Entrepreneurial Resilience Development within Constraints

This book focuses on how entrepreneurs developed resilience within institutional constraints at the lived experience level. Several assumptions of the phenomenological paradigms were adopted to shed more understanding on how entrepreneurs who participated in this study developed resilience within institutional constraints. Institutions determine the rule of the game, in that entrepreneurs fit within the limitations provided by the institutional framework (North, 1990). Institutions shape opportunity fields for entrepreneurship, determine the ease and transaction cost of entrepreneurship, determine the stability and certainty of the environment, guide the strategic activities of entrepreneurs, confer legitimacy on entrepreneurs, (re)allocate entrepreneurship, and counter market failures for entrepreneurs. The participants described how they were able to survive within such constraints through breakthrough, circumvent, destructive, and other strategies. The book therefore proposes that entrepreneurial resilience development is dynamic reflecting the context in which it arises, and hence work towards a more integrated perspective of entrepreneurship development.