There is an increasing concern for the notion of ‘embeddedness’ of economic activity; yet the conceptualization of the concept and its operationalization remain underdeveloped. First, embeddedness may concern, on the one hand, the structure of relations that tie economic actors together...

Conceptualizing proximity as a mainly geographically and more or less permanently anchored phenomenon has been shown to be insufficient in clusters; the proximity between firms also has a temporary and relational character when coupled with globalization. This paper aims to contribute to this...

This paper elaborates a proximity framework and provides empirical evidence of how knowledge cross-fertilization is instigated at international trade fairs (ITFs) and continued in a cluster network. This paper applies a case study method relying on social network analysis to explore the...

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to understand the logics at work when companies establish their corporate brand identities. Essential to this quest is to understand the reasoning of which corporate traits to communicate. As a case in point we target firms that make reference to being a...

This article deals with Triple Helix (university, industry and government cooperation) from an institutional theory perspective. The empirical context is the Western Cape Region in South Africa and the focus is entrepreneurship development. The purpose is two-fold: first, the existing Triple...

By combining literature on dialogues and strategy as practice, the purpose of this paper is to explore the role of family business owners’ strategic dialogues. Relying on a case study approach we follow the strategic dialogue in two family firms over a period of four years. Our results lead to...

This paper takes an interest in the past, as depicted by family business owners, and how it is reflected in the governance of the firm. The purpose of this paper is to explore how family business owners express and perceive their family business story and the implications for the strategy...

The purpose of this study is to better understand whether emotional aspects affect entrepreneurs’ and owner-managers’ decisions in investment situations when escalation of commitment can be observed and where the level of uncertainty was also added to the emotional aspect. The study was...

This paper provides a systematic assessment of how entrepreneurs react to firm failure. We use appraisal theory as an overarching theoretical framework and hypothesize that the more the failure experience is appraised as stressful in terms of its implications for harm or loss, the greater the...