Research projects explore inclusive entrepreneurship in Africa and Norfolk Island

Understanding the foundations of economic life and how entrepreneurship works in different social and institutional settings is the focus of two new research projects involving researchers connected with the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland. The work of CIE academic director Professor Rod McNaughton and Hynds lecturer of entrepreneurship Dr Marissa Kaloga will examine how inclusive entrepreneurship develops in communities with different cultural traditions and governance systems, and is made possible through the Juncture Research Fund.

Juncture, a research centre led by the University of Auckland Business School, responds to growing dissatisfaction with the social, distributional, and environmental outcomes of contemporary capitalism. The Centre brings together scholars and practitioners to explore how our economic systems can better serve people, communities and the environment.

Community obligations and enterprise

The first project, Sustaining family and community-based enterprises: Insights from Sub-Saharan African contexts, is led by Professor Leo Paas and Dr Marissa Kaloga from the University of Auckland Business School.

Working with researchers from Zambia, Tanzania and the Netherlands, the project examines how family and community expectations influence the sustainability of businesses in Tanzania and Zambia.

The international collaboration includes Dr Progress Choongo (Copperbelt University, Zambia), Dr Emiel Eijdenberg (University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, the Netherlands), Dr Nsubili Isiga (Mzumbe University, Tanzania) and Professor Enno Masurel (VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands).

Professor Paas says entrepreneurship research has traditionally been shaped by Western assumptions about profit maximisation.

“Our project will explore how entrepreneurs in other contexts may share resources with their community or employ family members, reducing poverty and strengthening communities,” he says. “At the same time, family and community obligations may place pressure on the long-term survival of the enterprise.”

By studying how entrepreneurs balance these responsibilities, the research aims to deepen understanding of how community-based enterprises operate in practice.

A community shaped by mutiny and reform

A second project led by Professor Rod McNaughton examines how external institutional reforms affect entrepreneurship in culturally distinct communities.

Titled Whose Institutions Count? Entrepreneurship, Legitimacy, and the Limits of Inclusive Capitalism on Norfolk Island, the study focuses on the Pacific territory after the Australian Government revoked its local self-government in 2015 and introduced a national system of taxation, welfare and regulation.

Norfolk Island has a population of about 2,000 residents, many of whom trace their ancestry to the mutiny on the Bounty and their Tahitian forebears.

McNaughton says the reforms created an unusual opportunity to study how institutional change affects local economic activity.

“The reforms were framed as a step towards inclusion, yet many residents, descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian ancestors, experienced them as a loss of autonomy, renewed colonisation and a misfit with the island’s relational economic practices,” he says.

Entrepreneurs faced new compliance requirements that disrupted established ways of doing business. In some cases, businesses withdrew from economic participation.

The research will combine archival analysis, field research with interviews with entrepreneurs and officials, and observation of community life to understand how people adapt to externally imposed governance systems.

While grounded in specific contexts, both projects speak to broader questions about inclusion, legitimacy and how economic systems interact with culture and community. For researchers at CIE and the Business School, the work highlights how research can inform policy and practice by revealing how entrepreneurship operates in different parts of the world.

Both projects will begin this year with support from the Juncture Research Fund.