by Dean A. Shepherd and Trenton A. Williams
The link above goes directly to the publisher’s page for this book, which is available open access. When I saw this 2018 book, I eagerly downloaded it and prioritized reading it. Shepherd, a management professor and past editor-in-chief of the Journal of Business Venturing, has been active in studying entrepreneurship for quite a while, and has encouraged researchers to examine prosocial motives in entrepreneurship — that is, to look beyond financial motives when examining how entrepreneurs form their identities and run their ventures. I have really appreciated this push to understand prosocial motives in entrepreneurship, especially because the startups I’ve interviewed often describe prosocial motives. They often pursue ventures not just because they may be financially successful, but because they can address a problem that has affected their family, friends, or communities.
Spontaneous Venturing takes up the torch of prosocial motives in entrepreneurship. Yet I found it baffling.
Why? Let’s start with this quote from the Introduction:
The story of the book began soon after the first author was exposed to the violence and destruction of a natural disaster that struck his home state of Victoria, Australia, in 2009. Moved by a deep desire to learn more about the disaster and the people caught in its path, both authors began an inductive exploration of how some of the victims responded to the crisis in real time. The result was the discovery of the extraordinary capacity for compassion unleashed in the form of venturing to alleviate suffering, or, as we call it, compassionate venturing. (p.ix)
The authors characterize this as a “discovery.” Following the disaster of wildfires in Victoria, residents in Marysville started “the Marysville and Triangle Development Group (MATDG), a venture that helped victims of the disaster” (p.12). This incorporated group, the authors say, were unencumbered by the command-and-control structure that dominates governmental relief efforts (p.44). It was not just volunteering, they say, because “Volunteering involves offering one’s services free of charge to an entity, a venture or a firm, that organizes a response. Entrepreneurial venturing entails the organizing of resources, including volunteers, to pursue a potential opportunity, which in this case is the opportunity to alleviate suffering in the aftermath of a natural disaster” (p.45). They add, “By spontaneous venturing, we mean the rapid emergence of a de novo or de alio new venture” (p.45).
They summarize: “These three insights—spontaneous entrepreneurial aid may come from ad hoc, informal groups outside a disaster area, victims’ suffering may prompt such an entrepreneurial compassionate response, and entrepreneurial groups need to have a reasonable economic footing to be able to deliver aid—are the main points of our book” (p.46).
At this point, I had trouble following the line of argument. I am familiar with the fact that people can rapidly self-organize when addressing disasters, and that self-organization is often faster than governmental response. (Although I didn’t do this research, there was a boomlet in research on how information and communication technologies revolutionized disaster response in the 2010s; see for instance Potts and Starbird & Palen.) I’m also familiar with how community organizations like chambers of commerce can pursue regional economic development. And although I’m less familiar with nonprofits, I understand how small nonprofits can also provide rapid organization for community action. So I struggled to understand how spontaneous venturing differed from these established ways of self-organization in the face of disaster. These well-known ways of self-organization were not addressed in the book at all — it’s as if they simply do not exist. The closest the authors get to addressing these is when they mention nongovernmental organizations in Chapter 6 — but the authors characterize NGOs, like government agencies, as command-and-control organizations.
Perhaps, I thought, the key difference is venturing, i.e., these self-organizing ventures focus on making money? The authors do point out that all ventures create value (p.101). But they are unclear on what the value is or what business model generates it. Finally, in Chapter 5, they offer this:
Up to this point in the book, we have primarily focused on how spontaneous venturing benefits the “customers” of the venture. This makes sense as organizational scholarship, especially entrepreneurship research, seeks to explain how organizations create customer and stakeholder value. In fact, one of the main points we have made up to this point is that organizational scholarship holds incredible potential to add to our understanding of organizing to alleviate suffering for victims of a disaster—which is an alternative firm outcome. In the context of this book, the customers are victims of the disaster who are suffering. (p.119)
But the entrepreneurship literature makes clear that the customer is the one who pays. Are the displaced, dispossessed victims of the disaster paying the venture? No, they are receiving aid. Where is the aid coming from? Buried in Appendix 3.A, we find the answer: The studied ventures receive and distribute donations of raw materials and services, feed and fencing, food, water, equipment, tools, and grief counseling (p.85 et passim). This is not a business model, and if it were, the “customers” would be the donors.
The one possible exception is in the last chapter, in which the authors examine an organization focused on disaster recovery in its local Haitian community. The organization bought water and resold it in the community at below-market prices. In this case, the beneficiaries were customers in the sense that they bought water (p.169).
The authors do point out that previous experience with venturing can transfer to the disaster context:
Previous entrepreneurial efforts provide the actor with experience in processing and framing information, both of which help individuals identify and take advantage of disequilibrium in the market (Kaish and Gilad 1991). Prior experience in generating ideas by evaluating a local market, obtaining feedback on existing products, and making adjustments over time, coupled with the knowledge attained in managing an entrepreneurial firm, likely prepares one for the creation of a venture to alleviate the suffering caused by a disaster. For example, many of the victims who started ventures in the aftermath of disaster did so in areas in which they had practical experience (e.g., farming, psychology) or in which they had prior experience starting a business (e.g., architecture, construction, animal care). (p.134)
I think it is probably true that a background in entrepreneurship could prepare someone for running a spontaneous relief organization — just as a professor’s experience with classroom management could transfer to a for-profit office — but the fact that experience transfers does not make spontaneous organizing a venture any more than the professor’s experience makes an office into a classroom.
As I said, the book baffles me. I genuinely don’t know whether this is the case, but it felt like the authors were just primed to see any sustained, self-organized effort as venturing. In trying to make the label fit, I think they have missed a chance to compare many other sets of literature on self-organizing that could shed a different light on the case.
(2003)
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