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...
Then Shane and Venkataraman added to that in 2000 and made things clearer for anyone who wanted to study entrepreneurship, but not everything has been addressed. There is still an elephant in the sense that quite a few people have touched pieces of the issue and formed an opinion of what the issue is based on that, but yet they do not see the whole picture. Because every person has touched a 'different part of the elephant,' they all have their own ideas without actually having an honest understanding of what entrepreneurship theory should be. Until they can come together into a cohesive unit and bring their research together as well, there will be continued problems with this kind of subject. Gartner's (2001) article, though, helps to shed light on the problem and remind those who study the issue that they must be open to the idea that there might be more to the subject than they realize, and other researchers can show them that.
Gartner, William B. (2001, Summer). Is there an elephant in entrepreneurship? Blind assumptions in theory development. Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice. Baylor University.…
