Alrabie, Nour (2019) Working Alone, Together: Towards Collective Entrepreneurship-as-Practice. École Doctorale Sciences de Gestion TSM (Toulouse).

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Abstract

Current evidence of the effectiveness of multidisciplinary co-location for healthcare integration is mixed. This research investigates how sharing workplace among self-employed healthcare practitioners promotes collective actions. The first essay investigates a territorial project that is implemented across four French healthcare practices co-locating multidisciplinary practitioners. The second essay investigates four collective entrepreneurial journeys taken by self-employed healthcare practitioners leading to the creation of four rural PCCs in southwest France and southwest Germany. The third essay investigates entrepreneurial actions emerging from self-employed healthcare practitioners who belong to a community of practice (CoP). It explores how entrepreneurial actions emerge unwittingly from practitioners who are part of CoP, by studying their day-to-day practice. The first essay expands the theory of care integration by identifying three antecedents of multidisciplinary collaboration: (i) prior GP joint-practice experience, (ii) professional impetus, and (iii) GP peer group membership. The second essay extends understanding of the unfolding of engaging for collectiveness among self-employed individuals. It improves understanding of the creative organizing of self-employed individuals by (i) theorizing well-being as a driver of collective entrepreneurship in the rural healthcare context; (ii) conceptualizing regional embeddedness as a process of ‘being in, ‘doing at’, and ‘understanding of’ the territory; (iii) conceptualizing peer co-working as a practice that involves sharing a workplace, developing skills, and benefitting from social interaction; and (iv) theorizing peer co-working as a catalyst of collective entrepreneurship. The third essay’s contribution is three-fold: the essay (i) introduces the concept ‘unwitting entrepreneurs’ calling entrepreneurship scholars to push the boundaries of investigation, (ii) unveils entrepreneurs’ openness as practice by elucidating their practice of ‘taking whatever comes’ that initiates a ‘process to entrepreneuring’ with possibilities of emerging entrepreneurship, (iii) suggests CoP play a regulatory role and calls for further investigation of their potential in empowering and promoting the unwitting entrepreneurship among self-employed practitioners.