Power and Entrepreneurship
Guest Post by: Antje Fiedler Power lets actors influence others towards desired ends. Power provides an alternative lens on entrepreneurship to institutional, networks and cognition lenses from an economic sociology perspective. Our introductory conceptualisation surfaces multifaceted dynamics of this fundamental force that most entrepreneurship literature, unlike social sciences and management, treats somewhat loosely, latently or lopsidedly. Power “comes from everywhere” (Foucault, 1978, p. 96). Not only well-resourced states and legacy firms, but entrepreneurs can shape the perception and development of entrepreneurial opportunities and potentially influence power structures. In Audretsch and Fiedler (2023), we pioneer a power lens for entrepreneurship research comprising three forms, two overarching types and three main actor groups. First, building on Wrong’s (2017) work in sociology yields three forms of power. Coercive power imposes on subjects’ will via rules, dominance, ...
