Entrepreneurship Safari

Entrepreneurship as a field of study is relatively new but the concept of entrepreneurship can be traced to the work of the Richard Cantillon in the 18th century and has emerged as a fast-growing line of inquiry during the last 30 years. While researchers present different conceptions of entrepreneurship, they highlight particular features that provide only a partial view. The result is that scholars lose theoretical clarity and policy makers lack conceptual guidelines for designing and evaluating the impact of their entrepreneurship policies. Entrepreneurship Safari presents a model that integrates the different phenomena implicit in previous theoretical and empirical work on entrepreneurship. It provides a framework: to understand both the phenomena underlying the different conceptualisations of entrepreneurship and the relationships among those phenomena; to make explicit the theoretical assumptions in terms of units and levels of analysis implicit in the disciplines and theories that are studying the entrepreneurship phenomenon. By mapping out the different entrepreneurship related phenomena and their associated theoretical assumptions, this book provides a template for scholars and policy makers to understanding the connections and overlap of different phenomena and their distinctive impact at the individual and societal levels. The authors focus on the identification of and links between different phenomena related to entrepreneurship according to different perspectives. The book presents the overall model based on previous theoretical and empirical work on entrepreneurship. It analyses each entrepreneurship phenomenon and its associated disciplines and levels of analysis. And it concludes with directions for future research and policymaking.