Abstract
The first edition of Researching Entrepreneurship appeared when entrepreneurship research was still struggling for legitimacy (Hambrick and Chen, 2008). Things have changed considerably since then as entrepreneurship is now firmly established in the Academy as a respectable field of scientific inquiry (Gupta et al., 2016). The second edition of Davidsson’s book reflects the changing status of entrepreneurship studies, speaking to major issues of interest to scholars interested in extending the knowledge frontier of research on entrepreneurial phenomena. Notably, in a span of 10 chapters, Davidsson covers a large body of relevant scholarship that falls under the broad umbrella of entrepreneurship research, regardless of whether it was published in a general management journal or a field journal in entrepreneurship.
Some chapters in the book are updated versions of the original chapters in the first edition (namely, Chapters 1–5 and 10), others drastically overhauled from the earlier version (Chapters 6 and 9), and yet others added anew (Chapters 8 and 9). Certain chapters from the first edition are eliminated in this edition (specifically, chapters on ‘preparing a secondary dataset’ and ‘job creation as the dependent variable’) ‘not because those topics have become obsolete, but because [Davidsson’s] expertise has not been much updated since [he] wrote the first edition’ (p. vi).
In my reading, two things make or break a book: writing style and content. This book adopts a chatty conversation style in laying out the logic and supporting arguments, sometimes even joking about serious issues, which enhances readability and engages the reader. Davidsson is quite candid in the book, criticizing by name studies that he believes to be weak, misguided, or just plain wrong (see Chapter 9 on ‘sampling and significance testing’ for examples of such direct criticism). In terms of content, the book can be divided into three main areas: Chapters 1–3 are about ‘what is entrepreneurship research?’, Chapters 5–7 relate to ‘how entrepreneurial phenomena are studied’, and Chapters 8–10 speak to ‘why the field has not yielded as many clear actionable answers as we would have wanted’. Thus, the book covers a wide range of What, How, and Why issues in entrepreneurship research.
There is much to like in the book, for example, its highlighting of replication as a worthy pursuit in Chapter 9 (albeit not as strongly as it could be in emphasizing the moral imperative on the part of editors and journals to publish replication studies) and the useful coverage of sampling, study design, and dependent variables (Chapters 4–7). The author’s attempt to delineate a bounded domain for entrepreneurship inquiry in Chapters 1 and 2 is commendable, especially as it is informed by work in Austrian economics. I also found the critical commentary on Shane and Venkataraman’s (2000) much-celebrated idea of the individual-opportunity nexus in Chapter 8 quite illuminating and found myself intrigued by Davidsson’s position that studying this nexus risks ‘engaging in a confusing cacophony rather than scholarly progress’ (p. 221).
Yet, as Davidsson himself acknowledges, the book falls short in two key areas: philosophy of science and qualitative inquiry. Philosophical issues are completely ignored in the book (except for noting that ‘reflections on the foundations of knowledge production is both important and lacking in a lot of mainstream research’, an observation with which I concur). Having done some work in this area (e.g. Chiles et al., 2010), I can say with confidence that philosophical issues are at the heart of the scholarly enterprise in entrepreneurship, for they guide the innumerable decisions researchers need to make about theory and empirics in their investigation. The scarce attention given to philosophical underpinnings of entrepreneurship in the literature is well recognized (Jennings et al., 2005), and Davidsson too ignores the profound implications of different philosophical paradigms in entrepreneurship. Second, the discussion on qualitative research in the book (pp. 84–90) reinforces the common, but incorrect, perception that qualitative approaches are suitable only for early-stage research, to be followed by more scientific scholarship in the form of quantitative investigations. Given the heterogeneity of assumptions, methods, and analytical approaches prevalent within the qualitative paradigm, the simplistic view of qualitative research presented in the book is quite limiting and surprising.
This review started by noting the tremendous progress entrepreneurship has made over the last few years. What I did not mention earlier was that Davidsson has played an important role in this development of entrepreneurship as a legitimate field of scholarship. His long and deep engagement with entrepreneurship research reflects clearly in this well-written comprehensive book, which makes it deserving of a prominent place in the reading list of those interested in furthering scholarship on entrepreneurial phenomena.