Call for book chapter contributions for: The entrepreneurship – productivity nexus: a reassessment

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Editors
Dr Robert Bowen, Swansea University, United Kingdom
Prof Don Webber, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

Objective
The purpose of this edited text is to collate and present new ideas that move forward understanding of the connections between productivity and entrepreneurship. It seeks to improve understanding about how entrepreneurship – perhaps as an activity of extracting and/or adding value – can reframe discussions of productivity in a more practical way. It builds on the recognition that the efficiency and effectiveness dimensions of productivity are either mis-measured and/or misinterpreted, and therefore inferences drawn from such analyses may lead to misguided policies.

For instance, when trying to capture an efficiency measure of productivity, authors often use value added per worker data (informed using the exchange value, i.e., the price in the market) without recognising the importance of the value in use or the importance of advertising, context, history, politics, and/or power in shaping those use and exchange values. Moreover, discussions with entrepreneurs and managers often result in a different understanding of productivity altogether that typically concern their effectiveness of production, i.e., whether the entrepreneur and/or the organisation has been able to achieve their aims.

Thus, our assessments of the productivity of entrepreneurial activities need to improve to capture more accurately the nuanced connections between entrepreneurship and productivity. There are also questions about how social entrepreneurship should be measured in terms of productivity, how effectiveness and efficiency productivity measures of entrepreneurs vary across geographies, and how this knowledge should shape government policy. This edited book is designed to challenge our understandings of the meanings and measurements of productivity to help move our productivity-related policies forward for the betterment of society.

Productivity levels are crucial for policymaking because they influence government expenditures, taxation, and revenues. However, productivity is very poorly understood, as reflected in the ongoing debate around the so-called ‘productivity paradox’. Rather than revisiting that important literature, this edited book will take a different path by exposing new and different understandings of the connections between productivity and entrepreneurship at the level of the organisation, thereby circumnavigating macroeconomic problems regarding the underappreciation of the importance of the accounting identity, the spurious near homogenous factor substitution estimates (Filipe and McCombie, 2014), and the fact that researchers commonly make assumptions that simply do not hold in the data (Temple, 2010).

The post-Covid, inequality impacted, climate emergency economy demands an update of the understanding of the connections between entrepreneurship and productivity. This edited text will collate blue-sky contributions on the connected literatures on entrepreneurship and productivity, broadly defined, and include contributions from across diverse ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies. The text is designed primarily to challenge and update established thinking, will include theoretical and/or empirical research (either or both qualitative or quantitative) that questions or extends the literature in unusual and/or pertinent ways, and progress towards nuanced policy recommendations that are designed to encourage us to build back better and fairer. Our intention is to provide an open forum that is accessible, realistic, even pluralistic, and includes as few assumptions as possible. Note that we are not providing a list of potential topics because we wish to collate the most interesting papers on any topic that address and challenge the existing entrepreneurship – productivity nexus. Similarly, there is no restriction on the geographical area of interest, so long as other geographical entities can learn from the important lessons. Chapters could take a variety of forms, from being very well developed empirically strong contributions, to an opportunity to develop ideas that are in their infancy, to state a claim for a particular analytical perspective that is far from accepted in the core entrepreneurship and productivity literature(s), to offering a completely different thought experiment.

Structure
Part One of the book will explore new perspectives on the connections between entrepreneurship and productivity, at the organisation, local, regional, national, and/or global level. The focus here will be more on the entrepreneurship side of the text, with productivity having a more modest role, perhaps due to the need to replace standard measures of productivity with other clearly stated productivity measures.

Part Two of the book explores new perspectives on the productivity-focused aspects of entrepreneurship, with productivity possibly measured in various ways reflecting efficiency or effectiveness. Here, the focus will be more on the productivity side of the text, but contributions will also have clear connections to general or specific entrepreneurship issues.

Target Audience
Scholars, researchers, graduate students, policy makers, inter-agency stakeholders, industry players, local and central government, and the general public will profit from the insights and discourses in this edited book.

Publisher:
We are currently in negotiations with a high quality internationally recognised publisher, and we anticipate the book will be published in the autumn of 2023.

Submission Procedure
Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit chapter proposals on or before March 31, 2022 to Dr Robert Bowen and Prof Don Webber. Chapter proposals of between 1,500 and 2,000 words are encouraged that clearly explain the mission, concerns, concepts, and contributions of the proposed chapter. Authors will be notified by May 1, 2022 about the status of their proposals and will then be sent chapter guidelines.

Full chapters are expected to be submitted by August 31, 2022. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a treble-blind review basis. All manuscripts will only be accepted subject to a treble-blind peer review editorial process. Note: there are no submission or acceptance fees for manuscripts submitted to this book.

Complete chapters are expected to be between 4,500 to 5,000 words.

Important Dates:
March 31, 2022:           Deadline for the submission of chapter proposals
May 1, 2022:                 Notification of acceptance of proposed chapter
August 31, 2022:          Full chapter submission
November 1, 2022:       Referee reports returned to authors
January 31, 2023:          Deadline for the resubmission of chapters

March 1, 2023:             Notification of acceptance, subject to requests for minor changes
May 1, 2023:                 Final Chapter Submission

Late summer 2023:      Book in print.

Enquiries and submissions:

Dr Robert Bowen, Swansea University, UK. Email:

Prof Don Webber, University of Sheffield, UK. Email:

 

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