Exploring founder identity tension, resolution and venture pursuit

Research suggests that venture founders from creative backgrounds can experience identity tension if they view artistic and commercial logics as competing. Whether they experience this tension and how it is resolved can have implications for their behavioral responses, ultimately shaping the development of their ventures. In this article, we adopt an identity work lens in a longitudinal study of venture founders from creative backgrounds. Our findings and subsequent model detail the circumstances that trigger identity tension and how founders from arts background experience and resolve it in different ways. This leads to practices that focus on different conceptions of performance and growth

The missing link in human security research: dialogue and insecurity in Kosovo

The concept of human security continues to defy definitional clarity at the same time as it is being embraced by policymakers. This article proposes a practice-grounded approach that focuses on investigative method as a way of linking conceptual understanding of human security to the research process. Probing the 'actorness' of individuals in volatile contexts, a study of insecurity in Kosovo shows how dialogue can be applied as a research tool to access and assess human security in the field. Dialogue permits recognition of the power of the researched in the construction of knowledge of security, and accordingly reflects the conceptual shift represented by human security from states to communities and individuals. In the Kosovo study, dialogic research captured individual agency in the face of pervasive insecurity and revealed contradictory effects of such agency. This led to the formulation of the idea of the multidirectional security marker as a means of understanding experiences of insecurity in relation to strategies to combat it. Three such markers - self-reliance, informality and community solidarity - emerged and are analysed in the case of Kosovo. Simultaneously denoting restrictions on people's security and possibilities for overcoming those very same limitations, the markers express the agential dimension of human security and show how agency and security interact