The Promise of Entrepreneurship

I’m too busy at the moment to read these two articles and comment on them in depth but I did want to flag them up as something to return to and discuss. They are reflections on the development of the field of entrepreneurship since the original article of Shane, S. and Venkataraman, S. (2000). “The Promise of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Research.” Academy of Management Review, 25 (1): 217-226. Here are the two reflections:

• Shane, S. (2012). “Reflections on the 2010 AMR Decade Award: Delivering on the Promise of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Research.” Academy of Management Review, 37 (1): 10-20.
• Venkataraman, S., Sarasvathy, S. D., et al. (2012). “Reflections on the 2010 AMR Decade Award: Whither the Promise? Moving Forward with Entrepreneurship as a Science of the Artificial.” Academy of Management Review, 37 (1): 21-33.

Note that the second article also has Sarasvathy on board, so I imagine that some insights from the philosophy of pragmatism might have also seeped into that one.

Hat tip to the Organizations and Markets blog, where Peter Lewin provides a summary of Shane’s argument. I find it interesting how much the concept of entrepreneurship in the discussion is underpinned by the acceptance of the self-world model and the assumption that therefore the main problem of entrepreneurship is also how the individual entrepreneur accesses and interprets the world. It is precisely on this issue that alternative ontologies (such as actor-network theory or object-oriented ontology) could give rise to some interesting contributions in the field of entrepreneurship.

P.S. In fact the NO-THING PERSONAL? Workshop next week at the LSE will be also looking at the role of the individual, but through the object-orientated lens of ANT-ish economic sociology and anthropology: “What has the detour via things helped us discover about men and women, about individual subjects, about persons?”

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