Entrepreneurship in action: bringing together the individual, organizational and institutional dimensions of entrepreneurial action

Abstract

There is increasing recognition that entrepreneurship research needs to achieve a better balance between studying to entrepreneurial activities and setting these activities in their wider context. It is important that these good intentions are realized and one way of doing this is to bring together ethnographic research with concepts from sociology and from pragmatist thinking. In this study, field research material is interwoven with a set of key concepts to ensure that balanced attention is paid to issues at the levels of the enterprising individual, the organization and societal institutions. The field research is innovative in combining depth study of several enterprises and their founders with the analysis of broader aspects of ‘entrepreneurship in society’. It achieves this through a process of ‘everyday ethnographic’ observation, reading, conversation and ongoing analysis. In the spirit of a pragmatist conception of social science, the underlying logic of entrepreneurial action is identified. This is a logic which needs to be appreciated by all of those who wish to understand and/or engage with the entrepreneurial dimension of contemporary social and economic life.

Keywords:

• entrepreneurship
• entrepreneurial action
• ethnography
• situated creativity
• effectuation
• institutional logics

Notes

^1. The term ‘engage with’ is used to make the point that a ‘good’ piece of social science, in Pragmatist terms, can inform the actions of people regardless of their particular interests. Thus, a good appreciation of the realities of entrepreneurial action would be relevant to people ‘doing’ entrepreneurship, to policy makers, to customers, to people opposed to entrepreneurial activity and so on.

^2. Gartner (1993), in particular, talks of entrepreneurship in terms of ‘organisational emergence’ and, as Lanström (2005) observes, this view has ‘found expression’ in two important international research projects, the Entrepreneurship Research Consortium and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Similar assumptions arise in the study of ‘habitual entrepreneurs’ with, as Rosa (2010, 248) points out, classifications used in this field excluding the category of business owners who own and manage a single business and who pursue ‘considerable entrepreneurially driven diversification over many years’.

^3. This is illustrated by the fact that one of the most critical scholarly works on entrepreneurship – one which is indeed sensitive to the difficulties here – indicates in its very title ‘Unmasking the Entrepreneur’ (Jones and Spicer, 2009) the difficulty scholars have with the idea that they can work without reference to the notion of ‘the entrepreneur’.

^4. It is important here, as Huovinen and Pasanen (2010) point out, to distinguish between entrepreneurial teams (where the individual entrepreneurial actor is part of a group of co-venturers) and management teams (where the entrepreneurial actor works alongside others who are recruited to fulfil specific managerial functions).

^5. I use the label emergent life orientations to differentiate the concept being used here from the US-applied psychology concept of LIFO or ‘life orientations’ (LIFO, 2011) and from the ‘entrepreneurial orientation’ concept and instrument introduced by Covin and Slevin (1989).

^6. I do not use the term ‘administration’ here in the rather negative pejorative sense of trivial or routine ‘admin’ but more in the sense exerting managerial control – as in the usage ‘master of business administration’ (MBA).

^7. The link between entrepreneurship and market logics is central to Davidsson's notion of entrepreneurship as a societal phenomenon. This ‘consists of the competitive behaviours that drive the market process (towards more effective and efficient use of resources)’ (2008, 25). When I talk of markets I am not using the term to imply any support for the notion of the ‘free market economy’. My usage is intended to be fully compatible with the notion of the ‘social market’.