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This is a thesis in marketing concerned with entrepreneurship in established firms and the discursive practices that take place within a perspective of strategic entrepreneurship. The study of discursive practices in this context assumes a concern with how different aspects of entrepreneurship are produced and consumed by people in text and talk. Strategic entrepreneurship can be seen as an organisational form of entrepreneurship. The latest contribution within strategic entrepreneurship tends to focus on opportunities and advantages in organisations as two processes that need to be considered and managed jointly. In this thesis, I have studied the discursive practices of how scholars position strategic entrepreneurship through an enhanced literature review and by means of a close analysis of assumptions made within strategic entrepreneurship, but also by studying two firms and their discursive practices of constructing opportunity and advantage positions. The results have then been analysed with reference to discourse theory and previous research within entrepreneurship based on European traditions that builds on the linguistic turn. By conducting an empirical study of two firms, I have studied discourses in use, and how they are produced by people. In so doing, two main findings emerge in the discussion of the empirical results: 1) Opportunity and advantage positions emerge in social interaction and are co-constructed. 2) Opportunity and advantage positions are constructed by the use of multiple discourses, on different levels of discourse and for different functions. The main purpose of the thesis is to enhance the understanding of entrepreneurship in established firms and the activities labelled as strategic entrepreneurship. In addressing the purpose, seven theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to research emerge in areas of strategic entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship and the enterprising self.

Corporate taxation is a very politicized topic, and policymakers have different perspectives on what level of corporate tax rate yields the optimal outcome for research and innovation activity. The argument is divided where one side believes that corporate taxation and R&D activity has a negative relationship, which implies that a decrease in corporate taxation yields a better outcome for firms’ R&D activity. Whilst the other side believes that there exists a positive relationship, implying that the prevailing strategy is to increase corporate taxes to further encourage R&D activity. Therefore, the inherent purpose of this study focuses on the effect that corporate taxation has on the U.S corporate environment, whilst researching to understand the two polarized perspectives on corporate taxation and discover which perspective appears more prominent. To succeed in this regard, this study extracts internal financial information from firms located in the U.S states, by comparing the corporate tax change that the Trump administration implemented in 2018. Enabling this research study to compare firms’ R&D expenditure during the pre-tax reform (2017) with the post-tax reform (2018), indicating a firm’s differences in R&D expenditure. The difference-in-difference method was used with a total sample size of 71 firms, which uses a control group and a treatment group to negate macro-environmental disruptions to indicate the accurate effects of the tax policy change. The results state that companies that experienced a reduction in corporate taxes raised their R&D expenditure, approximately by 11.60%. This showed that there was a very large increase in R&D activity when corporate taxation was significantly lowered, which would support the literature’s findings that suggested the existence of a negative relationship. However, the research yielded a result that would indicate that the 11.60% increase was not a statistically significant result and that further studies need to be conducted.