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- Naldi, Lucia, 1974-, et al.
(author)
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Policy entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial orientation in vulnerable Swedish municipalities
- 2020
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In: Entrepreneurship and Regional Development. - : Routledge. - 0898-5626 .- 1464-5114.
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Small- and medium-sized towns (SMSTs) not integrated into expanding metropolitan regions often face industrial decline and depopulation. As a result, many of them lack resilience to change and may be classified as vulnerable. While research holds that a local government’s efforts to act in an entrepreneurial way are important for the development of vulnerable SMSTs, entrepreneurship behaviours in the local public sector remain under-investigated. In this paper, we address this gap in the literature by investigating whether and how vulnerable SMSTs differ in their entrepreneurial behaviours. Based on the concepts of policy entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial orientation, we performed a survey of Swedish local communities about their work on strengthening and renewing local business life and improving their own administrations. We analyse factors associated with these activities and examine differences between the policy entrepreneurship of vulnerable and nonvulnerable places, as well as differences within the vulnerable group. Vulnerable places rank low in entrepreneurial orientation, which may contribute to regional lock-in. Cluster analysis reveals that the vulnerable municipalities are a heterogeneous group, which we classify into “entrepreneurs’ ‘local innovators’, and ‘disengaged risktakers’. Regression analysis indicates that local social capital may increase entrepreneurial orientation in vulnerable places by strengthening the focus on innovation.
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| 2. |
- Olsson, Amy Rader, et al.
(author)
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Entrepreneurial governance and local growth
- 2020
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In: Sustainability. - : MDPI. - 2071-1050. ; 12:9
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Do local development policies influence local employment growth? Based on a survey to municipal managers in all Swedish municipalities, this is one of the first studies to empirically assess the relationship between reported local development initiatives (entrepreneurial governance (EG) and growth of local employment. We find a weak but significant association between EG and employment growth for urban municipalities. This suggests that EG is more effective in larger, growing municipalities than in smaller, declining rural areas. Urban municipalities may of course have more resources for entrepreneurial governance than rural ones as they have grown substantially faster for a long period of time. The result thus indicates that EG and growth are in a positive interplay of interaction. When the EG index was divided into three sub-indexes after the entrepreneurial process (discover or create opportunities, collect resources and exploit opportunities) the analyses also showed positive correspondence between some sub-indexes and employment growth for the rural municipalities, indicating that EG is not solely a phenomenon connected to growth in urban, growing municipalities. In sum, the article indicates several avenues through which entrepreneurial governance at local level might be linked to local growth.
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| 3. |
- Westlund, Hans, 1957-, et al.
(author)
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Local Social Capital and Regional Development
- 2021
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In: Handbook of Regional Science. - Berlin, Heidelberg : Springer Nature. ; , s. 721-735
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In this chapter, we review the advances of recent decades in the field of local social capital research. We conceive of social capital as a multidimensional and ubiquitous concept. This “capital” may be embodied in people, firms, governments, and in civil society. It may be studied as a stock (networks) or flow (network transactions), and it may be good or bad in a normative sense. We review and take stock of the literature and trace out the role of social capital in regional development and its relations to national and regional institutions. We further discuss implications for empirical applications and how social capital is a context-dependent phenomenon that bedevils one-size-fits-all measurement. We conclude that data derived from different forms of social media provide a particularly fruitful avenue for the analysis of social capital and its effects in the twenty-first century.
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