Reading :: Spontaneous Venturing

 Spontaneous Venturing: An Entrepreneurial Approach to Alleviating Suffering in the Aftermath of a Disaster

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. 

Reading :: The Origins of Collective Decision Making

 The Origins of Collective Decision Making

By Andy Blunden

The link above goes directly to the PDF hosted on Blunden’s website. In this 2016 book, Blunden — who has been involved in Left activism for his entire life — considers how collective decision making works. Specifically, he considers “Collective decision making, that is, the determination by a group of individuals of their collective will” (p.1), as it developed mainly in the Left political tradition of England and the US. 

Blunden argues that such an investigation is badly needed: “there has never been an historical investigation of collective decision  making, far less an historical investigation of how the internal decision making processes of a project prefigure the decision making processes of a larger community” (p.2). I’m not familiar with this realm of scholarship, so I was wary of this claim — but some quick Googling turned up multiple scholarly reviews of the book that agree with Blunden. So there you go.

Blunden grounds his approach in Marx: “Marx began Capital with a consideration of the commodity exchange, which he took to be the ‘germ cell’ of bourgeois society. In the same spirit, I take a group of people in the same room, deciding what to do together as the ‘germ cell’ of collective decision making” (p.2). He carefully (and, I think, prudently) distinguishes two cases:

In one case, all the  individuals in the room already take it for granted that in the matter athand they all share the same interests, and it is only a matter how best to further an alreadyformed collective will. In the other case, two or more groups are seeking a modus operandi forwhat are taken to be and to remain distinct parties with distinct interests. 

It is only the first case which I take to be collective decision making, and which is to be the focus of the historical investigation to follow. (p.3)

He identifies four paradigms of collective decision making, based on ethical principles:

• Majority: “The participants take each other as mutually independent and morally equal individuals with an equal stake in what they do together. In the event that consensus cannot be found, a decision is taken by majority vote.” (P.4)
• Consensus: “a decision may only be made to which every individual participant may freely consent.” (P.5)
• Counsel: “one of the participants … takes the advice of the other participants, but bears sole moral responsibility for the decision.” (P.5)
• Sortition: “the decision is made by lot or some other arbitrary means” (P.5). Sortition is a paradigm, but does not play a significant role in collective decision making.

He also identifies three paradigms of collaboration:

• “Negotiation: The parties engage in a bargaining process, each with the aim of furthering their own project.”
• “Solidarity: One party voluntarily places themself under the direction of another, despite the fact that the parties are independent agents.”
• “Command: The Commanding Officer or Director simply tells everyone else what to do, and neither invites nor accepts advice.” (P.6; he suggests that this could also be called “Colonization.”

To examine how these have historically emerged, Blunden goes into a number of historical case studies. For Majority, these include the British trade unions, guilds, and the Methodist church, the London Correspondence Society, the Chartists, communist secret societies, and general workers’ unions. For Consensus, these include the English revolution and the Quakers, Levelers, and Diggers, New England town meetings, the Civil Rights Movement and women’s rights movement in the US, and the anarchist tradition. Finally, in Part III, he discusses the rise of alliance politics. 

This discussion is very much the result of Blunden discovering and reading sources. For this reason, each chapter tends to rely heavily on just 1-2 sources, and in some of the chapters focusing on recent events, these sources are actual interviews with members of these movements who are recalling their own experiences. The result is personalized: Although these chapters are not broadly based on multiple sources, they go deeply into each source. 

Overall, I found the book rewarding, but especially the framing chapter, which gives us a taxonomy of paradigms that we can use when categorizing and thinking through collective decision making. If that sounds interesting to you, definitely click through and grab that PDF. 

Reading :: Agency and the Will

 Agency and the will: Committing to make a difference

By Andy Blunden

I’ve linked directly to the PDF supplied by the author so that you can download this 2026 book. Blunden, who is thoroughly steeped in Hegel, Marx, and Vygotsky, considers a topic that especially fascinated the latter: The will. What is human will, and what is agency? Most importantly, how can we make a difference? This question is vital to Blunden, whose background is in activism.

Blunden argues that “Beginning with the conversion of Augustine of Hippo in 386 CE, the concept of  the ‘Will’ became the vehicle for concerns about whether it was possible to ‘rise above your own nature’ and act contrary to your natural inclination” (p.5). So Part I of his historical inquiry begins here, with Augustine, before wending its way through Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Fichte. 

In Part II, the question is taken up by Hegel. In four chapters, Blunden examines how Hegel — and Rousseau — took up questions of the Will and adjacent questions about freedom, personal autonomy, ethics, rights, morality, ethical life, responsibility, and conscience. 

This leads us to Part III, focused on the psychology of will. These three chapters focus on Vygotsky’s work with higher psychological functions, the development of will through childhood crises, and then on to adulthood, with the latter chapter explicating Perezhivanie.

Part IV moves on to sociology: in functionalism (Blunden centers Leontiev here), Althusser’s structuralism, and Bordieu’s structuralism. Part V examines pushback from Giddens and from Alasdair MacIntyre.

In Part VI, Making a Difference, Blunden moves on to the practical questions of how will and agency have been (and should be) taken up in activism. 

Personally, I got a lot out of this book. The word “agency” is like the word “solidarity,” with an overly general meaning and at least a few highly specific ones, and it’s not always easy for me to follow which meaning is being used. But here, Blunden does his homework, building from Augustine to the present so we can understand the sense in which he is using the word. I appreciated the clarity and especially how this work built up a historical background for Vygotsky’s project and his focus on self-mastery. 

If you’re interested in the intellectual history of agency and will, and especially the intellectual tradition that influenced Vygotsky, definitely click through and get this PDF.