A (partial) review of entrepreneurship literature across disciplines
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/20452101211261453 |
| Published date | 05 October 2012 |
| Pages | 183-199 |
| Date | 05 October 2012 |
| Author | Noel Campbell,David T. Mitchell |
| Subject Matter | Strategy |
A (partial) review of
entrepreneurship literature
across disciplines
Noel Campbell and David T. Mitchell
College of Business, University of Central Arkansas, Conway, Arkansas, USA
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to stimulate researchers’ interest by acquainting them with
some aspects of the entrepreneurship literature they may not have known.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a non-meta-analytic literature review of several
literatures in entrepreneurship.
Findings – The entrepreneurship literature is vast and can be found in every discipline where
humans and their behaviour are the object of analysis.
Research limitations/implications – Because the entrepreneurship literature is so large and
widespread, the paper reviews only a small, deliberately c hosen sample of the literature.
Originality/value – Tothe authors’ knowledge, no one has previously written a unified review of the
market entrepreneurship, political entrepreneurship, and public choice.
Keywords Rent seeking, Political entrepreneurship, Public choice and entrepreneurship,
Entrepreneurship policy, Entrepreneurship literature review, Entrepreneurialism, Public policy
Paper type Literatu re review
1. Introduction
The academic entrepreneurship literature is vast. It is easy to name the names of major
entrepreneurship researchers in various disciplines, but it is muc h harder to find and
summarize the literature. Much of it is in books or book serials, which makes research
more difficult because many of these sources are not easily delivered by personal
computers. Because an important essence of entrepreneurship is action, the lines
between entrepreneurial practical advice, consulting output, popular press publishing,
and academic literature are especially broad and fuzzy. Similarly, as entrepreneurship
is about perceiving opportunities and acting upon this perception – whenever,
wherever, and however these opportunities are perceived – the study of entrepreneurial
action “properly” belongs to an exceptionally broad collection of academic disciplines.
Some of these disciplines readily communicate across the disciplinary divide; others do
not. For example, economics routinely communicates with political science and the
business disciplines, but business and political science correspond less intensively.
Business readily communicates with psychology, but economics communicates with
psychology much less intensively. The situation leads to a multiplicity of effort and a
proliferation of discipline-specific jargon. Results from one field are transfer red to
others slowly and with difficult y, despite common acknowledge ment of the
“interdisciplinary-ness” of the entrepreneurship field and its jour nals. We imagine a
diagram of the universe of entrepreneurship literature to be a Venn diagram of many
different circles. Each circle represents an academic discipline; for example , marketing,
management, economics, political science, psychology, sociology, and geography.Some
of these circles exist as dyads or triads with comparatively small intersection sets.
Some of these dyads and triads appear to be completely separate from other union sets.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/2045-2101.htm
Journal of Entrepreneurship and
Public Policy
Vol. 1 No.2, 2012
pp. 183-199
rEmeraldGroup Publishing Limited
2045-2101
DOI 10.1108/20452101211261453
183
Review of
entrepreneurship
literature
For example, consider three excellent documents: Kuratko’s (business) “The
emergence of entrepreneurship education: Development, trends, and challenges”
(Kuratko, 2005); Audretsch’s (economics) “Entrepreneurship: a survey of the literature”
(Audretsch, 2002), and Van Praag (economics) and Versloot’s (economics) “What is the
value of entrepreneurship? A review of recent research” (Van Praag and Versloot,
2007). As of March 3, 2012, Kuratko (2005) has 311 citations according to Google
Scholar, while Audretsch, 2002 has 248 citations, and Van Praag and Versloot (2007)
has 186 citations. Kuratko’s piece effectively serves as a literature review article for a
broader field of knowledge than just the pedagogy of entrepreneurship. Kuratko and
Audretsch have written together and are on the faculty at the same university, but
Kuratko’s article and Audretsch’s article come from very different literatures. There is
little overlap between journal titles in Kuratko’s and Audretsch’s references, much less
in specific journal articles. Kuratko offers a list of high-quality entrepreneurship
journals. Between Kuratko and Van Praag and Versloot, only the Journal of Business
Venturing and the Strategic Management Journal appear both on Kuratko’s list and in
Van Praag and Versloot’s references. Although these titles account for 25 percent of
Kuratko’s list, they comprise only 4.4 percent of the Van Praag and Versloot references.
“The emergence of entrepreneurship education: Development, trends, and challenges”
(Kuratko, 2005) was published by Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice, a journal
that is both recognizably an entrepreneurship journal and recognizably a business
discipline journal. The Journal of Small Business Strategy is also recognizably an
entrepreneurship journal and business discipline jour nal. The Journal of Small
Business Strategy released the Carraher (business) and Paridon (business) study,
“Entrepreneurship journal rankings across the discipline” (Carraher and Paridon,
2008) which ranked the top 50 entrepreneurship journals. Only seven of Kuratko’s
listed journals are included in the Carraher and Paridon ranking of the top 50
entrepreneurship journals, but Kuratko’s list does not include seven of the top ten
Carraher and Paridon jour nals. Of Audretsch’s257 references, only two are drawn from
Kuratko’s listed journals, both from the Journal of Business Venturing. Outside of the
notable exception of Small Business Economics, none of Audretsch’s references are
from journals listed by Carraher and Paridon. Carraher and Paridon have Small
Business Economics listed as 29th of 50 journals. None of these articles cite Schneider
( political science) and Teske’s ( political science) “Toward a theory of the p olitical
entrepreneur: evidence from local government” (Schneide r and Teske, 1992). This
article was published in the American Political Science Re view, one of the top journals
in political science, and the article has 195 Google Scho lar citations. None of these
articles cite Baumol’s (economics) “Entrepreneurship: productive, unproductive, and
destructive” (Baumol, 1990), which was published in the prestigious Journal of Political
Economy and has 2,074 citations in Google Scholar, nor Baumol’s “Entrepreneurship in
economic theory,” published in the American Economic Review (Baumol, 1968) – 912
citations in Google Scholar.
We are neither criticizing nor faulting anyone’s scholarship. These articles were
written for specific audiences, but to say that is to make our point. Despite the common
acknowledgment that focussed, disciplined inquiry into entrepreneurship occurs on
all floors of the Ivory Tower and beyond in the Real World, separate and largely
non-communicative audiences for entrepreneurship research continue to exist.
Aggravating these conditions is the observation t hat research interest in
entrepreneurship seems to always fall at the intersection of more solidly established
fields, i.e., at the intersection of marketing and management, or at the intersection of
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