Abstract
Theory development and testing are central to the advancement of entrepreneurship as a scholarly field. For nearly three decades now, researchers have borrowed popular theories from other disciplines and adapted them to the study of diverse entrepreneurship phenomena. This has enhanced the rigor of research findings. Future studies can achieve greater rigor and relevance by paying more attention to the context of their investigations. Understanding the nature, dynamics, uniqueness and limitations of this context can enrich future studies. This article describes common problems revealed in recent entrepreneurship research when applying existing and new theories to well known vs. emerging and novel phenomena. The article also suggests strategies to enrich creative and constructive theory building.
Keywords: Theory building; Entrepreneurship; Context of entrepreneurial phenomena
1. Executive summary
Theory drives the evolution of scholarship in an academic discipline. It also shapes the academic conversation by delineating a field’s boundaries, the core questions to be examined and preferred research methods. Research in entrepreneurship has benefited from borrowing theories from other disciplines, notably sociology, psychology and economics. Yet, for many entrepreneurship researchers building and testing theory remain an onerous challenge, leading some to ignore theory in conducting their research, arguing that entrepreneurial phenomena fall outside the boundaries of known theories. Other researchers have failed to invoke theory in innovative ways that enrich the academic conversation. Still, others have imported theories from other disciplines without considering the key and distinguishing qualities of entrepreneurial phenomena.
This ...