After having long been avoided in the entrepreneurship discourse, the topic of emotions started to emerge in the entrepreneurship literature in the early 2000s. A new reading of Schumpeter’s work suggests that entrepreneurship is a “form of social action” fueled in part by “emotional energy”, with two main motors: pride and shame. Joy and fear have also been shown to impact opportunity evaluation and exploitation. In parallel, the role of passion in entrepreneurship has received increased attention. Over the past decade, several studies have emphasized different aspects of positive and negative emotions in entrepreneurship, the role they play in the entrepreneur’s motivation, drive, creativity, success but also failures. However, the literature has given more consideration to the consequences of affect than to its antecedents. Against this backdrop, a handful of studies have examined the role of dispositional affect in entry into entrepreneurship but the precursor of whether one becomes an entrepreneur or not has yet to be determined. In the field of social entrepreneurship, scholars have for example focused on the link between the entrepreneur’s background, how it shaped her/his dispositional affect, and in turn entrepreneurial action.

However, to date, very little is known about why do some people become entrepreneurs and others don’t. The objective of this special issue is to investigate this question from the perspective of emotions.

While entrepreneurial emotions have been defined (Cardon et al., 2012) and models of entrepreneurial motivations have been developed (Segal et al, 2005; Jayawarna et al., 2013), there is a paucity of research that includes dispositional affects or emotions triggered through the life course. Mahto & McDowell (2018) focus on identity, Cohen et al (2019) focus on personality, Pidduck et al. (2021) theorize about the entrepreneurial mindset, including its origins, and Vial & Richomme-Huet (2021) propose a full model of entrepreneurship antecedents including emotional background.

In this Research Topic, we invite scholars to investigate the role of emotions, feelings, and affect in shaping the entrepreneur’s mindset, motivation, attitude, personality, identity or experience leading to the entrepreneurship process, and in interaction with other characteristics such as (but not limited to) socio-economic background, education, gender, race, nationality, age or personal history.

We welcome conceptual manuscripts, qualitative and quantitative empirical research, as well as mixed-methods approaches in the following areas:

• Emotions and entrepreneurial intention
• Emotions management skills leading to entrepreneurial venturing
• The emotional antecedents of entrepreneurs
• The interplay of gender and emotions in the decision to become an entrepreneur
• Eco-anxiety: antecedent or hindrance to sustainable entrepreneuring?
• The emotional life history of necessity entrepreneurs
• The emotional life history of opportunity entrepreneurs
• The dispositional affect and emotional life history of the single entrepreneur
• Positive and negative emotions leading to start-up decisions
• Emotions and motivation to enter entrepreneurship
• The role of trauma in entrepreneurial intention

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