Entrepreneurship and success in e-business: on changing meanings of expertise and community in e-entrepreneurship

The dotcom crash presented new challenges to successful business and decision-making in e-entrepreneurship, the implications of which can be better understood by looking at the changing meanings of expert knowledge and of business community. This is one of the main findings of a case study on e-entrepreneurship in the Greater London business area. Using a sample of 42 entrepreneurs, who started small businesses in the wake of the dotcom stockmarket collapse in 1999/2000, or who 'survived' the latter, this research aimed to highlight changes in social meanings in e-entrepreneurship since the 'dotcom crash', compared to the period of the 'dotcom boom'. Specifically, the study analysed, from a social psychological perspective, how 'aftermath-entrepreneurs' relate to being successful and taking the 'right' decisions. Central to the social psychological angle was a social constructivist view on knowing and sense-making in contemporary organisation. Entrepreneurship was examined from the angle of how e-entrepreneurs make sense collectively in communication and interaction and thereby continuously re-negotiate and re-enact values, meanings and practices. This perspective enabled an understanding of the ways in which entrepreneurs relate to one another and thereby come to define their sector. The findings reveal changes in sense-making that are both intuitive and counter-intuitive in character: intuitive in terms of processes of community empowerment in a context that is coming to terms with failure; counterintuitive in terms of the meanings associated to the enactment of expert knowledge. Specifically, the study yielded a new sense of expertise that was enacted via ebusiness networks. Community enabled e-entrepreneurs to come to terms with the challenges the dotcom crash had posed to values regarding individual entrepreneurial expertise.