After the harvest: A stewardship perspective on entrepreneurship and philanthropy

Entrepreneurs comprise the majority of the richest people in the world. Their venture exits, or more specifically harvests, often represent the events through which they accrue this great wealth. Following these harvests, entrepreneurs make critical decisions with their financial resources that can have a profound impact on society. Through content analysis of The Giving Pledge letters and in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs, we explore how and why entrepreneurs redistribute their resources following harvests, and we reveal four mechanisms — intrinsic motivation, identification, personal power, and stewardship norms — that drive these philanthropic decisions. We extend stewardship theory and highlight a new avenue through which entrepreneurs can act as stewards of others and address societal concerns

Straight OUTTA Detroit: Embracing Stigma as Part of the Entrepreneurial Narrative

Through an inductive field study, we set out to better understand how and why ventures would embrace a non-core stigma; this is perplexing given that a majority of stigma literature suggests that organizations tend to avoid/disidentify from stigmatized entities. To do so, we study organizational locational stigma, which we define as a label arising from an organization\u27s geographic location that evokes a collective stakeholder group-specific perception that an organization possesses a fundamental, deep-seated flaw that deindividuates and discredits the organization. Our findings from Detroit, Michigan reveal that entrepreneurs embrace the locational stigma by taking part in Detroit\u27s underdog narrative and comeback story. Entrepreneurs use the underdog narrative in hope of differentiating their ventures from those in other locations, while they leverage the comeback story to gain access to the resources and in-group advantages. We thus advance the concept of locational stigma and show how it can benefit organizations