He is largely influenced by economic sociology, an area concerned with how social structures and mechanisms influence economic action and outcomes.

Professor Wennberg works at SSE’s Department of Management and Organization and the SSE Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Creation

"I started out doing research on the mechanisms that lead individuals to close down their businesses and continued with critical studies of policy support systems for entrepreneurship. Currently I am doing research on the demography and hiring practices in new firms, the demography of corporate boards, and this year I am launching a new project on cultural diversity in management teams", Karl Wennberg says.

Dr. Wennberg was a post-doctoral fellow at Imperial College London, and has served on the SSE faculty since 2009. He has been guest researcher at universities in Spain, Australia and the UK, and since 2014 he has also been affiliated with the Institute of Analytical Sociology at Linköping University. He sits on the Editorial Boards of Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Business Venturing, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal and Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, and is consulting editor of the International Small Business Journal.

“While a good deal of economic theory and popular discourse portrays entrepreneurship and business creation as rational profit-maximizing capitalism, something I’ve come to understand in my many studies of entrepreneurs is that creating a business is in the end a predominantly social activity. Convincing others to join a new venture, getting stakeholders to support it, and encouraging customers to try the product offering all require creativity and people skills more than anything else. The potential profit is often something that eventually come in the long run,” says Dr Wennberg when asked about some of his findings.