Bygrave on the State of Entrepreneurship Research
17 December 2008 at 11:35 am Peter G. Klein 3 comments
| Peter Klein |
William Bygrave surveys the field and concludes that it’s “dominated by quantitative research driven almost exclusively by statistical analysis with SPSS and that qualitative research is seldom published in the leading entrepreneurship journals. He regrets that it is almost impossible to get purely empirical paper published in the leading journal. He pleads with journal editors and their review boards to become less narrow minded and much more pluralistic.”
Bygrave’s assessment is valuable but I think limited by its focus on the “traditional” entrepreneurship journals (e.g., JBV, ETP, SBE). Newer journals such as the SEJ and, more important, the entrepreneurship research that increasingly appears in the top mainstream strategy, organization, and economics journals tends to have a different, and more varied, character.
Entry filed under: - Klein -, Entrepreneurship, Methods/Methodology/Theory of Science.
Organizations and Markets 
1.
Jüri Saar | 17 December 2008 at 2:06 pm
“Newer journals such as the SEJ and, more important, the entrepreneurship research that increasingly appears in the top mainstream strategy, organization, and economics journals tends to have a different, and more varied, character.”
I would be interesting to know, what you consider to be some of the more interesting work being published in these journals during the last few years. Any chance of getting a short and illustrative “suggested reading” list?
2.
Peter Klein | 17 December 2008 at 6:19 pm
Jüri, that is a tough question to answer, there are so many good ones…. The November 2007 Journal of Management Studies, a special issue on entrepreneurship and the firm, is a good place to look. Lazear’s 2004 and 2005 papers on the “jack-of-all-trades” approach are important and influential (and published in the AER and a labor economics journal). McMullen and Shepherd in the Feb 2006 AMR is thought-provoking. But these are just off the top of my head.
3.
spostrel | 19 December 2008 at 10:25 pm
Maybe the problem for Bygrave is that he published, as it says in his abstract, “two precious articles.”
OK, it’s a cheap typo joke but you don’t usually see one’s like that in academic papers.