Magdalena Markowska

My research interests center on identities, the interplay between structure and agency as well as the performative role of context in entrepreneurial endeavors. Women entrepreneurship, food entrepreneurship and nascent entrepreneurship are the empirical settings that I use for developing theoretical contributions. I am a qualitative researcher and I attracted, as project manager and/or project participant, over 16 million SEK (ca. 1,6 mln EUR) of research funding. My recent project explored Mumpreneurship in Sweden (financed by Swedish Research Council) and my two current research projects look at women entrepreneurs in retail (financed by Hakon Swenson Foundation) and plant-based food innovation and entrepreneurship.

My research journey started with my interest in competence development and entrepreneurial learning and resulted in my dissertation focusing on entrepreneurial competence development among gourmet chefs becoming gourmet restaurateurs (Markowska, 2011), and two papers published where one focused on individual agency (that is role of action control beliefs) in entrepreneurial expertise development (Markowska, 2018) and the other one on contextual adaptation of learning to perceived self-efficacy and perceived uncertainty (Markowska & Wiklund, 2020). This latter paper was awarded highly commended award by Entrepreneurship & Regional Development journal in 2021.

Issues of being and becoming turned to play a crucial role not only in the learning processes I observed, but also for many other strategic decisions and behaviors of the entrepreneurs I talked to. I subsequently focused on exploring issues of (entrepreneurial) identity, particularly among celebrity restaurateurs. This resulted in a book chapter on the role of achievement motivation on identity construction published with Friederike Welter (Markowska & Welter, 2018), another working paper with her on interplay between social and role identity and role of status. Continuing the interest in identity and identification, in 2015, Charmine Härtel, Ethel Brunding, Amanda Roan and I published a book chapter titled A Dynamic Model of Entrepreneurial Identification and Dis-Identification: An Emotions Perspective in which we theorized the role of emotional experiences and contextual embeddedness on the likelihood of following an identification or disidentification cycle with an entrepreneurial role. Alongside, I worked with Henry Lopez Vega on understanding agency of winemakers in identity construction of a Spanish wine region, Priorat. In this paper (Markowska & Lopez Vega, 2018) we developed the concept of storying which is an agentic construction of stories in efforts to create conducive conditions for own entrepreneurial action.

In parallel, I started to work with Jan Brinckmann and Dietmar Grichnik on a paper investigating how strategies come to be among nascent entrepreneurs and what factors influence the process (Markowska, Grichnik, Brinkmann & Kapsa, 2019). We argued that while we know much about how entrepreneurs use strategies, we do not really know, how these strategies emerge, and we showed how problem framing influences strategic orientation that comprises risk orientation and prediction orientation. We also show differential role of work experience (depth and breadth) and environmental flexibility on emergence of these two orientations. Building on this line of research, in 2020, together with Lianguang Cui of Nankai University, China, we applied and were granted a STINT China-Sweden mobility grant to work together on a project exploring and comparing decision making among entrepreneurs in Sweden and China. This work is ongoing.

A big part of my research journey builds on and develops further Friederike Welter’s ideas about context and its importance for entrepreneurship. For example, already in 2011, in the book chapter with Rögnvaldur Saemundsson and Johan Wiklund, we showed how entrepreneurs were contextualizing business models to fit their settings (Markowska, Saemundsson, & Wiklund, 2011). In 2017, I co-edited a book with Ethel Brundin and Marcela Ramirez Pasillas titled: Contextualizing Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies and Developing Countries. The book focuses on contextualizing entrepreneurship in less-developed contexts adding to the heterogeneity of entrepreneurship research. Recently, I explored the role of cultural context on women entrepreneurship in Ethiopia identifying three constraints that impact women’ entrepreneurship in Ethiopia: ostracism by family and society for becoming an entrepreneur rather than finding a job; (2) objection to the type of business; and (3) censure for prioritizing business over the role of mother (Markowska & Tesfaye Abebe, 2022).

Over the past ten years, women entrepreneurship has grown to be the most actively explored area of my research. Intrigued by a counterintuitive rise of mothers’ entrepreneurship in the Swedish social welfare context, Helene Ahl, Lucia Naldi and I sought and received funds from Swedish Research Council to explore the phenomenon. In this project, we seek to understand motivation of mothers of small children who become entrepreneurs despite family friendly policies in Sweden. First, using qualitative methods we showed how the family friendly policies, particularly the parental leave, provide an enabling factor for women to consider business start-up and how women actively control timing of their entry to synchronise the rhythms of their family, work, and institutional context (Markowska, Ahl & Naldi, 2022). Second, using population statistics, we showed that the uptake of parental leave by partners is the strongest predictor of women’s business start-up (Naldi, Bau, Ahl & Markowska, 2021). Taken together, we show that it is the coexistence of the formal institutions (social welfare with its policies) and informal institutions of family (egalitarian gender norms) that play an important role for women entrepreneurship and that the entrepreneurship is then a choice and not a necessity. I also have written a conceptual chapter (Markowska, 2018) suggesting that motherhood could become a springboard for women’s entrepreneurial journey. Together with Lucia Naldi and Sumaya Hashim (Hashim et al., 2020), we also explored the women entrepreneurship in Bahrain focusing on processes of legitimacy building by women owning and running their businesses there.