orgtheory.net

Teppo

I remember Jay Barney (’father’ of the resourced-based view) just two years ago labeling entrepreneurship research a “black hole” (specifically advising doctoral students to steer clear). I actually asked him about his comment at SMS in Vienna last month, and he appears to have changed his mind (as is also evident from his own research into the phenomenon).

Times appear to be a-changin’ – most business schools are now scrambling for good, publishing entrepreneurship scholars, to fill the entrepreneurship classes, and to staff the nearly ubiquitious entrepreneurship centers (my quick guesstimate is that 80-90% of the top 50 MBA program schools now have such a center [often well-funded], and, most of these centers have emerged just in the last 10 years).

A new journal has also recently been announced – Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (a sister journal to SMJ) – in an effort to push entrepreneurship research forward. I think this type of journal is a very welcome addition to the fray. Extant organization theory (and strategy for that matter) indeed seems to be rather skewed toward large, public organizations, where data is more readily available (Aldrich and Ruef’s Organizations Evolving makes a similar point) and history is observable. But, much of what’s interesting about organizations happens early on (”imprinting”, and the “path” of path-dependence has to start somewhere, etc. etc…much more on these matters later) and thus understanding entrepreneurship and new organizations ought to be critical for organization theory.  We do of course have much trait-based and rate-based (pop ecology) research (or, as Patricia Thornton puts it in her ARS piece - The Sociology of Entrepreneurship – demand and supply-based models), but I think better things are yet to come.