Entrepreneurial agency in context: Enacting places, relationships, and time

Imagining and building a desired future in the face of pressures and threats posed by grand challenges on societies and human life requires hands-on dreamers skilled to intervene in the present and to create a more promising tomorrow. Along with possessing skills, they must be equipped to deal with the uncertainty involved in such endeavors, and able to sense, act, and mobilize under dynamic conditions. Such characteristics are at the core of entrepreneurial agency and its associated mindset, which allows and empowers contextually-embedded entrepreneurial actors to come up with new ideas, solve problems, and take action to pursue opportunities. This dissertation delves deeper into the microfoundations of entrepreneurial agency, meaning cognitive, emotional, and behavioral attributes and microprocesses that sustain entrepreneurial actors and their undertakings in two different settings: established organizations and competitive markets. Accordingly, it looks at employees engaged in corporate entrepreneurial roles, on the one hand, and independent entrepreneurs, on the other hand, to unveil how entrepreneurial agency and its outcomes are affected by, as well as shaped and enabled in relation to the context in which these individuals operate. Thus, by drawing on empirically- and conceptually-driven ways of theorizing materialized in four independent studies, this doctoral dissertation reveals several microprocesses that substantiate entrepreneurship as a method of thought and action. The first study unpacks the emotionality underlying the enactment of a corporate entrepreneurial role. By closely examining the subjective experiences of corporate entrepreneurs operating in the Finnish industry context, the study brings forward the role of emotions and emotion work in supporting employees’ entrepreneurial action within large and established organizations. The second study theorizes the work done by novice corporate entrepreneurs toward moral legitimacy attainment. Departing from the challenges posed by the enactment of an unconventional role in a bureaucratic environment, the study postulates virtuousness and moral emotions as resources that novice corporate entrepreneurs can deploy to legitimize themselves and their role. The third study investigates how corporate entrepreneurs work around time, focusing on the practices and artifacts that they bring into play as forms of temporal work. The findings suggest contrasting forms of temporal work among types of corporate entrepreneurs, thus bringing forward the heterogeneity of entrepreneurial agency in corporate entrepreneurship. The fourth study explores the role of place in entrepreneurship, elucidating how entrepreneurs’ sense of place relative to their local setting of operation (i.e., rural and urban regions of Finland) relates to their psychological functioning and satisfaction with life.