ABSTRACT
Such was the advice of my soon to be head of the department after we co-organized the first conference on management buyouts in 1981. Some thirty-four years, several millions dollars of research funds and many journal papers and books later, I’m still wasting my career on this topic. While still including management buyouts, my work has evolved to embrace a wider agenda involving different forms of entrepreneurship. Although there is an old strand of the literature that sees residual ownership as a central part of entrepreneurship (e.g., Hawley, 1907), little of the mainstream recent literature seemed to recognize this, and even less was concerned with changes in ownership, or what I shall refer to as entrepreneurial ownership mobility. I illustrate my contribution with reference to several papers that cover the development and scope of my research. I have provided elsewhere some suggestions for sustaining a publications career (Wright and Sharma, 2013; Wright et al., 2016).
