Valuable learning experience or stigmatizing event? - Three studies exploring entrepreneurs lives subsequent to business failure

The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a detailed examination of the business failure phenomenon and to contribute to this important stream of research by formally investigating how business failure affects the subsequent lives of entrepreneurs. Building on an attributional perspective, diverse literature streams, and multiple methodological approaches, I seek to provide some new insights on this emerging stream of literature. Entrepreneurs lives after business failure can be studied as a process consisting of multiple stages uniting a great variety of phenomena ultimately resulting in affective, cognitive and behavioral outcomes for failed entrepreneurs. This thesis attempts to reflect and account for this process by exploring three selected phenomena determining entrepreneurs lives after business failure in depth. More specifically, I will explore and analyze selected immediate effects (i.e. the social costs and potential stigma associated with business failure), intermediate effects (i.e. the way entrepreneurs make sense of and explain their previous entrepreneurial endeavor), and finally long-term effects (i.e. how the sensemaking efforts of failed entrepreneurs could signal their future decision making and behavior). Overall, this dissertation provides a balanced and comprehensive picture of entrepreneurs lives after business failure. The results presented may represent an important step in the theory building process to better understand entrepreneurs reactions in response to the failure of their business. I am confident that the contributions of this dissertation pave the way for further empirical studies investigating the diverse effects of business failure on entrepreneurs subsequent lives.The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a detailed examination of the business failure phenomenon and to contribute to this important stream of research by formally investigating how business failure affects the subsequent lives of entrepreneurs. Building on an attributional perspective, diverse literature streams, and multiple methodological approaches, I seek to provide some new insights on this emerging stream of literature. Entrepreneurs lives after business failure can be studied as a process consisting of multiple stages uniting a great variety of phenomena ultimately resulting in affective, cognitive and behavioral outcomes for failed entrepreneurs. This thesis attempts to reflect and account for this process by exploring three selected phenomena determining entrepreneurs lives after business failure in depth. More specifically, I will explore and analyze selected immediate effects (i.e. the social costs and potential stigma associated with business failure), intermediate effects (i.e. the way entrepreneurs make sense of and explain their previous entrepreneurial endeavor), and finally long-term effects (i.e. how the sensemaking efforts of failed entrepreneurs could signal their future decision making and behavior). Overall, this dissertation provides a balanced and comprehensive picture of entrepreneurs lives after business failure. The results presented may represent an important step in the theory building process to better understand entrepreneurs reactions in response to the failure of their business. I am confident that the contributions of this dissertation pave the way for further empirical studies investigating the diverse effects of business failure on entrepreneurs subsequent lives

Large‐scale mass movements recorded in the sediments of Lake Hallstatt (Austria)–evidence for recurrent natural hazards at a UNESCO World Heritage site

The Bronze to Iron Age underground salt mining complex of Hallstatt (Austria) is widely recognised for its cultural importance and wealth of archaeological artefacts. However, while the daily life in the salt mines is archaeologically well documented and environmental effects of the mining activity have been investigated recently, the impact of natural hazards on the prehistoric mining community is still poorly understood. For instance, while it is well established that the prehistoric underground mines have repeatedly been destroyed by large-scale mass movements, only little is known about the characteristics and extent of these events as well as about mass-movement recurrence during more recent times. To shed light on past mass-movement activity in the vicinity of the Hallstatt salt mines, we investigated sediment cores from adjacent Lake Hallstatt. Within the regular lake sediments we identified three large-scale event deposits, which are interpreted to originate from spontaneous or seismically induced mass movements in the mid-19th and late 9th century ce and the mid-4th century bce. While the age of the latter event is in good agreement with the abandonment of the famous Iron Age cemetery at Hallstatt, the younger events indicate that large-scale mass movements also occurred repeatedly during the Common Era

Attributes of legitimate venture failure impressions

The current research investigates the effectiveness of impression management strategies available to entrepreneurs to foster social legitimacy with stakeholders following venture failure. We use a conjoint experiment to examine how different attributions of causes of failure influence the general public's legitimacy judgments. The most effective strategy proves to be the entrepreneurs distancing themselves from the failure, in that they attribute the failure to external factors that are not under the entrepreneurs' volitional control, and brought about by circumstances that are unlikely to reoccur. Our analysis also considers how the audience members' dispositional agreeableness and general self-efficacy influence judgment formation

Ligand-Directed Chemistry on Glycoside Hydrolases – A Proof of Concept Study

Selective covalent labelling of enzymes using small molecule probes has advanced the scopes of protein profiling. The covalent bond formation to a specific target is the key step of activity-based protein profiling (ABPP), a method which has become an indispensable tool for measuring enzyme activity in complex matrices. With respect to carbohydrate processing enzymes, strategies for ABPP so far involve labelling the active site of the enzyme, which results in permanent loss of activity. Here, we report in a proof of concept study the use of ligand-directed chemistry (LDC) for labelling glycoside hydrolases near – but not in – the active site. During the labelling process, the competitive inhibitor is cleaved from the probe, departs the active site and the enzyme maintains its catalytic activity. To this end, we designed a building block synthetic concept for small molecule probes containing iminosugar-based reversible inhibitors for labelling of two model β-glucosidases. The results indicate that the LDC approach can be adaptable for covalent proximity labelling of glycoside hydrolases.T. M. W. thanks the FWF (Wien, Austria) for financial support (project number P30372-B21). Authors from TU Graz acknowledge support from NAWI Graz.Peer reviewe