Tales of the Unexpected: The Repair Work of an Entrepreneurial Resourcing Practice and the Role of Emotions

Most of the previous research on social entrepreneurial resource mobilization has been significantly influenced by the RBV (Bacq & Eddleston, 2018, Desa & Basu, 2013; Liu et al., 2021; McNamara et al., 2018). This research implies that entrepreneurs know what kinds of goals they want to accomplish, the value imbued in the resources they need to achieve these goals, and what objectives could emerge for them based on ongoing social interactions (Busch & Barkema, 2020; Engel et al., 2017). Prior research has made much progress and provided valuable insights into when and how social entrepreneurs deliberately use social ties, bricolage (Di Domenico et al., 2010; Janssen et al., 2018), optimization (Desa & Basu, 2013), and socially oriented bootstrapping (Jayawarna et al., 2020) approaches. Similarly, several authors have theorized that different discursive appeals, such as rhetorical strategy (Ruebottom, 2013) and resourcefulness narratives (Fisher et al., 2021), are critical for social venture resourcing, largely considering the characteristics of successful communication. These studies mostly assume that social entrepreneurs act as strategic actors who have a high degree of control over their resource strategies. In sum, this stream of research implicitly or explicitly implies an over-reliance on an agency-driven conceptualization of entrepreneurial resourcing as a strategic and goal-directed behavior, where entrepreneurs work in a “knowledgeable, reflexive and strategic” fashion (Williams et al., 2021).

Although it makes insightful contributions to the extant literature, this strand of research obscures and largely underplays the dynamic, relational, and collaborative accomplishment of entrepreneurial resourcing enacted in rich contexts (Anderson et al., 2012; Chalmers & Shaw, 2017). This limited focus on deliberate and strategic entrepreneurial activities often neglects the roles of a multiplicity of actors engaged in resourcing and the ways of coping and acting when not fully knowing what the environment and future may hold in store (Johannisson, 2018a; Keating et al., 2014). Furthermore, many of these studies are agnostic to the context, and rarely zoom in on the rich detail of social interactions, interactive dynamics, and emotions at play. Recent entrepreneurship research, however, has made gains by challenging the assumptions that entrepreneurs know a priori with whom to connect, what kinds of resources and ties they need (Johannisson, 2011; Ramírez-Pasillas et al., 2020), and act as “heroic architects who strategically search, plan, and pursue their pre-defined goals” (Engel et al., 2017, p. 36). Consistent with the resourcing literature (Feldman & Worline, 2011) and practice lens (Schatzki, 2002, 2005), Keating et al. (2014, p. 2) made progress in this direction by shifting perspective to understanding entrepreneurial resourcing as a social practice, thereby demonstrating that “there is no ‘out there’ of social resources waiting to be identified and acquired by entrepreneurs over time.” Instead, these resources emerge as they are engaged with, in real time and over time, and are both a consequence of entrepreneurs’ and stakeholders’ ongoing resourcing efforts. Therefore, resources such as social networks, social ties, and institutional benefits are not objective things that the entrepreneur possesses or that exist “out there”; rather, resources come into play in the entrepreneurs’ and stakeholders’ actions, activities, and interactions. A practice such as entrepreneurial resourcing always takes place in a field of shared understandings (Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 2002).

This emerging stream of research is guided by the EaP perspective (Champenois et al., 2019; Gartner & Teague, 2020; Gross & Geiger, 2017), which often conceptualizes practices as a set of interconnected “doings and sayings,” activities, and forms of communication. The literature that adopts an EaP lens focuses on the relational and processual nature of entrepreneurial activities (“doings and sayings”) as they are performed by individuals in interactions and through practices in specific entrepreneurial contexts, as well as in the constitution and consequences of entrepreneurial practices (Johannisson, 2011; Thompson & Byrne, 2020; Thompson et al., 2020). This lens neither reduces properties of practices to individual behaviors, cognitions, or motivations nor overemphasizes the structuring power of contextual factors. Thus, building on the EaP literature and Keating et al.’s work (2014), we conceptualize entrepreneurial resourcing as an important entrepreneurial practice that is collectively enacted and accomplished in context.

Entrepreneurs and stakeholders are faced with an ambiguous environment that constantly brings unexpected situations, events, and surprises (Fisher & Neubert, 2022; Johannisson, 2018b), which in turn can lead to the collapse of entrepreneurial resourcing practice. Previous research has highlighted that entrepreneurial practices can be disrupted and reconfigured in various ways (Gross & Geiger, 2017; Keating et al., 2014). Research has further revealed the major events as having a greater impact on the entrepreneurial practices by disrupting the status quo and causing a state of ambiguity (Gross & Geiger, 2017). Keating et al. (2014) demonstrated how an entrepreneurial firm moved through processes of resourcing the venture during new venture development by adapting their social resourcing practices to changing relevant contexts, and, in turn, enacted new contexts. Indeed, given that practices are not static, reified, and rule-based patterns (Thompson & Byrne, 2020), they might adjust to changing environments, transform, or die out (Gross & Geiger, 2017; Keating et al., 2014). Although there have been calls to study entrepreneurial practice dynamics (Champenois et al., 2019; Johannisson, 2018a; Thompson & Byrne, 2020), the entrepreneurship research has little to say about how entrepreneurial practices, for example, resourcing, are reconfigured and repaired in response to unexpected situations and disruptions. Therefore, the ways that entrepreneurial practices are collectively repaired in times of crisis remain a black box.

As our study led us to discover the crucial role of emotions in entrepreneurial resourcing practice and in the repair work enacted, in the following, we integrate theoretical insights about the emotion–entrepreneurial practice link from a practice theoretical ontology of emotions.

Emotions are recognized as playing a significant role in the entrepreneurial process (Cardon et al., 2012; de Cock et al., 2020; Jennings et al., 2015; Williamson et al., 2022). Most entrepreneurship research in this area has focused, for example, on the relationship between psychological entities (such as joy, passion, compassion, empathy, grief, and envy) and cognitive processes and actions in the entrepreneurial context (Bacq & Alt, 2018; Cardon et al., 2005, 2009; Goss et al., 2011; Miller et al., 2012). Taken together, this line of research views emotions as individually experienced states.

More recent work has shown that entrepreneurs need to generate interest in their venture by evoking positive emotions in resource providers (Li et al., 2017). For example, Fisher et al. (2021) pointed out that discursive appeals, such as resourcefulness narratives, generate positive emotional and cognitive reactions from external resource providers, thus prompting them to look at the entrepreneur and the venture more favorably. In the context of social entrepreneurship, Barberá-Tomás et al. (2019) found that social entrepreneurs can use “emotion-symbolic work” through the use of visuals and words to evoke negative emotions, which they transform into emotional energy for enactment. This more recent research enables scholars to better understand how entrepreneurs can evoke others’ emotions and use emotions to influence target actors (Zietsma et al., 2019).

A practice theoretical lens and its alternative ontological stance offer different views on emotions. They foreground a dynamic, relational, and situated understanding of affective phenomena and focus on embodied yet mobile repertoires of emotion and performativity (Slaby & von Scheve, 2019). In our everyday life, we often become engaged in a particular activity because we are guided by particular emotions, and in turn, these doings and activities can create and alter emotions (Molander & Hartmann, 2018). Emotions are experienced individually, but belong to practices (Weenink & Spaargaren, 2016). In the context of entrepreneurship, an example is expressing delight and joy over a successful entrepreneurial pitch in certain contexts. In this vein, what matters to people and creates a meaningful difference—moods, emotions, affects, and passions—plays a crucial role in any activity, structuring the stream of behavior (Schatzki, 2010; Wiesse, 2019). Exploring the affective dimensions of entrepreneurial practices thus implies highlighting how practices incorporate affectivity, delineating the role of emotions in practices.

Few entrepreneurship studies have addressed the affective dimensions of entrepreneurial practices. Research in the context of commercial, art, and social entrepreneurship has provided some valuable insights into the emotional underpinnings of entrepreneurial practices. For example, Elias et al. (2017) employed a relational perspective to explore the relational, emotional, and embodied entrepreneurial cocreation process of aesthetic value among art entrepreneurs and their customers. They moved beyond the current focus on entrepreneurial cognition to illuminate entrepreneurs’ and customers’ imaginations, relationality, sensory, and emotional experience. Focusing on the practices of networking and production of small craft-food businesses, Tuitjer (2022) showed how the practices are interlinked and held together by shared general understandings and teleoaffective structures, such as pride in the product, the valuation of craftsmanship, the joy of cooperation, and “start[ing] something together,” which, in turn, generate business growth. In their study of the enactment of care ethics between social entrepreneurs and communities, Sengupta and Lehtimäki (2022, p. 27) demonstrated that the care ethics of social entrepreneurship are a “relational practice in which social entrepreneurs engage in embodied relations with emotion, cognition, analytical thinking, lived experience, and acting on others’ behalf.” Furthermore, several studies (van Wijk et al., 2018; Zietsma & Toubiana, 2019) have shown that emotions can both fuel and impede social entrepreneurial activities and efforts.

Although there have been calls to include more practice theories by focusing on emotional aspects of entrepreneurial practices and the ongoing features and patterns of social activities (Gross & Geiger, 2017; Thompson & Byrne, 2020; Wigren-Kristoferson et al., 2022), as well as emotionally infused microlevel interactions (Goss et al., 2011; Zietsma et al., 2019), such studies are rare. How emotions are intertwined with an entrepreneurial resourcing practice has yet to be examined in the entrepreneurship research (Keating et al., 2014).

In order to shed light on these issues, we adopt the perspective articulated by Schatzki (2002, 2005, 2012), which underlines the importance of hands-on interactions (Cucchi et al., 2021; Johannisson et al., 2016) and foregrounds that emotions matter for practices. Practices are organized by rules (formulated directives, instructions), practical understandings (how things are done), and general understandings, which are “ethoses or general senses of things” (Schatzki, 2019, p. 30). Furthermore, practices are shaped by their teleoaffective structure, combining the sense of orientation toward particular goals and ends with the emotions, moods, and motivational engagements (affects) enjoined by such orientations. Schatzki’s notion of “teleoaffective structure” underscores its emotional dimension–emotions matter for and are deeply inscribed in the structural blueprints of practices. From this vantage, his notion of “teleoaffective structure” provides a fruitful way to position emotions vis-à-vis practices instead of categorizing emotions as individual content and the property of entrepreneurs (Thompson & Byrne, 2020). Hence, by adopting Schatzki’s practice lens, we focus our analysis on the level of practice rather than on the individual entrepreneur, which still remains the central unit of analysis in much of the literature. We will now outline our research design and methodology.

We studied entrepreneurial resourcing practice in the context of a social venture–public collaboration. It took place in Norway, where the government has increasingly supported and promoted collaboration between social ventures and local authorities (municipalities). As a Nordic welfare state, Norway has an extensive public supply of social services, most of which are produced and provided by public bodies at different levels: municipalities, counties, and governmental entities (Trætteberg & Fladmoe, 2020). The Norwegian welfare model is sometimes described as a number of “welfare municipalities” (Borzaga et al., 2020, p. 9), because the needs of its citizens emerge at the municipal level and it is at this level that the services need to be produced and provided (Kobro et al., 2018). Norway is organized in 356 municipalities and has a population of approximately 5.5 million.

Even though the public sector has been the dominant service provider, nongovernmental organizations have for several decades provided welfare services, such as old people’s homes (e.g., The Salvation Army), services for drug addicts (e.g., The Church’s Social Service), and kindergartens (e.g., Women’s National Health Association and the Red Cross). However, over the last 20 years, there has been an increasing tendency to accept both for-profit and non-profit social entrepreneurs. In addition, the public sector has experienced major structural reforms, such as the implementation of new public management governance, the merger of county administrations and municipalities, and the centralization of public tasks (Kobro et al., 2018). This was accelerated by the conservative coalition cabinet that was in office 2013 to 2021. Notably, there is a political divide in Norway on the privatization of welfare, in that the conservative parties are pro-privatization, whereas the social democratic and left-wing parties take a more ambivalent view.

As a part of a larger project, we conducted a longitudinal case study (2012–2020) of the collaboration process between the social venture Betz (pseudonym) and the municipality of Fjord (pseudonym), initially driven by our aim of understanding how social entrepreneurs enact resourcing through public collaboration. Our selection was based on theoretical sampling that warranted both real-time and retrospective investigation (Van Burg et al., 2020) of the entrepreneurial resourcing practice in a collaborative setting. In-depth access was obtained through direct requests to the founder of Betz and representatives of Fjord who were deemed potentially interested.

Helena (pseudonym) is a portfolio entrepreneur who started Betz, operating in the health sector, in 2009. The business idea is based on her own experiences of her family’s encounters with the health services provided by a municipality. Betz provides innovative services to vulnerable groups of people with substance abuse problems and also recruits people who have been out of the labor market as part-time assistants (service providers). At the time of the data collection, Betz employed three full-time management staff, 42 part-time assistants, and had an ongoing collaboration with Fjord. Fjord has a conservative political leadership and promotes itself as “a pioneering municipality, being innovative and focused on problem-solving.” In 2012, Fjord launched a major plan to improve the health and care services of the municipality. According to the plan, Fjord was to ensure the provision of high-quality services to vulnerable groups of people with substance abuse problems (anonymized) by engaging in collaborations with external actors. In 2012, Helena and two Fjord employees, Jennifer and Bertha (pseudonyms), met at a conference and established a contact. After 5 years of relationship-building, Betz and Fjord started a collaboration project in 2017. The collaboration implied that Betz, in close cooperation with Fjord, would adapt Betz’s services, or cocreate services, to fit the municipality’s resources and needs. However, during the data collection period, it was announced that Fjord and two other neighboring municipalities would merge in January 2020, resulting in serious budget cuts, which came as a surprise to all the stakeholders and jeopardized the entrepreneurial resourcing practice. Figure 1 shows the chronology of resourcing and the major events.

The lead author engaged with the field site from Fall 2019 to Spring 2020. The nature and extent of access provided an exceptional opportunity to “follow the practice” as it unfolded (Johannisson, 2011) and capture its complexity and idiosyncrasies (Chalmers & Shaw, 2017; Gartner & Teague, 2020). Following a case study method (Stake, 2005), field research entailed generating data through interviews, shadowing, observation, real-time email correspondence, informal conversations, and documents. A summary of data sources is provided in Table 1. The second author joined the research project in 2020 as an “outsider” researcher who was given access to the data and participated in analysis (Tillmar, 2020).

Reflexivity took place throughout the research process (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2018). During the shadowing process, the lead researcher endeavored to make (their) presence nonintrusive (Ruebottom & Toubiana, 2020) by zooming in on the doings and sayings from a distance to make it easier to “keep the activities and conversations directed toward the practice of interest” (Johnson, 2014) and to build trust with participants. However, the dynamics experienced in the field, in particular, during the unexpected situation that jeopardized the practice, were encountered as emotionally challenging and distressing not only for the stakeholders but also for the first author as well, making it impossible to be immune to the circumstances. The first author felt sympathetic to the situation, which also could affect the future of the research, in particular, the opportunity to continue to follow the unfolding of resourcing. The researcher felt that it was important to communicate a feeling of genuine empathy in order to make Helena feel at ease and have her open up about her feelings and intentions after the unexpected event. Writing field notes from the very start which outlined the involvement of the researcher’s emotional reactions and feelings during the research process deemed to be important. This enabled us to look more closely and reflexively at the role the lead author’s experience, emotions, and feelings had to play within the research process (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2018). In addition, the choice made to audio-record the meetings during the longitudinal process, especially the meetings that took place after the unexpected situation, and gaining consent for this turned out to be advantageous for scrutinizing the micro-processes at play and interpretation of the results. Our study benefitted from getting further access to the field as Helena showed her support for our research and found it important that an external observer (the lead author) followed how the situation unfolded after the practice collapse.

The audio-recorded interviews and meetings were transcribed and imported into MAXQDA software to assist with coding, along with handwritten field notes and email correspondence. We engaged in theorizing starting from empirical data and iteratively moving toward theory. We carried out several rounds of data analysis. This iteration involved the following stages.

First, as we were making sense of the data in context, we decided to zoom in on an entrepreneurial resourcing practice as our unit of analysis. We started by developing a timeline of the main events permeating resourcing, starting from the conference in 2012, where Helena, Jennifer, and Bertha met. This timeline provided insight into events that occurred prior to entry into the field and a general understanding how specific events were linked together, about the actors involved at various points in time, their roles and activities.

Second, we zoomed in at the micro level of the resourcing practice and identified a list of the recurring resourcing doings and sayings—mundane and repetitive patterns of activity that were deemed central to the reproduction of the entrepreneurial resourcing practice. Following Schatzki (1996, 2005), we also coded the elements constituting and structuring the entrepreneurial resourcing practice, including rules (i.e., explicit formulations that prescribe or instruct an action that needs to be done), practical and general understandings, and particular goals and ends pursued by the stakeholders. We organized these recurring resourcing doings and sayings and the elements of the practice into a practice template. This analytical process required a period of intensive reading and rereading of transcripts, field notes, observation guides, emails, regular weekly discussions between the authors, and iterations between theory and empirical observations. This particular cooperation—with one researcher “inside” the empirical field and the other “outside”—enhanced the analytical process. As Berglund and Schwartz (2013, p. 9) note, “this acts as a second shadowing process, in which the ‘outside’ researcher becomes another observer revealing the blind spots in the ‘inside researcher’s’ observations.” The second author’s perspective was useful to balance, and occasionally challenge, the views of the lead author and was key to our reflexive considerations.

As data analysis progressed, we noticed that the interactions between Helena, Jennifer, and Bertha were emotionally very laden, giving a sense of the emotional dynamics and making it possible to provide a detailed account of the micro-processes at play. Encouraged by the comments of the reviewers, we zoomed in on emotions and how the emotional dynamics evolved over time by returning to the original audio recordings, field notes, and emails for a more detailed analysis of the interactions. This inductive insight led us to delve into prior literature on the role of emotion in (social) entrepreneurship, particularly in resource mobilization, and to engage in a more refined coding. Drawing on a practice theoretical ontology of emotions, in particular Schatzki’s notion of “teleoaffective structure” that integrates emotions into practices, we paid attention to desired outcomes that Helena, Jennifer, and Bertha pursued in performing their activities and the emotional dimensions attached to these. As a result, we recoded our data to shed light on teleology and affectivity that were shared by the entrepreneur and stakeholders. When zooming out, we also came to realize that our data was particularly informative for understanding how Helena, Jennifer, and Bertha collectively tried to stitch the practice back together after the unexpected situation and the role of emotions in their attempts. As a result, other interesting and unexpected findings emerged from several rounds of reiterative data analysis—collective repair work to resourcing doings and sayings after the practice collapse. Based on the literature available at the time, we narrowed our research question to focus more precisely on the repair work of an entrepreneurial resourcing practice. We proceeded inductively, starting by organizing our findings around three vignettes (prior to, during, and following the unexpected situation). Finally, we organized the recurring resourcing doings and sayings and their structural dimensions in Appendix 1. To help ensure that our theorizing was valid, we did two things. First, we delved into the entrepreneurship studies that have addressed the affective dimensions of entrepreneurial practices either implicitly or explicitly, and research in other fields, such as consumption. Second, we discussed our findings with practice theory and entrepreneurship scholars, which encouraged further reflexivity.

The first step toward resourcing through collaboration dates back to 2012, when Helena was presenting Betz and its solution to a social problem at a conference in which Jennifer and Bertha participated as representatives of Fjord. Helena recalled that “the story started occasionally during the innovation conference, and [Jennifer and Bertha] liked what they heard about what we are doing.” Jennifer and Bertha became very interested and were inspired to form bonds with Helena to explore new ways of improving the lives of Fjord’s citizens. They were open to new ideas and solutions, despite Betz being a private company and given the political debates about the role of the private sector in welfare provision. During the conference, Jennifer and Bertha joined Helena at the lunch table, “where all this started” (Helena). They stayed in touch by “emailing, making phone calls, and SMSing all the time […] after the conference just checking out possibilities” (Helena).

After 5 years of regular contact, the three women had established strong ties and emotional bonds and finally managed to develop a collaboration contract for a 2-year project. The project implied that Betz, in close collaboration with Fjord, would “co-create services that fit the municipality’s resources and needs and were in line with their major plan” (Helena). Hence, the conference cultivated conditions enabling unexpected encounters to emerge, in which Helena met and formed connections with Fjord employees even if the value of the relationship as a potential resource was yet unknown (Busch & Barkema, 2020; Johannisson, 2011). By investing in long-lasting relationships (Ostertag et al., 2021; Weber et al., 2017), the partners turned initially serendipitous encounters into meaningful connections, which became important to achieving the desired outcome (Engel et al., 2017)—the initiation of resourcing. As Helena recalled, “Now, looking back, I understand what happened; because they were in a long-lasting process establishing a major political plan, the plan how to tackle the drug abuse problem […], they had just started in 2012 and were checking out the possibilities.”

In January 2020, Fjord officially merged with the neighboring Island and Hill municipalities and became the municipality of Headlands. The new municipality still had conservative political leadership and promoted itself as a pioneering, innovative, and problem-solving organization. However, as with all mergers, it was a struggle to get the new organization to become one unit and, according to Helena, “many municipalities had intentions to collaborate, but when the merger is about to take place, they say we do not have time, we have to focus on the merging process.”

In November 2019, when the lead author shadowed Helena on one of her trips to Fjord to renegotiate the continuation of the collaboration, unexpected news arrived. Helena was to meet Jennifer and Bertha at 9:00 a.m. Helena and the author were waiting in the main hall of the municipality premises to be accompanied to the meeting room. Helena seemed surprised that neither Jennifer nor Bertha had showed up by 9:15 a.m., as they were both punctual. She decided not to call either of them. After a while, Jennifer arrived and appeared to be very concerned (author’s notes). Jennifer informed Helena and the field researcher that she had received bad news: the new Headlands municipality had been obliged to reduce its budget to the extent that it was no longer able to continue the collaboration. This threatened the resourcing practice with collapse. Jennifer apologized and said that the meeting had to be canceled. Helena listened carefully, standing very close to Jennifer, and acknowledged that she understood the situation. Jennifer was so disappointed that she had to go home. The difference in their emotional reactions was striking, as noted in the field notes: while Jennifer expressed disappointment, sadness, grief, and concern for the users, Helena displayed confidence and calmness. Our analysis showed how the collapse of the practice elicited frustration, disappointment, and feelings of displeasure, as their desired outcomes moved further and further out of reach and control, affecting the performance of the resourcing practice. When Helena and the researcher left after hearing the bad news, Helena smiled and reflected on the situation as follows:

You know what…[smiling]. I want to challenge them, they should think outside the box to seek other financial alternatives. (Author’s field notes)

This episode demonstrates the emotions and affectivity structuring both the entrepreneur’s and stakeholders’ doings and sayings, playing the role of guiding future performances in a way that inspired experimentation and creativity (Johannisson, 2018b). It also points to the complexity of how affectivity guides practice performances. Our data demonstrates that the teleoaffective structure is dynamic and prescribes a number of emotions that can run counter to each other, as in the case of Helena and Jennifer. According to Schatzki (1997, p. 303), “there is no particular type or set of conditions that a given action must express and thus no particular form that the teleoaffectivity governing it must take.”

Just a few minutes later, on the bus returning from Fjord, Helena decided to schedule a meeting with Bertha the next morning to clarify the status of the collaboration. She emailed Bertha, sending an invitation that the latter accepted, despite her feeling of loss. Scheduling a meeting was important because, as Helena said to the author, “there were plenty of ways to continue the collaboration regardless of the budget cuts.” Interestingly, while Helena immediately wanted to find out possible solutions how the resourcing practice could be repaired and carried forward, our data suggest that Bertha did so too, since she accepted and attended the important meeting, despite disappointment, sadness, grief, and feeling of loss initially. This demonstrates a sort of mutual defiance that propels them to look for solutions together in the wake of practice collapse as both Helena and Bertha were willing to meet. The following morning, Helena and the researcher returned to Fjord. The meeting took place at 8:00 a.m. in Bertha’s office. In Schatzkian language, the unexpected situation—the budget cuts—was triggered by clashes of shared understandings, rules, and teleoaffectivity, leading to the termination of relationships and, consequently, a collapse of the entrepreneurial resourcing practice.

The third vignette demonstrates the collective repair work of the collapsing resourcing practice following the unexpected situation, detailing how the social entrepreneur and partners renegotiated, reconfigured, and remedied the practice and its affective components.

Approaching entrepreneurial resourcing from the ontology of EaP brings attention to the dynamic, relational, and mutual accomplishment of entrepreneurial resourcing enacted in context (Champenois et al., 2019; Ramírez-Pasillas et al., 2020; Thompson et al., 2020). First, and most importantly, our theorizing provides novel and important insights into the repair work of an entrepreneurial resourcing practice after unexpected collapse. Our primary finding is how the collective repair work is enacted and plays out—the collaborative ways to repair and reconfigure the practice to keep resourcing on track (Johannisson, 2018b, Keating et al., 2014).

There is an increasing interest in studying resource mobilization at the earliest stages of social venture creation and development, even though resourcing is always present in the flux of any entrepreneurial journey. Prior research has provided rich insights into when and how social entrepreneurs use specific approaches to access and repurpose external resources (Desa & Basu, 2013; Drencheva et al., 2022; Renko, 2013). This stream of research is largely grounded in (methodological) individualism, particularly in terms of privileging the entrepreneur as a locus of explanation (Dimov & Pistrui, 2020). Our starting point is that entrepreneurship is a process, where relationality, ambiguity, and dynamism gain prominence (Thompson & Byrne, 2020), a process that unfolds over time and in unpredictable ways, and in which unexpected situations surrounding resourcing constantly emerge (Dimov, 2020; Johannisson, 2018a). Following this, our study suggests that when a resourcing practice collapse occurs, enacting collective repair is particularly critical for the survival and growth of social ventures. Viewing entrepreneurial resourcing as a social practice, we demonstrate that repair is a relational outcome, where both entrepreneurs and stakeholders act with creativity, experimentation, and spontaneity to keep resourcing on track. This is important, as the entrepreneurship literature has not yet specified how entrepreneurial practices are repaired, renegotiated, and reconfigured in times of crisis. We thus offer new insights when compared to existing research (Clough et al., 2019; McNamara et al., 2018) as we show that disruptions to practices necessitate collective repair work to enable a continuation of resourcing. We argue that repairing the affective dimensions of the practice is particularly important as emotions matter for the way in which entrepreneurial practices, such as resourcing are kept on track because they tie practitioners and the practice together (Zietsma et al., 2019).

Specifically, we demonstrate how the collapse of a resourcing practice is triggered by clashes in the “normativized and hierarchically ordered ends, projects and tasks, [. . .] emotions and even moods” (Schatzki, 2005, p. 480). In our study, in their attempts to stitch the practice and its components back together, practitioners collectively repaired its affective dimensions. For example, they resolved the negative emotions caused by the practice collapse, reestablishing the former emotions that guided resourcing. In particular, they transformed the affective displeasure, feelings of loss, and fear of not succeeding caused by the collapse back to the joy of accomplishing shared goals and feeling of doing good that had guided the resourcing before the collapse. Furthermore, we illustrate how the practice collapse refined the general understanding of resourcing by reintroducing the public–private divide, which had been dismantled before the unexpected situation. This is crucial, as the practitioners in our case had to repair both the teleoaffective structure and the ambiguity in the general understanding, which required them to take a step back in their relationships and reexperience them as they had been when they met at the very beginning.

Considering the need for alignment of the teleoaffective structure and general understanding in such repair work, our data show that practitioners engaged in collective communicative handling of the incident, collective caring, and opened an agenda for alternative solutions to repair and carry the resourcing practice forward. Collective caring is as an important compassionate and collaborative activity in repair work, which aligns with and extends Sengupta and Lehtimäki’s study (2022), in which they argue that social entrepreneurs produce new structures and opportunities in their enactment of caring. Hence, context is not something that exists on its own, but is instead enacted in the caring practices. We offer more refined insights by demonstrating how caring is dispersed among the stakeholders, which is important for developing shared understanding of the meaning of the practice and for reconfiguring its affective dimensions. In this way, through the detailed scrutiny of collective affectual activities, we highlight affective statements and questions through which the stakeholders communicated their feelings and emotions, which enabled changes in affectivity and re-engagement. Our study thus demonstrates that shared emotions are essential in enabling practitioners to jointly repair and reconfigure a practice and its components though alignment of shared understandings and teleoaffective structures.

Relatedly, and while not our explicit focus, another insight from our study is that unexpected situations act as turning points in social relationships, requiring partners to rebuild them. We show how the falling-apart affective dimensions of the resourcing practice are collectively remedied (Baker & Welter, 2015; Engel et al., 2017), thus contributing to our understanding of how the rebuilding, re-activation, and transformation of connections and relationships play out after disruption to an entrepreneurial resourcing practice (Elfring et al., 2021).

Our study has theoretical implications for the entrepreneurial resourcing literature. We extend recent research (Jayawarna et al., 2020; Keating et al., 2014; McNamara et al., 2018) by providing insights into a hidden element of the entrepreneurial resourcing practice—its emotional dimensions and the role of emotions in repair work, which have remained largely unexplored in previous studies (Elias et al., 2017; Thompson & Byrne, 2020; Wigren-Kristoferson et al., 2022). Recent research has made gains by shifting understanding of (social) resources as tangible and intangible assets “out there” toward something that emerges when entrepreneurs and stakeholders engage in a resourcing practice that entails messy, practical, improvisational, and collective work (Johannisson, 2018b; Keating et al., 2014; Papazu, 2021). Yet the literature tends to black-box the notion of emotions and how they are intertwined with entrepreneurial resourcing practice (Wigren-Kristoferson et al., 2022).

Our study demonstrates that emotions are invested in the entrepreneurial resourcing practice and that the practice is sustained and structured by emotions (Schatzki, 2002, 2005). With the help of Schatzki’s notion of “teleoaffective structure,” we are able to unpack the complex intermingling of emotional commitment and motivational orientation toward resourcing goals. Our findings show that emotions have a major bearing on the resourcing practice and structure the stream of behavior (Schatzki, 2010; Wiesse, 2019), thereby keeping practice and entrepreneuring practitioners together. Importantly, emotions may align contrasting general understandings, as our case demonstrates, thus enabling repair following unexpected collapse. Accordingly, we build on and extend Keating et al.’s (2014) work by taking a step forward and exploring the resourcing practice–emotion link, in particular, the nexus between resourcing activities and emotions, thus enriching the knowledge base with the collective emotional dynamics of resourcing (Brundin et al., 2021).

By changing the unit of analysis from the entrepreneur to the practice enabled us to highlight the significance of emotions in changes to entrepreneurial resourcing practice and demonstrate how changes in its emotional content alter the practice (Thompson & Byrne, 2020; Zietsma et al., 2019). Prior research emphasizes that entrepreneurs strategically “use” emotion as a tool, and consciously and deliberately enact various types of emotion regulation behaviors to create emotional experiences for themselves and their stakeholders for resource mobilization purposes (Huy & Zott, 2019; McNamara et al., 2018). Our study provides a more nuanced view. We show that emotions are neither strategically employed by entrepreneurs to facilitate resource mobilization nor a result of resourcing (Huy & Zott, 2019; Li et al., 2017), but is at the heart of the practice itself, as the resourcing practice is deeply shaped by underlying affective dynamics that unfold in social interactions. As we have shown, Helena, Jennifer, and Bertha collectively attempted to influence and recraft the emotional component of resourcing to stitch the practice back. Hence, our study challenges an individual-centric approach that emphasizes entrepreneurs’ strategic management of emotions. We thus contribute to theory by offering an EaP-based interpretation to complement the view (Champenois et al., 2019; Zietsma et al., 2019).

An opportunity to follow how the resourcing practice unfolded in real time and over time, in particular, after the practice was disrupted is a unique aspect of our study. Our findings suggest that unexpected situations and events have a significant impact on the entrepreneurial practices by “disrupting the status quo, causing a state of ambiguity” (Gross & Geiger, 2017, p. 200) and triggering collective repair to carry a practice forward. We see this crisis point as an important facilitator in collective repair work. It enabled us to gain insights into the detailed accounts of microactivities through which repair work was enacted and to capture the emotional dynamics in context across multiple meetings and interactions over time (Zietsma et al., 2019), thereby contextualizing the affective dimensions of resourcing (Brundin et al., 2021). Capturing collective emotions and how they travel when they occur in real time is a challenging task methodologically. Thus it is hardly surprising that emotion as a hidden element in entrepreneurial resourcing practice and in repair work has been largely neglected until now. Hence, we suggest that focusing on unexpected situations and approaching them with an EaP lens behooves researchers to attend to changes to entrepreneurial practices and advance theorization about their repair.