44.4 - Entrepreneurial Groups / Unification of Divided Systems

Special Issue - Isabell Stamm, Allan Discua Cruz & Ludovic Cailluet (Eds.): Collective Engagement in Entrepreneurship: Sociological and Historical Reflections upon Entrepreneurial Groups and Entrepreneurial Families.

Recent entrepreneurship research has come to the consensus that entrepreneurship is not only a process but also a collective action. In the pursuit of entrepreneurial ventures, the activities of a small number of individuals interlink constituting and reproducing a group of companions invested in each other. Such entrepreneurial groups share a past, a cemented culture and an imagined future for their collective venture. The contributions orchestrated in this thematic focus provide sociological and historical perspectives on “Collective Engagement in Entrepreneurship”. They offer systematic and empirical reflections upon entrepreneurial groups and entrepreneurial families considering the full trajectory of their collective engagement, changing historical contexts of group formation and evolution, and engaging in a methodological debate on how entrepreneurial groups can be studied over the long run. In their combination, the selected contributions advance an understanding of the social embeddedness and historic context dependency of entrepreneurship.

HSR Forum - Woo-Young Lee & Eun-Jeung Lee (Eds.): Social Integration or Mind Integration? An Alternative Approach for the Unification of Divided Systems.

This forum starts with the realization that overcoming the effects of national division requires an integration of “hearts and minds” on a micro-level, providing the foundation of integration in ideology and thought. By “hearts and minds” – or in Korean, maeum, the “heart-mind” – we mean the sum of emotions, sentiments, senses, and intentions which together inform people’s dispositions and behaviors. In the context of research on political systems’ integration into formerly or presently divided countries such as Germany and Korea, the concept of the heart-mind promises a novel and alternative approach which merges and condenses existing discussions on socio-cultural integration. In this HSR Forum, we rely on the notion of the heart-mind to identify an incongruity of national and political identities as being at the heart of the intractable conflicts on the Korean Peninsula, to analyze the attitudes of South Koreans toward inter-Korean integration, to understand the differences in thought and perception between South Korean migrants living in Germany and Koreans in South Korea, and, finally, to investigate North Korean defectors’ views on the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK).