Political Engagement in Small Businesses

Abstract

Despite recent insights from the corporate social responsibility literature, which has theorized the political roles of the private sector, there has yet to be any investigation into political engagement by small businesses. Insights from the CSR literature have tended to combine small and medium-sized enterprises, neglecting the unique political role of small and micro sized businesses with fewer than 50 employees. Using a qualitative approach, consisting of 52 semi-structured interviews with UK based small business owner-managers, I have produced 3 papers that contribute to the overall research topic. In paper 1, I introduce an introspective approach to understanding how small businesses assume a political role in society. This emerges from the political beliefs and values of owner-managers, who perceive that their business has a political role when they activate their political identity within their business. They then act upon this activation by adapting their business models to address the political injustices they identify with. In paper 2, I present a novel taxonomy of political engagement in small businesses, which includes two market-based and two nonmarket-based practices that small businesses use to address socio-political issues. These practices allow small businesses to overcome their size limitations by utilizing their specialist resources to intervene at different points in private and public regulatory processes. In paper 3, I investigate the process by which entrepreneurs incorporate a political role by focusing on the construction of activist entrepreneurial identities. Taking a role identity perspective, I find that entrepreneurs use two identity work strategies, assimilation and equivalence, to construct a hybrid activist entrepreneurial identity, resolving role tensions and enabling them to engage with political issues in their business ventures.

Date of Award	25 Jun 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Kostas Iatridis (Supervisor) & Andrew Crane (Supervisor)