Building start-up teams around challenges: a relational study of entrepreneurial identity (EI) and entrepreneurial opportunity (EO) construction and their interplay

Parsons, Katherine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3662-7916 2022. Building start-up teams around challenges: a relational study of entrepreneurial identity (EI) and entrepreneurial opportunity (EO) construction and their interplay. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the conflicts and tensions experienced by six nascent start-up teams undertaking an entrepreneurship education and development programme as they construct the entrepreneurial opportunity (EO) and their collective entrepreneurial identity (EI). Applying a relational sociology perspective, I demonstrate the need for a constitutive and contextualised perspective of EO and EI construction. Such a perspective recognises the influence of relational interactions across the entrepreneurial ecosystem on how EO and EI are constructed and understood as start-up teams transition from idealised to actualised conceptualisations of EO and EI. The thesis advances theory in this area through the introduction of a novel process framework, which presents a holistic model of EO and EI co-emergence in nascent start-up teams. The data-informed process framework shows how nascent start-up teams engage in legitimising and sense-making strategies (temporal sense-making, entrepreneurial framing and counter narratives) as they recursively and iteratively construct their EO and EI over time. The findings challenge the dichotomous view of social versus commercial enterprise and support a move towards a continuum perspective of hybridity in new venture creation. I introduce the ‘socially purposeful start-up’ as a conceptualisation of a new organisational form observed in this study. This organisational form, contrary to the dichotomous picture of hybrid new ventures typically presented in the literature, reflects aspirations to be both commercially successful and achieve significant social impact as a ‘for-profit’ company. The study culminates in a call for the extension of the dominant neo-liberal narratives of entrepreneurship taught in educational and incubator settings and reified through the ‘grand narrative’ of entrepreneurship permeating society, to include broader conceptualisations of entrepreneurship better suited to meet today’s complex challenges.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Business (Including Economics)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	entrepreneurial identity; entrepreneurial opportunity; start-up teams; entrepreneurship; purposeful business; hybridity; organisational ethnography; relational sociology; situational analysis;
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	6 February 2023
Last Modified:	28 Feb 2024 02:23
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/156502

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