Entrepreneurship in William B. Gartner\'s

Entrepreneurship

In William B. Gartner's (2001) entrepreneurship article, he addresses the unstated assumptions that are seen in the development of entrepreneurship theory. There are six specification decisions that are included in entrepreneurship research and that were talked about by Low and MacMillan back in 1988. These are: level of analysis, focus, purpose, theoretical perspective, methodology, and time frame. Another work, conducted by Shane and Venkataraman in 2000, is used to help bring clarity to the issue at hand. The field of entrepreneurship research, according to Gartner (2001), needs communities of scholars who identify with specific issues and the research questions that surround them. The main concern of the paper is that the theoretical perspectives and the choice of them in entrepreneurship is largely dependent on assumptions that are made about the other perspectives. In this way, all of the perspectives are linked.

The article found that most entrepreneurs are not conscious of the assumptions that they make, and this can be a serious downfall when determining how they are going to go about entrepreneurship and what they plan to get from it. A strong paradigm is needed, according to Gartner (2001), if entrepreneurship is going to be correctly and accurately developed as a field of research. Scholars who pursue similar interests and form a community can help to create this valuable paradigm. If there is nothing cohesive about the field of entrepreneurial research, those who study in that field will have no real reasons for what they study and have no real point to what their studies allegedly have to show. Discussing and debating assumptions, both conscious and unconscious, is the first step toward bringing cohesive and more structured thought to the field of entrepreneurial research, according to Gartner (2001).

Evaluation

This particular article focuses mostly on what others have said about the issue at hand, which is entrepreneurship and the blind assumptions of it that so many people make when they are studying it. Other researchers in the past have found that much of what is studied where entrepreneurship is concerned comes from the misguided opinions of those people who have good ideas but are not sure how to go about examining them and putting them into action. In other words, the article addresses the belief that those who have studied entrepreneurship are not really organized into a collective group, so they study many different things and do not have a way to put their studies together with others studies to paint a better pictures of entrepreneurship theory. With that being the case, there really is no actual theory of entrepreneurship, nor will there be one until these people can come together.

Another concern is that the theories of entrepreneurship that have been espoused in the past have been so overloaded with both conscious and unconscious assumptions that none of them have had any kind of staying power. Other studies have picked them apart, poked holes in them, and found reasons why they were unacceptable, but those same studies have not been able to come up with theories that worked better or that made more sense, or that avoided the assumptions of the previous studies. This is a conundrum for those who are legitimately interested in studying entrepreneurship, because the need for a theory is strong. It will help to define the study of entrepreneurship in a way that has not happened before, and it will also help to stop those who are studying anything and everything under the guise of entrepreneurship from wasting time and resources that should rightly go to those researchers who are truly interested in how entrepreneurship works, what it is about, and how people who choose to get into it actually figure out their goals and make their choices.

Reflection

From a personal opinion point-of-view, I think that this is a good article and that it has a lot of good information in it. The researcher is right in that others have talked about this issue in the past and discussed the different ways that assumptions can come into the picture. It is also true, though, that no researchers have completely cleared up the issue or come up with an entrepreneurship theory that really works and that addresses the assumptions that are so often made. Instead, the entrepreneurial theory research that has taken place in the past has generally focused on one assumption or area of theory and ignored the others, but this is not logical. In order for a theory to be complete it has to take in all areas of assumption, because one area is affected by all of the other ones.