Sarah R Chase
I am a fifth year PhD student at the University of Notre Dame. My research explores entrepreneurship in impoverished communities. It advances understanding of how destructive and productive entrepreneurship coexist within the same local system, are enabled by different blends of formal and informal systems, and can even become mutually constitutive. I also examine the psychology of entrepreneurship, studying how and why individuals construct and exploit opportunities that may cause harm to others. IÂ rely primarily on qualitative methods to explore these questions, collaborating closely with entrepreneurs, financiers, non-profit organizations, and local community members.Â
Prior to academia, I worked in investment banking at Citigroup and also in private equity in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Publications
Shepherd, D.A., Parida, V., Chase, S.R., & Wincent, J. (in press). Are You Looking at Me? Orchestrating Voyeuristic Events to Reduce Transgressions on Those Being Observed. Academy of Management Journal.
Chase, S.R., Shepherd, D.A., & Souitaris, V. 2026. The underbelly of entrepreneurship: A multilevel perspective of destructive entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 50(1), 150-191.
Chase, S.R. & Shepherd, D.A. 2025. Waves and rips: Abalone, entrepreneurial variants, and community functioning. Journal of Business Venturing, 40(4), 106507.
Chase, S.R., Shepherd, D.A., Parida, V., Patzelt, H, & Wincent, J. 2025. The glass is half full: A gendered model of illegal entrepreneurship. Journal of Management. 01492063251397380
Shahriar, A.Z., Chase, S.R. & Shepherd, D.A. 2025. Financial inclusion and low-income women’s new venture initiation: A field experiment. Journal of Business Venturing, 40(5), 106525.
In this editorial, we hope to motivate more non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research by highlighting the potential problems with the dominance of a WEIRD perspective in our most impactful research, introducing each element of a non-WEIRD approach to solve those problems, and offering some big-picture thoughts and methods as future research opportunities.Â
Shepherd, D.A., Wincent, J., & Chase, S.R. 2025. What if we are the WEIRD ones? A call (and roadmap) for more non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 49(5), 1223–1260
We draw on the literature on women's entrepreneurship and theories of financial inclusion and social gender norms to develop a financial-inclusion model of new venture initiation among low-income women. We theorize how financial inclusion influences new venture initiation among low-income women as well as how the context, in terms of the restrictiveness of gender norms, impacts this model.
We adopted a qualitative, inductive approach to explore the cognitive processes through which women entrepreneurs navigate their society’s gender role expectations to manufacture and sell illegal alcohol within their impoverished communities throughout India. In doing so, we offer insight into how women entrepreneurs use cognitive carve-outs to navigate potentially conflicting societal expectations regarding gender and entrepreneurial roles.Â
Through an inductive study of the South African abalone industry, we explore entrepreneurial variants—differentiated processes and activities of opportunity exploitation—offering a framework for identifying and interpreting the integrated mechanisms through which opportunities are exploited within a local system.Â
This article offers a comprehensive review of the literature on destructive entrepreneurship. We begin with a definition of destructive entrepreneurship, distinguishing it from seemingly similar constructs, such as unproductive entrepreneurship. We organize the fragmented studies into a multilevel model highlighting what we know about destructive entrepreneurship.
We used an inductive approach, focusing on the voyeuristic business of slum tourism in the Dharavi slum. We found that businesses attempt to orchestrate a voyeuristic event to ensure continued observee participation. This orchestrated interaction can temporarily blur the traditional roles of audience and observee, with some observees momentarily taking on the perspective of the audience and the audience momentarily being observed.Â
Chase, S.R., Maitlis, S., & Shepherd, D.A. (conditional accept). Ambiguity as Opportunity: A Theoretical Model of Conspiracy Entrepreneurship.  Academy of Management Journal.
This study involves multimodal data sources and focuses on the Lafferty et al. v. Jones (2022) court case, in which Alex Jones was sued by relatives of those killed in the Sandy Hook School shooting. We find that conspiracy entrepreneurship hinges on collective sensemaking and perpetuated sensegiving—a process in which an actor introduces new cues and questions interpretations to shape and sustain others’ efforts to make sense of an event and obstruct narrative closure.
Working Papers
Chase, S.R., Shepherd, D.A., & Parida, V. [Combining formal and informal systems in an impoverished community] (Writing stage; targeted for Administrative Science Quarterly).
Chase, S.R., Shepherd, D.A., & Parida, V. [Deceptive entrepreneurship]
(Writing stage; targeted for Academy of Management Journal).
Shepherd, D.A., Chase, S.R., Parida, V., & Wincent, J. [Masculinity and entrepreneurship in impoverished communities] (Data analysis stage; targeted for Academy of Management Journal).