How Can Entrepreneurship Help San Antonio?

Entrepreneurship is often celebrated for the value it creates, but researchers have often overlooked the value it leaves behind. In this episode, we explore what we miss when we study only the opportunities that get exploited rather than the ones that don’t, and how a kid from San Antonio came to believe that entrepreneurship might be the key to changing the city he loves.

Alexander Lewis is the Melvin Lachman Chair in Entrepreneurship in the Alvarez College of Business. An assistant professor of management, his work in entrepreneurship explores how markets can be better harnessed to benefit not only entrepreneurs, but society at large.

He’s published in some of the most elite journals in management including the Academy Management Review, Academy Management Journal and the Academy of Management Annals.

Hear why value creation is important to the future of San Antonio.

Stay connected with the UT San Antonio Carlos Alvarez College of Business to learn more about how we are empowering the next generation of business thinkers. Follow us on social media or visit us online at business.utsa.edu

Transcript

Jonathon Halbesleben, PhD 0:04

Entrepreneurship is often celebrated for the value it creates, but researchers have often overlooked the value it leaves behind. In this episode, we explore what we miss when we study only the opportunities that get exploited, rather than the ones that don't, and how a kid from San Antonio came to believe that entrepreneurship might be the key to changing the city he loves. Welcome to this episode of Inside Alvarez Business, a podcast dedicated to bringing you the stories behind the research. I'm your host, Jonathan Halbesleben, Dean of the Carlos Alvarez College of Business at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Our guest today is Alex Lewis, the Melvin Lockman Chair in Entrepreneurship in the Alvarez College of Business. His work in entrepreneurship explores how markets can be better harnessed to benefit not only entrepreneurs, but society at large. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Well, welcome to Inside Alvarez Business. I'm delighted today to welcome Alex Lewis. Alex is an assistant professor, currently an assistant professor in the Department of Management in the Carlos Alvarez College of Business. He will be promoted to an associate professor coming up here in September, and also has recently been appointed as the Melvin Lockman Chair in Entrepreneurship. So congratulations on both of those achievements, Alex. He completed his PhD in organization and management studies here at UTSA in 2020 and then immediately joined the management department right after that. An interesting time to have joined a management department in your first academic job as well. He's still pretty early in his career, of course, having graduated in 2020, but he's already making a huge impact. So he's published work in some of the most elite journals in management and in the special specialty area of entrepreneurship, including a rare hat trick of publications in the Academy Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Annals. He'll be taking on a role as an associate editor at Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice very soon, which is a rare accomplishment also for someone so early in their careers. So I'm excited. I'm excited to hear a little bit more about your research. But before we talk about your research, I want to get some kind of background on you in terms of how you ended up here and in your academic career. I often will tell guests that I've never heard anyone ever say, when I grow up, I want to be a management professor.

Alex Lewis, PhD 2:22

I'm glad I can be the first.

Halbesleben 2:23

You can be the first. All right. This is something you aspire to for a while.

Lewis 2:27

Yeah. You know, and I'm going to mention Pierre Bourdieu right away because everybody who knows me knows when I mentioned this sociologist Pierre Bordeaux. He's he's fantastic, he's amazing. You know, one of the things he argues and sort of presents is the idea of the way you were raised, you develop the, you know, cultural capital, you know, sort of what is normal language, what's what you're used to, what's around you, social capital, who you know, you know, economic capital, I think most people figure out, symbolic capital. For me, this is relevant because I was raised in a family of academics. So, you know, my dad has a PhD, all of my parents' friends, all of like the sort of the six closest friends that I was, you know, in and out of the house that we were visiting, family friends, all of them are academics.

Halbesleben 3:06

Okay.

Lewis 3:07

So it was very much like, oh, okay, this is what you do. You go on and you get a PhD. And so I think by middle school, I was thinking a PhD in economics. So not a PhD in management, but a PhD in economics. And I sort of kept to that up until taking Fathali Firoozi Ali's class here, as I was my master's degree in economics here, and I had to do mathematical proofs, and I was like, no, thank you. I did not, I did not like doing these proofs. It was, I think, the only B I got in my master's program. And you know, I quickly learned that if you want to be a management, getting a management PhD is gonna pay more, and you have a lot more sort of flexibility in terms of what you research and how you research it, and the job market is easier. So I'm like, okay, I'll get a management PhD. But yeah, and that was pretty much a straight line for me.

Halbesleben 3:56

So if I understand correctly, you're a native of San Antonio, is that correct?

Lewis 3:59

Born in Houston, but moved here when I was two.

Halbesleben 4:02

Okay. So how has that shaped all of the - I mean, you mentioned your parents, but also I mean, I feel like I could be wrong, but I feel like that's also maybe shaped a little bit about specifically what you study and kind of entrepreneurship...

Lewis 4:12

Absolutely. So, you know, I was raised in a neighborhood here in San Antonio called Alamo Heights, which is an old money neighborhood. It's extremely classed, and we did not have money, you know. So we moved there. I think my mom and my dad were thinking, oh, okay, school district. So we bought a small kind of rundown house and lived very, very frugally for a very long time. It was difficult for my sister and I, my sister, I think, in particular, but I do remember, for example, my sister asking my dad to drop us, drop us off down the block because they didn't want, you know, she didn't want people to see, and I probably didn't want people to see either, you know, the beater that my dad was driving. You know, all of our friends and our peers are being dropped off in BMWs and Mercedes, and my dad was driving a 18-year-old Toyota Tercel. So, I mean, that definitely, you know, certainly is why when I came across Pierre Bordeaux, who's famous mostly for his I mean a lot of things, but studies of social class, like, oh, this is for me. And so, you know, I'm - I am very interested as a result of that in things to do with power and class and agency and changing things. That's also part of why I like entrepreneurship so much, is you know, entrepreneurship is fundamentally agentic, you know, and it is so there's certainly that. There's also the fact that I tend to just associate very strongly with things San Antonio Spurs, San Antonio the City, UTSA, you know, when you know what I hold on very strong to things. And so the fact that San Antonio has, I mean, I love love San Antonio, but it's a city that's hurting. You know, a couple years ago I read in that I think it was the Rivard Report then. Now it's a San Antonio Report, but we have something like 400,000 adults in this city with less than a ninth grade education. We are one of the most economically segregated cities in the United States. We are one of the most ethnically segregated cities in the United States. The the cool thing about being part of UTSA and specifically being part of the Alvarez College of Business is, you know, we are a San Antonio institution, you know, and so being a part of UTSA makes me feel like I'm a part of, I am a part of San Antonio. You know, being part of UTSA, here comes Bordeaux again, you know, gives me symbolic capital, right? That, you know, I say I'm a UTSA professor, I'm a business professor, right? Which is a bit different from being a history professor or a psych professor, is a bit more sort of relevant oomph there. You know, policymakers are more likely to be like, okay, business, there's symbolic capital there. So, you know, it there's the potential that I'm working towards to be able to say, hey, these are things that we can do to help our city. Let's try it, let's experiment with this. And then, you know, entrepreneurship is sort of the the icing on the cake there because you know, not only is entrepreneurship exciting, it's sexy, you know, people are interested in it, you know, individuals are interested in it, you know, NGOs are interested in policymakers, it's a buzzword. And I'm, you know, I think it's a deserved, it's deservedly so. It's just it deserves to get the attention that it's getting. You know, entrepreneurship is fundamentally agentic, right? It is an expression of self. It is, oh, there's an opportunity. I want, I think that this neighborhood needs a grocery store. I think this neighborhood needs, you know, a doctor's clinic or you know, all these kinds of things. I think that, or you know, I want to have a student or I had a student who just sort of set out and started selling balloon animals and other sort of things, like at the Pearl and things like that. And it's just a sort of, you know, you're putting yourself out there. You again, I'm gonna come back to this idea of agency, agency, agency. And so for me as an entrepreneurship professor, you know, in the classroom with undergrads, I get to really, really push this idea of agency. And, you know, I say, listen, you know, regardless of what you believe politically, I don't think anybody right now believes that the world's in great shape. That the world thinks that people believe, oh, the world should stay the way it is. And, you know, I think any major changes, any major progress, entrepreneurs are gonna be involved.

Halbesleben 7:58

Yeah.

Lewis 7:58

And I think it's it scales down to San Antonio as well. That, you know, major changes, major positive changes in San Antonio, they're gonna involve a lot of people, but they will involve entrepreneurs. So yeah, I mean, I think in terms of you know, circling back to your question of my attachment affiliation to San Antonio, yeah, it's very, very strong. It it motivates me very strongly. And you know, one of the things that we'll get back to, I imagine, when talking about my research is, you know, I have that lab and I'm doing all these field experiments now and all of these things. And, you know, part of the reason of that is hey, this is going to be a - a vehicle with which I can can sort of try out things that I hope will improve this city. But so far, you know, a lot of my work has been outside of, I mean, I'm doing some work in the country, but there's a lot of stuff, you know, doing stuff in Ghana, doing stuff in the Bahamas, doing reading something in Kenya and Morocco and all of these places in Virginia. And I, you know, we're right now talking with the CEO of Warrior Rising, which is sort of an international veterans, not international, a national level, sort of veterans NGO, you know, focusing on veteran entrepreneurship, which certainly would affect San Antonio. But, you know, it's funny. I'm like, okay, I haven't yet actually done something at really from a policy level, from a field committee that really has engaged San Antonio. Fortunately, you know, my PhD student, doctor, Celeste Diaz Ferraro, as of yesterday, two days ago, you know, did this, did this incredible, incredible dissertation on basically 400 years of San Antonio's entrepreneurial ecosystem and how it's evolved, these dynamics of sort of economic policy, development policy, race and class over the course of 400 years. And so she has now all of these connections. It's deep, and she's also from San Antonio. All of these connections that she has developed. And so with that together, I'm like, okay, here's my lab. Here's all the infrastructure that I set up to run field experiments. Let's go design. We'll figure out some sort of policy relevant so we can actually do something in San Antonio.

Halbesleben 9:54

Yeah. Well, I want to I do want to come back to the lab in a little bit here. Before we do that, let's I want to talk a little bit about a couple of your papers because I find them really fascinating. So I want to start with a paper that you published not too long ago in the Academy of Management Review. So what I thought was interesting about it, that the paper kind of asks scholars to kind of flip the foundational entrepreneurship question. So instead of asking things like what which opportunities get exploited, it's which opportunities don't get exploited. That's a pretty fundamental like reorientation in terms of the way we think about entrepreneurship. What do you think the field has missed by focusing more on that first question? And what becomes more maybe visible when you start to look at the the alternative?

Lewis 10:39

So I think there's two answers. The sort of a little bit more concrete answer, the narrower answer is you miss things like I mean fundamentally it's a question about what could have been, what could have been exploited, what could have been opened. And you when you start thinking about that, you can start recognizing patterns and what gets neglected. And so you think about the city of San Antonio. If, San Antonio has food deserts, right? Food deserts, for the listeners who don't know, are areas where it's not easy to walk or drive and get fresh food. And a lot of these places, the closest access to quote unquote fresh food is a convenience store. That leads to a lot of problems, principally located in rural areas and sort of inner city areas. And so San Antonio has food deserts both within San Antonio but also in the San Antonio area. You know, let's say that there is, and sometimes food deserts exist because there's not market demand for them. Like it's just the neighborhood is so poor that it can't afford, you know, it can't support a grocery store. And that wouldn't be what this paper is talking about, right? That's not an optimal opportunity because you can't start a viable business there.

Halbesleben 11:40

Right.

Lewis 11:40

Missed opportunity is where that could have been viable, where we could have harnessed markets, yeah, and this actually we could have harnessed markets to create some sort of structure that would have created value for a community, for consumers, or whatever, right? Because that's you know, all successful entrepreneurs create value. That's otherwise people wouldn't be buying their goods. It's fundamentally a value creation process that also implicates structural change. You know, you compare that to, I mean, Alamo Heights, we have plenty of grocery stores. We have a Trader Joe's, we have Central Market, we have a Whole Foods, and we have two H-E-Bs, three if you include the one almost, plenty of grocery stores. But let's just say, let's just pretend, pretend that we there's not enough grocery stores in this area and there's a latent demand for a grocery store. Well, there are many, many, many people in this area who not only can recognize the demand for grocery stores, but then marshal the resources necessary to open that grocery store and so that opportunity gets exploited. You know, conversely, if you look at, you know, the far, you know, at parts of the far wet east side or parts of the near west side, south side where you do have food deserts. And yeah, there may be people there who recognize that there's a need for this, but there are the population of people with the capacity to marshal those resources or with access to those resources is much smaller. So it's like to sort of be fallow. And so you can make the argument, and that's what the paper does argue, is that oh, okay, you know, the this dynamic that of inequality, and we talk about a lot, you know, other other aspects, but fundamentally, you know, controlling for purchasing power, marginalized consumer groups, whether they're rural, minority, you know, working class, so you know, lower social classes, you know, all of these folks, the market is less responsive to their needs, controlling for their purchasing power.

Halbesleben 13:22

Yeah.

Lewis 13:22

Right. And so that's sort of a fundamental movement away from our belief that markets are by and large efficient, particularly when it comes to things like inequality. I can't remember, I think it was either Du Bois or Booker T. Washington who said that, you know, a dollar doesn't care if you're black or white. And you sort of range the market, right? If you can pay, nobody's nobody's gonna. And that's that's not the case. And it's not even because necessarily people are classist, racist, genderist, or you know, hate people living in rural areas or whatever reason, where whatever these sort of neglected opportunities are. It's just the way social structures and markets work. That's the first answer of why, you know, this. But I think the bigger, the sort of bigger question here and why it's important to pay attention to what doesn't get exploited, is if entrepreneurship is fundamentally about value creation, which it is, and our goal is to, as people who work with policy, think about policy, study policy, and try to improve entrepreneurship to to increase to basically maximize the amount of value that entrepreneurship is creating within a certain region. If you're not paying attention to, you know, you can say, okay, this opportunity is exploited. You're fantastic. Entrepreneurs have, you know, injected, you know, 54 trillion or 54 billion dollars into the Texas economy this year. Okay, well, that's very impressive if you know sort of the maximum amount that could have created was 60 million, 60 billion, right? That's that's great. Like, okay, 54 out of 60, we create a lot of value. Good job, our policies work fine. If on the other hand, there was the opportunity, like a reasonable opportunity to create a hundred billion dollars worth of value, and you've created 54, that's a problem. And if you're not paying attention to what doesn't get exploited, then you're not gonna be able to recognize the difference between 54 out of 60 and 54 out of 100.

Halbesleben 15:09

Right.

Lewis 15:09

You're not really gonna be able to assess the success of your of your entrepreneurship policy.

Halbesleben 15:14

Yeah. So I guess it raises the kind of interesting question. I mean, what do we do about it in a case like that? I mean, if we realize, for example, it's 54 out of 100, what do we do?

Lewis 15:27

I mean, so the first thing you gotta do is you gotta measure it. Right. I mean, that's you just you have to measure it. There's ways to measure it. You know, you can look at sort of counterfactual studies. So, you know, as an example, you look at what happens if you actually a really great example from I think it's management science, Rem Koning, one of Rem Koning's papers, but he basically looks at the the value that's getting lost by the fact that this is more of a marketing example, but hey, we have a marketing department here. So the value that gets lost when your focus groups are predominantly male.

Halbesleben 15:59

Okay.

Lewis 16:00

Which is the case. Most focus groups are male-oriented. And as a consequence, the you know, entrepreneurs or marketers, the people who are gathering data from these focus groups, they have a really good understanding of the sort of consumer demand of men and a less good understanding of the consumer demand of women. And you can sort of estimate to what degree that is the case, and what this experiment does is, okay, we're gonna sort of randomly make it so that some of these entrepreneurs get access to a gender balanced focus group and others don't. And what happens? And well, the the crew of entrepreneurs with the gender-balanced focus group does better because they have a better and understanding of broader consumer, they have the consumer understanding the consumer demand of male consumers and of female consumers. Another example of this, and you know, you can look at okay, this is what this is the difference, right? So sort of a counterfactual approach. You can also, you know, sort of take much more sort of economic geography approaches. So, as an example, there's another paper that looks at, yeah, as we know, everybody, you know, all these businesses are gathering our data, right? And they're selling our data, and marketers get this data, and there's I'm not as huge fan of it, scares me, but at the same time, from a perspective of, oh, we know our consumers were able to, you know, provide the goods that they need, it provides them a lot of information. The issue is that in some, you know, in areas where you have very low internet usage, they don't do a lot of internet shopping or around the like, the information is just not as good around 50% less accurate, in fact. And this in this paper, it was looking at working class neighborhoods and minority neighborhoods, and they found that the consumer information being gathered by all these information brokers was 50% less accurate. Not because information brokers are were classists or racists or whatever, it's just that these areas didn't use the you know internet as much. And so you can sort of compare, you know, and look at okay, well, what happened, you know, you can sort of you know look at that data and you can imagine, well, what happens if we increase the sort of fidelity of that information of or you know, reduce digital - digital divide so that these internet more. You can compare what's happening there to areas where you do have you know much more robust data and say, okay, this is this is the gap.

Halbesleben 18:09

Yeah.

Lewis 18:10

So there's there's a whole bunch of ways to sort of get around to it. And you know, my personal preference is gonna be okay, field experiments. Like let's let's put our our thumb on the scale and see what happens.

Halbesleben 18:20

Okay. Before I move on to another paper or another kind of topic, I want to say, so it's pretty common in academic papers to put, you know, kind of some sort of throwaway quote at the beginning of papers. I have to say, I loved in this particular paper, you actually opened with two quotes, and it was such a like a striking juxtaposition.

Lewis 18:39

I was pleased with it. Thank you.

Halbesleben 18:40

Yeah, that you between the the quote from Schumpeter, you know, and his optimism about capitalism lifting the masses, and then James Baldwin's rather straightforward statement that you know it's pretty expensive to be poor.

Lewis 18:53

It is expensive to be poor. And you know, I think one of the one of the other key ideas of this paper, and I think this speaks to a broader, you know, my broader interest in entrepreneurship is I am very interested in trying to find a middle ground, right? We are very, very divided politically, obviously. I think everybody knows that. And you know, even within the business world, there are, and you know, you know, throwing aside the various sort of identity politics, cultural war stuff that's going on, there's still fundament a fundamental divide about okay, is business and capitalism good, is business and capitalism bad, the benefits outweigh the costs, etc. And you know, I think it's a fundamentally unhealthy, unhelpful way to think about it.

Halbesleben 19:30

Yeah.

Lewis 19:31

You know, it, you know, capitalism is, or you know, it's a variety of different systems. You know, even you know, even Karl Marx was, you know, he very clearly stated that he felt that capitalism represented, you know, immense progress. He didn't, you know, he didn't think that was the end state, obviously, right, or something more, but he did recognize, hey, and you know, that markets were probably the most powerful social force that has ever been sort of emerged in human history, something I very much agree with. And you know, that again ties back to where I think entrepreneurship is so important because entrepreneurship essentially allows people to you know wed their interests, you know, that the change they want to see in the world, it you know, if they're able to, it can harness the market, and the market can drive that change. And the market is so, so incredibly powerful. Okay, so again, we go we go back to sort of fundamental sort of disagreement. And you know, this paper, the is also a JBV on sort of I think it's like I describe as compatibility, the compatibility between the market and emancipation. Where it's like, okay, yeah, you can take this either-or approach, but regardless, this is the system here, and we have to recognize that it's not either or, it's both.

Halbesleben 20:39

Yeah. You mentioned this notion of emancipatory entrepreneurship. Can you just gonna give a sense of what what that is and maybe how that that differs from what maybe people typically think about?

Lewis 20:48

So, and and I'm gonna start with the academic aspect of it, which is you know, it's one of the sort of growing streams of research and entrepreneurship that fundamentally looks at how entrepreneurship enables people to escape or reduce constraint. You know, how, you know, for you know, as an ex as a Texas example, right? This is one of my as well, this comes with very a fun, a fun story when I gave a brown bag at Syracuse too a couple of years ago. And I think it was first, this is like my first couple of years out. And so we're talking about emancipatory entrepreneurship again. So entrepreneurship where the structures that are emerging from this, whether it is a product, whether it's a new sort of process of doing things, whether it's the business itself, sort of empowers people with respect to something that was constraining them.

Halbesleben 21:35

So a few years ago, you created the Alvarez- Powell Lab for Entrepreneurship Policy and Prototyping, part of an NSF grant. Unfortunately, that was one of the casualties.

Lewis 21:45

So it goes.

Halbesleben 21:46

Yes. Can you talk a little bit about the work that you're doing with the lab and and the impact you're hoping to have with that?

Lewis 21:51

Sure, sure, sure. So big picture in this field, there's this idea of publish or perish. I think even outside of academia people hear it. And management in particular were very interested in theory, writing theory, theoretical contribution, etc. I remember when I was in I was thinking of myself as an economist and I was talking with economics professors. Like, oh yeah, management is just storytelling. There's some truth to that, but there's a lot more to it than that, believe me. But you know, we also then get quote unquote raised in our PhD program. It's be like, okay, it's all about, you know, a contribution to theory. You know, you don't, you know, policy isn't as important. Contribution to policy, it's real-world relevance. That's not what's going to get you into the elite publications. And I remember, you know, say, okay, you know, that's it is the way it is. There's other ways you can make impact. And I think it was probably my first year as a professor where I started reading again. I started reading more management science, which is, you know, a top journal, you know, UT, elite, you know, whatever, where they have a lot of policy research where it's fundamentally about like, hey, you know, here is this problem. Is there a way that we can design a policy to a way to test this policy and design it to make a difference? Okay. So first is this idea of okay, field experiments. If you want to publish top journals and you also want to be relevant, field experiments are your best bet. So I'm messing around with field experiments and I'm working, we have we have a experiment set up with this in in Iran, some sort of many years ago, not that many years ago, but a sort of a tech entrepreneur conference. And what we were doing is we had a little, you know, working with the organizers and we were gonna, you know, some entrepreneurs are gonna get training on how to develop social capital and social networking, et cetera. And some weren't. And we were gonna look at their LinkedIn profiles, how they evolved, and ask after, like, you know, did they, you know, how many connections did they make? You know, they follow up these connections, et cetera, all this kind of stuff. Everything was all going, all going well. The day before the conference started, they just went no contact. They were replying emails, texts, or whatever. Our person on the ground was not able to contact them. And you know, other members of the team says, Yeah, this happens. And so I was like, okay, how do we stop this from happening? We have to build our own infrastructure. Okay, that's sort of how the lab was born. It's like, okay, this is an effort to build infrastructure so that we don't have to rely on NGOs to all we have to rely on these other actors is just give us access and we'll do everything else. And of course, we know if we're doing everything else and we're able to say, hey, this is going to help the people that you're supposed to be helping, it makes it a lot easier to work with. And, you know, the it's sort of the if you build it, they will come. You know, we had we had initial things going and y'all built the the website for us and that helped us a lot make make additional connections. And you know, now I have more opportunities than I know what to do. I do know what to do. I expand my teams, bring people in, whatever. But the point is it's you know, it it's enabling me to do what I really hope to do, which is do this research that has has real world impact. You know, and then I think one thing I wanted to mention, I took just completely slip my mind, is you know, you go back to the, and again, this is a family of academics, you go back to the history of academia, and you know, this is also just who who we remember, but you know, you have people who had grand, you had academics with grand visions for change who were, you know, deeply engaged in thinking about, you know, John Stuart Mill comes to mind, deeply engaged in thinking about how we should set up society and and what can we do? Can we experiment with different social systems, different ways of organizing? Somewhere along the line, I feel the profession lost that. I mean, maybe again, also maybe it was never truly there, just who we remember, right? Just survivorship bias.

Halbesleben 25:25

Right.

Lewis 25:26

Just an element of that. But regardless, it it makes sense to try for that. And that's that's also the big sort of motivation here is I think that you know, universities, education is by far the you know not the only thing that is an indication of intelligence. And getting a PhD and working this is not necessarily an indication of intelligence, but regardless, universities all over the world, and certainly this country, represent a concentration of not just you know, extreme human capital, where it's not, you know, not just raw brain power, but a certain way of thinking and training and approaching problems that is very amenable to you know these difficult problem solving. They're all concentrated here, we're all concentrated here. We're you know hyper-focused, very neurotic, you know, we're able to intensely read and focus on something for it's just insane amounts of times, definitely not healthy or well adjusted or whatever, but we're all concentrated together. Why aren't we directing all of our energy to these thorny problems?

Halbesleben 26:28

Yeah.

Lewis 26:28

Because there's so much latent [indistinct] it again. This it goes back to underexploitation, latent resource, latent value. It is there. How can we access it better? And then comes back to San Antonio. San Antonio desperately needs value creation. We desperately need to be able to identify what do we have, what latent value is there so that we can access it? Because that's going to be the lower hanging value versus having to do all this creation, creating infrastructure that there isn't there is then these potential, you know. What do we already have? How do we how do we activate that? I think that everybody should be involved in that. Every everybody in the university should be involved in that wherever we go.

Halbesleben 27:05

Yeah.

Lewis 27:05

And so this is, I guess, part of that.

Halbesleben 27:08

Very inspiring. Let me ask you, what's up next? I mean, what what's something you're working on that you're really excited about?

Lewis 27:14

So, you know, research-wise, I think the thing I'm most excited about is of a paper under review at AMR where it's sort of going the other direction, where a lot of my research in entrepreneurship is focused on marginalized groups and people without with low power, which again is very interesting when it comes to agency. This is research looking at entrepreneurship of people with high power. So it's specifically research of entrepreneurial elites, and it looks at how the processes of entrepreneurship and support structures that enable entrepreneurship produce a particularly sort of powerful class of elites, of organizational elites. Organizational elite research is you know, it's a standard org theory, mostly it's focused on CEOs, C-suite of executives, boards of directors. It sort of traces back to C. Wright Mills' the power elite. Cultural capital, again, I started this research after my dad gave me his copy of C. Wright Mills, the power elite.

Halbesleben 28:00

Okay.

Lewis 28:00

Oh, you know, I could probably do something with this idea. This is really important. You know, you look around people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and well, these people are very, very powerful, and they're powerful in part not just because they're CEOs, but because of, you know, you know, how did they get there? It has to do with entrepreneurship. So paper-wise and that sort of stream of research, I'm particularly excited about.

Halbesleben 28:16

Okay.

Lewis 28:16

Big picture, what's next? So for me, LEPP was the first lab in my grand career plan. And, you know, what I really, really want to do, and this goes back to John Stuart Mill, is you know, I want to sort of create large-scale policy experiments focused on circular economies in in rural and ex-urban areas.

Halbesleben 28:40

Okay.

Lewis 28:40

You know, I am I don't think it's ideal in this country that we have to choose between economic and social inclusion and being able to live away from cities. If you don't want to live in a city, a lot of people don't want to live in cities. It's very understandable. I think you can make an anthropological argument that this sort of dense concentration of humanity isn't always ideal psychologically, socially, whatever. And yet cities are incredibly economically efficient. And our system is set up to make that so. And when something is efficient, just the forces of the market are going to push people there. It's where the jobs are. It's where you have, you know, youth flights. So, you know, you have these towns across Texas, towns across the Rust Belt, right? Well, they move they moved to San Antonio, the kids, people who have the most production potential, they move to where the opportunities are. They moved to San Antonio, to Austin, to Cleveland, and away from these rural areas. But just in general, right? The quality, the access, the institutional access to things is just and the economic access is just much better in cities. And that troubles me. I think that we should. I'm a city person, I was born in Houston, lived in San Antonio most of my life. The one time I didn't live in San Antonio or Houston I was living in Seoul, South Korea which is a city of 30 million people. So I'm fine with cities, but I recognize that really not everybody is, and it is, you know, living in Seoul, this huge, huge megalopoly, you know, this sort of a just almost like a futuristic dystopian and everything is tech and wire or whatever. You're like, gosh, I can really see how people aren't going to be comfortable with this. I understand that.

Halbesleben 30:14

Yeah.

Lewis 30:15

I understand that. So yeah, big picture is, you know, once , you know, I would say the the once this lab is established, maybe you know, five, 10 years from now, getting, you know, additional external funding and grants and all this kind of stuff, and I get a track record of doing this kind of stuff. The the next step is going to be a second lab focusing on you know policy experiments on circular economies, other sort of alternative ways to organize economic activity. Because, you know, as I said, you know, the the way in which our systems are set up right now, it is, you know, cities are efficient, which means that we need to devise some way to provide some level of economic protectionism to smaller communities so that you know, you know, money circulates within a little bit better, so that, but at the same time, they can't entirely be decoupled or detached from the broader economic system. They can't be entirely self-contained.

Halbesleben 31:08

Yeah.

Lewis 31:08

How do we do that? I don't know. But that's kind of why this is we're gonna hopefully in 10 years have another lab to study it. And you know, right now it's in the back of my mind. I'm thinking about it a lot, but most of my focus is on the sort of problems in front of me right now. Some people ask, okay, so what what are you gonna do? I'm like, I don't know. I need to, I need to study it. I'm not there yet in my career, but eventually I will be you know reading all this stuff very deeply, thinking very deeply, going out into the field, talking with people, trying to fuel these things. I've just, you know, that's that's down the line. All I can tell you right now is that this is something that needs to be done, and I'm gonna try to do it.

Halbesleben 31:42

Great, great. So one last question for you. Obviously, you've got a lot on your plate with research and with the lab and everything, but what keeps you busy outside for your time and your work here in the Carlos Alvarez College of Business.

Lewis 31:56

I think right now owning a 120-year-old wooden house.

Halbesleben 31:59

Oh wow, okay, yeah, that guy can see how that might be.

Lewis 32:01

Yeah, you know, when we first bought it, I was like, oh my god, I get to go to Lowe's and buy all these power tools, and it was I was just so happy. I felt, I felt like a happy Hank Hill.

Halbesleben 32:13

Yeah.

Lewis 32:13

King of the Hill, very Texan. You're not from Texas, right?

Halbesleben 32:16

I'm not originally from Texas.

Lewis 32:17

Okay, okay. Have you watched King of the Hill?

Halbesleben 32:19

Yes.

Lewis 32:19

Okay, good. All right, you're you're right. If you haven't watched King of the Hill and you're from Texas and you watch King of the Hill, it's it's a it's a beauty show. I felt like Hank Hill with all these power tools, and then oh god, like this is this is hard, this is tiring. Learning how to use them was tough. And so for a couple of years, definitely struggled with the house. But I think the biggest thing is my wife convinced me to buy a nail gun. Like I was like, oh my god, this makes things so much easier.

Halbesleben 32:41

Yeah, really.

Lewis 32:41

And so, you know, last the last I would say six months, I've been making a lot more progress on on the house than was before. You know, we also I'm reading right now the Patrick O'Brien series, the you might be familiar with the movie Master and Commander. There's a whole series of books. So I'm reading that right now. I have a 16-year-old blind-deaf pug that we're taking care of.

Halbesleben 33:03

Okay.

Lewis 33:03

And we are in the process for adopting a person.

Halbesleben 33:06

Oh, that's wonderful.

Lewis 33:07

A s opposed to a dog.

Halbesleben 33:08

Right, right. Wonderful. So, well, Alex, it's really been a delight to talk with you today. I appreciate you taking taking the time. I'm so glad to know that we've got researchers like you here that are focused on society the steps we can take to continue to make people's lives better. So thank you for being here today, and more importantly, thank you for the great work that you're doing. Really appreciate it.

Lewis 33:29

Thank you.

Halbesleben 33:31

Thank you for listening to the Inside Alvarez Business Podcast. Special thanks to our producer, Brittney Johnson, and for the support of Wendy Frost and Melissa Lackey to help make this podcast possible. Stay connected with the Carlos Alvarez College of Business at the University of Texas in San Antonio to learn more about how we are empowering the next generation of business thinkers and conducting groundbreaking research to ensure their success. Follow us on social media or visit us online at business.utsa.edu. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Halbesleben. Thank you for listening.