New ventures are expected to continuously add new jobs and managerial positions to meet the expanding demands of scaling. However, the rapid pace and inherent uncertainty of scaling often lead founders of new ventures to rely on heuristics when making these critical hiring and managerial appointment decisions. By integrating research on scaling, cognition in decision-making, and gender stereotypes with literature on HR practices, we argue that such heuristics can exacerbate reliance on gender stereotypes rather than the actual competencies of potential candidates. Using matched employer-employee census data covering all new ventures established and led by solo male founders in Sweden between 2004 and 2018, we find that scaling decreases the likelihood of hiring females for job positions and appointing females to managerial positions. However, the founder's HR education mitigates these negative effects on both female hiring and managerial appointments, while the founder's HR experience only mitigates the negative effects on female hiring decisions. We also tease out the invoked mechanisms, conduct post hoc tests, and run an extensive number of robustness tests.

This chapter explores the importance of expanding diversity, equity, and inclusion research beyond Western, business-centric contexts. The authors draw from their experiences as researchers in Northern Europe to highlight the need for a more globally inclusive approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion scholarship. Through an analysis of studies on cultural diversity in top management teams, healthcare teams, and entrepreneurship, they illustrate the impact of institutional contexts on diversity outcomes. The chapter advocates for action-oriented research and interdisciplinary collaboration to better understand how diversity operates across different societal and professional settings.

Recent research on entrepreneurial failure has started to investigate the impact of failure on entrepreneurs and how this influences their motivation and willingness to engage in subsequent entrepreneurial ventures. We approach this topic from an alternative perspective, focusing on former entrepreneurs seeking to return to paid work and exploring how their experience of venture failure is perceived and appraised by employers in the recruitment process. Such perceptions matter because employers are gatekeepers to the employment market and thus their appraisals influence how easily former entrepreneurs can re-integrate themselves in the paid workforce. We conducted 30 interviews with employers in growing human-capital intensive companies in Sweden, asking these recruiters about their perceptions of former entrepreneurs and how their evaluations affected their hiring decisions. Conceptually, we frame our study using a process model of stigmatization by nuancing this model with fine-grained analyses of employers’ perceptions and appraisals of applicants’ entrepreneurial failure experiences in the recruitment process. This analysis identifies some of the key conditions that lead employers either to value or devalue an applicant’s experience of entrepreneurial failure, further indicating the implications of this finding for entrepreneurs’ careers and prospects of gaining paid employment.

To advance the discussion on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, we analyze the management literature and examples of advocacy practices inspired by the three DEI logics of moral justice, business case, and power activism. By identifying litigation, self-interest, and coercion as the mechanisms driving change within these logics, we show how the concept of diversity is approached differently in the three logics. Based on this discussion, we explain why diversity has taken precedence over equity and inclusion in both research and practice. We further show how the tensions between DEI logics inform diversity initiatives and exacerbate rather than mitigate bias and inequality. To rejuvenate scholarly and managerial debates around DEI initiatives and address managerial biases to focus on the wrong things, we discuss what could be learned from the rationales of such initiatives, including how one can be fooled into focusing on diversity at the expense of equity and inclusion.

Although academic interest in organizational scaling is growing, extant research has focused primarily on the antecedents and processes, neglecting how employees experience scaling. Drawing on the scale-up, firm growth, and well-being literature, we take an employee perspective to examine the impact of scaling on employee burnout and job satisfaction. Using a sample of 10,908 new venture employees in Sweden, we show that scaling is positively associated with employee burnout, and negatively with job satisfaction. We also show that the link between scaling, burnout, and job satisfaction depends on whether the employee is in a managerial position or has prior new venture experience.

Purpose

In the process of pursuing an entrepreneurial career, the role of the relational institution of the family depends on the economy in which the institutions are embedded. In emerging economies, parents play a more significant role concerning their children’s career in contrast to those in developed ones. In this respect, there is limited knowledge regarding the process of pursuing an entrepreneurial career while simultaneously handling parental relations in a context that does not support entrepreneurship. This paper investigates how parental dynamics influences the process of an individual’s transition to an entrepreneurial career after graduating from a university in a developing country.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper is based on a longitudinal study of 15 graduate entrepreneurs in Ethiopia who were in the process of transitioning to entrepreneurial careers. Data was collected and analysed during a two and a half year period (2018–2020) drawing on 45 interviews with, and observations of, these entrepreneurs, and six interviews with parents.

Findings

The paper identifies patterns of how entrepreneurs embedded with or dis-embedded themselves from their parental relations as they developed their ventures. The findings show that there were shifts in the entrepreneur–parent relational dynamics from the pre-startup phase to the up and running phase. Drawing on these findings, the paper develops a theoretical framework of graduates’ transitioning to entrepreneurship as a process of individuation from parental relations. Further, we find that parents are both the context and the agents in the entrepreneurial process and that the graduates’ pursuit of entrepreneurial careers is instrumental for their individuation process. The findings contribute to the literature on family embeddedness in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship career literature and individuation theory.

Originality/value

Answering the call for research on family embeddedness in entrepreneurship, this paper explores the role of parental dynamics when a family member transitions to an entrepreneurial career after graduating from a university. The study proposes and shows how individuation theory is a relevant perspective for understanding graduates’ transition to entrepreneurial careers.

In this article, we introduce the special issue on entrepreneurship and embeddedness. We do so by providing a brief overview of existing research on the topic focused on three important conversations related to process, context and theoretical foundations. The overview highlights essential contributions from extant research and suggests that expansion and advancement in the research conversation can be accomplished by focusing on dynamic and multilayered conceptualizations of embeddedness and by broadening the theoretical foundations of our research. We also present and position the papers in the special issue within the conversations on process, context and theoretical foundations in entrepreneurship research on embeddedness.

We conduct a comprehensive review of embeddedness in entrepreneurship research. Although the term "embeddedness" is frequently used in this field of study, less is known about the ways in which it is operationalized and applied. Using criterion sampling, we analyse 198 articles in order to investigate how embeddedness is conceptualized and what role it plays in the extant entrepreneurship literature. We categorize our findings based on different phases of the entrepreneurial process (early, mature and exit) and outline the dominant focus and the main conceptualization of embeddedness for each phase. We highlight important learnings for each of the three phases and identify potential areas for conceptual development. Across the phases, we find that embeddedness and context are often used interchangeably. We thus call for construct clarity in the field. In the existing literature, entrepreneurs are generally portrayed as reactive to embeddedness, resulting in a loss of entrepreneurial agency. To remedy this, we introduce the term agencement, which takes into account the relationship between the entrepreneurship and embeddedness. Further, entrepreneurs are found to be embedded in multiple contexts at the same time, and embeddedness can be understood at different levels and to different degrees. To address this complexity, it is relevant to focus on the embedding process itself, acknowledging that it takes place in social interactions including cultural, cognitive, and emotional aspects between contexts and across levels. While the extant literature supports the notion that embeddedness is important for understanding entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs, it does not necessarily support our understanding of how embeddedness takes form or why it takes certain forms. We therefore include a call for future research to turn to process and practice theories.