A REALIST PERSPECTIVE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP: OPPORTUNITIES AS PROPENSITIES

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ramoglou, Stratos; Tsang, Eric W. K.
• 署名单位: University of Southampton; University of Texas System; University of Texas Dallas
• 刊物名称: ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0363-7425
• DOI: 10.5465/amr.2014.0281
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 410-434
• 关键词: 2010 AMR DECADE; DISCOVERY; creation; MARKET; field; RECOGNITION; management; KNOWLEDGE; science; promise

摘要

The idea that entrepreneurial opportunities exist out there is increasingly under attack by scholars who argue that opportunities do not preexist objectively but are actively created through subjective processes of social construction. In this article we concede many of the criticisms pioneered by the creation approach but resist abandoning the preexisting reality of opportunities. Instead, we use realist philosophy of science to ontologically rehabilitate the objectivity of entrepreneurial opportunities by elucidating their propensity mode of existence. Our realist perspective offers an intuitive and paradox-free understanding of what it means for opportunities to exist objectively. This renewed understanding enables us to (1) explain that the subjectivities of the process of opportunity actualization do not contradict the objective existence of opportunities, (2) acknowledge the category of agencyintensive opportunites, (3) develop the notion of nonopportunity, and (4) clarify the ways individualsmight make cognitive contactwith opportunities prior to their actualization. Our actualization approach serves as a refined metatheory for guiding future entrepreneurship research and facilitates the revisiting of subtle conceptual issues at the core of entrepreneurial theory, such as the nature of uncertainty and nonentrepreneurs, as well as the role played by prediction in a scientific study of entrepreneurship.