Howard E. Aldrich

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | UNC · Department of Sociology

The external enablement perspective was first described in Davidsson's (2015) paper that critiqued the concept of "entrepreneurial opportunities" and offered an alternative view organized around the concepts of external enablers, new venture ideas, and opportunity confidence. Since then, the perspective has been further developed in a series of pro...

We explore the application of evolutionary theory in understanding entrepreneurship. We focus on how evolutionary perspectives can elucidate the nuances of organizational creation, growth, and survival. Central to this approach is the role of environmental conditions as mediators between entrepreneurial strategies and outcomes, underscoring the sig...

Craft has been an important part of human history and therefore also the way we organize. As such, perhaps it is not surprising that the concept of craft has a longstanding presence in management literature (Kroezen, Ravasi, Sasaki, Żebrowska, Suddaby, 2021). More than a century ago, Veblen (1914) talked about the related to craft concept of “workm...

This special issue contributes to the literature on entrepreneurship in family firms by leveraging the family embeddedness perspective. In doing so, the papers of the special issue bridge entrepreneurship at firm level with analyses at the individual and the enterprising family levels. Starting from and extending such contributions, in this introdu...

Forthcoming in one of the special 100th anniversary issues of Social Forces, edited by Arne Kalleberg Social Forces, a sociological journal, published several articles in its early years about teaching that anticipated a focus on student learning and engagement, and the importance of student emotions in the learning process. However, these ideas...

In its first several decades, Social Forces published several amazingly prescient articles about teaching that might have formed the basis for a sociological pedagogy for the twentieth century. These articles anticipated a focus on learning rather than teaching, active student engagement with the material rather than lecturing, and a recognition of...

The enormous scale of suffering, breadth of societal impact, and ongoing uncertainty wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic introduced dynamics seldom examined in the crisis entrepreneurship literature. Previous research indicates that when a crisis causes a failure of public goods, spontaneous citizen ventures often emerge to leverage unique local knowl...

p>The enormous scale of suffering, breadth of societal impact, and ongoing uncertainty wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic introduced dynamics seldom examined in the crisis entrepreneurship literature. Previous research indicates that when a crisis causes a failure of public goods, spontaneous citizen ventures often emerge to leverage unique local kno...

The enormous scale of suffering, breadth of societal impact, and ongoing uncertainty wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic introduced dynamics seldom examined in the crisis entrepreneurship literature. Previous research indicates that when a crisis causes a failure of public goods, spontaneous citizen ventures often emerge to leverage unique local knowl...

We studied how organizations emerge and achieve impact by examining the networks of citizen response that emerged at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to produce personal protective equipment (PPE) and other medical supplies. Through a rich inductive multiple case study of four regionally-focused maker groups, we identified a set of common barrier...

Studies of unicorns and gazelles can offer detailed information about the process of enterprise development but are unrepresentative as examples of entrepreneurial success. In presenting a novel approach to outlier analysis, this article combines insights from case studies of unusual organizations with explanatory frameworks that management scholar...

In response to COVID-19 and the shortage of personal protective equipment, the maker community activated local networks in a display of collective action. We conducted a multiple case study of emergent networks to understand how makers self-organized for collective entrepreneurial action while facing resource constraints and legitimacy deficits. Al...

This article offers a socio-historical view of how families make a living and contribute to business formation. We review the history of family changes that occurred over the last several hundred years in developed nations – decline of the corporate family, increasing occupational opportunities for women, decline of multigenerational families, grow...

A fundamental issue underlying facing makers and makerspace organizers is the tension between design and emergence in understanding the evolution of entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE) in American cities. As applied to entrepreneurship, three key features of an EE are first, an institutional environment characterized by (potentially) shared cultural un...

Organizations Evolving offers a unique theoretical framework for understanding organizational emergence, persistence, change, and decline. Synthesizing and integrating six paradigmatic approaches to organization theory, this updated and revised third edition presents an evolutionary view that provides a unified understanding of modern organizations...

Organizations Evolving offers a unique theoretical framework for understanding organizational emergence, persistence, change and decline. This updated and revised third edition presents an evolutionary view that provides a unified understanding of modern organizations and organization theory.

Viewing entrepreneurship as a form of collective action, this paper investigates the tension between an entrepreneurial team’s reliance on collective efforts for achieving success and individual members’ tendencies to withhold their personal resources. We argue that the precarious nature of the early founding stage and the difficulty of redeploying...

Dazed and confused by the wild hype surrounding “gazelles” and “unicorns,” entrepreneurship researchers have focused on the “black swans” of the entrepreneurial world, even though IPOs and venture capital financing of firms are extremely rare events. Despite the rarity of IPOs and obtaining venture capital, entrepreneurship conferences and journals...

An affirmative approach to what’s been discussed in class reinforces a growth mindset by showing students that you are making an assumption not only about that they already know something but also that they are now capable of building on that knowledge and integrating and synthesizing new information. Thus, rather than ask students for their “muddi...

In this essay, I describe my five-decades-long journey from sociology graduate student to small business researcher to, finally, a scholar of entrepreneurship. I describe my years at the University of Michigan, where I learned the craft of sociological research from the masters of the trade, and then my early years at Cornell University. My early w...

What lesson did I take away from this? First, don’t abandon ship when things move in a direction other than what you had planned. Instead, see what you can salvage. Second, using open-ended questions, find out how the students interpreted the assignment. Rather than lecturing to them on what I’d expected, I listened to their interpretations of the...

In reviewing the premiere of a performance of the Dorrance Dance Company, a New York Times critic praised Michelle Dorrance, the company’s founder and lead choreographer. The critic commented on their excellent collective work as well as the virtuosity of their solo performances. After noting that Michelle was the most prominent and ubiquitous tap...

Scholars in the management field have been increasingly interested in how historical factors and processes affect current organizational behaviors and have called for a fuller integration of a historical perspective into organization and management theory. This symposium brings together a diverse set of papers that explore ways through which histor...

About half of all new ventures are team-based, with most teams consisting of only two people and very rarely more than three. Most teams emerge from relations between people who already know one another and thus they are deeply embedded in a broadly shared social environment. We might think that people already familiar with one another would have a...

Strategic Entrepreneurship: Human Capital and Knowledge ABSTRACT The knowledge and skills of founding members lie at the heart of heterogeneous performance outcomes for new organizations. This panel symposium explores how we can incorporate the dynamics of founder human capital and knowledge in understanding new organizations, including their fo...

In this chapter, the authors investigate the degree to which organizational ecology (OE) had a long-term impact on the way scholars study organizational foundings. Dubbed the “rates” approach by Aldrich and Weidenmayer (1993), OE argued that organizational foundings depend on intra- and inter-population processes such as organizational density, pri...

Actors, musicians, authors, craft workers, entrepreneurs and others spend years without achieving success in their craft, sustaining themselves by working in jobs that may have little connection to their preferred identity. And yet they persist in the apparent belief that they will succeed. Why? I think the answer lies not only in their personal ch...

The maker movement has been touted as a harbinger of the next industrial revolution. Through shared access to tools and digital fabrication technologies, makers can act as producers in the sharing economy and potentially increase entrepreneurship rates, catalyze advanced manufacturing, and spur economic development. We develop a model of the maker...

Students are confronted with an enormous variety of activities from which they must choose, and their priorities don’t always accord with ours. As faculty, the tasks we set for them are often overshadowed by more immediate and pressing demands, including work for other courses, jobs, family demands, and their desire to live rich social life as youn...

Begin establishing good habits from the moment you enter graduate school. You can do this by taking advantage of the many opportunities offered to you to begin acting “as if” you had already earned your PhD. As Chambliss (1989) pointed out in his analysis of competitive swimming, excellence is accomplished through mundane actions, ordinary in thems...

The maker movement has been touted as a harbinger of the next industrial revolution. Through shared access to tools and digital fabrication technologies, makers can act as producers in the sharing economy and potentially increase entrepreneurship rates, catalyze advanced manufacturing, and spur economic development. We develop a model of the maker...

Academic research has become increasingly collaborative, not just in the hard sciences and engineering but also in the social sciences. In this paper, we review studies that have documented this increasing collaboration, showing that collaboration, especially in the form of co-authorship, has risen across the board in almost all academic discipline...

“Talk less, teach more” sums up the mantra of the active learning approach to pedagogy. But how can you do that? I have four suggestions. First, if you ask students a question, listen to their answers. We all know the research showing that most instructors wait two seconds or less before answering their own questions. Don’t do that! Ask a question...

Modern society is experiencing a revival of craft, yet our understanding of the role of craft in society remains very sparse. Craft appears to be an important component of the new economy and may provide opportunities to dampen inequality in modern society. As such, enhancing our understanding of the craft revival seems to be essential. In addition...

Today's students have grown up in a world structured by the forces of rationalization, making it difficult for them to comprehend the scope and magnitude of the transformations Weber described. In this paper, we outline a plan for helping students appreciate Weber's theoretical achievements, as well as teaching them to think more critically about w...

My point is straightforward: when humans are put in situations where they are simply being talked to, with no opportunities offered for them to engage their higher order cognitive powers, they will struggle mightily to stay engaged with the material. I recently read a blog post by a scholar who works with online courses and who noted that she had v...

Dazed and confused by the wild hype surrounding gazelles and unicorns, entrepreneurship researchers have focused on the black swans of the entrepreneurial world, even though IPOs and venture capital financing of firms are extremely rare events. Despite their rarity, entrepreneurship conferences and journals have been filled with papers on various a...

What’s heard most often when colleagues complain about teaching is dislike of testing and grading? Many love classroom discussions and advising students on projects, but dread having to assess students’ content mastery and discuss grades with them. Three matters appear especially troublesome: (1) the amount of time spent preparing questions and gra...

In this essay, I describe my five-decades-long journey from sociology graduate student to small business researcher to, finally, a scholar of entrepreneurship. I begin with my four years at the University of Michigan, where I learned the craft of sociological research from the masters of the trade, and then cover briefly my early years as an assist...

An updated version of this paper was published in Journal of Business Venturing. The article is available at: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1YsJU38~UTXKnn . Please cite the JBV version.

This chapter evaluates two commonly held stereotypes about strategies for constructing founding teams promoted by practitioners and experienced entrepreneurs.

The papers in this special section highlight three important questions in organization and management theory. First, evolutionary theorists studying organizations have an opportunity to address issues of organizations as units of selection. Trade associations focus their members’ attention on collective interests, creating shared understandings abo...

An updated version of this paper was accepted for publication in Journal of Business Venturing, Jan. 2019.

Cooperative learning (CL) has been slow to catch on at the college level, despite decades of successful implementation at the K–12 level. Resistance by instructors and students alike has slowed its diffusion. Some resistance stems from poor experiences with CL, but potential adopters often fail to realize that effective CL rests on a set of princip...

Conventional wisdom suggests that new ventures can employ a combination of two general strategies to confront the challenges of operating in transition economies or regions known for their weak institutional conditions: These ventures may succeed by enacting a market-orientation strategy, which focuses on providing value to customers and implementi...

No abstract is available for this article.

Entrepreneurship research, as an academic field, has grown from groups of isolated scholars to an international community of departments, institutes, and foundations. Growth has produced progressively systematic and unified knowledge, with growing numbers of knowledge producers and knowledge users sharing core concepts, principles, and research met...

Slacks and its effect on new ventures’ strategic decision are important research fields of entrepreneur study. By incorporating upper echelon perspective, this study contributes to knowledge of the effect of various slacks on new venture innovation investment by exploring how narcissistic CEO and slacks configuration combine to determine the presen...

The literature on work, marriage and the family, and organized social life irrtplies that women are embedded in different personal networks than men, with potential conseauences for their rates of business formation, sirvival, and growth. We tested this implication b; studying the personal networks of potential and active entrepreneurs in the Resea...

In this essay, I describe my five-decades-long journey from sociology graduate student to small business researcher to, finally, a scholar of entrepreneurship. I begin with my four years at the University of Michigan, where I learned the craft of sociological research from the masters of the trade, and then cover briefly my early years as an assist...

No abstract is available for this article.

Time matters for entrepreneurship. Whose time should matter and how it should be conceptualized, however, are heavily contested questions in the humanities and social sciences. In this chapter, we examine the ways in which time matters for entrepreneurship and the temporal contexts in which entrepreneurs operate. We review how temporal processes ar...

We draw on the historiographical concepts of “generational units” and “collective memories” as a framework for understanding the emergence of entrepreneurially oriented cohesive groups within regions. Generational units are localized subgroups within generations that have a self-referential, reflexive quality, by virtue of the members’ sense of the...

Entrepreneurs often encounter contexts in which other people have preset expectations about their practices, processes, and products; these institutionalized expectations often constrain actions to choices deemed “appropriate” and “reasonable.” Such constraints arise because institutional forces have created internalized pre-reflective behaviors, i...

Management scholarship is built on a foundation imported from older disciplines, particularly economics, psychology and sociology. Anthropology also once played an important role in the history of management thought, and currently includes many "practicing" anthropologists who work in the private sector. Yet it now has a demonstrably marginal influ...

Calls to ban laptops in college classrooms are based on accumulating research showing their negative effects not only on users but also students sitting nearby. Survey research documents that students believe they can simultaneously pay attention to what is happening in the classroom while surfing the web, checking emails, and visiting social media...

Entrepreneurial exit completes the full cycle of the entrepreneurial process, because every entrepreneurial entry carries the potential of becoming an entrepreneurial exit. Indeed, the great majority of entries make fairly rapid exits from the business population, often leaving little trace of their existence . Simply put, we cannot have one withou...

Instructors need to be careful about using sports analogies in their teaching. Some students have no interest in sports and others, especially international students, may not have the context needed to understand these analogies. However, occasionally I find an analogy that is so appropriate that it would be a shame not to use it, and this one is m...

This article explores how biological theories of evolution have been applied to the area of organizations. We review the processes of selection, adaptation, learning, retention, co-evolution, and strategic intent and how they fit together to determine both organizational success and change at the level of populations and communities.

Managers in declining firms must make choices regarding how to use their slack resources: do they attempt to turn around the firm through strategic investments or do they give up control to the largest shareholders. Controlling stakeholders may expropriate slack resources via tunneling, which is an agency problem between a controlling shareholder a...

Because new growth ventures have been recognized as the engine of job creation, communities and states have made the creation and support of entrepreneurship a top priority. Community leaders, policy-makers, investors, corporations, and local media have an interest in increasing the formation and success of new ventures. While entrepreneurs and the...

Over the past year, I’ve met with many doctoral students and junior faculty in my travels around the United States and Europe, all of them eager to share information with me about their research. Invariably, at every stop, at least one person will volunteer the information that “I’m doing a qualitative study of…” When I probe for what’s behind this...

If you are interested in my work on entrepreneurship & family business, then you should not only read the original statement of the family embeddedness perspective but also the latest revision of that perspective: Aldrich, Brumana, Campopiano, and Minola, "Embedded But Not Asleep..." available on my Research Gate website & published in the Journal...

This document tells you have to obtain Russian version of my paper: Howard E. Aldrich. 1996. "Entrepreneurial Strategies in New Organizational Populations." In Ivan Bull, Howard Thomas, and G. Willard (eds.), Entrepreneurship: Perspectives on Theory Building. Pergamon Press.

Capitalist economies are experiencing technological and institutional changes that some have described as potentially as important as a second Industrial Revolution and others, somewhat more modestly, as a development as important as the rise of the commercial Internet in the 1990s (Anderson 2012). Or, even more modestly, like the transformation of...