Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
This open access book investigates an entrepreneurial approach to building new theories. It provides a rich understanding of how specific tools facilitate aspects of the theorizing process and offers a clearer big picture of the process of building important new entrepreneurship theories. The authors show that anthropomorphizing has been a critically important tool for developing influential entrepreneurship theories. They reveal how scholars build on their rich and highly accessible understanding of humans (i.e., the self and others) to make guesses and sense of entrepreneurial anomalies, articulate theoretical mechanisms to build more robust entrepreneurship theories, and create plausible stories that facilitate sensegiving. Further, they offer a framework that guides entrepreneurship scholars in finding a balance to maximize their contributions and guides reviewers and editors in managing the revise-and-resubmit process to advance the entrepreneurship field. Finally, they present lean scholarship as an approach to developing a portfolio of high-quality, high-impact papers. Lean scholarship starts with an entrepreneurial mindset and involves creating a minimum viable paper, exploring its validity, adding a plausible paper to one's portfolio, and managing the portfolio by periodically deciding whether to persevere, pivot, or terminate each paper. This seminal work will appeal to entrepreneurship researchers, both those new to the field as well as seasoned veterans, who want to learn more about the tools that can be used to generate new knowledge about new ventures and other entrepreneurship topics.
Synopsis
Chapter 1: Theorizing and Entrepreneurship
1]Building theories is essential for advancing knowledge of entrepreneurship. But it is also a highly challenging task. Although there is considerable advice on the many theorizing tools available, we lack a coherent understanding of how these tools fit together. This chapter highlights the literature on theory building around the five critical elements of a good story: conflict, character, setting, sequence, and plot and arc. We offer advice on when to use a particular tool and which combination of tools can be used in the theorizing process. This chapter provides a rich understanding of how specific tools facilitate aspects of the theorizing process and a clearer big picture of the process of building new entrepreneurship theories. We also offer an approach that uses quantitative empirical findings to stimulate theorizing on entrepreneurial anomalies.
Chapter 2: Generating Ideas for Entrepreneurial Theorizing
2]The future of the entrepreneurship field is bright primarily because of the many research opportunities to make a difference. However, as scholars, how can we find these opportunities and choose those most likely to contribute to the literature? This chapter explains me-search as a tool for generating or finding research opportunities to advance entrepreneurship. Me-search focuses scholarly attention on issues from one's personal experiences as a valuable tool for generating research opportunities in which one has personal knowledge and is motivated to see it through to publication. In conducting me-search, we highlight the importance of solving a practical problem, problematizing, contextualizing, and abstracting entrepreneurship research, and using empirical theorizing to explore entrepreneurial phenomena. We hope that this chapter gives scholars the direction to find research opportunities and the confidence to pursue them.
Chapter 3: Anthropomorphizing for Entrepreneurial Theorizing 3]
In this chapter, we show how anthropomorphizing has been a critically important tool for developing influential theories in entrepreneurship. Analyzing the literatures related to an organization's entrepreneurial orientation and organizational knowledge reveals how scholars build on their rich and highly accessible understanding of humans (i.e., the self and others) to (1) make guesses and sense of entrepreneurial anomalies at the organizational level, (2) articulate theoretical mechanisms to build more robust entrepreneurship theories, and (3) create plausible stories that facilitate sensegiving to editors, reviewers, and other audiences. However, anthropomorphizing does not always lead to such positive outcomes. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the conditions under which entrepreneurship scholars' anthropomorphizing will be more or less effective.
Chapter 4: Managing Trade-offs in Entrepreneurial Theorizing 4]
While several editors and scholars have shared critical insights into the craft of writing a theory paper, there is an essential aspect of publishing a theory paper that is less understood: the process by which expert reviewers and authors engage in the review process, which has a significant influence on theory. We identify three major challenges of entrepreneurship theorizing: (1)
the scope of the entrepreneurship paper's theorizing being either too narrow or too shallow; (2) the common features of the paper's
contextualization, boundary conditions, and
time considerations; and (3) the
"point of view" of the entrepreneurship paper's perspective-theoretical, philosophical, level, and purpose
. This chapter offers a framework that guides (1) entrepreneurship scholars to find a balance to maximize their contribution