About

John C. Dencker is a Professor at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University, where he specializes in research related to the effects of corporate restructuring on the employment relationship, necessity entrepreneurship, and the workforce consequences of generational dynamics. His work has been published in prominent journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, Industrial Relations, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal. Dencker holds an MA and PhD in Sociology from Harvard University and a BA in Economics and US History from Northwestern University. Prior to his current position, he was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the School of Labor and Employment Relations and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He has also held visiting appointments at ESADE Business School in Barcelona and the National University of Singapore. His research interests include the impact of corporate restructuring on employment, public policy programs for unemployed individuals transitioning to self-employment, generational dynamics in workplaces, and the causes and consequences of domestic and cross-border mergers and acquisitions.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Business
• Economics
• Sociology
• Engineering
• Economic geography
• Operations management
• Business administration
• Engineering ethics
• Economic system
• Ancient history
• Process management
• Finance
• History
• Telecommunications
• Management
• Market economy

Selected publications

• Inequality and Entrepreneurship: Institutional Barriers Faced by Underrepresented Entrepreneurs

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  Entrepreneurs from under-represented groups, inherently face inequalities in starting and succeeding in their entrepreneurial endeavors. In recent years, significant progress has been made in understanding the entrepreneurial challenges faced by diverse under-represented groups, including racial minorities, women, immigrants, and justice-impacted individuals. While such previous work has been influential in identifying barriers such as restricted access to human, social, or financial resources (Kim, Aldrich, and Keister 2006) and biased evaluators (Fairlie and Robb 2008) faced by under-represented entrepreneurs, we have limited knowledge on how institutional barriers – ranging from formal regulations to informal societal and cultural norms – shape and aggravate entrepreneurial inequalities. Thus, our symposium aims to address the underexplored role and impact of diverse and novel institutional contexts in shaping entrepreneurial inequality for under-represented groups. This symposium addresses this question by focusing on different under-represented populations including individuals with criminal records, women, and racial minorities, leveraging a diverse set of experimental and archival methods. Each paper in our symposium explores distinct and novel institutional contexts encountered by under-represented groups such as formal regulations on financial access for individuals with criminal records, informal legacies from historical slavery, social and cultural norms around women entrepreneurs in Mexico, and gender bias in the start-up employee market. Our presenters further showcase novel consequences of such institutional contexts, by documenting that institutional barriers to entrepreneurship not only leads to stunted entry and success by under-represented entrepreneurs, but also perpetuate inequalities in unforeseen areas by exacerbating gender-bias in innovation and increasing crime among the most vulnerable populations. These presentations collectively broaden our understanding of the impact of institutional barriers on under-represented entrepreneurs, examining novel mechanisms across a variety of institutional contexts as well as unique consequences. Through our symposium, we hope to underscore the importance of creating inclusive formal and informal institutional ecosystems, which are crucial for leveling the playing field in entrepreneurship. The Effect of Barriers to Credit on Justice-Involved Entrepreneurs Author: Keith Finlay; U.S. Census Bureau Author: Kylie Jiwon Hwang; Northwestern Kellogg School of Management Author: Michael Mueller-Smith; U. of Michigan Author: Brittany Street; U. of Missouri Policy and Patriarchy: Changes in Startup Costs and the Entrepreneurial Gender Gap in Mexico Author: Grady Wallace Raines; Cornell SC Johnson College of Business Author: Peter Polhill; Cornell U. Author: Ryan Scott Coles; U. of Connecticut Long-term Effects of Institutional Slavery on Black Representation in Entrepreneurship Author: Kunyuan Qiao; Georgetown U. Author: John Dencker; Northeastern U. Does the gender of an idea matter? Evidence from the market for startup talent Author: Solene Delecourt; UC Berkeley Author: Sahiba Chopra; Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley

  PublisherDOI

• Advancing Management Theory through Interdisciplinary Research: Challenges and Opportunities

  Academy of Management Journal · 2024-12-01 · 23 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• When Monetary Value Erodes Social Value: Motivations, Rewards, and Occupational Pride of Frontline P

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  To address challenges posed by social crises, organizations often leverage monetary rewards to mobilize essential frontline workers. However, little is known about how such a reward scheme affects frontline employees. Situated in the healthcare context during the COVID-19 pandemic, our research integrates motivation crowding out theory with appraisal theories of emotions to study how healthcare professionals respond to monetary rewards in exchange for their frontline participation. Results of two field studies that combined objective salary data with survey data showed that when healthcare professionals experienced high prosocial and low extrinsic motivations, large monetary rewards diminished their occupational pride, reducing positive work behaviors after they shifted back to routine work. Our findings derive important implications for strategic policy-making on mobilizing essential labor forces to address socially disruptive events.

  PublisherDOI

• Positioning Research on Novel Phenomena: The Winding Road From Periphery to Core

  Academy of Management Journal · 2023 · 32 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Economic geography
  • Engineering

  ENTC

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Founder Human Capital and Founding Conditions Shape New Firm Performance: A Study of Necessity Entrepreneurship during Times of Economic Crisis

  Academy of Management Journal · 2023 · 43 citations

  • Political Science
  • Economic system
  • Economics

  Economic crises have profound effects on societies, motivating many individuals to launch their own firms in order to make a living. Although these firms created “out of necessity” possess few resources besides their founder’s human capital, the role that this critical endowment plays in establishing a successful firm during a crisis is unclear, as existing knowledge offers diverging predictions about the value of general and specific human capital. We argue that this debate remains unresolved because we lack a holistic understanding of how each human capital type influences performance when founding conditions vary, and aim to reconcile the contrasting claims by considering how “hard” a crisis hits a given industry. Analyzing data collected from 500 founders who created firms in Greece during the Great Recession, combined with data from the Greek Statistical Office, we find that general human capital provides the greatest benefits, on average, during a crisis; yet specific human capital is more valuable in both the most favorable and the most unfavorable industry contexts. These results reveal how the value of human capital in entrepreneurship is contingent on founding conditions, and call into question existing notions of what it means to be resilient in a crisis.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Continuums and Dichotomies in Necessity Entrepreneurship Research

  Academy of Management Review · 2021-06-25 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Basic Needs as the Boundary Condition for a Reconceptualization of Necessity Entrepreneurship across Contexts

  Academy of Management Review · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Necessity entrepreneurship and industry choice in new firm creation

  Strategic Management Journal · 2019-07-31 · 91 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Research Summary Research on necessity entrepreneurship has generated important insights, yet it views necessity entrepreneurs in developed countries as one encompassing group of unemployed individuals—ignoring that the level of need is not uniform but instead increases with time spent in unemployment. We begin to unpack the role of unemployment duration in necessity entrepreneurship by asking how it affects one of the most fundamental decisions in start‐ups: “what business should I be in?” Analyzing primary data on 576 necessity entrepreneurs combined with three secondary data sets, we find that unemployment duration affects whether ventures are launched in “home” or in external industries, and moderates the extent to which founders' industry experience and the attractiveness of external opportunities relative to those in the “home” industry shape industry choice. Managerial Summary Necessity entrepreneurs—individuals who create new firms because they have no other options for work—represent a substantial proportion of world‐wide entrepreneurial activity, and, in developed countries, often come from the ranks of the unemployed. We analyze these entrepreneurs by answering the question “what business should I be in?,” a fundamental strategic decision that founders make. Our findings reveal that duration in unemployment is a key, hitherto unexamined factor that systematically affects the industry‐choice decision in startups. Moreover, we find that duration of unemployment moderates the founder's industry experience and the attractiveness of external opportunities relative to those in the “home” industry, with a markedly different picture for the long‐term unemployed—suggesting the need for customized government policies for formerly unemployed entrepreneurs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reconceptualizing Necessity Entrepreneurship: A Contextualized Framework of Entrepreneurial Processes Under the Condition of Basic Needs

  Academy of Management Review · 2019-04-11 · 335 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Scholarly interest in necessity entrepreneurship has risen steadily over the last four decades, with much of the research in this area focused on distinguishing individuals who are pushed into entrepreneurship by negative factors, such as unemployment, from those who are pulled into it by its attractiveness. Yet, although past research has extended knowledge considerably, the dichotomous framing commonly employed in studies in this realm has limited theoretical development, as it ignores important variation among necessity entrepreneurs and, hence, the processes by which they engage in entrepreneurship. In this paper, we seek to reconceptualize the necessity entrepreneurship construct by drawing on a motivational theory of necessity to predict how variation in founders’ basic needs influences the entrepreneurial process, conditional on the level of their human capital endowments, the environmental context in which they are embedded, and the presence of supportive institutional levers. We conclude by discussing the implications of our study and the potential ways in which our theory can be tested and extended.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Layoffs in Structural-Historical Perspective

  Members-only Library · 2018-05-25

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper describes a “trimming the fat” account of restructuring in which firms lay off the least productive employees in a job, and a “broken contract” account in which firms lay off highly paid employees in a job. Analyses of personnel files of a Fortune 500 manufacturing firm that restructured multiple times reveal that the firm laid off high-paid and low-performing managers during the 1980s and low-performing managers in the 1990s. These patterns stem from the firm’s increasing use of pay-for-performance from the late 1980s onward and from differences in the institutional contexts in which the restructurings occurred.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Marc Gruber

  École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

  21 shared

• Ruth V. Aguilera

  18 shared

• Sonali Shah

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  7 shared

• Zeynep Y. Yalabik

  University of Bath

  7 shared

• Aparna Joshi

  Pennsylvania State University

  5 shared

• Grady Wallace Raines

  Cornell University

  4 shared

• Argyro Nikiforou

  Technical University of Denmark

  4 shared

• Xavier Escandell

  4 shared

Education

• PhD, Sociology

  Harvard University

  1998

• MA, Sociology

  Harvard University

  1995

• BA, College of Arts and Sciences

  Northwestern University

  1990

Awards & honors

• IDEA Thought Leader Award, Academy of Management. Entreprene…
• Saroj Parasuraman Award Finalist, Academy of Management. Gen…
• Carolyn Dexter Award Finalist, Academy of Management. Entrep…