1st Edition

Entrepreneurship, Community, and Community Development

Edited By Michael W-P Fortunato, Theodore R. Alter Copyright 2018
    172 Pages
    by Routledge

    172 Pages
    by Routledge

    While entrepreneurship is widely cited as playing a key role in economic development, job creation, and advances in well-being in capitalist nations, there has been an overwhelming focus on the firm, firm founders, and founders’ strategies and decision-making processes. Only more recently, the important link between communities and entrepreneurs has emerged as a new frontier in entrepreneurship research.





    This book brings the emerging nexus between community and entrepreneur to light by exploring the mutual impact that communities and entrepreneurs have on one another. It focuses on how entrepreneurship development can push beyond the traditional emphasis on economic growth: from enriching the local lifestyle to building self-sufficiency; from attracting new markets to rediscovering traditional work; from the highest tech enterprises to the most ancient crafts and trades. The authors cover a wide variety of topics including rural community entrepreneurship development and culture, innovation and regional development, community-based enterprise learning, and urban revitalization strategies.





    This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Community Development.

    1. Community entrepreneurship development: an introduction Michael W-P Fortunato and Theodore Alter  2. Entrepreneurship and community development: what matters and why? Thomas S. Lyons  3. Rural economic development under devolution: A test of local strategies Jessica A. Crowe, Ryan Ceresola, Tony Silva and Nicholas Recker  4. Complex transactions: Community development financial institutions lending to ethnic entrepreneurs in Los Angeles R. Varisa Patraporn  5. Invisible struggles: the representation of ethnic entrepreneurship in US newspapers Leona Achtenhagen and Cindy J. Price Schultz  6. Constructing a multi-dimensional measure of local entrepreneurial culture Nicole Breazeale, Michael W.-P. Fortunato, James E. Allen IV, Ronald J. Hustedde and Helen Pushkarskaya  7. Government and the entrepreneurial ecology: The case of Halifax, Nova Scotia Bruce Dye and Theodore R. Alter  8. Creating and sustaining a model of community-based enterprise learning: a participatory case study of ready hubs Tim Vorley and Nick Williams  9. Creating entrepreneurial communities: building community capacity for ecosystem development Deborah M. Markley, Thomas S. Lyons and Donald W. Macke

    Biography

    Michael W-P Fortunato is a founding partner of Creative Insight Community Development (CICD), co-founder of North Bay Music Foundry (California, USA), an instructor in Community and Economic Development at Penn State University (Pennsylvania, USA), and former Assistant Professor of Sociology, Engaged Scholar, and Director of the Center for Rural Studies at Sam Houston State University, USA. His professional interests include finding ways to infuse community development practice with high levels of creativity, enthusiasm, and compassion. His research focuses on how local culture and institutional structure shape local innovation, entrepreneurship, and well-being in communities both domestically and internationally; and how to enable transformation from legacy social systems into newer, flexible, more democratic and entrepreneurial local systems that serve the public good.





    Theodore R. Alter is Professor of Agricultural, Environmental and Regional Economics, and Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Community Development, at Pennsylvania State University, USA. He also serves as an Adjunct Research Fellow in the School of Law at the University of New England in Australia. His research and teaching focus on community and rural development, resource and environmental economics, public sector economics and policy, institutional and behavioral economics, and public scholarship and civic engagement in higher education.