ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Entrepreneurship

Table of Contents

Entrepreneurship3

Introduction3

Conceptual Overview3

Historical Overview5

Structural Perspective5

Cultural Perspectives6

Studies Of Entrepreneurs9

Critical Commentary And Future Directions11

Conclusion12

References14

Paper Outline

Entrepreneurship

Introduction

Conceptual Overview

Historical Overview

Structural Perspective

Cultural Perspectives

Studies Of Entrepreneurs

Critical Commentary And Future Directions

Conclusion

Entrepreneurship

Introduction

Entrepreneurship is the process whereby newness is created in the market and society at large through creating new organizations or through transforming existing organizations, which in turn is called intrapreneurship or corporate entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship allows organization studies to focus on organizational emergence and organizational innovation and to understand the “event” of organization, which is how organizational processes are created and changed or are continuously in the making. Entrepreneurship is also important for organization studies as it allows assessment of the impact of organizations on people's everyday lives in both a critical and generative sense as illustrated by the phenomena of “enterprising selves” and “entrepreneurial history making.”

Conceptual Overview

Entrepreneurship is of primary interest for organization studies because it does not take the existence of organizations for granted but allows for the study and explanation of how organizations come into existence, either as individual new firms or as new industries, and to emphasize that organizations always need to develop new products and services and to innovate in order to perpetuate their existence. To describe the significance of the concept of entrepreneurship for organization studies, it is important to indicate that entrepreneurship has developed into an academic field in and of itself, as Scott Shane and Sankaran Venkataraman suggest, implying that entrepreneurship studies and organization studies share an interface with organizational emergence at its core. Entrepreneurship is thus both related to both small and medium-sized firms, since new venture creation focuses on how young and (for that reason) smaller firms are started up, develop, and grow, as well as to organizational change and innovation processes of larger and more established organizations. Entrepreneurship thus brings creativity and newness under the attention of organization studies. The focus on newness and innovation for the most part goes back to Joseph Schumpeter who defined entrepreneurship as the creation of new combinations in the form of new goods and services, new methods of production, new markets, new sources of supply, and new organization of the industry. For Schumpeter, creative destruction is central, since entrepreneurship both overwrites current products, services, and markets and develops new ones. For instance, the mobile phone replaced the practice of wired phoning and reorganized the sector of telecommunication.

Within the field of entrepreneurship studies, it is debated whether the creation of new combinations requires the creation of a new organization or if it is also made possible through innovation in existing organization. William Gartner sees entrepreneurship as the study of the creation of organizations or so-called new venture creation. He conceives entrepreneurship as organizational emergence and hence shifts the focus from the individual entrepreneur to the more complex process of how organizations are created through the interplay of four perspectives: characteristics of the individuals who start the venture, the organization that they create, the environment surrounding the new venture, and the process by which the new venture is ...