The Opportunity Not Taken: Institutional and Cognitive Barriers to Entrepreneurial Innovation in Contexts of Resource Scarcity

Entrepreneurship is increasingly heralded as a solution to poverty, and many organizations and governments have begun to pursue market-based approaches to poverty alleviation through programs like microfinance and entrepreneurship training. Despite some exceptions, the results of such efforts have largely generated imitative opportunities, whereby individuals use the money and training they receive to replicate existing businesses within their community, rather than becoming able to recognize a broader range of opportunities for innovation and growth, and would-be entrepreneurs are often little better off than before. Whereas prior work has predominantly explored human/financial capital and formal institutional barriers to innovative entrepreneurship, this dissertation, through a series of three studies, using multiple theoretical lenses and methodologies, aims to identify and understand other potential impediments to innovative entrepreneurship in contexts of poverty, focusing on informal institutional and cognitive barriers. My studies all aim to provide both theoretical and practical insights around the following broad research question: What are the (informal) institutional and cognitive barriers to entrepreneurial innovation in contexts of resource scarcity, and how might they be addressed

The Social Effects of Entrepreneurship on Society and Some Potential Remedies: Four Provocations

A rapidly growing research stream examines the social effects of entrepreneurship on society. This research assesses the rise of entrepreneurship as a dominant theme in society and studies how entrepreneurship contributes to the production and acceptance of socio-economic inequality regimes, social problems, class and power struggles, and systemic inequities. In this article, scholars present new perspectives on an organizational sociology-inspired research agenda of entrepreneurial capitalism and detail the potential remedies to bound the unfettered expansion of a narrow conception of entrepreneurship. Taken together, the essays put forward four central provocations: 1) reform the study and pedagogy of entrepreneurship by bringing in the humanities; 2) examine entrepreneurship as a cultural phenomenon shaping society; 3) go beyond the dominant biases in entrepreneurship research and pedagogy; and 4) explore alternative models to entrepreneurial capitalism. More scholarly work scrutinizing the entrepreneurship–society nexus is urgently needed, and these essays provide generative arguments toward further developing this research agenda

How Formal and Informal Hierarchies Shape Conflict Within Cooperatives: A Field Experiment in Ghana

As an organizational form, cooperatives are increasingly being used throughout the world across different industries and sectors. While it has been suggested that various benefits can be derived from shared ownership, cooperatives are often characterized by conflict among members that, in turn, can lead to eventual failure of the cooperatives. Existing theory has suggested that the choice of formal control structure can play an important role in mitigating conflict, but a longstanding debate exists as to whether flat versus hierarchical control structures are more effective. To add further insight into this theoretical discussion, we conducted a field experiment involving 40 newly formed cooperatives in rural Ghana, which were randomly assigned to either a flat or hierarchical control structure. The quantitative results of our field experiment and subsequent qualitative data suggest that formal hierarchical control structures lead to lower levels of collective psychological ownership, which in turn result in higher levels of conflict compared to flat control structures within cooperatives. However, our results also suggest that the extent to which the choice of formal control structures influences conflict among cooperative members can be highly dependent on the absence or presence of an informal hierarchy