Department of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour

Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal Doi: https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sej.70068

This conceptual study develops a process theory of vulnerability acceptance explaining how trust and behavioral uncertainty coevolve as entrepreneurial actors form, interpret, and realize opportunities. Trust is frequently invoked to explain creativity, exploration, and opportunity formation, yet remains theorized through predictability and evaluability, which entrepreneurial opportunities often lack ex ante. We distinguish three forms of vulnerability acceptance: uncertainty creating, releasing, and decreasing trust. Each transforms the uncertainty it engages, which in turn reinforces or unsettles that form, so no form is terminal. Their salience shifts across opportunity formation, interpretive recombination, and realization, and misalignment between a form and the conditions it confronts impairs entrepreneurial progress. Trust thereby becomes a means through which epistemic conditions are produced, not only a response to them.

Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management 37(9) p. 212-236 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/JMTM-02-2026-0249

Journal of Business Economics (JBE) Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11573-026-01290-x

Philosophy & Technology 39(3) Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-026-01179-1

Technology and Policing p. 83-103