Why this context matters
Family enterprises and small firms operating under material scarcity, legitimacy deficits and uneven access to formal markets or institutions.
Research branch 02
From Bricolage to Effectuation
When making do with what is at hand becomes a pathway toward a broader logic of entrepreneurial action.
See the open questions01 / Research framing
The problem and its doctoral foundation.
Connection to the thesis
The second thesis essay studies family enterprises that begin by recombining locally available resources and examines whether effectual action becomes more prominent as their room to manoeuvre expands.
02 / Proposed mechanism
Follow the action, step by step.
Make do
01Recombine what is already at hand
Actors respond to immediate constraints through local knowledge, relationships, overlooked materials and practical experimentation.
Legitimise
02Build access and room to choose
Useful action can create credibility, networks and selective access to more conventional resources without erasing the value of local ingenuity.
Expand
03Use effectual commitments strategically
The research examines when affordable loss, partnerships and co-created commitments begin to extend the venture’s action set.
03 / What the thesis contributes
A foundation to test, refine and challenge.
- Treats bricolage and effectuation as potentially sequential, not only parallel entrepreneurial logics.
- Highlights legitimacy and access to conventional resources as possible transition mechanisms.
- Examines family-centred non-financial goals as a boundary condition rather than assuming one universal pathway.
Evidence boundary
The dissertation combines an in-depth retrospective family-business case with a cross-sectional owner survey. Its evidence is consistent with a transition pathway; it does not prove a universal causal sequence.
Useful next design
The strongest extension would observe ventures repeatedly over time and triangulate interviews with resource, partnership, legitimacy and performance records.
BricolageEffectuationLegitimacyAffordancesCommunity resourcesSocioemotional wealth
04 / Open research agenda
Questions worth building evidence around.
These are invitations for research, not claims that a study is already funded or in the field.
- 01
When does a transition occur, stall or fail—and what observable threshold marks the change?
- 02
When are bricolage and effectuation sequential, simultaneous or substitutable?
- 03
How do industry, region, firm age and family involvement change the pathway?
- 04
What roles do legitimacy, community ties and access to conventional resources play over time?
05 / Collaboration fit
Who could strengthen this branch?
- Scholars studying entrepreneurial process, effectuation, bricolage or resource orchestration
- Family firms and small enterprises willing to participate in longitudinal field research
- Researchers building comparative family and non-family samples
- Institutions working in regions where formal-market access is uneven
Build the next study together
A useful collaboration starts with a precise question.
If your question, context, dataset or method intersects with from bricolage to effectuation, I would be glad to compare ideas. A useful first note names the question, what evidence may be available and what a credible contribution could be.
Source note: this public research summary is grounded in Swapnil Sahoo’s submitted 2024 doctoral thesis. It does not distribute an unpublished paper or imply that every proposed extension is already an active study.