To be or not to be: Latent entrepreneurship, the networked agent, and the fear factor

Amal Ahmadi and Lebene Richmond Soga

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2022, vol. 174, issue C

Abstract: This conceptual paper explores a potential entrepreneur's journey of possessing the intention to start a new venture, but not necessarily realising it. We use the perspectives of actor-network theory and affective events theory to argue that latent entrepreneurship is underpinned by micro- and macro-level factors. First, the would-be entrepreneur is inescapably connected to a heterogeneous entrepreneurial network of relations that may enable or constrain entrepreneurship. Second, contextual risks and uncertainties impact the would-be entrepreneur's cognitive appraisals of and behavioural responses to fear, either leading to latent entrepreneurship or emergent entrepreneurship. We propose a framework to depict the interplay between the individual and the context within the dynamics of latent and emergent entrepreneurship. Our contribution is twofold: First, we contribute to the actor-network theory by suggesting that fear is one of the tokens in a would-be entrepreneur's heterogeneous network of relations, and that it must be negotiated either for latent or emergent entrepreneurship. Second, we advance the understanding of the role of fear in the entrepreneurial process by conceptualising it as a context-specific phenomenon and highlighting its dualistic nature, showing how it could play both negative and positive roles in the shift from latent to emergent entrepreneurship.

Keywords: Latent entrepreneurship; Emergent entrepreneurship; Actor-network theory; Affective events theory; Fear (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162521007150
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:174:y:2022:i:c:s0040162521007150

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2021.121281

Access Statistics for this article

Technological Forecasting and Social Change is currently edited by Fred Phillips

More articles in Technological Forecasting and Social Change from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().