News

Paper MSM Assistant Professor nominated in Top 3 Best Paper Award

29-11-2018

Dr. Caren Crowley, Assistant Professor in Research Methods and Skills at MSM, recently presented her paper titled “Artisan Entrepreneurship and the Navigation of Institutional Swamps”, co-authored with Professors Maura McAdam and Richard Harrison, at the Research in Entrepreneurship Conference (RENT2018), held in Toledo, Spain.

The RENT conference is the premier entrepreneurship research conference in Europe and brings together leading academics who present and debate cutting edge research in a wide variety of entrepreneurship related topics. Dr. Crowley’s paper was nominated as a top 3 finalist for the Best Paper Award challenging the Conventional Wisdom in Entrepreneurship.

About the paper
Entrepreneurship and SME development is at risk when institutions prescribe competing and conflicting behaviors. Institutional complexity occurs when different institutions logics prescribe behaviors that are inconsistent and possibly in conflict. Prior research has highlighted the potential of artisan entrepreneurship in facilitating socio-economic, rural and regional development. As a result, significant attention has been paid to the role of supporting organizations, semi-state bodies and government regulations to facilitate sector development. However, competing institutional logics can have a detrimental effect on artisan entrepreneurial behavior. We argue that in the face of institutional complexity artisan entrepreneurs have three primary responses, ‘navigate’, ‘bridge’ or ‘drown’. The empirical setting for this paper is a full population analysis of artisan entrepreneurs in the Irish artisan cheese sector. Accordingly, the researchers developed a typology of artisan entrepreneurs’ responses to institutional complexity and examined how and why these responses emerge, thus providing a framework for future research.

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