Abstract
Professor Howard Aldrich has long held chairs in both sociology and management at the University of North Carolina, and we are privileged indeed that entrepreneurship has formed the link so often that bridges these two disciplines for him, acting as the conduit and context through which he has brought themes, theories, data and insights from sociology and organisational theory together. The story of his ‘finding’ – or being found by – entrepreneurship is retold in the book’s engaging introduction. Attending an eye-opening 1995 entrepreneurship conference in Austin, TX, Aldrich writes that ‘the scholars I met were passionate about their work, energised about what they were finding, and cared deeply about the phenomena’ (p.xiii). Our area has provided him with an ‘instant organizational laboratory’ (p.xiv) where simple but dynamic new business organisms are born, grow, die and change in huge numbers, all the time. Thus entrepreneurial phenomena are especially suited to the application and development of the evolutionary theory that underpins Aldrich’s work.
The selection logic driving this theory is set out clearly in the book’s opening chapter, ‘Who wants to be an evolutionary theorist?’, where Aldrich highlights the need for event-driven (not backward-looking, outcome-driven, cross-sectional) explanations, and seeks a focus on the many emerging organisations, not the few large survivors. Similarly, this keynote paper makes a plea for greater recognition of the importance of time (pacing and duration), and for consideration, theoretically, of what happens next. The paper also makes strong arguments against prioritising agents over context. These themes all recur throughout the remainder of the volume, and in the concluding essay Howard re-emphasises how myriad nascent entrepreneurs are among the most important participants for our study, and their engagement in collective action a special feature to be explored further if we are to make more sense of organisational selection and retention (chapter 24). The opening chapter was originally given as a talk, when Howard was awarded the Academy’s Organizational and Management Theory Division’s Distinguished Scholarly Career Award in 2000.
Aldrich’s work is so well-known and so extensively drawn upon that almost certainly readers will find several of their own favourite entrepreneurship articles in the volume. However, the great benefit of reading the pieces in this collected essays format is that it moves us beyond our own personal Aldrich canon – whether this happens to be networks, gender, population ecology, ethnicity, building theories or strategy – and exposes us to his detailed thinking in these other related fields. In addition, Aldrich has pulled together cognate work so that readers can develop a wider appreciation of his developing thinking on specific topics. However, this is not a book for reading from cover to cover in one sitting, although the writing is so engaging that you will be tempted to do so. Rather, it is for dipping into, one carefully crafted article at a time, for thinking about, re-reading and puzzling over. Of the 23 articles, just three are sole-authored, with 26 eminent co-authors also represented in the volume. Indeed, the list not only of co-authors but colleagues generously thanked at the end of each paper reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of organisational and entrepreneurial theory.
The 23 collected papers in this book have been organised into five main themes, identified post hoc as having unified Aldrich’s work from the 1980s until now. I was very much taken with the vision of Aldrich reviewing and sifting his own historical archive to figure out the larger narratives which followed his work on entrepreneurship, given his own cautiousness about the dangers of reading back a coherent story into a fragmented past. It must have been a matter of some relief to him that each of the five themes that emerged are indeed very robust, compelling and internally consistent.
The book’s first main section (Part II) is themed around developing theory, and illustrates that it is the interplay between organisation and environmental context, as entrepreneurs compete for scarce resources and strive to ‘fit’, which concerns evolutionary theorists. Reviewing the strategies, group characteristics and opportunity structures of ethnic business development, Aldrich and Waldinger (chapter 2) propose greater attention be paid to ‘the reciprocal relation between ethnicity and entrepreneurship, more careful use of ethnic labels, the need for more multiple group, comparative research, and the need for more process-oriented research designs’ (p.39). Aldrich and Kenworthy (chapter 3) present six empirical facts and puzzles about entrepreneurship, which they interrogate using Donald Campbell’s blind variation selective retention model, concluding with a plea for ‘more dynamic analyses of firm emergence and the founding process’ (p.56). Aldrich’s solo chapter 4, ‘Lost in Space, Out of Time’, is a bravura call for spatio-temporal contextualisation in comparative research. His chapter 5, ‘Beam me up Scott(ie)!’ argues that although neo-institutionalist approaches are helpful for considering cultural and political contexts, for example, they are not appropriate to the study of micro-level entrepreneurial processes – not least due to their tendency to focus on inherently unrepresentative great cases, and difficulties in considering the dynamics of time and process.
Part III presents a collection of work on entrepreneurial networks and social capital. Aldrich and Zimmer (chapter 6) broke new ground for entrepreneurship by introducing the concept of social networking to our field, along with Sue Birley’s (1985) Journal of Business Venturing paper. Given the plethora of later studies and ever-firmer recognition of the importance of social embeddedness to enterprise, this contribution has proved prescient, highly influential and much celebrated. The chapter firmly critiques the then-dominant contestations between personality theories, economic rational actor theories, and over-socialised and deterministic cultural approaches. Instead, Aldrich and Zimmer argue that ‘within complex networks of relationships, entrepreneurship is facilitated or constrained by linkages between aspiring entrepreneurs, resources and opportunities’ (pp.126–127). The chapter adopts a population ecology perspective to highlight the significance of network density, reachability and centrality, as well as the struggle over resources and the importance of both solidarity and diversity within an entrepreneur’s network. Dubini and Aldrich (chapter 7) differentiate between the entrepreneur’s personal network and the organisation’s extended network, recognise the need for both density and diversity in networking, and propose that firmly managing organisational networks is a crucial practice for the entrepreneur. Chapter 8, by Aldrich, Elam and Reese, presents an important empirical study into gender and networks, combining two key Aldrich themes. Women entrepreneurs are found not to differ from men in terms of their networking practices, pursuing financial, business loan and expert assistance (although not legal assistance) as actively as their male counterparts, paying no more than men for resources, and using similar network channels – friends and business associates rather than family. However, women were found to draw upon other women contacts rather than men for such assistance, provided that they knew them already. Stellar empirics also drive chapter 9 by Ruef, Aldrich and Carter, which explores the structure of founding teams, testing for five possible mechanisms of task-group composition, and finds that homophily of many characteristics (‘in particular gender, ethnicity and occupation’) is especially important, with the network constraints of strong ties (such as family or marriage), and ecological constraints (such as gender or ethnicity) also relevant. Chapter 10, ‘Mixing or Matching’, by Davis, Renzulli and Aldrich, deploys a unique dataset to conclude that voluntary association memberships help owners overcome some of the career isolation produced by their social location. Aldrich and Kim (chapter 11) explore the strategic, contextual and structural implications of three network models for entrepreneurship scholars: random, small-world and scale-free.
Part IV draws together five articles on strategic themes, beginning in Chapter 12 with the classic ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ by Aldrich and Auster. Here, the liabilities of small, new firms (struggling to survive, raise capital, compete for labour and manage internal control and communication) and large, old firms (ossification of culture, routines and power structures) are contrasted. Aldrich and Auster consider the degree to which interrelations between these two firm types, through franchising, long-term supply contracts, acquisition and emulation, may help each form to overcome their own specific liabilities. In Chapter 13, Bradley, Aldrich, Shepherd and Wiklund’s Strategic Management Journal paper demonstrates empirically that new organisations that are independent at founding may be at a strategic disadvantage during ‘normal’ economic times compared to subsidiary start-ups, probably because they have a heightened exposure to the liabilities of newness and smallness just discussed. However, independent new organisations appeared to have a strategic (and survival) advantage over subsidiaries when economic shocks or jolts are experienced, perhaps due to their inherent flexibility and freedom. Aldrich’s Academy of Management Review collaboration with Fiol, entitled ‘Fools Rush In?’ (chapter 14), remains one of the clearest, deepest and most influential institutional explorations of how new industries, and the entrepreneurs within them, can build cognitive and sociopolitical legitimacy, as well as the importance of trust and collaboration for these strategic processes. In Chapter 15, Hunt and Aldrich use the example of the world wide web to build an ecological model of organisational community around the three co-dependent themes of catalytic technological innovation, the sustaining and promoting role of entrepreneurial activities, and dependence on multi-level legitimation. Chapter 16, the final chapter in the strategy section (with Fortune) presents the story of applications service providers as an example of an innovative business model in an evolving, emerging context ripe for live analysis.
Part V moves on to themes of family and gender, with Chapter 17 by Baker, Aldrich and Liou making a nuanced argument that a more subtle consideration of gender differences is needed, in spite (or perhaps because) of increasing media neglect and assumptions of gender homogeity. Highlighting dissenting voices, and critiquing androcentric assumptions as to pre-gendered (male) business norms, the authors propose interesting areas of study by drawing on the social behaviour literature on gender differences. In Chapter 18, Renzulli, Aldrich and Moody’s study brings together the issues of gender and networking once again, with an empirical exploration of entrepreneurial social capital. They find that disadvantages can be expected to accrue from a start-up entrepreneur’s network when their ties are mostly kin or very homogenous, rather than due to the gender of the entrepreneur or their network. Aldrich and Cliff’s masterful Journal of Business Venturing essay in chapter 19 sets out the significance of family as a dynamic context shaped by time and space, and with important implications for the entrepreneurs embedded within it. Family systems and the entrepreneurial process interact in various ways, and there are many questions relating to the co-dependence of the two institutions which are yet to be explored.
Stratification and inequality form the themes for the four chapters of Part VI. The first study in this section, chapter 20 by Aldrich, Renzulli and Langton, tests empirically whether the capital endowments of self-employed parents play a role in business ownership patterns among their children. Its findings suggest that entrepreneurs without business-owning parents do not face more pronounced capital acquisition barriers, nor greater difficulties acquiring entrepreneurial capital, than entrepreneurs who are brought up by business-owning families. Since high levels of occupational inheritance are well established for business owners, they propose a more subtle understanding of the role of entrepreneurial capital throughout life courses. This challenge is taken up in chapter 21 by Aldrich and Kim, using a detailed review and Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics data, to develop propositions of diverse parental influence on children’s self-employment throughout childhood, adolescence and adulthood. They also conclude that a reframing of the problem allows us to ‘see that instead of looking for occupation-specific kills, resources and training, we should look for more general factors, such as occupational self-directedness’ (p.529). In chapter 22, Kim, Aldrich and Keister return to explore further the capitals needed for entry to entrepreneurship, also using Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics, testing for financial, cultural and human capital. Of these, higher levels of human capital, most especially advanced education and managerial experience, were positively correlated with being a nascent entrepreneur. The final paper in this section, chapter 23, studies a variety of review evidence and theory to explore the relationships between economic (in)equality and levels of entrepreneurship, cross-nationally. The study concludes with the somewhat discomforting finding that ‘state policies encouraging social and economic equality may suppress entrepreneurial activity, while those favouring entrepreneurship may unintentionally lead to higher levels of economic inequality’ (p.582).
Footnotes, introduction and conclusion link the articles more closely to the trajectory of Aldrich’s own professional and personal life course, his colleagues, family and students. Like his chapters on the importance of family and embeddedness, Aldrich’s own context is woven through his work, made evident and transparent, in charming examples of academic honesty and authenticity. Similarly, the humility, openness and directness of his written voice resonates with the timbre of his spoken words. Aldrich’s voice, whether written or spoken, is deeply rigorous, serious and scholarly, while simultaneously personal, warm, exploratory and funny.
Selecting just 23 articles and book chapters from 175 published in the 43 years since 1969 means that some very remarkable, much-loved pieces have not been reprinted here. I was sorry not to see some of my favourites but that is probably inevitable, given the sheer volume and range of Aldrich’s work. For example, ‘Small Business Still Speaks with the Same Voice: A Replication of “The Voice of Small Business and the Politics of Survival”’, written with Zimmer and Jones, is an absolute all-time classic that surely merited inclusion. Similarly, in spite of its length, Aldrich and Wiedenmayer’s ‘From Traits to Rates: An Ecological Perspective on Organizational Foundings’ (1993) has proved so helpful to so many that its omission is regretful, as is Aldrich’s 1987 piece with Baker (1997), ‘Blinded by the Cites?’. In addition, it would have been wonderful to see some of Aldrich’s papers on teaching and enterprise education collected into a section within this volume. Aldrich talks with great passion about the value that he has always placed on teaching, and brings his considerable analytic and practical skills to bear on this often overlooked and undervalued topic. His commitment to teaching excellence is an integral part of his scholarly persona, and merited recognition in this volume through a section bringing together his writing on the topic.
However, I am being greedy: the volume is already more than 600 pages long, and represents a splendid selection of Aldrich’s work. Our thanks must also go to Edward Elgar’s stalwart commissioning editor, Francine O’Sullivan, who cajoled this book out of him. Francine’s sterling role in shaping the entrepreneurship library is nowhere better illustrated than in this volume, for which we all owe her and, of course, Professor Aldrich, a substantial vote of thanks.