacy? (c) W...

Purpose This conceptual, multi-voiced paper aims to collectively explore and theorize family entrepreneuring, which is a research stream dedicated to investigating the emergence and becoming of entrepreneurial phenomena in business families and family firms. Design/methodology/approach Because of the novelty of this research stream, the authors as...

Using three theory-based performance criteria as decision attributes, we conducted a conjoint analysis experiment with 105 social venture founder-CEOs to examine their decisions to exit their firms voluntarily. Multilevel regression analysis of founders’ choices revealed that various exit preferences were chosen that did not support theoretical pre...

We use concepts from rhetorical history and mnemonic communities to expand on the notion of “intermarriage” in a family business as the merger of shared histories among family members, nonfamily members, and individuals from other families and suggest that a common mnemonic narrative defines the parameters of the family business rather than the str...

The concept of “generation” in family business scholarship is primarily used genealogically to reflect family lineage. This approach fails to account for complementary perspectives that are more established in history: “generation” as a category of societal belonging and a form of rhetorical history. Using a constitutive history approach, we identi...

There are two battles at the heart of the "opportunity wars": 1) Are opportunities discovered or created, and 2) Should we perhaps abandon the opportunity concept altogether? We argue that the first question is a pseudo-question, made possible by the loose use of "opportunity" in the discovery/creation debate during the last two decades. However, w...

Purpose The authors explore the relationship between adolescent behavior and subsequent entrepreneurial persistence by drawing on scholarship from clinical psychology and criminology to examine different subtypes of antisocial behavior (nonaggressive antisocial behavior and aggressive antisocial behavior) that underlie adolescent rule breaking. The...

This editorial offers ways to develop qualitative studies in entrepreneurship research. We indicate why and how qualitative methods clearly and distinctively contribute to the understanding of current entrepreneurship challenges using examples from the articles in this Special Issue and from other recent qualitative research. We provide a synthesis...

This paper theorizes the spiritual processes of community entrepreneuring as navigating tensions that arise when community-based enterprises (CBEs) emerge within communities and generate socio-economic inequality. Grounded on an ethnographic study of a dairy CBE in rural Malawi, findings reveal that intra-community tensions revolve around the occur...

Purpose This study offers empirical evidence from a nationally representative panel dataset of nascent entrepreneurs (PSED-II) regarding when external financing is acquired and how certain factors affect this timing during the cumulative process of nascent entrepreneurs taking actions toward establishing an operational entity. By assessing the rela...

In discussions with entrepreneurial families about their futures, we often suggest that each family member should consider four aspects of their lives—achievement, happiness, significance and legacy—as a broad framework to explore their goals and values and to reflect on “who they are” and ultimately “who they want to be.” This framework comes from...

This book focuses on family entrepreneurship and the role that families play in starting, growing, changing and transforming businesses. If you are interested in knowing more about how families act entrepreneurially across generations in terms of gaining insights into practical knowledge that can be applied, as well as learning about the ideas and...

This study theorizes on the sociomateriality of food in authority-building processes of partial organizations by exploring Alternative Food Networks (AFNs). Through the construction of arenas for food provisioning, AFNs represent grassroots collectives that deliberately juxtapose their practices from mainstream forms of food provisioning. Based on...

This book provides recent ideas, insights, facts, evidence, frameworks, and perspectives on how and why entrepreneurial families are successful over generations. The book focuses on how families successfully implement entrepreneurship across generations. That success, it argues, requires entrepreneurship at the level of the family, not only in the...

The purposes of this Special Issue in the Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior and Research on “Filling in the Blanks: “Black Boxes” in Enterprise/Entrepreneurship Education” were therefore to explore four broad topic areas that, we believe, have been overlooked and thus received less attention and interest from entrepreneurial education scholars....

Abstract Purpose – This study investigates when in the startup process, external financing is acquired by nascent entrepreneurs successful in getting outside funding and when this event takes place relative to other startup activities. Acquiring external financing is critical to achieving organizational survival and growth. This study unpacks when,...

The idea that there exist undiscovered entrepreneurial endowments fell into disfavor after Gartner's (1988) "'Who is an entrepreneur?' is the wrong question". However, a resurgence of the "question of the entrepreneur" suggests that advances in genetics research may be the key to discovering what makes entrepreneurs distinctive. This paper draws fr...

This article presents an exercise designed for successors and other business family members with the aim to enable them to communicate their understandings of their family and family business’ past legacies and to express their future-related projections. First initiated in France in 2014, then duplicated in United States in 2019, the exercise has...

In this article, we contend that entrepreneurship studies would greatly benefit from engagement with contemporary theorizations of practice. The practice tradition conceives of the process of entrepreneuring as the enactment and entanglement of multiple practices. Appreciating entrepreneurial phenomena as the enactment and entanglement of practices...

Research Summary We articulate the value of historical methods and reasoning in strategic entrepreneurship research and theory. We begin by introducing the papers in the special issue, contextualizing each within one of five broader methodological approaches, and elaborating on the applicability of each to other topics in entrepreneurship research....

Purpose The purpose of this paper commentary is to explore the intersection of project management and entrepreneurship through a poetic exploration of Flannery O’Connor’s short story: “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Through the use of the Japanese Haiku format, this commentary probes the nature and meaning of “projects,” the importance of goals and...

This study investigates how members in community-based enterprises (CBEs) engage in processes of co-constructing their collective prosocial identities. Based on an inductive analysis of 27 organizations that were formed explicitly as communities and sought to build alternative forms of production and consumption through innovative ways to pool and...

The objective of this chapter is to understand innovative processes of resource redeployment taking place during consumption. We label this as consumer entrepreneurship. We define consumer entrepreneurship as the process of sharing and recombining resources innovatively to seek opportunities for self-creating user value. Through the illustration of...

The chapter reviews several of the most prominent entrepreneurship frameworks to demonstrate that the entrepreneurship field lacks a theory of entrepreneurial behavior. However, each of these existing frameworks would benefit from, and be complemented by, an entrepreneurial behavioral theory. Drawing from multiple streams of research, the chapter o...

This article is an introduction to the special issue on ‘Entrepreneurship: Cross-National and Cross-Cultural Perspectives’. Besides providing overviews of the six articles published in the special issue, we discuss some of the challenges that arise when scholars explore cross-national and cross-cultural perspectives in entrepreneurship.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study different aspects and tensional forces that play a role in the internal and contextual negotiation that takes place within students in the exploration of the possible identity of entrepreneur. It expands the knowledge of how the university context influences student entrepreneurial processes from a mult...

This study investigates how members in community-based enterprises (CBEs) engage in processes of co-constructing their collective prosocial identities. Based on an inductive analysis of 27 organizations that were formed explicitly as communities and sought to build alternative forms of production and consumption through innovative ways to pool and...

The objective of this chapter is to understand innovative processes of resource redeployment taking place during consumption. We label this as consumer entrepreneurship. We define consumer entrepreneurship as the process of sharing and recombining resources innovatively to seek opportunities for self-creating user value. Through the illustration of...

This essay contrasts a perspective that places an excessive focus on technology businesses and growth with a view of entrepreneurship that embraces its heterogeneity. We challenge a taken-for-granted belief that only certain kinds of entrepreneurship might lead to wealth and job creation and additionally suggest that these two outcomes (wealth and...

There is growing recognition that entrepreneurship can be better understood within its context(s). This carefully designed book invites readers to take a journey: from reflecting critically on where the discussion on context and entrepreneurship stands today towards identifying future research questions and themes that deserve the attention of entr...

In this article, we briefly identify three main challenges/issues that should be taken into consideration in the institutionalization of entrepreneurship research: (1) recognizing the complexity of the phenomenon under study; (2) producing interesting, relevant and useful research results for all stakeholders; and (3) developing a critical posture...

More information at http://sej.strategicmanagement.net/entrepreneurship_and_strategy.php

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between low-wealth business founders in the USA and external startup funding. Specifically, the authors test whether a founders’ low personal net worth is correlated with a lower probability of acquiring funding from outside sources during the business creation process. Design/meth...

Entrepreneurship is the creation of organizations. What differentiates entrepreneurs from non-entrepreneurs is that entrepreneurs create organizations, while non-entre- preneurs do not. In behavioral approaches to the study of entrepreneurship an entre- preneur is seen as a set of activities involved in organization creation, while in trait approac...