From flashlight to spotlight: Illuminating gray shadows that shape entrepreneurship’s dark sides
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Research on entrepreneurship has predominantly focused on its positive dimensions, overlooking the complex dynamics that lead to harmful or unethical outcomes. This special issue advances our understanding of entrepreneurship’s dark sides by introducing the “entrepreneurial fulcrum” model, which conceptualizes entrepreneurial activities as existing in a precarious balance between light and dark manifestations. Moving beyond simplistic characterizations of entrepreneurs or ventures as inherently good or bad, we illuminate how various contextual forces—institutional environments, regulatory systems, financial incentives, and legitimacy-building strategies—can tip entrepreneurial activities toward either constructive or destructive outcomes. The five papers in this special issue examine these contingent factors across multiple levels, from formal and informal institutions to individual entrepreneur behaviors, revealing entrepreneurship as neither inherently light nor dark, but rather existing in dynamic equilibrium. By spotlighting these systemic and interactive influences, we challenge prevailing assumptions and provide a foundation for research that considers not only the diagnosis of dark side manifestations but also potential remedies and transformative pathways.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".