Where did interpretivism go in the theory of entrepreneurship (original) (raw)

I argue that an interpretivist philosophic approach has been neglected in modern entrepre-neurship research, but that such an approach may be most appropriate to the individualist nature of entrepreneurship. Realist meta-theories suffer from issues of paradigm incommensurability that may be at the heart of the present difficulties in defining and delin-eating the field of entrepreneurship. Interpretivism offers a potentially groundbreaking philosophical alternative that highlights the source of entrepreneurship in individuals rather than in abstract markets, emphasizing emergence rather than presuming opportunity existence. In this paper I defend interpretivism against its critics and revisit the nature of entrepreneurship through this lens. I show that process theories of entrepreneurship are aligned with interpretivist meta-theory, and that their explicit adoption of an interpretivist foundation may better facilitate theoretical progress. Interpretivism is the scientific philosophy that social order—including markets and the entrepreneurial processes within them—emerges from intentional action and interaction at the individual level. This view has been overlooked as management scientists continue to try to employ natural scientific philosophy to social concepts. These predominant functionalist approaches have so far been fruitless in producing a robust general theory—a framework that captures all types of entrepreneurship. Theories such as the IO nexus have afforded a way forward, but they continue to run into challenges concerning foundational definitions, underlying assumptions, and their implications. Without an assumptionally strong and coherent foundation, theoretical development in this still-nascent field of research has been hindered. The very definition of entrepreneurship, for example, remains remarkably elusive, with some postulating that an adequate definition may be unattainable. Resolution to these issues is not likely to come from a faithful adherence to the predominant meta-theories. A paradigm shift may be required. Here I put forth interpretivism as, perhaps, a more appropriate meta-theoretical foundation for the study of entrepreneurship, pointing to their alignment along individualist lines. Interpretivist meta-theoretical frameworks hold to assumptions of nominal-ism, rationalism, and voluntarism, and generally favor more ideographic methods of research. They accept abstract concepts such as economies, organizations, social groups and structures as concepts only, and reject them as ontologically 'real' entities. While epistemologies vary within the broad classification, interpretivists typically presume that knowledge emerges from both experi-ential (exogenous) and imaginative (endogenous) sources. Interpretivist approaches highlight human intentionality as a key determinant of behavior, in addition to other internal and external causal factors, whereas entrepreneurship's dominant functionalist paradigm often ignores or rejects intentions in favor of deterministic causes alone. In short, interpretivism sees the social world