The SAGE Handbook of Small Business and Entrepreneurship

Robert Blackburn, Dirk De Clercq, Jarna Heinonen, Robert Blackburn, Dirk De Clercq, Jarna Heinonen

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473988095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

The SAGE Handbook of Small Business and Entrepreneurship offers state-of-the-art chapters on all aspects of this rapidly-evolving discipline. Original contributions from the best international scholars map the development of Entrepreneurship as an academic field, explore its key current debates and research methods, and also consider its future directions.

• Part One: The People and the Entrepreneurial Processes
• Part Two: Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management and Organization
• Part Three: Entrepreneurial Milieu
• Part Four: Researching Small Business Entrepreneurship

This handbook will be the leading reference book for Entrepreneurship academics and researchers, as well as those from other associateddisciplines including business and management, psychology, marketing, sociology and anthropology.

1 Introduction

Robert Blackburn

Dirk De Clercq

Jarna Heinonen

For some decades now, the field of entrepreneurship and small business studies has been one of the most vibrant and expansive in business and management, as well as the social sciences more broadly (see for example Carlsson, Braunerhjelm, McKelvey, Olofsson, Persson, & Ylinenpää, 2013; Fayolle, 2014; Landström, Parhankangas, Fayolle, & Riot, 2016; Shane & Venkataraman, 2000). Indeed, one estimate is that the number of Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) journals covering the field has expanded from four in 2003 to around 16 in 2016. Other estimates are much greater depending on the definitions used.¹ Entrepreneurship and small business special interest groups (SIGs) are now part and parcel of most mainstream business and management conferences, including the Academy of Management, and there has been a burgeoning of specialist entrepreneurship-related conferences and workshops, such as the Research in Entrepreneurship and Small Business (RENT) and a variety of doctoral and post-doctoral activities ensuring sustainability.²

Whether we know more about the phenomena under study than we did decades ago remains debatable but we believe this is the case. Certainly we have witnessed the increasing number of publications in the form of books series and specialist and mainstream international journals, as well as growing levels of engagement of academics with practitioners and policy makers at national and supra-national levels (Blackburn & Schaper, 2012; OECD/European Union, 2015; Storey, 2014). With this expansion and legitimization has come a growing fragmentation of the field, or specialization in sub-fields, in deepening our knowledge and levels of theorizing. Hence, the field spans topics ranging from entrepreneurial characteristics to the entrepreneurial process and behavioral issues, social entrepreneurship, family business, the management and organization of small businesses, the significance of context and many more (see: Fayolle, Landström, Gartner, & Berglund, 2016a; Ferreira, Reis, & Miranda, 2015; Hsu, Wiklund, Anderson, & Coffey, 2016; Meyer, Libaers, Thijs, Grant, Glänzel, & Debackere, 2014; Volery & Mazzarol, 2015; Hsu, Wiklund, Anderson, & Coffey, 2016; Welter & Gartner, 2016). In some instances, particularly when studying a new area, researchers continue to borrow and develop concepts and approaches from other disciplines whilst, in others, specific theories have emerged (e.g. Aldrich, 2012). Davidsson, for example, in his analysis of the field, reports its ‘considerable growth in volume, quality, and theory-drivenness’ (Davidsson, 2016: p. 17). Certainly, the field cannot be accused of being narrow, insular or experiencing ossification! We thus concur with Landström and colleagues (2016) that the field is highly heterogeneous and multi-disciplinary and addresses the phenomena at different levels.

The goal of this Handbook is to take stock of past research in the broad field of entrepreneurship and small business as well as push the agendas forward. This should be of particular interest to postgraduate students, researchers, and public and private analysts. The timing of a handbook such as this is relevant, as entrepreneurship programs have grown significantly in the past decades and virtually every higher education institution in the world has entrepreneurship within their curriculum, in some shape or form, irrespective of socio-political-economic context (see Davey, Hannon, & Penaluna, 2016; Valerio, Parton, & Robb, 2014),³ as well as discussion over the complexities of ‘entrepreneurship education’, both conceptually and in practice (Fayolle, Verzat, & Wapshott, 2016b; Neck & Greene, 2011), or its impact on entrepreneurship levels (e.g. Walter & Block, 2016). Early career researchers are often required to publish numerous journal articles in order to develop, establish, and maintain their academic standing. Researchers of entrepreneurship also increasingly come from different disciplines – including psychology, finance, marketing, sociology, engineering, medicine, anthropology, and other fields – and hence there is need to be knowledgeable of the history of the field, as well as have insight into fruitful areas for further research. Combining past and existing research with future orientation particularly helps younger scholars to identify researchers with similar interests and supports them to find new interesting questions to be asked in order to secure the future of entrepreneurship studies. Moreover, public policy-focused organizations and trade associations have for some time now drawn upon entrepreneurship and small business researchers to independently and critically assess the impact of policy interventions, such as growth policies and taxation incentives, as well as analyze entrepreneurial activity levels and a growing list of other topics (see for example Acs, Åstebro, Audretsch, & Robinson, 2016; Audretsch, Grilo, & Thurik, 2007; Bennett, 2014; Curran, 2000; Storey, 2014). Thus, a handbook such as this is also an essential tool to assist a varied set of stakeholders.

This brings us to the title of this Handbook. Of course, one of the earliest divisions in the field was the conceptual separation of ‘entrepreneurs’ from ‘small business’, essentially based on the observation of the different motivations of the people establishing an enterprise (Carland, Hoy, Boulton, & Carland, 1984). ‘Small business owners’ were classified as those that start the enterprise as an extension of the personality of the founder and the activities of the enterprise are inextricably bound with family needs. On the other hand, the ‘entrepreneur’ was regarded as one who starts an enterprise for the purpose of profit, or a risk taker, and the owners and managers utilize strategic management techniques. Such a separation is furthered by the argument that the domain should set out its boundaries in order to develop its own concepts as well as achieve external recognition. In examining the field as a whole, however, many empirical studies of ‘entrepreneurship’ involve analyses of human endeavor within new, small, or independent enterprises (e.g. Scase & Goffee, 1981). Furthermore, even when ‘entrepreneurship’ is in the foreground of articles and books, when the empirics of their studies are examined in detail, the arguments relating to ‘risk-taking’ often appear to disappear into thin air.⁴ Indeed, this unraveling of entrepreneurs from the small business remains one of the Gordian knots of the field of study. Thus, although we recognize the significance of entrepreneurship as a focus of research, in the sense of new venture formation and risk-taking, we also recognize the importance of established and small firms, as well as the new areas of intellectual curiosity in the wider field.

In developing this Handbook, it has become even more obvious that the landscape of research has widened and deepened to include new and distinctive areas, such as entrepreneurial learning (e.g. Leitch & Vollery, 2017) and critical perspectives (e.g. Essers, Dey, Tedmanson, & Verduyn, 2017; Fletcher & Seldon, 2016), as well as to drill down into existing ones, such as family business (e.g. Hsu et al., 2017; López-Fernández, Serrano-Bedia, & Pérez-Pérez, 2016; Short, Sharma, Lumpkin, & Pearson, 2016), finance (e.g. Roberts, 2015; Short, Ketchen, McKenny, Allison, & Ireland, 2017), psychology (Brännback & Carsrud, 2017) and entrepreneurial ‘exit’ (e.g. DeTienne & Wennberg, 2016). The literature has also seen the production of more nuanced accounts and the utilization of a range of methodologies as sub-fields of study have emerged (see for example Shepherd & Patzelt, 2017), building upon earlier approaches to research (Curran & Blackburn, 2000; Davidsson, 2004). Furthermore, critical persp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on the Editors and Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I People and Entrepreneurial Processes
• 2 Entrepreneurial Leadership: A Critical Review and Research Agenda
• 3 Entrepreneurial Action Research: Moving Beyond Fixed Conceptualizations
• 4 Pre- and Post-entrepreneurship Labor Mobility of Entrepreneurs and Employees in Entrepreneurial Firms
• 5 Networks and Entrepreneurship
• 6 Migrant Entrepreneurship
• 7 Entrepreneurship from a Family Business Perspective
• 8 Social Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship and Social Value Creation
• Part II Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management and Organization
• 9 Entrepreneurial Strategy: A Contingency Review and Outlook for Future Research
• 10 Perspectives on New Venture Creation
• 11 New Venture Growth: Current Findings and Future Challenges
• 12 Small Business Growth and Performance
• 13 The Nature of Entrepreneurial Exit
• 14 Corporate Entrepreneurship
• 15 Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Small Business
• 16 Entrepreneurial Marketing in Small Enterprises
• 17 Financing Entrepreneurial Ventures
• 18 Internal Financial Management in Smaller, Entrepreneurial Businesses
• Part III Entrepreneurial Milieu
• 19 Can Governments Promote Gazelles? Evidence from Denmark
• 20 Exploring Firm-Level Effects of Regulation: Going Beyond Survey Approaches
• 21 Entrepreneurial Ecosystems1
• 22 Entrepreneurial Social Responsibility
• 23 Bringing ‘I’ into ‘E’ – What Could It Mean? Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of International Entrepreneurship Research
• 24 Challenges to Venture Growth in Emerging Economies
• 25 Learning and Educational Programs for Entrepreneurs
• 26 The Use of Case Studies in Entrepreneurship Education
• 27 Enterprise Education Pedagogy and Redesigning Learning Outcomes: Case of a Public Reform School
• Part IV Researching Small Business and Entrepreneurship
• 28 In Search of Causality in Entrepreneurship Research: Quantitative Methods in Corporate Entrepreneurship
• 29 Qualitative Research in Entrepreneurship
• 30 Gender and Entrepreneurship at the Crossroads: Where Do You Want to Go?
• 31 Making Entrepreneurship Research Matter: The Challenging Journey to an Academic Identity
• 32 Critical Perspectives in Entrepreneurship Research
• Author Index
• Index