Entrepreneurial Custodianship: The Institutionalization of Entrepreneurial Projects in Time & Space

There is a growing interest in the ways in which entrepreneurial endeavors extend over time and space. Unfortunately, however, much of entrepreneurship research has adopted shorter time horizons and has revolved around the (often under-contextualized) figure of the “hero-entrepreneur”. We seek to extend entrepreneurship research by focusing on how preserving, transmitting, revitalizing and reinvent social-symbolic resources from the past, such as legacy values, stories, and traditions, can trigger entrepreneurial endeavors and facilitate, instead of constraining, entrepreneurial agency. We nest such set of activities within institutional theory, and specifically, with respect to the idea of “custodianship” which highlights the role of tradition in entrepreneurial action. In particular, the proposed symposium emphasizes two interrelated perspectives on custodianship: custodianship-through-time and custodianship-through-space. The first perspective seeks to investigate how the social construction of temporality and history by entrepreneurial actors situates and favors entrepreneurial endeavors. The second perspective focuses on how institutionalized communities of individuals that claim attachment to a bounded space curate and mobilize social-symbolic resources to favor entrepreneurship. In this way, the proposed symposium seeks to foster opportunities for the development of an approach to entrepreneurship research that foregrounds transformative action that occurs over broader spans of time and space. How Craft Entrepreneurs Leverage Legacy to Save Craft & Place Author: Peter Dacin; Queen's U. Author: Tina Dacin; Queen's U. Institutional Emplacement and the Novel Resurgence of Independent Bookstores Author: Ryan L. Raffaelli; Harvard Business School Author: Ryann Noe; Harvard Business School Custodian Work in the Development of Community Health Centres in China Author: Yaru Chen; U. of Liverpool Management School Author: Trish Reay; U. of Alberta Author: Ian Kirkpatrick; U. of York Management School Conflation in Intergenerational Entrepreneurial Projects: Insights from American Business Dynasties Author: Trevor Lyle Israelsen; Penn State Smeal College of Business