PDS 1: E-Ship Narratives -
Ethics Perspective
Mara Brockmann & Paula Gehde
Berlin's Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: How Do Business Angels Embody Core Identity Practices within Business Angel Networks?
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This paper investigates how business angels (BAs) embody core identity practices within business angel networks (BANs) and, in doing so, shape Berlin’s entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE). Departing from entrepreneur-centric narratives, the study foregrounds early-stage investors as sociocultural actors who participate in and reinforce the ecosystem’s informal institutions. Drawing on entrepreneurial ecosystem theory, organizational culture, and social identity theory (SIT), the paper explores how norms, values, and group affiliations influence investment behavior. Here, SIT offers a valuable psychological lens to understand how group membership shapes perceptions, behaviors, and decision-making by aligning individual self-concept with collective norms and values. Through six qualitative interviews with BAs and BAN representatives, the findings highlight a tension between individual agency and collective identity. While BAs frame their decisions as objective and experience-based, their practices are shaped by cultural fit, symbolic boundaries, and the desire for legitimacy within the network. BANs, in turn, institutionalize these informal codes, reinforcing homogeneity while projecting openness. Ultimately, the paper argues that belonging to a network matters not only structurally but as a cultural field that shapes perception, enforces norms, and reproduces dominant ecosystem values. By tracing these informal logics, the study contributes to emerging research on the sociocultural foundations of entrepreneurial ecosystems and opens space for future inquiry into the cultural reproduction of power and inclusion within these systems.
Jim Lei
Rethinking alternative entrepreneurship: An inquiry into the interstitial positions of Agnès Varda’s cinematic entrepreneuring
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While alternative perspectives on entrepreneurship have increasingly challenged its traditional economic
logic, less is known about how such alternatives are practiced, negotiated, and potentially reorganized by the very systems they aim to unsettle. This paper explores the emergence of interstitial artistic entrepreneuring as one such alternative, focusing on the cinematic practices of Agnès Varda. Building on existing organizational research at the intersections of entrepreneuring, art, and space, the study investigates how Varda’s documentaries mobilize ephemeral artistic gestures to create heterotopias in contested public landscapes. Through an analysis of four interstitial positions in Varda’s filmmaking—between (1) art and politics, (2) culture and nature, (3) fiction and fact, and (4) living and dying— the paper traces how Varda’s cinematic entrepreneuring unfolds as a precarious negotiation between organization and disorganization of art. Rather than asserting artistic autonomy or offering resistance to neoliberal capitalism, Varda’s films highlight the fragility of spatiotemporal constructs in her journey of cinematic entrepreneuring. The study contributes to ongoing debates on the limits of alternative entrepreneurship by showing how such alternatives emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure within the interstices of dis/organizational life.
Marina Vorholzer
Commercial Mother Teresa’s (or not): Moral Flexibility and Entrepreneurial Action
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Employing a variance approach, this paper advances a model of moral flexibility in entrepreneurial action. To start, I leverage the notion of commercial Mother Teresa’s – entrepreneurs who are primarily driven by generating non-monetary impact – to illustrate the entrepreneur’s exposure to motivational moral ambiguity and how it affects their access to resources. Drawing on moral cognition literature, I theorize (1) two cognitive orientations, which the entrepreneur can enact towards moral ambiguity; namely, moral flexibility and moral rigidity; (2) how each orientation triggers distinct cognitive processes to reconcile moral ambiguity, and (3) how they enable the entrepreneur to initiate and maintain distinct partnerships with key stakeholders. Highlighting the negative repercussions for the entrepreneur of enacting either orientation, I then propose a third, more promising stance for establishing lasting partnerships throughout the entrepreneurial journey: Strategic moral flexibility. Finally, I discuss how the model advances scholarship on moral judgment and knowledge problems in entrepreneurship, and I outline research opportunities on moral ambiguity orientations in entrepreneurial action.​