Enacted experiences: Analysing Drama in Entrepreneurship Training

This paper identifies and interprets enacted experiences in drama workshops organized as part of an entrepreneurship training programme. We argue that drama is an effective tool in entrepreneurship training programmes offered to practicing entrepreneurs. Drama exercises can contribute to creating, reinforcing or complementing different forms of entrepreneurial experience, which are here termed enacted experience. The results are encouraging for those who advocate using drama in training programmes for entrepreneurs. Drama sessions provide powerful experiences that may otherwise be out of reach of the participant. The paper contributes to the entrepreneurship training and entrepreneurial learning literatures by showing how enacted experiences in drama workshops are a form of experience that together with mastery, vicarious and social experience (Erikson, 2003) is connected to entrepreneurship development. Methodologically the paper illustrates how visual material can be applied in research.</p

Gender and Innovation: State of the Art and a Research Agenda

Purpose - The purpose of the article is to present a framework for research on gender and innovation. The framework is developed based on a review of current literature in the area; it is applied to provide a context for the articles in this special issue and to offer suggestions for future research.&nbsp; Design/methodology/approach - The article relies on a literature review of gender and innovation. Additional literature searches on Scopus were conducted to provide an overview of the area. In addition, comparative analogies are sought from research fields of gender and entrepreneurship as well as gender and technology. Findings - The article presents the scope and issues in current research on gender and innovation. Based on our overview, research in this area is conducted in various disciplines applying a variety of methodological approaches. In order to make sense of the current research we developed a framework consisting of various approaches to, gender and innovation; these include gender as a variable, construction and process and innovation as a result, process and discourse. Research implications - Based on the review, several recommendations for future research are made. First, future research should question the connection between technology and innovation, and purposefully seek innovation activity also in low-tech and service sectors and firms. Innovation scholars and policy makers should not primarily target radical and product innovations but should be equally interested in incremental and process innovations. Second, understanding women&rsquo;s innovation activity needs to be embedded in understanding the normative frames and structural factors at play. A particular theoretical call is linked to the study of power and innovation. Third, it is imperative to develop and apply new methodological approaches and new operationalizations of innovation and innovators. Practical implications - By focusing on gender and innovation, it is possible to discover innovation as a gender biased phenomenon. Policy makers should bear this in mind when developing innovation policies. Originality/value - This introductory article puts forward a framework on gender and innovation that helps to make sense of the current state-of-the-art and to develop new research questions that need to be addressed for further theorising within the field.</p

Determinants of job satisfaction for salaried and self-employed professionals in Finland

This article contributes to our knowledge of the determinants of job satisfaction by analysing the effects of employment status (self-employed or salaried employee) and work characteristics (autonomy, variety, task identity, task significance and feedback) on job satisfaction in a sample of 2327 Finnish professionals. The results of the analysis show that although the self-employed professionals are significantly more satisfied with their jobs than their salaried counterparts in Finland, employment status as such does not explain job satisfaction when the five work characteristics are added to the structural model. Furthermore, the analysis finds that task significance, variety and autonomy have similar effects on the level of job satisfaction among both employees and self-employed individuals, while feedback has a weaker effect when the individual is self-employed and task identity does not affect job satisfaction in either group. Overall, the study points to the need to develop jobs that are high in autonomy, variety and task significance for professionals in order to enhance job satisfaction

Challenges in delivering a brand promise - focusing on municipal healthcare organisations

Purpose To investigate how healthcare professionals understand a new organisational brand and examine the ideas discussed in relation to it within health care organisations. Design/methodology/approach The research is based on a discursive approach that facilitates understanding how the informants perceived a new organisation brand and how that might shape their activities in the enterprise. Findings The study identified four distinct interpretative repertoires: the organisational brand as an economic solution, the magic wand, the factory, and a servant to the customer. The new brand was understood in terms of economic and business-like functions marked by external branding and its signs (logos etc.). The brand is not communicated to patients or colleagues, and the factory metaphor is applied to work practices. Hence, several potential dilemmas arise concerning the brand promise, customer expectations, economic and efficiency gains and the professional values of employees. Research limitations/implications Adoption of private-sector practices in semi-public or public-sector organisations is common. This study focuses on how private-sector ideas diffuse into the organisations and how they are translated within them. Practical implications We suggest a stronger emphasis on internal branding as a reconciliation to enhance legitimacy, high-quality customer service and staff wellbeing. Originality/value Theoretically, the unique contribution of the study is drawing upon health care branding, dilemma theory and discursive institutionalism in its interpretation. Consequently, it demonstrates how ideas about the brand and public health care are translated and communicated in the examined discourses and how those ideas reconstruct understanding and change behaviour within the organisations

Entrepreneurs’ mental health and well-being:A review and research agenda

Interest in entrepreneurs’ mental health and well-being (MWB) is growing in recognition of the role of MWB in entrepreneurs’ decision making, motivation, and action. Yet relevant knowledge is dispersed across disciplines, which makes what we currently understand about entrepreneurs’ MWB unclear. In this systematic review I integrate insights from 144 empirical studies. These studies show that research is focused on three research questions: (1) Do different types of entrepreneurs differ in their MWB? What are the (2) antecedents and (3) consequences of entrepreneurs’ MWB? The review systematizes evidence on known antecedents and consequences of entrepreneurs’ MWB but also reveals overlooked and undertheorized sources and outcomes of entrepreneurs’ MWB. The review provides a mapping and framework that advance research on entrepreneurs’ MWB and help to position entrepreneurs’ MWB more centrally in management and entrepreneurship research. It calls for researchers to go beyond applying models developed for employees to understand entrepreneurs. Instead, the findings point the way to developing a dedicated theory of entrepreneurial work and MWB that is dynamic, socialized, and open to considering context and acknowledges variability and fluidity across entrepreneurs’ life domains, as well as the centrality of work for entrepreneurs’ identity

Work orientations, well-being and job content of self-employed and employed professionals

Drawing on psychology-derived theories and methods, a questionnaire survey compared principal kinds of work orientation, job content and mental well-being between self-employed and organisationally employed professional workers. Self-employment was found to be particularly associated with energised well-being in the form of job engagement. The presence in self-employment of greater challenge, such as an enhanced requirement for personal innovation, accounted statistically for self-employed professionals’ greater job engagement, and self-employed professionals more strongly valued personal challenge than did professionals employed in an organisation. However, no between-role differences occurred in respect of supportive job features such as having a comfortable workplace. Differences in well-being, job content and work orientations were found primarily in comparison between self-employees and organisational non-managers. The study emphasises the need to distinguish conceptually and empirically between different forms of work orientation, job content and well-being, and points to the value of incorporating psychological thinking in some sociological research

The Impact of Entrepreneurship Education in Higher Education: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda

Using a teaching model framework, we systematically review empirical evidence on the impact of entrepreneurship education (EE) in higher education on a range of entrepreneurial outcomes, analyzing 159 published articles from 2004 to 2016. The teaching model framework allows us for the first time to start rigorously examining relationships between pedagogical methods and specific outcomes. Reconfirming past reviews and meta-analyses, we find that EE impact research still predominantly focuses on short-term and subjective outcome measures and tends to severely underdescribe the actual pedagogies being tested. Moreover, we use our review to provide an up-to-date and empirically rooted call for less obvious, yet greatly promising, new or underemphasized directions for future research on the impact of university-based entrepreneurship education. This includes, for example, the use of novel impact indicators related to emotion and mind-set, focus on the impact indicators related to the intention-to-behavior transition, and exploring the reasons for some contradictory findings in impact studies including person-, context-, and pedagogical model-specific moderator