Journal of Business Venturing 2024 year in review: The year of exercising entrepreneurial agency in response to crises

Abstract

When various forms of crisis hit, they can stimulate changes in entrepreneurial agency – the capacity to act (or choose not to) – and the actions entrepreneurs take to mitigate the threats and pursue the new opportunities those crises create. While assessing articles for the Journal of Business Venturing's annual “Best Paper” award, we observed this to be a recurring theme across a significant number of the studies published in 2024. Inspired by this research, we summarize the 17 articles that explored this theme and develop a framework that highlights material, relational, and discursive concerns brought about by crises. In response entrepreneurs across individual or collective levels take action to preserve or cultivate distinct forms of entrepreneurial agency – adaptive, allied, and censored – and to resolve various paradoxes of entrepreneurial agency. We close with a brief discussion of the growing relevance of a social symbolic lens in reconciling how entrepreneurs construe and respond to crises and how the specific forms of agency and paradox identified could inform theory both within and beyond entrepreneurship.