title: Individual and household Life course explanation to entrepreneurial exit
Creators: name: Alam, Muntasir
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2021

description: Entrepreneurial exit, a critical stage in the entrepreneurial process, happens when the venture creators disengage from ownership control and decision-making authority of the firm they helped to create. Until now, academic research delineating the role of individual and household level resources in explaining exit (or otherwise) are relatively sparse. Of the limited research that provided a resource-based explanation to exit, hardly any research has investigated the influence of a multitude of different resources on the exit process and the subsequent decision to exit. Moreover, the impact of resources on the exit decision has only been studied at the individual level of analysis, despite evidence suggesting an inextricably intertwined relationship between the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial households. Like the literature on entrepreneurship more broadly, research on entrepreneurial exit largely relies on cross-sectional data. Moving beyond the current understanding that exit is a dichotomous adverse event often equating to business failure, this research attempts to study the exit phenomenon factoring 'the time an individual takes to make the exit decision' to understand the influence of resources to determine (a) who experience an exit event (as opposed to who remain in business), (b) when in the business life course they make the exit decision, and (c) varying exit profiles for individuals. More specifically, this research study entrepreneurial exit from an entrepreneurial resource perspective, paying particular attention to human, financial and time as key resources to succeed, or otherwise, in the entrepreneurial journey. Drawing upon the UK longitudinal household survey (UKLHS), the thesis finds that a combination of human, financial and time resources determines one's faith in business. Overall, the author found support for the original thesis that household dynamics are highly influential in explaining the likelihood of the entrepreneur exiting from their business. The research findings also suggested that whether resources facilitate or constrain entrepreneurial practice, the effect of those resources in determining the exit outcome vary considerably. The study has made several contributions to the entrepreneurial exit literature. First, this research extends the current knowledge base on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial exit with its exploration of the role of the resource in the entrepreneur's exit decision. Second, by adopting the entrepreneurial household as the framing context and positioning self-employed/business owners' resource base within the resource base of their household, this study has extended the resource definition to entrepreneur exit, which was earlier looked upon from an owner-centric perspective. Third, the life course analysis generated a more complex picture of entrepreneur exit than those provided by the existing literature. More specifically, by building the nuanced empirical understanding of resource demands, this research offers a broader conceptualisation of exit conditions that enable entrepreneurs and self-employed individuals to experience varying forms of exists. The typology that differentiates voluntary from non-voluntary and positive exit experience from negative experiences helps to respond to the call for reframing exit as an emergent opportunity-based decision rather than a one-off misfortune that often refers to in the exit literature as a ‘failure’ event. At the policy level, research findings challenge the policy discourse that anyone with access to minimum levels of resources and institutional support can start entrepreneurship by highlighting the importance of entrepreneurial capital. This research also challenges the policy understanding that household dynamics are separate from entrepreneurial/enterprise decisions, thereby overlooking the role of the household in entrepreneurial decisions, including exit.