Maarten van Ham, Darja Reuschke, Reinout Kleinhans, Colin Mason and Stephen Syrett (eds.) Entrepreneurial neighbourhoods
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Maarten van Ham, Darja Reuschke, Reinout Kleinhans, Colin Mason and Stephen Syrett (eds.) Entrepreneurial neighbourhoods: towards an understanding of the economies of neighbourhoods and communities Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017, 336 pp, ISBN: 978 1 78536 723 6 Anne Risselada1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2018
The role of community, neighbourhood and local social networks in shaping entrepreneurship has not received much attention in entrepreneurship research. On the other hand, neighbourhood and community studies focus mostly on residents and rarely look into how entrepreneurship can benefit and transform neighbourhoods. This book aims to overcome this mutual neglect, focussing on how neighbourhoods and communities shape entrepreneurship and vice versa. The book consists of two parts. The first focuses on how neighbourhoods and other localised spaces and networks influence entrepreneurship. This type of research is becoming increasingly important with the rise of solo-self employment (which is often home-based) and the mainstream policy discourse in which entrepreneurship is seen as a ‘magical’ solution for upward social and economic mobility of residents in deprived urban neighbourhoods. The second part focuses on how Community-Based Enterprises shape neighbourhood revitalization. This type of research is triggered by retreating governments due to budget cuts and austerity measures, the increased use of market logics in community development organisations and the new ‘ideological discourse of active citizenship’ (p. 203). Although both parts investigate the relationship between entrepreneurship and neighbourhood, content-wise, the two parts do not overlap that much and read as separate volumes. Part one starts of by investigating the influence of neighbourhood characteristics on entrepreneurial activity. The authors of chapter two focus on deprived urban areas where (nascent) entrepreneurs often face individual and area-based barriers into entrepreneurship. Moreover, entrepreneurs in deprived neighbourhoods are frequently characterized as necessity-driven. The researchers argue a more nuanced approach: motives for entrepreneurship can move from necessity-based to opportunity-based and entrepreneurs in deprived neighbourhoods are not ‘less entrepreneurial’, but often operate outside of the formal economy and are therefore not represented in much research on local entrepreneurship. The following chapter looks at local inter-firm cooperation contacts of Dutch neighbourhood firms. The authors find that both total * Anne Risselada [email protected] 1
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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and local cooperation contacts are highly temporal: between 2008 and 2014, almost 90 per cent of all cooperation contacts were replaced. Part one continues with two chapters that focus on co-working spaces. The researchers find that in such co-working spaces, communities of practice are more relevant than communities of place at the neighbourhood level. The final
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