Rethinking Entrepreneurship

Debating Research Orientations

Alain Fayolle, Philippe Riot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138802537
• eBook ISBN: 9781317623250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Entrepreneurship is a growing field of research, attracting researchers from many different disciplines including economics, sociology, psychology, and management. The concept of entrepreneurship, and research in the field, is becoming institutionalized, increasingly oriented by influential trends, theories and methods, following the mainstream and being shaped accordingly.

The objective of this book is to move beyond mainstream approaches and assumptions which are dominating the field, and to raise questions about the nature and process of entrepreneurship research. Over twelve chapters, leading international thinkers in the field debate the impact and the consequences of institutionalization. Taking key research orientations including multidisciplinarity, international entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, and ethics, it takes a critical and constructive and sometimes controversial posture and encourages a re-examination of the way we look at the social and economic phenomenon of entrepreneurship.

This book is vital reading for entrepreneurship researchers and educators, advanced students and policy-makers in Entrepreneurship, Economics, Sociology and Psychology.

1
Introduction

Alain Fayolle and Philippe Riot

Rethinking Entrepreneurship: Debating Research Orientations is the title of the first, foundational, book of a series entitled Routledge Rethinking Entrepreneur-ship Research.

Entrepreneurship has been seen for years as a young and emerging field of studies. It was often described “with terms such as ‘developing’, ‘emerging’ and ‘promising’” (Rehn et al., 2013). The field of entrepreneurship was emerging not yet established.

Since 2000 and the publication of the Shane and Venkataraman article, the scientific status of the field has been changing. Entrepreneurship is now described as a very fast growing field which is getting a better scientific and social recognition. To give just an example, from 2000 to 2010, the growth of the entrepreneurship division of the Academy of Management has been over 230%. This division is one of the biggest of the association, with over 3,000 members in 2014. There are more and more articles published in entrepreneurship journals and, more importantly, there is a growth of the penetration rate of entrepreneurship research in top-tier management journals, such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, and Journal of Management.

In 2010, Shane and Venkataraman’s article, “The Promise of Entrepreneur-ship as a Field of Research”, won the Academy of Management Review Decade Award. This article got over 2,500 citations and has been influential for some reasons (Shane, 2012). It offers a process-based conceptualization of discussion of entrepreneurship as a distinctive domain of research with its own questions and theories. It also opens new research avenues at the nexus of individuals and opportunities. Since the beginning of the third millennium, we see in the academic literature an ongoing theoretical conversation on the discovery versus the creation of entrepreneurial opportunities. A more nuanced view of entrepreneurship is also developing in the field, giving some importance to cognition, intuition, emotion, failure, learning, and expertise. There is also a shared view that entrepreneurship research is becoming more theory-driven (Wiklund et al., 2011). Finally, researchers have identified specific mechanisms and theories of entrepreneurial action: effectuation, causation, bricolage, improvisation (Fisher, 2012).

In other words, entrepreneurship is now quite established as a field even if entrepreneurship remains a complex and multidimensional research object. We can still observe a lot of epistemological and theoretical debates within the field. While, in 2000, Shane and Venkataraman, the two winners of the Academy of Management Review Decade Award, appeared to share the same line of thoughts, since that date their research avenues seem to be divergent. As Shane (2012), 10 years later, is analyzing the impact of the “Promise of entrepreneurship as field of research” and offering new perspectives to go further, Venkataraman is exploring a new avenue considering with Sarasvathy that entrepreneurship is a science of the artificial (Venkataraman et al., 2012). Moreover, as it has been emphasized recently by influential scholars, entrepreneurship is a context-based phenomenon (Welter, 2011; Zahra & Wright, 2011), and this adds to the complexity of the field. The context can be seen and studied in different ways and dimensions: spatial, industry, market, temporal, social, and institutional (Zahra & Wright, 2011). Obviously, there are big issues and challenges for entrepreneurship scholars in designing and doing research aiming at getting a better understanding of the importance and the role of context in its different dimensions.

But, there are other important issues and research perspectives to be considered. To just open some doors, Zahra & Wright (2011) consider with others that entrepreneurship research has to be relevant and emphasize the need for entrepreneurship research to be useful. They talk about the “raison d’être de l’entrepreneuriat”, which is its usefulness. It seems also really important that entrepreneurship research throws some light on the dark side of entrepreneurs and the hidden face of entrepreneurship, as has been done by, among others, Jones & Spicer (2010), Anderson et al. (2009), and Fayolle (2011). Finally, taking as a starting point the existence of a huge gap between what our textbooks in entrepreneurship say and what entrepreneurs really do, and following the line of research from Sarasvathy (2001) and Baker & Nelson (2005), based on fine observations of the activities of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship research should be more often focused on the behavior of real-life entrepreneurs, paying some attention to the dilemma and the problems they face and the way they deal with them. The question here is how can we develop such innovative and ‘out-of-the-box’ research while the field is becoming increasingly institutionalized and “thereby beset by an increasing number of assumptions, even myths” (Rehn et al., 2013). Assumptions and myths concern both the focus (i.e. the main research objects/topics) and the ways (theories, methods) we should use to study entrepreneurship as a social and economic phenomenon. The institutionalization of a field of studies is certainly a positive thing for a research community, but is it a good thing for all the research stakeholders and for the whole society? Does it allow researchers to think about alternatives, new paths, and original ways in studying the phenomena? The institutionalization process and the foundations it contributes to build “can also be a hindrance, blinding the field to alternatives and new paths” (Rehn et al., 2013). More fundamentally, the institutional conditions and professional norms (for example, incremental gap-spotting research in entrepreneurship) can lead, by paraphrasing¹ Alvesson and Sandberg (2013), entrepreneurship studies to lose its way and weaken the desire within the scholarship community for more imaginative and innovative research. An interesting way to counterbalance the negative effects of the institutionalizing process of a field of studies is to challenge the main beliefs and assumptions and to encourage critical approaches and perspectives on entrepreneurship. Some initiatives have been done, mainly in Europe. Research workshops and conferences have been organized focusing on critical studies. Books, articles in journals, and special issues have also been published. Our book series and this book are exactly positioned on this stream of thoughts.

More precisely, the objective of this book is a first attempt to challenge the main research streams, theories, methods, epistemologies, assumptions, and beliefs dominating the field of entrepreneurship. By doing so, we are raising questions and issues about the institutionalizing process of entrepreneurship research. The book comes from a workshop that we (the editors of the book) organized at EMLYON Business School in June 2013 as a pre-conference of the 2013 BCERC. The title of our workshop was: “Institutionalization of Entrepreneurship: Hopes and Pitfalls for Entrepreneurship Research”. The keynote speakers (the contributors of the book) were asked to adopt a critical and constructive posture towards the questions raised and the issues covered and move the frontiers between thinking and acting, academic and practice worlds, and between disciplines looking at entrepreneurship as a social and economic phenomenon. Before introducing the different chapters of the book and the key logic behind its content, we would like to highlight, just as examples, some recent and original pieces of research in line with what the book series and the book aim to achieve.

Rethinking entrepreneurship research by going “out of the box”

This section is a call for thinking and designing entrepreneurship research “out of the box”. By doing so, the four contributions proposed here show the importance of the multidisciplinary dimension of entrepreneurship, the use of the historical perspective, the power of analogy and metaphor, and the need for more qualitative methods. These contributions, which have to be seen as some inspiring examples, come from a recent Handbook of Research on Entrepreneurship (Fayolle, 2014).

William Gartner has been interested for a long time in studying the organizing process leading to the creation of a new organization. The contribution he is bringing to our collective thinking on the future of entrepreneurship research is around organizing. He is developing ideas and thoughts about entrepreneurship as a field of research.² For him, entrepreneurship can be conceptualized as organizing emergence. By “organizing emergence”, William Gartner suggests “a commonality in phenomena (both theorized and studied) that involve situations where something develops from one state to another and that within that development there is a process in which the phenomena become more ‘organized’”. Entrepreneurship as “organizing emergence” can be studied and theorized from a wide range of disciplines. These disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, philosophy, and so on, can bring value to the concept of entrepreneurship, but the opposite is true, entrepreneurship can add value to the disciplines which study the phenomena. Thinking in this stream, William Gartner offers interesting thoughts to look at the ways disciplines are informed by and informing entrepreneurship. The other main idea explored by William Gartner is that of community. Is there a need of a unique entrepreneurship scholar community? Would it be realistic? William Gartner is inviting us, as entrepreneurship scholars, to think about a set of questions in relation to this issue of community. In his conclusion, he “wishes that all entrepreneurship scholars consider how they can both speak to the expertise in their narrow community while offering ways to connect to the broader network of entrepreneurship scholars overall”. It is here probably the greatest challenge entrepreneurship will need to deal with.

Thinking entrepreneurship research “out of the box” is also based on a good understanding of the history of entrepreneurship research, and Hans Landström is becoming a specialized scholar on the topic. In his contribution, he applies an historical perspective to the field of entrepreneurship.³ History matters and entrepreneurship as a field has a long history, so the main aim of the author is to help us in getting a better understanding of the roots and the foundations of entrepreneurship research. We fully agree with Hans Land-ström when he states that “[e]ntrepreneurship is a complex, heterogeneous and multi-level phenomenon, and there is a need to use knowledge from many different research fields in order to understand it”. Consequently, entrepreneur-ship has attracted a lot of scholars from many different fields, which creates a potential for the importation of concepts and theories from many other fields of research. Hans Landström develops what he calls “early entrepreneurial thinking” focusing first on the seminal contribution of Joseph Schumpeter and then inviting us in a discussion about three eras of the evolution of entrepreneurship in relation to three core disciplines: economics, social sciences, and management studies. He also claimed the importance of the multidisciplinary dimension of entrepreneurship highlighting the need and the challenge for entrepreneurship scholars to engage in the future in more systematic theory-driven research.

Bengt Johannisson is offering the third “out of the box” view. He has always been a creative and original entrepreneurship scholar. He develops, in his contribution, innovative ideas mobilizing the concept of entrepreneuring.⁴ To him, this notion seems well appropriated to qualify a phenomenon, entrepreneur-ship, that is generically associated with movement and process (Steyaert, 2007). Bengt Johannisson sees “entrepreneurship as a collective phenomenon, as creative organizing – of thoughts, actions and people in projects which accumulate for the individual into an existential endeavour, as an approach to and way of life”. His main goal here is to offer “conceptual ideas of entrepreneurship as a phenomenon that is made comprehensive through encounters between theory, art and practice”. In this way, he shows first that entrepreneuring can be understood as a process of becoming, and children are natural-born entrepreneurs because they live in a world of becoming where experiencing new things and learning from mistakes and failures are essential components of their lives. Based on this analogy and empirical material, a strong argumentation is developed by Bengt Johannisson, highlighting the interrelationships among theory, art, and practice, three modes which capture entrepreneurship as a phenomenon.

Good and useful entrepreneurship research is not exclusively quantitative and positivist. It is why entrepreneurship scholars should use and develop more intensively qualitative research. Helle Neergaard, in her contribution to the collective discussion of doing entrepreneurship research “out of the box”, maps the landscape of qualitative methods in entrepreneurship, with a particular focus on Europe in order to provide qualitative researchers with some recommendations for how to handle the publication game.⁵ It will take as a starting point review articles from different countries: France, Germany, the UK, and Scandinavia. It will then analyze the trends and identify the major themes and approaches used in qualitative entrepreneurship research in four journals from 2004 to the present, picking up where a former review covering the period from 1995 till 2003 left off. It will provide an overview of the challenges that scholars using qualitative methods meet and discuss the new land we need to explore. The findings show that the challenge for qualitative researchers remains the same; there has been no change in the number of articles reporting the use of qualitative methods in recent years, although an increase in the use of combinations of qualitative and quantitative research can be seen.

Rethinking entrepreneurship research by challenging and debating

Challenging and debating around the hopes and pitfalls of the institutionalizing process of entrepreneurship research were the key words of the foundational research workshop in 2013 and of our collective journey in this research-driven book. To bring challenging views, we asked five influential scholars (Howard Aldrich, Benson Honig, Nicole Coviello, Hans Landström, and Alistair Anderson) to develop their thoughts based on a topic we proposed them. To discuss, debate, and enrich (we hope) these intellectual developments, we asked five other well-known scholars (Daniel Hjorth, Bengt Johannisson, Denise Fletcher, Matthias Fink, and Karen Berglund) to react on the papers and add their own ideas. We introduce in the rest of this section each chapter in this volume.

In Chapter 2, “Dimly through the Fog: Institutional Forces Affecting the Multidisciplinary Nature of Entrepreneurship”, Howard Aldrich briefly presents the forces (social networking mechanisms, increase of publication opportunities, training and mentoring of scholars, role of major foundations, individual scholarship recognition, globalization) that have collectively created the institutional infrastructure underlying the field of entrepreneurship and addresses two main interrelated questions in his essay. The former relates to the contribution from various social science disciplines (anthropology, economics, history, psychology, and sociology) to the field of entrepreneurship. The latter is centred on the identification of the institutional obstacles to creating a truly multidisciplinary field.

Echoing Gartner (1988), Howard Aldrich sees the contribution from anthropology in the study of what entrepreneurs actually do. The main obstacle here comes from the resource-intensive nature of mainly observational and longitudinal methods. Looking at economics, he underlines the powerful lenses of the transaction cost economics perspective, useful to explain how entrepreneurs seek to minimize transaction and governance costs with the aim to use resources in the most efficient way. The theory is relevant but some difficulties remain when it is applied to the field of entrepreneurship. There are disagreements among researchers around the operationalization and measurement of the key constructs. Moreover, very few dynamic analyses are conducted to understand how organizations adapt to their evolving environments. From Howard Aldrich, history matters in the sense that the historical perspective is increasing attention to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Dimly through the fog: institutional forces affecting the multidisciplinary nature of entrepreneurship
• 3 Moving on: affirming the entrepreneurial in entrepreneurship research
• 4 The economic reification of entrepreneurship: re-engaging with the social
• 5 Social entrepreneurship: to defend society from itself
• 6 Is international entrepreneurship research a viable spin-off from its parent disciplines?
• 7 Navigating the growing field of entrepreneurship inquiry: successionist and relational modes of theory development
• 8 Institutionalization of the field and its impact on both the ethics and the quality of entrepreneurship research in the coming decades
• 9 Legitimacy or relevance – that is the question
• 10 What makes scholarly works “interesting” in entrepreneurship research? learning from the past
• 11 Entrepreneurship research without passion: let’s fall in love again
• 12 Conclusion: final thoughts and perspectives
• Index