How Do Organizations Shape Entrepreneurship? Explaining Employee Entrepreneurs’ Entry and Performance

Abstract

My three-essay dissertation consists of three independent chapters that examine how two major institutions, organizations and family, shape entrepreneurship in Sweden. In chapter one, I frame a contingent approach to social influence on entrepreneurship and empirically test the specifications about the contingencies. I first conceptualize entrepreneurship as a process of discovering and pursuing startup opportunities, I then theorize the conditions that amplify or reduce peer influence on entrepreneurship. In chapter two, I investigate the question of under what conditions spousal couples leave their wage jobs to become co-entrepreneurs. Whereas some spousal couples jointly create new business together, others may decide to have one person becoming an entrepreneur while the other person remaining employed in an established organization. I distinguish between competing theoretical accounts by investigating wives and husbands' transitions into entrepreneurship, taking into account their separate employment in the labor market and their joint household conditions. In chapter three, I investigate how founders and their recruited employees jointly create new businesses, contingent on the founding context of new businesses. I argue that an important dimension of developing routines and delineating boundaries is manifest in entrepreneurs' selections of employees from their local labor markets (Scott 2008). Once recruited, employees join the founders to create new organizations and exert influences on organizations' structures and performances. Even though entrepreneurs largely follow the blueprints they learned from prior employer organizations to recruit employees, the effects of transferring routines may be contingent on the founding conditions surrounding the new businesses. Tackling these research questions requires big data on founders’ employment history and their workplaces. I use a large-scale data set that are well-suited for my research questions, which are panel data from multiple cohorts on employer organizations and their employees in all industries in Sweden from 1989 to 2002.