Glancing backwards; looking forwards

Glancing backwards; looking forwards

Having recently taken over editorship of the IJEBR from Sue Marlow I would like set out my vision for the journal over the next few years. It is obviously in the interests of our community of scholars to improve the status of the entrepreneurship and small firm journals in general. Becoming editor provides an opportunity to look back to what has been achieved since the IJEBR was launched in 1995 and look forward to how the journal may develop in the future. The journal has published over 150 papers to date and in my retrospective I have examined the topics on which those papers are based. I have used the titles and keywords to categorise each of the papers that have appeared in the journal between 1995 (Vol. 1 No. 1) and 2005 (Vol. 11 No. 3). My objective in carrying out this brief review of the journal is to identify key issues that have been discussed so far and to use that as a basis for suggesting future directions (see Sarasvathy, 2004).

Six special issues (SIs) have been published in the IJEBR since its launch and these give some indication of topics which are of particular interest to the research community. The first SI in 1998 (Vol. 4 No. 2) was edited by David Deakins and contained five papers dealing with “Learning and the entrepreneur”. The second “Enterprise and Learning Conference” provided eight papers for issues Vol. 5 No. 3 and Vol. 5 No. 4 (1998), edited by Alistair Anderson and David Deakins, which focused on entrepreneurial learning and entrepreneurial education. The third SI, edited by Jan Rath and Robert Kloosterman, contained eight papers examining the topic of “The economic context, embeddeddness and immigrant entrepreneurs”. Panikkos Poutziouris, Lloyd Steier and Kosman Smyrnios edited the fourth SI in 2001 (Vol. 10 No. 1/2), which contained nine papers dealing with entrepreneurship in family businesses. In 2004 (Vol. 10 No. 4) David Deakins edited four papers which examined the distinctive nature of “rural entrepreneurship”. Finally, in 2005 (Vol. 11 No. 2) Pauric McGowan and Colette Henry brought together five papers dealing with “female entrepreneurship”. In total, these six special issues contained 39 papers out of the 154 papers published over the last 11 years.

Excluding these six special issues, I then categorised the remaining papers into groups. I certainly do not claim that my approach was particularly objective because some papers could have fitted a number of categories. For example, “Entrepreneurial traits of undergraduate students at selected South African tertiary institutions” (Louw et al., 2003) could have been classified as “entrepreneurial traits”, “entrepreneurial education” or “international entrepreneurship”. Based on the title, keywords and the abstract I judged that this paper was essentially concerned with “entrepreneurial traits”. Similarly, rather than have a number of categories containing only one paper such as “management buy-outs and buy-ins” (Wright et al., 2000), I grouped this paper with “finance for SMEs” because such activities are based on access to venture capital. Concentrating on the conventional papers (non-special issue) my categorization revealed that “entrepreneurial types” incorporating both psychological and social elements was the most common topic with ten papers (see Table I). This was followed by nine papers dealing with “international entrepreneurship” and eight papers examining “entrepreneurial strategy”.

Grouping papers from the six special issues together with the individual papers provides a very different set of results. Entrepreneurial learning (incorporating entrepreneurial education) was represented by 19 papers in total. This is followed by 14 papers on ethnic entrepreneurs, and 13 dealing with the family firm. I am certainly not claiming that this is a definitive listing of papers which have appeared in the IJEBR. However, I do believe that this summary provides a useful overview of those topics which are of concern to the academic community. It might, for example, be interesting to compare this list of topics with other UK or US journals dealing with entrepreneurship.

Perhaps it is more fruitful to examine topics which appear to be under-represented in Table I. Since becoming interested in the study of entrepreneurship in the late 1990s I have been intrigued by the absence of studies dealing with the process of business start-up. This certainly seems to be reflected in the IJEBR with only two papers explicitly examining new venture creation. Other under-represented areas which are generally regarded as of particular significance to entrepreneurship, include marketing, exporting and innovation all of which appear in only three papers. Even entrepreneurial networking (six) and e-business (five) receive less attention than I might have anticipated. There were also five papers adopting a “critical” or “reflexive” approach to entrepreneurship and, as I discuss below, this is certainly an issue which I intend to give a higher profile in the future. I would also like to encourage more focus on intrapreneurship not only in small firms, but also in larger organizations as well as in the public and third sectors.

Table I

Summary of paper topics

Opens in a new window.

Another of my objectives for the journal is to bring together entrepreneurship theory and more general organizational theory. In the USA, William Gartner and his various colleagues have been at the forefront of exploring such linkages (Gartner, 1985; Katz and Gartner, 1988; Gartner et al., 1992; Carter et al., 1996). In the UK, this tradition has recently been explored by examining links between managerial behaviour and small firm performance (Sadler-Smith et al., 2004). A wide range of authors have proposed frameworks for understanding new venture creation (Van de Ven et al., 1989; Vesper, 1990; Katz and Gartner, 1988) there is little evidence to suggest a common pattern of events. Carter et al. (1996) draw on Weick’s (1979) theory of organizing as the conceptual basis for their exploration of business start-ups. The process of new business creation is analogous to the concept of “enactment” which refers to the generation of specific patterns of interlocking behaviours (Weick, 1979):

In broad terms, a view of organization formation as “enactment” would assume that entrepreneurs who were involved in behaviors that demonstrated to others that the emerging business was “real” would be more likely to create an organization (Carter et al., 1996, p. 154).

Ideas associated with enactment were recently utilized to analyse the creation of a public-private business venture (Jones, 2005). The Phoenix case study illustrates the difficulties of team-based entrepreneurship particularly when team members have apparently competing objectives. The case also represents at attempt to utilize the concept of enactment (Weick, 1979) to analyse activities associated with new business creation.

I am also keen to promote greater critical reflection on the nature of entrepreneurship and enterprise. Most authors concentrate on the positive links between ideology and enterprise (Chung and Gibbons, 1997). Sceptical voices about the role of entrepreneurship and the activities of owner-managers tend to come from outside the discipline. For example, Ogbor (2000) adopts a postmodernist approach to analyse entrepreneurial texts:

By exposing the use of language and metaphor (e.g. entrepreneur as “he”, as essentially masculine, with super-normal qualities), we can also see how these texts create myths about the entrepreneur, such as reflecting archetype of white male hero.

In contrast, Baines and Wheelock (1998) focus on the “household” rather than the firm or the entrepreneur as the unit of analysis in an attempt to identify institutionalized power relations. Their purpose is to demonstrate that the family is a key economic institution in the emergence of “modern” micro firms:

The household as an institution plays an essential role if we are to gain an understanding of the whole economy, including in-between or hybrid organizations (Baines and Wheelock, 1998, p. 581).

Dependence on the family is a key element in providing small firms with flexibility via the “decommodified” nature of employment relations. The family has many advantages over market-based relations including the unique nature of rewards and sanctions that are not open to firms organized according to bureaucratic principles. The study by Baines and Wheelock (1998) was based on a comparison of two disparate UK cities (Newcastle and Milton Keynes). A common feature in the survival of micro-firms in both cities was that “flexibility” was primarily spouse-based. Further, the division of tasks was “overwhelmingly” along gender lines with women, even when co-owners, providing services that supported their husband’s craft skills. Family-based firms have a “special kind of hierarchy” that draws heavily on the altruism and loyalty of partners.

Adopting a traditional critical perspective, Armstrong (2001, p. 525) points out that in its “classic Marxist usage” ideology refers to the distortion of reality, by a dominant class, in a way that legitimates or obscures the power and material interests of that class. Armstrong sets out a powerful critique of enterprise ideology as portrayed by successive UK governments and recently enthusiastically adopted within higher education. Technology transfer is seen to be a particular area of weakness within the UK which restricts the ability of industry and commerce to exploit outputs from the knowledge-creation sector. While this diagnosis is regarded as questionable, the main thrust of Armstrong’s critique relates to the prescription which involves larger does of enterprise. In particular, both policy-makers and academics have a poor understanding of what might be termed “entrepreneurship” and the “entrepreneurial process”. With reference to the Science Enterprise Challenge, a £50 million government investment to aid technology transfer, Armstrong (2001, p. 526) comments on the nature of enterprise education:

Although this is now a large-scale industry, the ontological status of entrepreneurship as a mystery wrapped in an ideology ensures that controversy will continue over whether such teaching is possible at all.

Armstrong’s broadside against Science Enterprise Challenge is then extended to include the teaching of entrepreneurship in general. His assertion that the content of such courses is based on “conventional business school disciplines” such as finance, marketing and human resource management (HRM) is almost certainly true. Armstrong claims that the main benefit of such courses is that participants are given an introduction to the language and culture of business. This critique also includes what are described as “the more recent action learning programmes for new entrepreneurs” (Armstrong, 2001, p. 539):

Even more than conventional courses on entrepreneurship, however, such an approach is about the acquisition of enabling skills. The entrepreneurial impulse itself is taken for granted.

Armstrong’s case against government policy and the advocacy of entrepreneurship within higher education is powerfully and convincingly argued. At the same time, to suggest that all entrepreneurial education is both misguided (ideological) and misplaced (concentrating on skills) ignores the contribution that many initiatives make at both and individual and societal level.

Finally, I would like to introduce the papers which comprise this issue of the IJEBR. We have two papers which very much reflect core themes identified in Table I (female entrepreneurs and international entrepreneurship). Neergaard, Shaw and Carter examine the impact of gender on the generation of social capital in small firm networks. The authors develop a conceptual model based on a review of literature associated with small business networks. Social support theory, like social network theory, concentrates on structural attributes such as size, density and frequency. However, Neergaard et al. argue that it is much more important to examine the composition of social networks and the nature of resources available to individual actors by means of four types of support: emotional, companionship, tangible and informational. Therefore, understanding the interaction of gender and social capital means that researchers must take account of structural attributes (density, range, anchorage, reachability), interaction (intensity, frequency, durability, direction) and content (emotional, companionship, informational and tangible support). Literature reviewed by the authors indicates that male-female “networking” varies according to these three dimensions. Future research to “test” this model, the authors suggest, should be based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods in a “cross-cultural” context.

International entrepreneurship is certainly a topic which is attracting increasing attention from the research community. Mtigwe makes the important point that internationalization theory associated with multi-national enterprises (MNEs) is not satisfactory for explaining the behaviour of small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). A cross-industry survey of 494 small entrepreneurial firms operating in South Africa and Zimabwe provides clear insight into the processes associated with internationalization. The case of South Africa is of particular interest because the domestic market was largely isolated from international competition until the early 1990s. Also, it has increasingly been recognized in the literature that small firms do have some advantages over their larger rivals when they engage in internationalization: rapid learning for example. Mtigwe confirms that there are internal and external triggers which influence the entrepreneurial decision to move into international markets. Based on his empirical data, Mtigwe develops an integrative model of the internationalization process. A number of practical issues are also highlighted including the importance of the entrepreneur’s background, the necessity of effective training and the role played by networking with foreign contacts.

In a short policy paper, Kautonen and Koch examine new venture support networks (NVSN) which were established to promote entrepreneurship in Germany. Initially NVSNs were funded directly by the federal government on the understanding that they would eventually become self-funding. As the authors point out, if such networks are to persist then the benefits must exceed the cost of membership. However, creating reciprocity in the networks was difficult because the heterogeneous actors (municipal authorities, chambers of commerce, private consultants, credit institutions as well as universities) all had very different objectives. Also, the networks were set-up as a result of a political initiative rather than emerging “organically” in response to some perceived market need. Consequently, it seems clear from the paper that the NVSN network does not address the fundamental problems of establishing an enterprise culture in Germany. The authors explain this failure by reference to the very different political culture in Germany, in contrast to Anglo-Saxon countries, which means that such initiatives only emerge after a highly bureaucratized process involving a wide range of political actors.

These three papers represent a diversity which I am keen to retain during my tenure as editor. Neergard et al. integrate ideas from a range of literatures in order to develop a conceptual model of links between gender and the generation of social capital in small firm networks. Mtigwe uses a relatively large data set to examine the processes of internationalization in entrepreneurial firms. While Kautonen and Koch utilize a qualitative methodology (interviews) to critical examine the creation of a network to support entrepreneurship in Germany. Also, as I stated at the outset, my overall objective is to raise the status of the IJEBR by ensuring that we publish interesting and rigorous papers which reflect contemporary concerns of academics, practitioners and policy-makers. Finally, I believe that it is important the IJEBR remains true to its title and continues to attract papers from the broadest possible international research community.

Ossie Jones