Guest editorial: the early adolescence of entrepreneurship research

Abstract

The two most prestigious journals, the Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, have very high impact factors.Although entrepreneurship still lacks an accepted paradigm (indeed it lacks definitional clarity), and we continue to struggle fully specifying what entrepreneurship education is and for what purpose (Liguori et al., 2018), entrepreneurship has cemented its position as a legitimate domain for research and teaching.Why was entrepreneurship as research field ignored for so long?We feel part of the explanation goes into the heart of business research.Normally, management, and other business faculty major motivation (indeed the fastest way for promotion) is to develop and test theories.As theories are based on some covering laws, they should hold for all-time.Accordingly, the test of business research is not in its practical application, but its ability to develop stable, theoretical frameworks.This was not always the case.Business theories such as Frederick Winslow Taylor and Elton Mayo addressed real, social problems.The transformation of the business school, which occurred after the Ford and Carnegie reports of the 1950s, placed an emphasis on the development of theory and the use of the scientific method.The net result of this change is that we have moved past the mundane to the theoretical.Entrepreneurship research struggled as a result.The ideal place for entrepreneurship, given its financial implications, is the field of economics.However, neoclassical economics limits the role that the entrepreneur can play because of its assumptions of perfect information and equilibrium.Although there were mainstream economists such as William Baumol who attempted to develop theories of entrepreneurship within the neoclassical framework, these attempts were limited in their effectiveness.Heterodox economists, such as those of the Austrian school, did develop a framework for entrepreneurship given that their tradition (unlike neoclassical) does not assume perfect information, but rather ignorance and subjectivism.However, the Austrian economics school was not as wellregarded in the general economics profession.This lack of attention to Austrian economics created wrong assumptions.A common viewpoint, one held by the economist John

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.