The Wiley Handbook of Entrepreneurship

Gorkan Ahmetoglu, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Bailey Klinger, Tessa Karcisky, Gorkan Ahmetoglu, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Bailey Klinger, Tessa Karcisky

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118970720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia in industrie e organizzazioni

Written by leading scholars, The Wiley Handbook of Entrepreneurship provides a distinctive overview of methodological, theoretical and paradigm changes in the area of entrepreneurship research. It is divided into four parts coveringhistory and theory, individual differences and creativity, organizational aspects of innovation including intrapreneurship, and macroeconomic aspects such as social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship in developing countries. The result is a must-have resource for seasoned researchers and newcomers alike, as well as practitioners and advanced students of business, entrepreneurship, and social and organizational psychology.

Section 1
Entrepreneurship: Theory and Research

1a: Understanding Entrepreneurship

1
A Future of Entrepreneurship Research: Domain, Data, Theory, and Impact

Per Davidsson^a,b

^a Queensland University of Technology, Australia

^b Jönköping International Business School, Sweden

Introduction

Over the past couple of decades, entrepreneurship research has undergone tremendous growth as well as maturation and institutionalization (Aldrich, 2012; Davidsson, 2016b; Meyer et al., 2012). Overall, this has no doubt been for the better, and when we sometimes feel that we have not come far enough, fast enough, it is probably because so much knowledge about the phenomenon is now taken for granted. One may have to revisit some of the early literature or engage in an extended conversation with a complete newcomer to the field in order to realize how much we have actually learned.

In this chapter I will offer some observations and speculations about current developments as well as likely and desirable scenarios for the future. The particular topics I will discuss are (a) the delineation of the “entrepreneurship research” field and community; (b) data and data sources; (c) the quest for increased theoretical precision; and (d) demands for practical relevance and real-world impact. My observations come from the perspective of an experienced “business school” researcher (with escapes into applied psychology and applied economics) who was an early (i.e., 1980s) entrant into the emerging field of entrepreneurship research, who has predominantly worked with large-scale survey and archival data, and who views outlets like the Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice as main communication channels.

Narrowing and Broadening the Field

Over time, the field of entrepreneurship research has drifted away from having a considerable overlap with issues of small business management to having—at least in “business school research”— an increased overlap with research on innovation and strategy (Baker & Pollock, 2007; Dino, 2015; Salt er & McKelvey, 2016).¹ There seems to be increasing consensus around creation of new economic activities as the core of what entrepreneurship is and what entrepreneurship research should study (Carlsson et al., 2013; McMullen & Dimov, 2013; Wiklund, Davidsson, Audretsch, & Karlsson, 2011).² Yet, characterizations of the field as being a “hodgepodge” (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000) or a “potpourri” (Low, 2001) remain relevant to an extent. The journal Small Business Economics has added “An Entrepreneurship Journal” to its name, but has not dropped the stronger connotation to organizational size from its title. Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice (ETP) features special issues on family business on a regular basis, and Family Business Review (FBR) is commonly included in the set of “entrepreneurship journals” as are the Journal of Small Business Management and International Small Business Journal (e.g., Teixeira, 2011). The Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management (ENT) has retained “the characteristics, actions, and challenges of owner-managers and their businesses” as one of two alternative understandings of its stated domain (Mitchell, 2011).

It is not difficult to understand why this is so. Why would Small Business Economics' publisher, Springer, take the risk of dropping a well-established brand name? Why would ENT choose to alienate a large proportion of its membership, or ETP willingly forgo the citation volumes generated by their special issues on family business? However, there is an undeniable problem. Critics justifiably argue that self-employment and small business activity do not equate to entrepreneurship (Henrekson & Sanandaji, 2014) and there is objective, quantitative evidence that FBR is an outlier compared to other journals associated with the field of entrepreneurship (Teixeira, 2011, p. 17). Self-employment, small business, and family business are organizational and governance contexts that are interesting and important objects of study. However, only occasionally does an interest in these phenomena coincide with a focus on creation of new economic activities. If the latter is our arrived-upon and agreed-upon understanding of “entrepreneurship” then a separation of entrepreneurship from the self-employment, small business, and family business contexts is the better long-term solution for all parties. I think it is time to complete the separation.

I would argue that criteria like innovativeness and growth-orientation should not be the basis for separation. That would not only be impractical but also an example of methodologically unsound sampling on the dependent variable. Instead, I think the divider should be entry versus state. The state of being self-employed or an established small organization has no definitional or otherwise obvious connection to “creation of new economic activities.” Entry does. True, we know that representative empirical populations of entry attempts are dominated by a “modest majority” and that this is also problematic for some purposes (Crawford, Aguinis, Lichtenstein, Davidsson, & McKelvey, 2015; Davidsson & Gordon, 2012). Nonetheless, apart from utter failures, the members of the modest majority perform, at least to some small extent, what I have argued elsewhere (Davidsson, 2016c) are the essential functions of entrepreneurship in driving the economy forward:

1. They provide customers with new choice alternatives, potentially giving some of those customers more value for their money.
2. They stimulate incumbent actors to improve their market offerings in their turn, which increases efficiency and/or effectiveness of those actors.
3. If perceived to be successful, they attract other new entrants to the market, thus further increasing competitive pressures toward improved efficiency and effectiveness.

To this list—which essentially reflects wealth creation—we should perhaps add wealth redistribution and note that the alignment of the two is of utmost societal importance (Baumol, 1990). We may to varying degrees have qualms about uber-rich and uber-powerful plutocratic dynasties, but spectacular cases of what Baumol calls “productive entrepreneurship” are in my book a far preferable means of creating and destroying these dynasties compared to the alternative mechanisms of radical wealth redistribution (i.e., war, revolution, robbery, and confiscation) that mankind has witnessed through history.

The above places entrepreneurship in the economic but not necessarily in the commercial domain. As long as there is a market-like situation with equivalents of customers and incumbents present, we can welcome the broadening of the field exemplified by the recent surge in research on “social” and “green” entrepreneurship (Shepherd & Patzelt, 2011; Zahra, Gedajlovic, Neubaum, & Shulman, 2009). In fact, this is a refreshing move away from a narrow focus on “‘the art of enriching oneself by starting and growing one's own business” which at one point threatened to come to dominate entrepreneurship research, at least in business schools (Davidsson & Wiklund, 2001).

Refreshing also is the disciplinary broadening of the field. After some debate about “entrepreneurship is a distinctive domain” versus “entrepreneurship belongs in the disciplines” (Sorenson & Stuart, 2008; Venkataraman, 1997) most have probably come to agree with Low (2001) that these perspectives are not contradictory but complementary. We need strong disciplinary theory and methods insights applied to the phenomenon of “creation of new economic activity” (Wiklund et al., 2011).

There used to be only a few individuals with strong disciplinary identities in economics, psychology, or sociology (e.g., Acs, Aldrich, Audretsch, Baron, Frese, Parker, Shaver) who participated regularly in the interdisciplinary community or entrepreneurship researchers, plus a few, significant “transient” visitors to the field (Landström & Persson, 2010). We now see the development of subcommunities of researchers identifying firstly as, for example, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and so on, who devote most of their research interest and effort to studying entrepreneurial phenomena through their particular, disciplinary lens. This is accompanied by infrastructure development that facilitates intradisciplinary dissemination and debate. For example, Applied Psychology: An International Review recently published a Special Issue on entrepreneurship. This is definitely a positive development because coopetition within the discipline may be a prerequisite for really good disciplinary research on entrepreneurship to result. There are one or two catches, though. We would probably not like to see these disciplinary subcommunities become completely isolated fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Section 1: Entrepreneurship: Theory and Research: 1a: Understanding Entrepreneurship
• Section 2: The Individual: Psychology of Entrepreneurship
• Section 2a: Genetics of Entrepreneurship
• Section 3: The Organization: Corporate Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurial Teams: 3a: The Organization
• Section 3b: Entrepreneurial Teams
• Section 4: National and International Entrepreneurship: 4a: National Entrepreneurship
• Section 4b: International Entrepreneurship
• Index
• End User License Agreement