Opportunity creation: Entrepreneurial agency, interaction, and affect

• Date: 01 June 2018
• Author: Eugene Sadler‐Smith,David Goss
• Published date: 01 June 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/sej.1273

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Opportunity creation: Entrepreneurial agency,

interaction, and affect

David Goss | Eugene Sadler-Smith

Surrey Business School, University of Surrey,

Guildford, U.K.

Correspondence

David Goss, Surrey BusinessSchool, University

of Surrey, Guildford,GU2 7XH, U.K.

Email: d.goss@surrey.ac.uk

Research Summary: This article addresses opportunity creation,

with particular focus on the interplay between social context and

individual agency. Using ideas grounded in contemporary micro-

sociology, we offer a conceptual framework that articulates

opportunity-creating agency as the outcome of socially situated

subjectivity, supportive or challenging interactions, and the circula-

tion of emotional energy. This dynamic process is illustrated with

references to entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson (founder of Virgin).

Our article contributes to opportunity creation research by: offer-

ing a conception of individual opportunity-creating propensities

rooted in social situations and consistent with constructionist

assumptions; specifying the role played by affect/emotion in

opportunity creation and positing a novel creative role for negative

affect; and connecting opportunity creation with other areas of

theoretical interest in entrepreneurship, such as creativity, frustra-

tion, and hubris.

Managerial summary: This article examines how social relation-

ships and emotions can together influence the ways entrepreneurs

initiate and shape opportunities. Using examples from the career

of Sir Richard Branson (founder of Virgin), we suggest ways in

which the emotional intensity of social interactions can motivate

entrepreneurs to act decisively to initiate opportunities for busi-

ness formation and development. We suggest how this may help

us understand not just opportunity creation, but also key entrepre-

neurial issues, such as creativity, frustration, and hubris.

KEYWORDS

affect, agency, emotional energy, interaction ritual, opportunity

creation

Received: 13 January 2014 Revised: 2 March 2017 Accepted: 12 April 2017 Published on: 6 November 2017

DOI: 10.1002/sej.1273

Copyright © 2017 Strategic Management Society

Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. 2018;12:219–236. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/sej 219

1|INTRODUCTION

Whether opportunities are created or discovered is an issue of continuing interest for entrepreneurship researchers

(e.g., Alvarez & Barney, 2007; Alvarez, Barney, & Anderson, 2013; Foss & Foss, 2008; McMullen & Shepherd,2006;

Wood & McKinley, 2010). The creation position asserts that opportunities cannot exist independently of an entre-

preneur’s constructive agency. The discovery position, in contrast, treats opportunities as objective features of the

economic system, needing to be “found”before they can be acted upon (Ardichvili, Cardozo, & Ray, 2003;

Eckhardt & Shane, 2003; Ramoglou & Tsang, 2016). As interest in social constructionism has grown within entrepre-

neurship, so too has concern with opportunity creation; it is to this debate that we aim to contribute. Opportunity

creation for us entails the interplay of social context and individual motivated action; following sociological usage,

we refer to the latter as agency (Barnes, 2000; Giddens, 1984; Spreitzer et al., 2005). We explain the nature and

strength of an individual’s agency in terms of situated subjectivity and intersubjectivity, specifically “emotional

energy”and “interaction rituals,”respectively.

Proposing this novel treatment of individual agency as a form of socially situated subjectivity contributes to the

opportunity creation debate in three ways. First, it extends the breadth of opportunity creation research by intro-

ducing social antecedents as a necessary underpinning for the usual focus on opportunity enactment. Second, incor-

porating the construct of “emotional energy”enriches opportunity creation research by aligning it with the growing

recognition of affect’s significance for understanding entrepreneurial processes. Third, the constructionist approach

to opportunity creation is strengthened theoretically by explaining differences in agency from a relational, rather

than an individualist, standpoint.

Following an overview of the literature on opportunity creation, agency, and entrepreneurial emotion, we intro-

duce our approach to situated subjectivity and intersubjectivity. We then offer a conceptual framework combining

interaction ritual chains, emotional energy (Collins, 2004), and energy texts (Quinn & Dutton, 2005), elaborating this

with illustrations from biographies of U.K. entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin brand. We con-

clude our article with a discussion of how this approach contributes to opportunity creation and related concerns in

entrepreneurship (such as creativity, frustration, and hubris).

2|OPPORTUNITY CREATION: SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION, AGENCY, AND

EMOTION

Underpinning many opportunity creation approaches is the assumption that:

“Opportunities are social constructions that do not exist independently of those perceptions and human

action…this does not mean that “reality”is unimportant in understanding creation opportunities. After all,

actors test their beliefs about an opportunity against the market—itself a social construction—and based

on feedback, they refine those beliefs and continue to do so until they either give up or form an opportu-

nity….”(Alvarez et al., 2013, pp. 306–308)

Limiting the “knowability”of an opportunity in advance of the activity through which it is constructed, this view

posits that even if starting with a clear idea of a desired objective, the very process of its realization is likely to

transform it into something quite different from the original intention (Dimov, 2007; Tocher, Oswald, & Hall, 2015;

Wood & McKinley, 2010). Opportunities are “emergent”because their realization (if not their initial conception) is

through others’collaboration or resistance, embedded within an ongoing flow of more or less structured social

interactions. Rather than awaiting discovery by an alert individual, their “reality”is an intersubjective accomplish-

ment. It is, nevertheless, undeniable empirically that some individuals are considerably more adept at conceiving

220 GOSS AND SADLER-SMITH