Book Publication

Digital Kenya:
An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making

with Bitange Ndemo. Palgrave MacMillan Open Access Publication.

Link to open access book.

Presenting rigorous and original research, this volume offers key insights into the historical, cultural, social, economic and political forces at play in the creation of world-class ICT innovations in Kenya. Following the arrival of fiber-optic cables in 2009, Digital Kenya examines why the initial entrepreneurial spirit and digital revolution has begun to falter despite support from motivated entrepreneurs, international investors, policy experts and others. Written by engaged scholars and professionals in the field, the book offers 15 eye-opening chapters and 14 one-on-one “conversations” with entrepreneurs and investors to ask why establishing ICT start-ups on a continental and global scale remains a challenge on the “Silicon Savannah”. The authors present evidence-based recommendations to help Kenya to continue producing globally impactful ICT innovations that improve the lives of those still waiting on the side-lines, and to inspire other nations to do the same.

Academic Articles

survivalist organizing in urban poverty contexts

Tim Weiss, Michael Lounsbury and Garry Bruton (2024 published in Organization Science).

Link to accepted and pre-print, open access article. Article in The Conversation. Short practitioner piece on the collaborative edge.

Institutional scholarship on organizing in poverty contexts has focused on the constraining nature of extant institutions and the need for external actors to make transformative change interventions to alleviate poverty. Comparatively little attention has been paid to the potentially enabling nature of extant institutions in poverty contexts. We argue that more empirical work is needed to deepen our understanding of self-organizing processes that actors embedded in such contexts generate in their own efforts to survive. Drawing on the social worlds approach to institutional analysis, we shed light on how actors self-organize to produce enduring organizational arrangements to safeguard themselves against adverse poverty outcomes. Employing data from fieldwork and interviews collected in the urban neighborhood of Dagoretti Corner in Nairobi, Kenya, we examine the colocation of 105 largely identical auto repair businesses in close spatial proximity. We find that actors leverage an indigenous institution—the societal ethos of Harambee—to enable a process we identify as “survivalist organizing.” Based on our research, we argue that survivalist organizing incorporates four interlocking survival mechanisms: cultivating inter-business solidarity, maintaining precarious inter-business relationships, redistributing resources to prevent business deaths, and generating collective philanthropy to avoid personal destitution. We develop a new research agenda on the institutional study of self-organizing in poverty contexts focused on strengthening rather than supplanting urbanized indigenous institutions that catalyze collective self-organizing.

the Social effects of entrepreneurship on society and some potential remedies: four provocations

with Eberhart, R., Lounsbury, M., Nelson, A., Rindova, V., Meyer, J., Bromley, P., Atkins, R., Ruebottom, T., Jennings, J., Jennings, D., Toubiana, M., Slade Shantz, A., Khorasani, N., Wadhwani, D., Tucker, H., Kirsch, D., Goldfarb, B., Aldrich, H., & Aldrich, D. (2023 published in Journal of Management Inquiry).

A rapidly growing research stream examines the social effects of entrepreneurship on society. This research assesses the rise of entrepreneurship as a dominant theme in society and studies how entrepreneurship contributes to the production and acceptance of socio-economic inequality regimes, social problems, class and power struggles, and systemic inequities. In this article, scholars present new perspectives on an organizational sociology-inspired research agenda of entrepreneurial capitalism and detail the potential remedies to bound the unfettered expansion of a narrow conception of entrepreneurship. Taken together, the essays put forward four central provocations: 1) reform the study and pedagogy of entrepreneurship by bringing in the humanities; 2) examine entrepreneurship as a cultural phenomenon shaping society; 3) go beyond the dominant biases in entrepreneurship research and pedagogy; and 4) explore alternative models to entrepreneurial capitalism. More scholarly work scrutinizing the entrepreneurship–society nexus is urgently needed, and these essays provide generative arguments toward further developing this research agenda.

the experimental hand: how platform-based experimentation reconfigures worker autonomy

with Hatim Rahman and Arvind Karunakaran (2023 - published in the Academy of Management Journal)

Link to accepted, pre-print article and practitioner article. Highly commended for societal impact contribution by Financial Times. Op-ed in Financial Times.

We examine how platform-based experimentation influences worker autonomy when workers do not have access to the same relational opportunities that workers in conventional bureaucratic organizations have traditionally relied on to preserve their autonomy. By analyzing longitudinal qualitative data from one of the world’s largest digital labor platforms, we found that the platform implemented three experimentation regimes—explicit, concealed, and unbounded—that reconfigured workers’ autonomy in unexpected ways. We theorize the introduction of and successive changes in platform-based experimentation as constitutive of the experimental hand. Our model of the experimental hand captures how successive changes in platform-based experimentation regimes reconfigure workers’ degree of autonomy: workers first experienced increased autonomy, followed by diminished autonomy, and finally workers normalized their diminished autonomy as a “business as usual” aspect of work life on the platform. Whereas prior research has primarily examined the design and efficacy of experiments from the perspective of organizations, our study builds new theory on the social effects of experimentation, capturing the implications faced by workers.

pacing entrepreneurs to success

with Sonali Rammohan, Darius Teter, and Jesper Sørensen (published in Stanford Social Innovation Review)

Link to open access article for English and Spanish speaking audiences.

Entrepreneurial support organizations called pacers are helping businesses in emerging markets achieve their goals by providing services for them in the long run. A blueprint for shifting to a pacer model shows how organizations can support entrepreneurs as they grow.

Scaling technology ventures in Africa: new opportunities for research

with Markus Perkmann and Nelson Phillips (published in Innovation: Organization and Management)

Link to pre-published paper and practitioner article.

Research on new venture creation in Africa is growing rapidly. This increasing interest reflects both the potential for entrepreneurship to contribute to the economic and social development of Africa, as well as the potential for this research to provide new insights that challenge and extend theories developed primarily from studies of North American and European new ventures. In this editorial essay, we argue for an expansion of this important research stream to include a focus on how technology ventures scale in Africa. We identify seven topics that offer interesting opportunities for research on scaling in Africa: (1) the effect of venture location on scaling; (2) the effect of founding team diversity on scaling; (3) the effect of entrepreneurial strategies on scaling; (4) the effect of nascent ecosystems on scaling; (5) the effect of the institutional environment on scaling; (6) the effect of nascent financial markets on scaling; and (7) the societal effects of scaling. We discuss each of these topics, their potential to contribute to the existing literature, and provide examples of African technology firms that have scaled to illustrate each topic. We conclude with a discussion of how African social, political, and regulatory change, combined with rapidly developing entrepreneurial ecosystems, are creating a context where the successful scaling of technology ventures is becoming increasingly common, and research is therefore increasingly valuable.

the unique vulnerabilities of entrepreneurial ventures to misconduct

with Don Palmer (forthcoming in Research in the Sociology of Organizations)

Links to pre-published paper, practitioner article, and Forbes article.

Entrepreneurs and their ventures are often portrayed as unambiguously positive forces in society. Specifically, high technology and equity-funded startups are heralded for their innovative products and services that are believed to alter the economic, social, and even political fabric of life in advantageous ways. This chapter draws on established theory on the causes of misconduct in and by organizations to elaborate the factors that can give rise to misconduct in entrepreneurial ventures, illustrating our arguments with case material on both widely known and less well-known instances of entrepreneurial misconduct. In venturing into the dark side of entrepreneurship, we hope to contribute to theory on entrepreneurship and organizational misconduct, augment entrepreneurship pedagogy, and offer ideas and examples that can enhance entrepreneurs’ awareness of their susceptibility to wrongdoing.

making sense of africa's emerging digital transformation and its many futureS

with Bitange Ndemo (published in the Africa Journal of Management)

Digital technologies have spread across the African continent at an inexorable pace. Widely cited data on adoption rates suggest that digital technologies are making their way into every facet of life in African societies — a broader change process cast in this paper as digital transformation seems to be underway. We look beyond adoption rates and examine actions that bring about favorable economic, organizational, political, social, and cultural environments which digital technologies depend on to realize their transformative potentiality. In our view, pure adoption does not indicate any broader change or transformation but rather indicates a potentiality for change — a latent power to catalyze broader societal change processes. In this paper, we develop a framework to make sense of Africa's emerging digital transformation. In so doing, we elaborate on the multiple environments that digital technologies are embedded in and, by extension, the multidimensional change processes they need to ignite. The goal is to provide a better understanding — and new avenues for research — why actions and changes in some environments tend to more readily embrace the new possibilities offered by digital technologies while others seem disconnected and are lagging behind.

Book Chapters

Ndemo, Bitange and Weiss, Tim (2018). A Call for Lifelong Learning Models in the Digital Age. In Galperin, Hernan and Alarcon, Andrea (eds.) The Future of Work in the Global South. International Development Research Center.

Weiss, Tim and Weber, Klaus (2016). The Art of Managing World Views in Kenya’s International Technology Sector. In Ndemo, Bitange and Weiss, Tim (eds.) Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making. Palgrave MacMillan.

Weiss, Tim (2016). Entrepreneuring for Society: What’s Next for Africa? In Ndemo, Bitange and Weiss, Tim (eds.) Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making. Palgrave MacMillan.

Hanley, Lisa; Wachner, Aline and Weiss, Tim (2016). The Role of Social Investors in Developing and Emerging Economies. In Lehner, Othmar (ed.). Routledge Handbook of Social and Sustainable Finance.

Proceedings

Weiss, Tim and Weber, Klaus (2016). Globalization Dynamics in Kenyan Technology Entrepreneurship. In John Humphreys (Ed.) Proceedings of the Seventy-sixth Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management.

Practitioner Reports and Business Cases

Weiss, Tim (2015). Combining the Best of the Valley and the Savannah: Comparative Advantage for the Next Generation of Technology Enterprises in Kenya. In Lisa Hanley, Stephan A. Jansen and Beate Grotehans (eds.) Entrepreneurial Solutions for Social Challenges in Colombia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mexico and South Africa. Complete report here.

Hanley, Lisa; Wachner, Aline and Weiss, Tim (2015). Taking the Pulse of the Social Enterprise Landscape in Developing and Emerging Economies: Insights from Colombia, Mexico, Kenya and South Africa. Complete report here.

Weiss, Tim and Wachner, Aline (2015). Navigating a social business through unchartered waters - Valid Nutrition’s strategy to access capital.