Entrepreneurship Safari: A Phenomenon-Driven Search for Meaning
By Hector Rocha, IAE – Management and Business School of Austral University, Argentina, hrocha@iae.edu.ar | Julian Birkinshaw, London Business School, UK, jbirkinshaw@london.edu
Abstract
We propose a model that links seven different conceptions of entrepreneurship and maps them in relation to eight associated disciplines and theories, specifying their corresponding units and levels of analysis and stage in the entrepreneurial process. Entrepreneurship scholars are attempting to either carve out a distinctive domain for the field or build a distinctive theory of entrepreneurship. However, an obstacle for understanding entrepreneurship is the lack of integration of the assumptions implicit in different conceptualizations of entrepreneurship. We contribute a scholarship of integration approach for understanding the phenomena underlying these conceptualizations and linking entrepreneurship domain, theory, method, and policymaking.
Entrepreneurship Safari
Entrepreneurship as a field of study is relatively new but the concept of entrepreneurship can be traced to the work of the Richard Cantillon in the 18th century and has emerged as a fast-growing line of inquiry during the last 30 years. While researchers present different conceptions of entrepreneurship, they highlight particular features that provide only a partial view. The result is that scholars lose theoretical clarity and policy makers lack conceptual guidelines for designing and evaluating the impact of their entrepreneurship policies. Entrepreneurship Safari presents a model that integrates the different phenomena implicit in previous theoretical and empirical work on entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship Safari provides a framework: to understand both the phenomena underlying the different conceptualisations of entrepreneurship and the relationships among those phenomena; to make explicit the theoretical assumptions in terms of units and levels of analysis implicit in the disciplines and theories that are studying the entrepreneurship phenomenon; by mapping out the different entrepreneurship related phenomena and their associated theoretical assumptions, this book provides a template for scholars and policy makers to understanding the connections and overlap of different phenomena and their distinctive impact at the individual and societal levels. The authors focus on the identification of and links between different phenomena related to entrepreneurship according to different perspectives. Entrepreneurship Safari presents the overall model based on previous theoretical and empirical work on entrepreneurship. It analyses each entrepreneurship phenomenon and its associated disciplines and levels of analysis. And it concludes with directions for future research and policymaking.
