WP117.DOC

BLINDED BY THE CITES? HAS THERE BEEN PROGRESS IN

ENTREPRENEURSHIP RESEARCH

by

Howard E. Aldrich and Ted Baker

Department of Sociology, CB 3210

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 27599

Published in Donald Sexton and Raymond Smilor, Entrepreneurship 2000

email: Howard_Aldrich@UNC.EDU

Home Page: http://www.unc.edu/~healdric/

Paper prepared for presentation at the Fourth State of the Art in Entrepreneurship

Research Conference, sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation Center for Entrepreneurial

Leadership, Inc. Kansas City, Missouri, May 10-11, 1996.

DRAFT: Ok to cite but do not quote: we may change our minds!

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Introduction

At the first two state of the art conferences on entrepreneurship, authors were

highly critical of entrepreneurship research, faulting it for sloppy thinking and shoddy

methods. At the third conference, Aldrich (1990) noted that the field had expanded its

repertoire of research designs and analytic techniques, but he concluded his review on an

ambiguous note. Rather than directly answering the question of whether entrepreneurship

research had made progress, Aldrich (1990) argued that the answer depended upon one’s

assumptions about the scientific and normative structure of the field. He posed three

viewpoints: a unitary, normal science view; a multiple paradigm view; and a totally

pragmatic view. In our paper for this year’s conference, we examine the past five years’

research, using his three-part framework.

Our title reflects our feeling that much of the dialogue about entrepreneurship

research methods is grounded in researchers’ unreflective situational applications of only

one of the three viewpoints. Some researchers never waver in their viewpoint, whereas

others vary their position, depending on the situation. Entrepreneurship researchers often

accuse one another of not measuring up to the standards set by more established fields.

Do researchers pay too much attention to norms followed by the top-ranked organizations

and economics journals? Has the gap between entrepreneurship and other fields,

identified by earlier critics, been closed? Answers to these questions require both

information on trends in methods and a perspective from which to interpret the trends.

Three Views

The three possible views of the norms governing entrepreneurship research are

based on different assumptions about what counts for “progress” in the field of

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entrepreneurship research and how it can be achieved. First, people with a unified or

normal science view hold as their ideal the accumulation of empirically tested hypotheses

and well-grounded generalizations, developed through rigorous research designs,

quantitative data, and the latest statistical techniques. Based on strong theories,

investigators test hypotheses to replicate and confirm previous findings, using negative

findings and disconfirmations of previous work as a signal that theories must be

modified. Continuity with the past is the order of the day (Aldrich et al, 1994). Units of

analysis are carefully chosen to reflect theoretical considerations, rather than by the

pragmatics of data collection. Sampling issues are given high priority, as investigators

search for the bounds to their empirical generalizations (McKelvey and Aldrich, 1983).

Achieving a unified scientific program requires disciplined adherence to accepted

practices, and support may be found in training institutes and the institutional discipline

imposed by senior members in the field. However, the entrepreneurship field lacks an

institutionalized set of programs teaching a consistent paradigm to new scholars. Instead,

recruits are trained by established academics from a variety of disciplines and are exposed

to a wide variety of standards and methods, and they pursue research which frequently

articulates poorly with the contributions of their entrepreneurship colleagues or

predecessors. However, some of the leading institutions in the field, particularly Babson

College and the Journal of Business Venturing, may be providing some pressure towards

coherence through standard setting, dialogue between scholars, and the building of

community.

Second, people with a more eclectic view of entrepreneurship research emphasize

the importance of diversity in theories and methods. Low and MacMillan (1988: 154-

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155), for example, noted the wide variety of disciplines involved in entrepreneurship

research. Rather than lamenting disagreements between various subgroups of

entrepreneurship researchers, advocates for diversity welcome the invigorating effect of

multiple perspectives and methods on research. If we adopted a multiple paradigms

perspective, we would neither expect nor wish for complete convergence in methods.

Instead, different sub-fields would have different standards against which to judge

research design and execution, and perhaps even their own journals. Encouraging

diversity, however, brings with it some dangers, because subgroups may not only

construct too narrow a slice of the field, but also waste efforts emphasizing how they

differ from one another. If subgroups develop into coherent and self-contained entities,

they may irrevocably fragment the field.

If there are multiple, disparate conferences and journals with widely varying

standards, the scholarly community may become fragmented, and member of different

camps may fail to communicate with one another. Within the field of business strategy --

another young, empirical, multi-disciplinary field -- we have seen the development of

institutions that parallel the role played in the entrepreneurship field by the Kauffman-

Babson Conferences and JBV: the Strategic Management Society Annual meetings and

the Strategic Management Journal. The strategy field may be a useful benchmark for

assessing developments in entrepreneurship research.

Third, if we adopt a more pragmatic approach, focusing on the importance of the

issues addressed, the question of research methods assumes a secondary role. From this

point of view, methods should be chosen to match researchers’ purposes, and these will

change as conditions change. In entrepreneurship research, pragmatism may be oriented

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toward either policy or practitioner concerns. Current socio-political factors will govern

what issues are researched, and changing conditions, not abstract methodological

concerns, will drive research practice. Positive values will be placed on topicality,

uniqueness, and usefulness, rather than adherence to a confining code of research

practices. Indeed, rewards for peculiarity and topical value can create feedback loops that

destroy researchers commitment to normal science norms, promoting greater pursuit of

uniqueness rather than continuity (Mone and McKinley, 1993).

We’ve suggested that academic journals and conferences can help to either pull

together or fragment a research field. Similarly, in a pragmatically-oriented field, the

relationship between academic and popular journals and the intermingling of authors and

topics may shape the influence that practitioner concerns have on scholarly coherence.

As we summarize previous reviews and present our findings for trends over the

past five years, we will use these three views as benchmarks against which to evaluate the

results.

Previous Reviews

In three previous state of the art conferences, thirteen authors of seven articles

reviewed research methods. At the first conference, Paulin, Coffey, and Spaulding (1982)

found more formal research on entrepreneurship than they had anticipated, and they also

discerned a trend toward more systematic, empirical methods. They were fairly critical of

the state of the art, however, arguing that much of the “knowledge” in the field was based

on untested or narrowly based anecdotal wisdom. They called for more diversity in

research methods; specifically, they advocated more field studies and experiments,

longitudinal studies, and rigorous statistical analyses. Peterson and Horvath (1982)

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appealed for more cross-national studies, as well as more precise and meaningful

definitions of research questions. In contrast, Perryman (1982) defended the imprecision

and chaos of the emerging field, arguing that entrepreneurship research was still in its

“pre-science” phase.

At the second conference, Wortman (1986) cast a withering glance on the state of

the art, and pronounced it decidedly inferior to the research methods being used in other

social science fields. Not only did he excoriate entrepreneurship researchers for their

weak statistical analyses, but he also advocated a single unifying framework that would

integrate entrepreneurship and small business research. At the same conference,

Churchill and Lewis (1986) took a more encompassing and sympathetic view of the field,

using a systematic review of Babson Conference papers and 10 academic journals to

build empirical generalizations about entrepreneurship research methods. They seconded

Perryman’s (1982) observation that the field was still in its infancy and hence dependent

on exploratory research and simple statistics. Churchill and Lewis introduced a theme

that will also concern us: a practice-oriented discipline has some difficulties that more

theory-oriented disciplines do not have. We will have more to say about their

classification scheme for research methods -- shown in Table 1 -- in the next section.

The other methods paper at the second conference, Carsrud, Olm, and Eddy (1986),

reprised Wortman’s theme: investigators were spending excessive amounts of time on

descriptive statistics and case studies, using unsophisticated methods. They also

proposed that the field adopt a unified research paradigm, employing a comprehensive

categorization scheme for variables, although they shied away from nominating any

particular framework.

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At the third conference, Aldrich (1990) replicated Churchill and Lewis’s (1986)

analysis, examining all articles in the 1986 and 1989 Babson Conference volumes and in

the same ten academic journals, plus the Journal of Business Venturing. As we review

his results again in our Table 2, we simply mention now that he found strong continuity in

research methods across all three conferences. Entrepreneurship research was still very

much a mono-method field, dependent on mailed surveys and other questionnaire-based

techniques, with fairly unsophisticated data analyses. Field-based research designs were

notable by their absence.

Beginning in the late 1980s, other voices were added to those of state of the art

reviewers, calling for more explicit attention to research methods in entrepreneurship. In

1986, Churchill and Lewis found only six papers -- all presented at conferences between

1981 and 1984 -- that dealt with methodological improvements in the field. In our review

of the literature, we found that at least 16 journal articles published between 1987 and

1993 that either provided general reviews of methods or advocated a particular remedy to

what were seen as methodological deficiencies. We think the heightened level of self-

consciousness about how research is carried out indicated that some investigators were

trying to push the field toward a more “normal science” posture, whereas others with a

more multiple-paradigms view were resisting attempts at “premature closure.”

Bringing Us Up to Date

To maintain continuity with past reviews, we used the same strategy as our

predecessors in organizing and defining the field of entrepreneurship research. The

Babson College Entrepreneurship Conference is still the premier venue for disseminating

unpublished research on entrepreneurship, and we examined all the articles and

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summaries in the 1990 and 1994 conference volumes. We found 77 papers in the 1990

Babson volume and 111 in the 1994 volume.

In 1990, Aldrich (1990) followed Churchill and Lewis’s procedures for choosing

the 10 academic journals which published a large number of entrepreneurship articles,

and he added the Journal of Business Venturing (JBV), which began in 1985. These

journals fell naturally into two groups: Group I, which published primarily empirical

articles, and Group II, which published primarily conceptual or “think” pieces. The

journals are listed in Appendix A, classified into the two groups, along with the number

of articles found in each source. Because our focus is on research methods, we decided to

eliminate Group II journals from our analysis, and hence only articles from Group I

journals appear in our tables.

We searched the abstracts of all journals in the ABI/INFORM data base, as was

done for all three previous conference papers. We used the same key words as in Aldrich

(1999): entrepreneur, corporate venturing, and intrapreneur, as well as variations on all

three words. We did not search on “small business.” Our search uncovered 164 articles

in the Group I journals. Our goal was to include all articles published between 1991 and

1995, but Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice (ETP) did not publish a 1995 issue until

after our search was completed, and the Journal of Business Venturing’s 1995 volume

was not in our library at the time of the search..

Many authors reviewing entrepreneurship methods have made implicit

comparisons to “mainstream” organization studies journals, and so we decided to include

a specific comparison group of journals in our study. The Administrative Science

Quarterly and the Academy of Management Journal are the oldest and most prestigious of

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the organization and management journals, and so we examined all the empirical articles

they published in 1990 and 1995. All articles were coded, regardless of subject matter.

As they publish almost no non-empirical articles, these journals provide a good standard

of comparison for examining research methods. As luck would have it, there was no

overlap between the articles found in our Group I search and the articles coded from ASQ

and AMJ.

Trends in Methodological Focus

We used the classification scheme of Churchill and Lewis (1986), as modified by

Aldrich (1990), and added several new categories, as shown in Table 1. The added

categories signify several changes in the field. First, in the 1990s ETP began publishing

case studies of entrepreneurial firms as a special section of the journal, evidently as a

service to instructors looking for classroom discussion material. Other journals have also

begun publishing case studies that cannot really be classified as ethnographies, because

they are not based on extensive field work inside the organizations. Second, in addition

to a category called “armchair, or observational and contemplative theory building” in the

last several reviews, we added a new category of literature reviews as an

acknowledgment of a more disciplined type of conceptual article. Literature reviews are

an explicit effort to summarize what other authors have said about a specific topic, rather

than an attempt at model building or commentary. Third, the occasional papers on

research methods in the 1980s apparently spawned a more concentrated effort by authors

in the 1990s to deal with methodological issues, and so we separated such papers out

from other literature reviews. Fourth, the Babson College Conference organizers have

taken note of initiatives by the Kauffman Foundation and others to put entrepreneurship

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education on a more solid empirical footing, and entrepreneurship journals have also

begun paying more attention to that topic. To maintain continuity with earlier analyses,

we have not included literature reviews and methods/entrepreneurship education topics in

the percents reported in Table 2 and subsequent analyses.

TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE

How much has changed since the last state of the art conference? Not much, as

shown in Table 2. Indeed, research design and sources of data have not changed very

much over the past 15 years, other than a decisive break with journalistic and armchair

methods by the journals after 1985. In contrast to a 69 percent share of journal articles in

1981-84, journalistic and armchair articles made up only a 35 percent share in the most

recent period. In keeping with the Babson Conference’s mandate, almost no journalistic

or armchair papers were accepted in either 1990 or 1994, and both Administrative

Science Quarterly and Academy of Management Journal effectively bar such papers.

TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE

Despite repeated calls in previous state of the art reviews and journal articles on

methods, survey research has maintained an almost constant share of Babson Conference

papers over the past decade, with a 78 percent share in 1986 and a 77 percent share in

1994. Among the entrepreneurship journals, survey methods also maintained their

prominent place, rising only slightly from 43 to 48 percent, after a sharp jump from 1981-

84 (when non-empirical methods predominated). A casual glance at the last two columns

of Table 2 might give one the impression that entrepreneurship journals and ASQ/AMJ

shared the same enthusiasm for survey research, but the nearly similar proportions of

survey-based articles is misleading.

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In addition to publishing almost no journalistic and armchair papers, the two

general organizations journals included a very large number of empirical papers using

publicly-available data. Whereas only 9 percent of articles published in the

entrepreneurship journals used publicly-available data, 43 percent of the articles

published in ASQ/AMJ did so. With so many papers using data from sources accessible

to all investigators, ASQ/AMJ have built a pool of empirical results that facilitates

replication and disconfirmation research by other scholars. By contrast, most

entrepreneurship researchers still work with proprietary data they’ve collected

themselves, mainly through questionnaires

Ethnographic research has actually declined in significance at Babson

Conferences, and it has fared poorly in the journals, as well. After a modest showing at

the 1986 and 1989 Babson meetings, ethnographers took a holiday in the 1990s, with only

2 reporting at the 1990 and 1994 meetings. Ethnographic studies were also unpopular

with both entrepreneurship journals and authors of ASQ/AMJ articles: only about 3

percent of the papers published in either set featured ethnographic research. The

continued isolation of ethnography reveals the futility of passionate exhortations to

unwilling researchers -- commentators have repeatedly urged that more such research be

conducted, and almost every reviewer at previous state of the art conferences urged

“more, more, more.”

Simulations and experiments are another category of methods that reviewers have

proposed to counter the field’s dependence on surveys, but they have never appeared in

any of the entrepreneurship journal articles covered by reviews. Low and MacMillan

(1988) noted that experiments were extremely rare -- they cited only 2 successful ones

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from the 1980s. They have also rarely made appearances at Babson conferences. By

contrast, about one in twelve of the papers published in ASQ/AMJ have been simulations

or experiments, mostly testing social-psychological hypotheses.

“Case studies” takes account of non-ethnographic empirical reports on single

firms or industries, typically prepared for teaching purposes. A handful of such studies

have been presented at Babson conferences, and ETP has been including them in a special

appendix to some issues of the journal. The mandates of ASQ/AMJ rule out case studies

in this mold.

Three categories of papers and articles are included in the coding scheme of Table

1 but are not shown in Table 2, because we wanted to make the percentages shown in the

table as comparable as possible to earlier reviews: literature reviews, and methods and

entrepreneurship education reviews. At the 1990 Babson meeting, one methods review

and two entrepreneurship education papers were presented, and in 1994 these numbers

had increased to one literature review, three methods reviews, and 14 entrepreneurship

education papers. Entrepreneurship journals began featuring such articles in the 1990s, as

we found 10 literature reviews, 7 methods reviews, and 10 papers on entrepreneurship

education. If this trend continues, we hope the next state of the art conference will devote

more attention to a detailed examination of these categories. In subsequent sections, we

will have more to say about the methods reviews.

Trends in Research Design

Research design issues involve not only data collection strategies but also

strategies affecting the scope of a research project: what topic to focus on, what

populations to study, how to define a sampling frame, and so forth. Authors of papers for

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the first and second state of the art conferences discussed such issues, but did not collect

data on them. For the third conference, Aldrich (1990) presented data on nine indicators,

which we have replicated and extended for our analysis: (1) personality traits versus

other foci; (2) inclusion of a non-US nation; (3) inclusion of more than one nation; (4)

reliance on an identifiable sampling frame; (5) identification of a homogeneous versus

non-homogeneous population; (6) longitudinal versus cross-sectional design; (7) sample

response rate; (8) number of cases in the study; and (9) the statistical methods used. We

added a new indicator: (10) probabilistic or random sampling versus other procedures.

For the two premier entrepreneurship journals -- ETP and JBV -- we also

collected information on four new indicators that directly address the extent to which

investigators are following a normal science strategy: (11) extent to which the study

replicates previous research; (12) presentation of explicit hypotheses; (13) tests for the

reliability of measures; and (14) reporting of negative findings. We also collected the

same new information for the top-rated organization and management journal, ASQ.

We only present results from the Group I journals identified in Appendix A, as

well as Babson, because they published almost all the empirical papers in

entrepreneurship. The coding scheme is shown in full in Appendix B.

TABLE 3 ABOUT HERE

Changes in some aspects of research design have occurred, as shown in Table 3,

but we are more impressed with the continuity between our results and those of the last

round.

We chose only one topic for detailed investigation -- the extent to which articles

focused on the traits of entrepreneurs versus other themes. Debate over the usefulness of

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studying entrepreneurial traits has been raging for over a decade, and a small committed

community of researchers continues to publish traits research. At the Babson meetings,

personality traits research has fluctuated between 13 and 20 percent of papers presented,

with the most recent conference (1994) at 14 percent. Only 15 percent of the

entrepreneurship journal articles between 1985-90 emphasized an entrepreneur’s

personality traits, but between 1991-1994, 31 percent of journal articles focused on this

theme. ETP had the highest percent, 44, but JBV was not far behind, at 32 percent, and

the JSB was close by, at 26 percent. In sharp contrast to the entrepreneurship journals,

AMJ/ASQ published almost no traits articles -- only 5 percent fell into this category.

We are puzzled by the rise in traits articles in entrepreneurship journals, especially

because so many articles critical of traits research have been published over the past

decade (Gartner, 1988, 1989; Aldrich and Wiedenmayer, 1993). Moreover, traits articles

have not increased as a proportion of Babson conference papers. All three

entrepreneurship journals for which the case base is sufficient to allow separate

computation of percents have at least one-quarter of their papers in the traits category,

and so we must look to some cross-journal factor for an explanation. Perhaps traits

articles, because they fall into the psychological paradigm, are easier to review and more

likely to win favor with reviewers than non-traits articles.

Less parochial than before?

At the first state of the art conference, calls were issued for more cross-national

research, and since then, international participation at Babson conference meetings has

steadily increased. Several initiatives over the past decade have expanded international

involvement, such as Babson College’s holding two of its conferences overseas. Sue

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Birley and Ian MacMillan’s founding of the Global Entrepreneurship Conference, with its

associated edited volumes (Birley and MacMillan, 1992, 1995), was explicitly designed

to involve more non-US scholars and their students in entrepreneurship research. The

fruits of these efforts are apparent in the steady increase in the proportion of papers and

articles reporting research on a non-US nation. For Babson, the percent began at 33 in

1986, dropped to 28 in 1989, but then rose to 31 in 1990 , and climbed to 43 by 1994.

Similarly, 18 percent of the journal articles in the 1985-90 period included a non-US

nation, growing to 40 percent in the 1991-95 period. By contrast, AMJ and ASQ are

much more parochial journals, with about 82 percent of their articles focusing only on US

cases.

As in previous years, a much lower percentage of articles are truly comparative --

including more than one nation -- than they are international (using a non-US nation). In

1986, only 5 percent of the Babson papers were comparative, but by 1995 this percentage

had more than tripled, to 16 percent. In the 1985-90 period, only 4 percent of the journal

articles were comparative, and again this percentage more than tripled by 1991-95, to 14

percent. Comparative studies made up only about 8 percent of AMJ and ASQ’s articles.

The gap between the high percentage of international contributions and the relatively low

percentage of comparative contributions can be attributed to the slow growth of

collaborative relations and alliances between scholars from different nations. As Aldrich

(1990) noted, enthusiasm for entrepreneurship research has become global, but

researchers have lagged in responding to Peterson and Horvath’s (1982) observation that

cultural values are critical in accounting for national differences in rates of

entrepreneurship. Perhaps now that about two out of five entrepreneurship papers use

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non-US data sets, the pace of international collaboration will quicken. AMJ/ASQ might

benefit from adopting the more international spirit of the entrepreneurship journals.

Sampling

Sampling procedures are central in a normal science view of entrepreneurship.

The normal science paradigm emphasizes building empirical generalizations by

identifying the scope conditions under which a principle holds (McKelvey and Aldrich,

1983) and collecting data from populations that are homogeneous enough to allow

generalization to apply to most of their units. Two interrelated decisions are involved:

what population is an appropriate context in which to test an hypothesis, and what

sampling frame will generate a representative sample of that population or populations.

These decisions clearly affect a third decision, as well: what statistical techniques to use.

Most modern statistics are based on the assumption that a representative sample has been

drawn from a larger, limited population. Another research design decision that affects

statistical decisions concerns whether to use a cross-sectional or longitudinal design, as

dynamic analyses are usually more complicated and trouble-prone than static ones.

State of the art reviews at the first two conferences did not explicitly address

sampling and population definition issues, but authors implied that researchers had not

been as systematic as the should have been. Many of the studies reviewed were based on

convenience or quota samples, rather than being drawn from identifiable sampling

frames. In 1990, Aldrich presented evidence showing that 62 percent of the journal

articles in 1985-90 used an explicit sampling frame, compared to only 35 percent of the

1989 Babson papers. As shown in Table 3, there has been no change in the sampling

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frames of journal articles since then, whereas Babson conference papers have been

inconsistent, rising and falling over the years.

For 1990-95, we expanded the classification of sampling frames to include four

sub-categories: use of a sub-national frame, and use of a national or international frame,

use of a random sample or complete census of the identified population, and choice of a

cross-sectional or dynamic data collection strategy.

We were interested in whether investigators were attempting to generalize their

results to entire nations, rather than limiting their claims to local or regional populations.

For Babson, no trend is apparent between 1990 and 1994, as the percent of papers with an

identifiable sampling frame dropped from 63 to 47 percent, and the percent with national

or international frames dropped from 41 to 16 percent.

For entrepreneurship journals, we can make two comparisons -- to the Babson

conferences, and to AMJ/ASQ articles. First, as we noted, the journals have been very

consistent in the percent of articles reporting an explicit sampling frame: 62 percent in

each of the two study periods. Within the 1991-95 group, the percent of

national/international frames in journals was lower than the 1990 Babson Conference but

higher than the 1994 meeting. Second, AMJ/ASQ clearly enforce a different set of

standards on their submissions than do the entrepreneurship journals, as not only did 87

percent of their papers report an identifiable sampling frame, but also almost half -- 49

percent -- used a national or international frame. This striking difference means that

readers of AMJ/ASQ articles can more easily envision generalizing the results of what

they read to a national level than can the readers of entrepreneurship journals. Whether it

is reasonable to do so, however, depends on two other sampling decisions: did the

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investigators identify a reasonably homogeneous population or set of populations, and

was the sample truly representative of the population or populations?

Population definitions are also critical to investigators’ abilities to generalize from

their results. Investigators who draw illustrations of their ideas indiscriminately from

diverse industries and those who draw samples of firms from convenient lists are

operating on the principle that all organizations are pretty much alike (McKelvey and

Aldrich, 1983). Investigators who devote entire articles to a case study of a single

organization and who disdain explicit comparisons with others are operating on the

principle that each organization is unique. By contrast, some investigators explicitly limit

the scope of their generalizations to specific types of organizations, such as venture

capital firms, semiconductor manufacturers, or California wineries.

AMJ and ASQ again stand out in comparison to entrepreneurship journals and

Babson Conference papers: 46 percent of their articles identified a homogeneous

population, with about 80 percent of such articles focusing on a single population and the

rest on multiple homogeneous populations. Using an explicit sampling frame

substantially increases the likelihood that a homogeneous population will be identified by

AMJ/ASQ authors: with no frame, 24 percent of the articles involved a homogeneous

population; with a sub-national frame, the percent increased to 47 percent; and with a

national or international frame, the percent increased further to 61 percent. Within the

entrepreneurship journals, there was no association between the type of frame used and

the resulting population. Taken together with the strong emphasis in AMJ/ASQ on using

an identifiable sampling frame, these results are another manifestation of the strong

normal science norms underlying AMJ/ASQ’s editorial strategy.

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The contrast with entrepreneurship journals and Babson papers is clear-cut: the

percent of entrepreneurship journal articles reporting on homogeneous populations

actually fell from 19 percent in 1985-90 to 16 percent in 1991-95, whereas Babson’s

papers have fluctuated between 15 and 29 percent over the past decade. In contrast to

AMJ/ASQ papers, Babson papers were about equally divided between single and

multiple homogeneous populations, and the small fraction of entrepreneurship journal

articles with a homogeneous population was slanted toward multiple populations.

On the third sampling issue -- the representatives of the sample -- the distinct

differences noted above between the different journals and Babson disappeared. We

ranked sampling decisions from (1) not a probabilistic, random, or systematic sample; (2)

a probabilistic, random, or systematic sample; and (3) a complete census of the identified

population or populations. As shown in Table 3, almost half of the articles in all sources

did not draw a sample from the population or populations identified by their frame.

Indeed, truly probabilistic or random samples made up only between 10 and 24 percent of

the studies between 1990 and 1995.

The fourth sampling issue involves deciding between cross-sectional and

longitudinal data collection, taking account of resource constraints and problems of

access to data from more than one time point. In previous methodological reviews,

almost every author decried the scarcity of longitudinal designs and dynamic statistical

analyses. Aldrich (1990) thought he detected some hopeful signs in his review of

research between 1985 and 1990, but a closer look at his coding scheme revealed that he

had been too generous in crediting investigators with longitudinal designs. Accordingly,

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we started over again with our coding of the 1990-95 period, as shown in Table 3, where

we have entered asterisks for columns from previous years.

Very few entrepreneurship conference papers or articles used an explicit dynamic

design: 9 percent in 1990 and 16 percent in 1994 for Babson, and only 5 percent for

entrepreneurship journals in 1991-95. AMJ/ASQ articles, by contrast, were much more

likely to use dynamic designs, with one-quarter of all papers making use of longitudinal

data sets. The considerable gap between AMJ/ASQ and the entrepreneurship journals

cannot be fully explained by resource constraints on entrepreneurship investigators, we

believe, because entrepreneurship journal articles are now using samples that are

equivalent in size to those in AMJ/ASQ, as we note below. Moreover, entrepreneurship

researchers are more likely than AMJ/ASQ authors to use cross-national designs, which

undoubtedly involve more logistical and organizational problems than one-nation

designs. Instead, the difference in use of longitudinal data may stem from differences in

how problems are conceptualized and how much attention is given to the fit between

theories of action and the data needed to test such theories.

Replication and hypothesis testing

Normal science norms concerning “progress” strongly support four other

practices: replicating previous studies before placing much confidence in their results,

formulating explicit a priori hypotheses to avoid data-dredging and dust-bowl empiricism,

checking the reliability of one’s measures whenever possible, and publishing negative or

disconfirming results rather than only supportive ones. Woo, Cooper, and Dunkelberg

(1991) demonstrated the value of replication when they found that a common typology –

craftsmen versus opportunists – did not stand up to closer scrutiny. These practices are

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held up as a standard against which to judge research, but note that they also have the

effect of slowing down the introduction of innovative topics. Authors who adopt a more

pragmatic, topical orientation may dismiss these practices as stultifying and antithetical to

creativity in entrepreneurship research.

As an experiment, we attempted to code articles in ETP, JBV, and ASQ along

these four dimensions. (Because the process was time-consuming and we felt ASQ was

the most stringent benchmark, we did not code AMJ articles on these dimensions.) The

coding process itself was quite revealing, because we discovered how the norms

regarding professional discourse differ across fields. ASQ editors and reviewers

obviously expect to see precedents clearly listed and hypotheses formally stated, whereas

we often had to wade through paragraphs of prose for such information in ETP and JBV.

Most articles in all three journals made some mention of theoretical precedents for

their research -- 86 percent of ETP/JBV and 88 percent of ASQ papers -- but ASQ

authors were more likely to claim a direct replication of previous work than were

ETP/JBV authors. We found two types of direct replications. First, a handful of papers

specifically replicated a prior finding by choosing the same population, the same

concepts, the same indicators, and examining the same relationships. Second, and more

typical, authors attempted to confirm the form of a relationship that was previously

observed, such as the pattern of density dependence in founding rates, or a finding that

early adopters of an innovation are more central in a network than late adopters. A key

criterion was that an author not only cited general precedents for examining a problem but

also cited specific empirical generalizations as justification for testing a proposition

22

(again). We found that 32 percent of the ASQ and 12 percent of the ETP/JBV articles

fulfilled this criterion.

More common were authors who used earlier papers as justification for applying

an older idea to a new domain, arguing that a concept or principle was important, without

citing previous empirical generalizations. The new study may have created hypotheses

that don’t specifically refer to a past study, using concepts that cover a wide range of

previous work, with indicators unique to the new study. About 56 percent of the ASQ

and 74 percent of the ETP/JBV papers fell into this category.

Even the relatively small percent of papers we classified as non-replications (14

percent of ETP/JBV and 12 percent of ASQ) made at least passing reference to earlier

work, but in a general way and without regard to any empirical generalizations. Most

papers went beyond such superficial acknowledgment of the past, however. Authors of

ASQ papers were especially advantaged, as they had more freedom to write long

introduction than authors in the other journals, giving them more space to develop their

concepts and models.

Hypothesis testing practices differed dramatically between the two sets of

journals: 83 percent of the ASQ papers contained explicit hypotheses, compared to 48

percent of ETP/JBV papers. In the roughly one-half of the ETP/JBV articles without

explicit hypotheses, we found that authors posed questions that were descriptive and did

not predict the form or sign of an expected relation. The researchers provided rather

diffuse theoretical discussions which did not lend themselves to hypothesis development.

Among papers that were not replications, only 14 percent spelled out hypotheses. Among

23

papers that were indirect replications, 61 percent reported explicit hypotheses, and 100

percent of the papers that were direct replications developed formal hypotheses.

Without clearly specifying hypotheses, authors cannot really know if their results

confirm or disconfirm previous findings. In any case, as we show in Table 3, very few

published papers reported findings that conflicted with the expectations authors laid out

in their theoretical introductions. Our criterion for negative findings was that 50 percent

or more of the measures of association reported had to be non-significant, and only 17

percent of the articles in both sets of journals contained such a pattern. Among articles

with explicit hypotheses, 23 percent reported negative findings, compared to only 6

percent of authors who’d failed to set out formal expectations (2 out of 35 articles). This

pattern did not differ significantly between ASQ and ETP/JBV.

Determining whether a study actually obtained negative findings was difficult, a

sign that norms surrounding research practice are still in flux, even in the most

prestigious journal in organization studies. Even if authors explicitly stated their

hypotheses, their results and discussion sections often did not refer back to which

hypotheses were confirmed and which were not. Often, authors concluded their papers by

ignoring what they had said in their theory review section. Even in ASQ, authors who

presented formal, numbered hypotheses sometimes ignored them when discussing their

results, e.g. Greve (1995)!

Our next assessment of normal science practices was whether authors tested the

reliability of at least some of their measures. Reliability was easiest to code when

personality traits or other individual characteristics were studied, for two reasons. First,

authors tended to adopt measures with previously documented reliability. Second,

24

authors studying traits or using individuals as units of analysis and data collection tended

to use multiple item questionnaires, allowing the collection of multiple indicators, and

thus their raw data lent itself to easy manipulation. When organizations were the unit of

analysis, authors apparently either assumed that their data were reliable, or ignored this

issue. We noticed that when organizational records were used, for individuals or

organizations, investigators paid almost no attention to their reliability, or to the use of

multiple indicators.

Two other problems came to our attention. First, authors sometimes extensively

discussed data reduction techniques, such as factor analysis or cluster analysis, but then

did not examine the reliability of the resulting new measures. Second, even studies that

reported reliability tests for some variables omitted it for many others. For example,

researchers performed reliability checks on individual-level traits but not for group or

organizational level characteristics.

About 31 percent of the ETP/JBV papers reported reliability checks on at least

some of their measures, compared to 42 percent of the ASQ papers. We found a strong

association between authors’ attempting to replicate prior research and doing at least

some testing for data reliability. Reliability testing was performed in 7 percent of the

non-replications, 37 percent of the indirect replications, and 50 percent of the direct

replications.

Without data from prior years, we cannot tell whether the patterns uncovered here

are a continuation of past practices or points in a long-term trend. We have results that

will encourage some normal science advocates but disappoint others. Almost all authors

made some pretense of linking their work to the past, but only a minority of

25

entrepreneurship researchers situated themselves squarely in a stream of empirical

generalizations that they intended to replicate. About half of the entrepreneurship papers

developed formal expectations or hypotheses, an encouraging sign but one that pales by

comparison to ASQ’s standard. Few studies disappointed their authors, as over 80

percent reported confirming findings, thus providing few clues as to what to discard for

the next round of research projects.

Samples: response rates and sample size

Regardless of whether investigators chose cases from an identifiable sampling

frame, many nonetheless treated the resulting target population of respondents or cases as

a “sample.” They then reported how many cases they obtained information from, out of

the original target population, enabling them to report a response rate for their efforts. In

Table 3, we report response rates for all studies using surveys or public data bases. Some

studies did not report response rates, possibly biasing our figures upwards.

As Aldrich (1990) noted, response rates to entrepreneurship surveys have never

been very high, and that tradition continued in 1990-95. Response rates for studies

presented at Babson conferences have fluctuated somewhat over the past decade, and may

have become worse. In 1986, 60 percent of the studies reported response rates below 50

percent; in 1989, it was 67 percent; in 1990, 70 percent, and in 1994, 66 percent. For the

journals, the latest period was a step backward, as 74 percent reported response rates

below 50 percent, compared to 50 percent in 1985-90. At these levels of response from

the target population, serious questions arise about possible sample bias. Only a small

percent of the studies reported tests for possible sample selection bias.

26

Response rates for ASQ/AMJ were higher than for the entrepreneurship journals

in 1990-95, as 60 percent of their papers reported rates of 50 percent or better. Because

we have no data for AMJ/ASQ from the earlier period, we don’t know whether this is an

improvement. We do note that only 8 percent of the articles reported response rates

below 25 percent, compared to about one-third of papers published in the

entrepreneurship journals or presented at Babson in recent years.

In calculating the number of cases on which a study was based, we included not

only surveys but also ethnographies and case studies, to maintain continuity with reviews

at previous conferences. At the last state of the art conference, sample sizes were larger

in Babson conference papers than in the entrepreneurship journals, and Aldrich (1990)

thought he detected a trend toward increasing sample sizes. His predictions were

premature, however, at least insofar as Babson is concerned. In 1990, 60 percent of the

Babson papers worked with samples under 100, and in 1994, the percent had actually

risen to 67.

In contrast, the number of cases analyzed in journal articles increased substantially

between 1985-90 and 1991-95. In the earlier period, about 60 percent of the studies were

based on fewer than 100 cases, and the figure dropped to only 38 percent in the latest

period. Indeed, the study size distributions for entrepreneurship journals and AMJ/ASQ

are statistically indistinguishable, especially in their tails -- both have about the same

percentage of very small and very large scale studies.

Statistical methods

At the first state of the art conference, Paulin, Coffey, and Spaulding (1982) were

critical of entrepreneurship researchers’ lack of statistical sophistication, but Perryman

27

(1982) adopted a more restrained tone, arguing that the field was still in an immature

phase. At the second conference, Wortman (1986) wrote an extremely critical paper,

scolding researchers who settled for crude descriptive methods and challenging the field

to borrow methods already in use in other social science fields. Carsrud, Olm, and Eddy

(1986) also criticized the descriptive orientation of many papers they reviewed, whereas

Churchill and Lewis (1986) reprised Perryman’s (1982) more benevolent tone, citing the

field’s immaturity. At the third conference, Aldrich (1990) noted that investigators

continued to rely heavily on simple descriptive statistics, but he detected a trend toward

greater use of significance tests and models assessing the strength of associations between

variables.

In preparing our report for this conference, we took account of the evolving nature

of analytic techniques and added two new categories to our classification scheme: “other

regression and discriminant analysis” and “non-recursive, event history, or formal

network models.” These categories will ultimately prove their value when they are used

again at the next conference.

If we use articles in AMJ/ASQ as a standard against which to judge the field, then

the statistical-sophistication gap noted in earlier critiques is still enormous: 81 percent of

the papers in AMJ/ASQ use ordinary least squares or more sophisticated methods to

analyze their data, compared to only 34 percent in entrepreneurship journals and 39

percent at the 1994 Babson conference. At the other extreme, only 6 percent of the

articles in AMJ/ASQ rely on simple percents or raw numbers, compared to 35 percent in

the entrepreneurship journals and 28 percent at the 1994 Babson conference.

28

If we use changes from an earlier period as a standard against which to judge the

present state of the field, then the statistical-sophistication gap may be closing, although

progress has been slow. Simple percents, raw numbers, or no numbers at all dropped

from 53 percent at the 1986 Babson conference to 28 percent in 1994. In

entrepreneurship journals, use of methods such as regression analysis and other methods

that explore the form of associations between variables increased from 28 percent in

1985-90 to 34 percent in 1991-95. More sophisticated forms of analysis -- beyond

ordinary least squares -- have also appeared, including event history analysis.

Babson as an Incubator

Have the Babson College conferences been playing a role as an incubator for

papers that are revised and then published in entrepreneurship journals? Aldrich’s (1990)

observed that the level of statistical sophistication at the most recent Babson conference

was nearly the same as in the empirically-oriented entrepreneurship journals. If Babson

conferences have served as incubator, then they may have contributed to the

standardization of research practices in entrepreneurship, as well as creating a core

community of researchers who can play gatekeeper roles in the profession and enforce its

emerging standards.

We investigated this question by asking the 20 researchers most active at Babson

from 1990 to 1994 whether they had published their Babson papers. The 20 authors’

names appeared 151 times in the Babson Conference Proceedings between 1990 and

1994. We sent them letters, asking whether their Babson papers had been published, and

where. Fifteen people replied, representing 117 Babson papers. Forty percent of the

papers had been published, 6 percent were under review, 6 percent were still in process,

29

and 3 percent were in limbo, with the authors having lost track of them (co-authors may

have been working on them). The rest were unpublished and no longer being worked on.

Of the 47 papers that had been published, 14 were in JBV, 10 in books or

monographs, 3 in Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 3 in the Journal of

Business Research, and the remainder were scattered over 13 other journals. We have no

baseline from which to judge the relative success of these authors, but three points stand

out. First, over half of the papers presented have either been published or were still under

active revision. These authors have treated the Babson conferences as an opportunity for

the first presentation of their ideas, rather than as an end it itself. Second, since its

founding in 1985, JBV has become the premier outlet for entrepreneurship research, and

it has been the journal these Babson participants have considered first when preparing

their work for publication. Third, the diversity of outlets for entrepreneurship research is

indicated by the range of 16 journals in which the 47 articles were published, and there

are many others that occasionally publish entrepreneurship papers. Diversity enhances

the opportunities for specialized or unusual research to find an outlet, but it also

complicates the process of developing agreed-upon norms of research practice. JBV’s

rising prominence in the entrepreneurship journal market may allow it to act as a core

arbiter of standards for the field.

Because we think JBV plays an important role in providing some boundaries and

coherence to the entrepreneurship research field, we examined its citation patterns during

the period from 1989 to 1994. As a comparison from a similar multi-disciplinary field,

we examined citation patterns for Strategic Management Journal (SMJ) over the same

period. We found that JBV has consistently published research which depends heavily (at

30

least in its citation patterns) on prior entrepreneurship research. Since 1989, the median

annual percentage of citations each year from articles published in JBV to other articles

published in JBV has been 21 percent. The median annual percentage of citations from

JBV to articles from entrepreneurship outlets in general has been 46 percent (based on

individually listed publications in Journal Citation Reports). In contrast, the analogous

percentage for cites from SMJ articles to other SMJ articles was only 10 percent. This

suggests that by some combination of scholarly behavior and editorial policy, JBV is

playing an important role in keeping members of the entrepreneurship research

community attuned to work done by other members of this community. If it is difficult to

publish in JBV without coming to terms with prior entrepreneurship research, and if

scholars remain committed to JBV as an outlet, then some level of coherence and

progress will emerge over time.

Ethnography

Ethnographic or direct field observations allow researchers to uncover the

meaning of patterns in social processes and to detect subtle processes and interpret

interactions which participants may be unable to articulate in interviews. Unlike mailed

surveys or archival records, ethnographic methods allow researchers to pursue intriguing

lines of thought they had not considered, prior to entering the field. Themes in the

anthropological literature mesh very well with the concerns of entrepreneurship

researchers, including the processes of accumulation knowledge and skills and gaining

access to resources. Ethnographic work is extremely time-consuming, however, and

requires a significant “methodological investment” (Stewart, 1991).

31

At the third state of the art conference, only 13 true field studies were discovered:

11 from the Babson conferences and 2 more in the HBR. None formally tested

hypotheses, about half were explicitly longitudinal, and the number of cases observed was

quite small in all but one case. In our search, we found only 6 true field studies on

entrepreneurship topics: 2 from Babson and 4 in JBV. (We found 5 non-

entrepreneurship ethnographic articles in AMJ (3) and ASQ (2) while preparing the data

for our comparative analysis.) Five of the six reported no statistics at all, one was

explicitly longitudinal, one was cross-national, and two were conducted outside of the

United States.

The Spring 1995 issue of ETP – which arrived too late to be included in the data

presented in Table 2 -- was a special issue on field research on firm-level

entrepreneurship, containing 10 papers. Five of the papers were conceptual overviews of

other people’s work, three were based on interviews and surveys, one was based on

interviews and records, and only one was based on actual non-participant observation.

Thus, only one of the papers would have been classified as “ethnographic” in our scheme.

Unlike many of the other interview-based studies we reviewed, the interviews and

surveys in the special issue were mostly in-depth, semi- or unstructured, and conducted

face-to-face with the respondents. Four of the five studies were of established firms,

mostly large ones, and focused on management issues.

Reviewing the empirical papers in the special issue, Guth (1995: 170) argued that

the field methods used have a paradoxical characteristic: “they are useful in making

groundable and creative contributions to corporate entrepreneurship theory, yet produce

results of low inherent credibility and breadth of applicability.” He argued for a normal

32

science approach, in which such studies would be used to develop good theory, which

could then be tested by more rigorous research designs. Stewart et al. (1995) demurred,

arguing that field researchers could archive their data and make it available to others, thus

creating a pool of results that could lead to cumulative generalizations. However, they

also noted the serious impediments to using other people’s field data.

Calls for more field research have been as ubiquitous as the clamor for more

longitudinal studies, and with the same consequences: still more calls for action but

almost no actual research heeding the calls! Despite repeated affirmations of the value of

field work, the number of ethnographic studies found through our search strategy dropped

by about half from the last conference. The lack of ethnographic research cannot be

attributed to ignorance of its value or the methods for carrying it out, as a large and

growing literature exists on such methods. Applications are also visible in other

management and organization fields, such as among organizational culture researchers

(Frost et al, 1991). Perhaps the declining significance of ethnographic studies is a result

of a professional reward system that places a higher value on projects that have a faster

payoff than fieldwork-based projects.

Community-building

The coherence of an academic field depends on the socialization of scholars to its

current research values. If a paradigm exists, it needs to be accepted and reinforced as a

research world-view. We examined two aspects of socialization: training of new cohorts

of scholars, and the consequences of research conferences and leading journals.

From a normal science viewpoint, generations play a key role in the consistency of

scientific progress: consistency as one generation trains the next, and progress as the new

33

cohort learns lessons, established generalizations, and methods which were not available

to their teachers. We therefore identified the 16 researchers whose names appeared most

frequently across our entire database of entrepreneurship articles. We then split the group

into the 8 scholars receiving their terminal degrees prior to 1985, and 8 completing their

graduate work more recently. We then compared the papers written by members of the

two groups (n=86) on all of the characteristics for which we had previously coded each

article. We expected to see generational progress. To our surprise, there were very few

substantial differences between the work of the junior and senior cohorts. The only

difference worth mentioning was that the older cohort was a little more likely to use

relatively sophisticated statistical techniques than was the junior cohort. Our finding

directly contradicted our expectation of inter-generational progress and reinforced our

sense of infrequent normal science victories in entrepreneurship research.

At several points in our analysis, we have cited the importance of the Babson

College Conferences in providing opportunities for professional socialization and

standard setting that may affect which of the three views – normal science, multiple

paradigms, or pragmatism – gains supremacy in the field. Thus, we were curious about

pattern of participation at Babson: do the same people attend year after year, forming a

closed community; do most people attend only once, severing any possible continuity

between years; or, is the picture more complicated?

We compared scholars writing in entrepreneurship journals with those writing

papers for Babson. Over 60 percent of the people whose journal articles we discovered in

our review also wrote papers for Babson during 1990-1994. Of the 448 people whose

names ever appeared on the Babson roster as an author, 323 attended (or co-authored

34

papers) once, 77 attended twice, 30 attended three times, 12 attended four times, and 6

people attended all 5 meetings. Our data are right censored in that the closer we get to

1994, the fewer the opportunities for people who began attending recently to have

attended more than one time. However, for our purposes, we ignore this subtle but

important methodological point. Of the 119 people who attended in 1990, 34 (29

percent) were in attendance again 4 years later, in 1994. Of the 201 people in attendance

in 1994, 93 (46 percent) were “new” in the sense of not having participated in any of the

preceding 4 years.

Babson participants form a loosely-knit community of scholars that contains a

small core of people who attend almost every meeting, thus maintaining continuity across

the generations of attendees. Many people attend one year and skip the next, but the

long-term hold of Babson is apparent in the 29 percent of 1990 attendees who were

present again in 1994, even though most had missed at least two meetings somewhere in

between. Babson may have its greatest impact on the newcomers who show up each year

and participate -- as they must -- in the rituals involving giving a paper and receiving

constructive criticism on it.

We have already noted that the most active Babson participants have turned nearly

half of their papers into published articles or book chapters, and if we extrapolate from

their experiences, a very high proportion of the articles in entrepreneurship journals must

have begun their lives at the Babson meetings. Thus, the norms and standards made

manifest in presentations and discussions at Babson may account, to some extent, for the

patterns we have reported. About 39 percent of the authors whose papers we found in our

keyword search for this research did not attend any of the Babson conferences between

35

1990 and 1994. They comprise a sizable minority whose non-participation may reflect

disagreement with the premises of the Babson conferences -- fostering a sense of shared

community among entrepreneurship scholars -- or perhaps a stronger attachment to other

research communities. Further research is required -- perhaps of an ethnographic nature -

- to discover if there is one voice or many represented at the Babson meetings.

Summary and Conclusions

We have suggested that reasonable people might adopt one of at least three

perspectives - normal science, multiple paradigms, or pragmatic - in considering whether

entrepreneurship research has made much progress over the past several years. The

perspective we adopt both suggests what features are important in defining a coherent

field of research, and focuses our attention on whether progress is being made in the

features which define coherence. In this section, we discuss features which suggest

coherence from each of the three perspectives, and review the evidence in favor of

progress for people adopting each of the three.

Normal Science

Previous reviewers have mainly adopted a normal science view when they

examined gains and shortcomings of entrepreneurship research. Because we wished to

build cumulatively on the past, we have also spoken predominantly in the voice of normal

science. To recapitulate, coherence, from the normal science perspective, consists in

pursuing research that results in the cumulation of findings over time, both within and

across individual scholars' work. Cumulation is generated when a group of scholars

comes to accept as a world-view the discipline of a research paradigm that defines both

36

what are legitimate and interesting questions and what are legitimate methods for

attempting to answer them.

Progress from this perspective has been limited, in comparison both with past

work and with more general, high-quality organizational research. The entrepreneurship

literature has become somewhat more comparative and international, a little more

longitudinal, and less likely to engage in purely speculative or purely descriptive work.

Statistical sophistication has gotten slightly better -- at least at the low end. The work we

reviewed is still dominated by survey research, and response rates have not improved.

Empirical articles in entrepreneurship journals are using bigger samples, often as large as

those found in the top organizations journals. Entrepreneurship articles are more likely

than work in ASQ and AMJ to utilize non-US and cross-national data. However, papers

in ASQ are more likely to test hypotheses explicitly, and to directly replicate prior work.

The top organizations journals are more likely than the top outlets in entrepreneurship

research to publish articles which are statistically sophisticated, use explicit and national

or international sampling frames, to identify homogenous populations, and to provide

dynamic analyses of longitudinal data.

Multiplicity and Diversity

We have argued that there is no well-developed paradigm creating coherence in

entrepreneurship research. Multiple voices, expressing multiple points of view and

methods, contribute to the body of work reaching the outlets we examined. Coherence, in

a field supporting multiple paradigms, suggests the existence of multiple communities of

scholars accepting and committed to research world-views that dictate which questions

are interesting and what methods are legitimate. In a normal science view, multiple

37

paradigms might appear to exist either in a somewhat chaotic “pre-paradigmatic” state of

development, or when a new paradigm is positioned to replace an old, but is waiting out

the retirement of scholars wedded to the old world-view.

Multiple paradigms might be expected in entrepreneurship research, because

scholars might come to the entrepreneurship field with commitments to their home

disciplines, such as strategy, economics, sociology, psychology, and others. The closest

evidence we found of multiple paradigms was reflected in research which we have

labeled "traits" or "not traits." Research focusing on psychological traits of entrepreneurs

has been reviewed and sharply criticized in several prominent articles. The authors of

these critiques have called for an end to traits research, and have tried to cleanly

distinguish traits research from other scholarship. However, as we have seen, "traits "

topics are continuing to generate significant numbers of papers, and several authors have

published rejections of the earlier critiques. If one measure of a paradigm is the topics it

defines as interesting, then we might infer that traits research is generated from a

paradigm which is evolving separately from the paradigm which underlies other

behavioral and "rates" research. We have suggested as well that traits research is more

likely to discuss and evaluate the reliability of its measures, and to utilize established

psychological measures and scales. If paradigms define what methods are legitimate, we

might also infer that a traits paradigm continues to emerge.

However, the evidence for multiple coherent paradigms is weak, at best. Once we

identify the potential for a "traits" paradigm, for example, we are unable to convincingly

label its competition any more suggestively than as "non-traits." Entrepreneurship

research continues to support a diversity (not to say a cacophony) of voices, and to

38

produce a great deal of research which often does not articulate easily with other research

defined in any paradigm.

Within the chorus of multiple voices, nevertheless, there are some signs of

coherence, at the level of the research community. A substantial core of scholars write

papers for Babson year after year, and continue to develop those papers over time. Ideas

introduced at Babson find later outlet as journal articles far more frequently than we had

imagined. Coherence and progress are also evident in the emergence and improvement of

leading entrepreneurship journals. In particular, JBV provides a favored forum for a wide

variety of scholars, including one group which is committed to Babson as an incubator,

and another group which seems to eschew participation at Babson. ETP has taken on an

important role as an outlet for literature reviews and self-reflection by entrepreneurship

researchers.

Pragmatism

Two main expressions of pragmatism among entrepreneurship scholars are

apparent in orientations toward either policy issues practitioner issues. A great deal of the

research we reviewed was energized by the belief -- debated in some circles, but largely

accepted among entrepreneurship researchers -- that entrepreneurial firms generate an

inordinate proportion of job growth in this country, and that they provide an powerful

outlet for innovation (see the special issue of Small Business Economics in which

Harrison (1995) took on his critics). An important group of researchers has tried to focus

on separating what are called truly "entrepreneurial" businesses from "small business,"

"lifestyle businesses" or simple "self-employment" and "income replacement"

motivations to found new firms. In general, we find that a great deal of entrepreneurship

39

research shares an underlying concern with the macroeconomic effects of entrepreneurial

activities. This is often implicit, but is sometimes quite blunt as when Low and

MacMillan (1988) suggested that entrepreneurship research ought to focus on explaining

and facilitating the role of new enterprise in furthering economic progress.

In normal science, a paradigm helps to structure research by defining what

questions are interesting. The implicit orientation to the macro effects of entrepreneurial

activities similarly serves to define what is and what is not interesting, and may thereby

help to lend some coherence. A number of questions one might imagine as important

research topics are not of much interest in the major entrepreneurship research outlets; for

example: entrepreneurship as a temporary career adaptation, non-profit entrepreneurship,

entrepreneurship and American ideals of freedom versus bureaucracy, entrepreneurship as

coping with restricted opportunities, the relationship between entrepreneurship and social

mobility, the study of nascent entrepreneurs and organizations, and business disbandings.

By defining such topics as uninteresting, the loose macro-economic impact orientation

helps to support greater focus and coherence around the topics which are seen as

important.

The second form of pragmatism is an orientation toward practitioner concerns.

Many entrepreneurship research articles conclude with commentary on how the results of

the research might inform entrepreneurial practice. The proliferation of teaching case

studies, particularly in ETP, along with more papers on entrepreneurship education, is an

indication that academic researchers are making progress in trying to be relevant to

practitioners. Readers of journals such as INC. and Nation's Business will find that some

articles written for practitioners are indeed informed by academic research. But the vast

40

majority of "how to" articles, and of topics assumed interesting to practicing

entrepreneurs bear little relationship to the more common topics of academic

entrepreneurship research. Some researchers have examined the lack of fit between topics

of academic concern and the expressed needs and problems of practicing entrepreneurs

(Banks and Taylor, 1991). There is little documented evidence that practicing

entrepreneurs find useful -- or are even aware of -- much of the research which claims to

hold strong implications for practice.

We find it ironic, but not surprising, that a great deal of entrepreneurship research

is of little short term value to practitioners. In particular, the macro focus which

energizes so much recent research may work against research of value to individual

entrepreneurs. Few entrepreneurs can afford the luxury of ruminating on the powerful role

of entrepreneurship in the greater economy. In contrast to academic researchers, most

entrepreneurs need to be closely oriented to the relatively micro concerns of their own

businesses.

The development of good theoretical frameworks and explanations, which is

difficult enough as it is, might not survive the additional burden of needing to be

continually topically useful to practitioners buffeted by the waves of fashion and short

term shocks of the economy. Good theory probably requires the freedom of researchers

to focus on questions which are interesting mainly in theoretical terms. The ability to

generalize findings over time and extend explanations to new topics requires the

development of good theory, as well as some degree of separation from insistent demands

for constant practical relevance.

41

Conclusions: A Managed or Evolutionary Process?

We have argued that from each of three perspectives: normal science, multiple

paradigms, and pragmatism, a case can be made for researchers' contributions to the

coherence of entrepreneurship research and progress over time. It seems clear to us that

attention to scientific standards, an openness to competing interests and approaches, and a

concern with practical relevance all continue to contribute to entrepreneurship research.

But we conclude that, from all three perspectives, progress has been quite limited.

Judging from normal science standards, entrepreneurship research is still in a very early

stage. If there is no single powerful paradigm, then there is even less evidence for

multiple coherent points of view. Finally, entrepreneurship research is of questionable

current topical concern and value to most practicing entrepreneurs.

Taking one step back, the state of the art appears to be a multiplicity of

perspectives, little structured by multiple paradigms, but finding some progress through a

variety of relatively uncoordinated sources. We reviewed some limited methodological

progress from a normal science perspective. We argued that ETP and especially JBV

have helped to bring coherence, as have Babson and the committed community of

scholars who participate in its forums. An orientation to macro issues has limited the

potentially boundless diversity of research topics. The academic community has taken

several concrete steps toward reaching out to practicing entrepreneurs and those who

would join the entrepreneurial ranks.

Despite some marks of progress, the unstructured multiplicity of perspectives and

approaches has left a number of thoughtful commentators frustrated. Part of the "methods

talk" -- the increased number of articles reflecting on entrepreneurship research methods -

42

- is plainly oriented to finding better ways to deal with this multiplicity. Two competing

arguments have emerged. One group of commentators seeks coherence through the

friendly imposition of core definitions (Bygrave, 1989) whereas the other group argues

that we should worry less about definitions and focus more on accurate descriptions of

the populations we study (Katz et al., 1993; Vanderwerf and Brush, 1989). Motivating

both groups is a belief that following either set of prescriptions will help build a common

ground of coherent research in which progress will become easier and quicker. Common

definitions make it harder to talk past one another or to define away inconsistencies.

Common sets of data descriptions make findings more open to replication, or to

empirically-sound reinterpretation through alternative perspectives.

Neither group of commentators has had much of an influence on research practice.

For example, some researchers are still prone to invent their own definitions of key

concepts, and sometimes even to argue that their definitions (even of basic terms like

"entrepreneur") are superior to those offered and used by all previous researchers. Our

evidence also suggests that there has been limited progress toward improving the

description of the samples and populations studied. The sampling frames investigators

have chosen are often obscure, sampling methods are ad hoc, and there has been no

significant improvement in the identification of homogenous populations. Further,

entrepreneurship scholars have continued, relative to other organizational analysts, to

make little use of public data sets, which are by definition available for replication and re-

analysis.

Admonitions to change practice in entrepreneurship research seem to have little

effect, regardless of the status of their source. The field lacks the sort of overall

43

coherence which might allow a limited group of leading figures to exert strong intentional

direction on the field. Rather, what coherence exists depends on a mixture of legitimate

perspectives. Progress comes in scattered bits from a variety of sources, and is much

closer to being an evolutionary process than one which is managed, or manageable by

leading scholars.

Brush and VanderWerf (1989), in a review of the emergence of other successful

scientific fields, noted that progress tends to be achieved without consensus on

definitions. Progress has tended to come after groups of researchers converge on study of

simple, well defined “entities” or populations. But for us, their most important point is

that convergence on what is studied comes because researchers are attracted by the initial

progress made by early investigators. The convergence is spontaneous rather than forced.

What lesson do we learn from history? Influence comes from exemplary research,

not from the propagation of rules or admonitions. The field will be shaped by those who

produce research that interests and attracts others to build on their work. This may also

provide an antidote to the frustratingly repetitive and ineffective calls we hear to do

"more ethnographic work" and more "longitudinal studies." Those who believe they

know the path forward need to do such work themselves, and provide exemplars which

attract others to follow.

44

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