What Makes an Entrepreneurship Study Entrepreneurial? Toward A Unified Theory of Entrepreneurial Agency

By Jeffery S. McMullen, Katrina M. Brownell, Joel Adams. 2020

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Calls for greater contextualization have been powerful in motivating research and knowledge creation about entrepreneurship. However, unless counter-balanced with attempts to identify the field’s conceptual core, these efforts have the potential to devolve into hyper-contextualization, exposing the field to fragmentation, loss of consensus, and possible disintegration. We identify five elements of entrepreneurial agency common across eight subcommunities of entrepreneurship but emphasized differently in each. By conceiving of entrepreneurship as structural transformation, we explain why some agents succeed at transforming social structures via entrepreneurial action. We conclude with some first steps toward the development of a unified theory of entrepreneurial agency.

Subfields: Business and International Management, Management of Technology and Innovation, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ea0aeaf533519e0ffdb2cd9d37fdc2ea584ddc6e