Abstract
Reading this book made me look up the meanings of two words – classic (judged over time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind) and foundational (denoting an underlying basis or principle). While it is difficult for an article to be both a classic and foundational piece, it is obvious that most will belong to only one of the categories. Although the editors of the volume use these terms interchangeably, knowing their nuanced difference will help appreciate books and papers of this genre. I would prefer to use the word classics for many of the articles studied in this volume.
The breadth of classics selected for this volume says how our field – entrepreneurship – has been explorative. Venkat’s chapter provided the much-needed anchor for entrepreneurship researchers – the much-needed distinctiveness our domain needed – entrepreneurial opportunity. It has remained an inspiration since publication and continues to inform the debate on entrepreneurial opportunities. The article by Aldrich and Fiol highlighted the need to look at the influence of social contexts in firm formation. They especially triggered research on legitimacy within entrepreneurship. Baumol’s chapter was a reality check to all scholars inquiring entrepreneurial phenomena – there can be unproductive outcomes from entrepreneurship – and this has probably helped keep a check on the dark side of entrepreneurship. Although limited studies have explored this, there remains a lot to be mined from this classic. The article by Miller is probably a good example of a classic article that is also foundational – in the sense that it inspired two more classics reviewed in the volume – the articles on entrepreneurial orientation (EO) by Covin and Slevin and Lumpkin and Dess. While these latter articles (both classics) have spurred a large amount of empirical work on EO, the Miller article continues to be an inspirational read for viewing entrepreneurship as a firm-level phenomenon.
The Bird and Krueger articles have been the basis for the large interest in exploring entrepreneurial intentions, which continues to be a strong stream of inquiry among entrepreneurship scholars. The De Vries paper highlighted the importance of the person within the entrepreneurship phenomenon. While studying traits was not under criticism then, it has been so in recent times. With all its criticism, including Gartner’s classic paper calling to move from studying traits to behaviours, re-reading the De Vries article will provide enough impetus to the small but growing stream of research exploring personality traits. Improvements in medical technology and devices will probably give a boost to this stream of studies. The Gartner article, other than shifting our focus from traits to behaviours, gave us a number of interesting pathways to take forward entrepreneurship research – distinguishing different types of entrepreneurs, studying entrepreneurship as a complex process, exploring both individual and environmental factors influencing the entrepreneurship process, also, some initial insights into measuring the outcomes of such a process. Although many readers of Gartner’s article come away thinking it is about individual entrepreneurs, the review chapter in this book does away this myth. The Bowen and Hisrich article helped bring attention to the then much neglected aspect of women entrepreneurs. With the increasing number of calls to bring more gender balance to the study of entrepreneurship, it appears that not much has changed over the past 30 odd years. Although it is obvious that entrepreneurs cluster at certain locations over others, it remains a mystery as to why they do this. Pennings brought attention to such a topic – quality of life (well-being; social impact) – and her paper is probably also important for the interesting approach used to find and analyse evidence. While economic factors are an easy explanation, it is in recent times that non-economic reasons are being explored with greater interest.
The 13 classic articles are organised into 11 chapters. Each chapter provides a summary of the key ideas from the classic paper, its influence on research so far and potential future research directions. A short summary of the classics is a useful contribution but is no replacement to reading the original classic (as acknowledged by the editors too). While the review of literature influenced by the classic may be unsystematic, it has been summarised in interesting ways across chapters. Readers looking for novel research questions or directions may not be greatly enamoured by the future research sections.
While reading through the book, it is almost impossible to ignore that nine of the 13 papers considered classics in this volume are conceptual in nature and five of these are from one journal – Academy of Management Review (AMR). If we count the one conceptual book chapter (which eventually resulted in an AMR article too) to also be a conceptual article, then it makes AMR the single largest contributor of classics (six) to this volume. While it is not fair to generalise, it can be fun to imagine that writing a conceptual article and publishing it in AMR might increase the odds of becoming a classic.
The editors indicate the debatable and subjective nature of such a book project (pp. 5–6), which appears accentuated while identifying classics rather than foundational articles. As the editors acknowledge, while it is easy to criticise such a work, seeing its merits – identifying an initial set of classics, providing key readings for doctoral students, knowing where to search when you want fresh perspectives – can be easily ignored.
Entrepreneurship is a relatively young discipline. A large part of its intellectual tradition is recent and evolving. Yet, with the rapid increase in volume of academic publications, it becomes difficult for researchers (especially doctoral students) to keep pace, know where they are headed or where the field should go. It is in times like these that such a volume offers solace. It points to a select set of influential articles which scholars (young and old) can turn to for inspiration, guidance and direction.