Entrepreneurship Theories

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, ...

“Who am I?” / “ Who are we? ” Social identity theory (SIT) has long been a mainstay of social psychological thinking about politics and human behaviour in general. SIT is at its core a theory about in-groups and out-groups, as easily formed social constructions that can manifest with real consequences. Consider football hooligans beating each other over their team colours. We all have multiple identities, and some scholars propose that the more central one's entrepreneurial identity, compared with family and other identities, the more likely they will start a venture, grow a startup, or developing a capability ( Hayter et a., 2021) . In entrepreneurship, SIT is pointed at the entrepreneurial identity, defined as a set of attitudes, beliefs and behaviours reinforcing being an entrepreneur. According to Shepherd et al. (2018) "a meaningful self-identity is central to individuals’ psychological functioning and well-being" "I am an Entrepreneur" The liter...

"75% of entrepreneurs in 48 economies around the world said that their family was involved in starting their businesses, either as co-managers or co-owners. The vast majority of startups around the world are, in fact, family businesses." - Babson Entrepreneurship has non-economic dimensions as a vehicle for legacy or building family institutions. Many aging entrepreneurs wish to pass the business to the next generation, while other feels to pull of the family business as they reach maturity.  However, it's not all about succession! Family entrepreneurship is about families building businesses together, often for the first time. Perhaps one of the most interesting characteristics of families is their ability to pool together resources to spawn new ventures that achieve family goals (Chrisman et al., 2003).  Randerson et al. (2015) propose a number of interesting new topics for family entrepreneurship scholars to pursue. They suggest researching 'copreneurs', ...

The External Enabler Framework (Davidsson, Recker & von Briel, 2020) is a conceptual toolbox developed for analyzing the strategic and fortuitous influence of changes to the business environment in entrepreneurial pursuits. External Enabler (EE) refers to significant changes to the business environment, such as new technologies, regulatory changes, macroeconomic shifts, demographic and sociocultural trends, changes to the natural environment, and the like. The basic assumption of the EE body of work is that every such change will benefit some entrepreneurial initiatives even if it disadvantages other economic activities. EE analysis focuses on those enabled; other frameworks are needed for analyzing negative consequences of change. The EE concept was introduced as a more workable alternative to “objective opportunity” for realizing the idea of entrepreneurship as a nexus of enterprising agents and favorable environmental conditions (Davidsson, 2015). Unlike the notion of objective ...