[Please note that this workshop is taking place immediately before the joint BHC/EBHA meeting in Miami and at the same location; those accepted for the workshop are welcome to register for and attend that meeting, but this workshop is organized separately under different auspices. Those interested in applying for the Paper Development Workshop should contact the organizers listed below, not the BHC or EBHA.]
Paper Development Workshop on Wednesday, June 24, 2015, Noon-5pm, Hyatt Regency Miami
Deadline: March 15, 2015 for abstracts (updated)
In recent years, both business historians and entrepreneurship scholars have grown increasingly interested in the promise of using historical sources, methods and reasoning in entrepreneurship research. History, it has been argued, can be valuable in addressing a number of limitations in traditional approaches to studying entrepreneurship, including in accounting for contexts and institutions, in understanding the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic change, in providing multi-level perspectives on the entrepreneurial process and in situating entrepreneurial behavior and cognition within the flow of time. Support for historical research on entrepreneurship has grown, with both leading entrepreneurship researchers calling for the use of historical perspectives and with Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal announcing a call for papers for a special issue devoted to history and entrepreneurship.
The purpose of this workshop is to provide scholars with developmental feedback on work-in-progress related to historical approaches to entrepreneurship and strategy, broadly construed. Our aim is support the development of historical research on entrepreneurship for publication in leading journals, including for the special issue of Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. In addition to providing feedback and suggestions for specific topics, the workshop will address the commonly faced challenges of writing for a double-audience of historians and entrepreneurship/management scholars, engaging entrepreneurship theory and constructs, and identifying the most valuable historical sources and methods in studying entrepreneurial phenomena. We welcome work-in-progress at all stages of development. Interested scholars may submit two types of submissions for discussion: full research papers (8,000 to 12,000 words) or paper ideas (1,000 to 3,000 words).
If you have questions or are interested in participating, please submit an initial abstract of max. 300 words and a one-page CV before March 15, 2015 to Christina Lubinski (cl.mpp@cbs.dk) and Dan Wadhwani (dwadhwani@pacific.edu). Invitations to the PDW will be sent out before March 20, 2015. Full paper (8,000 to 12,000 words) and paper idea (1,000 to 3,000 words) submissions will be expected by May 15, 2015. Please feel free to contact the organizers with your paper ideas if you are interested in early feedback or want to inquire about the fit of your idea with this PDW.
The Broader Project
This workshop is part of a larger project that seeks to examine how analytical attention to history, context, and time may reshape theories of entrepreneurship as well as how these theories in turn allow us to re-consider how we account for agency, time and change in history. It also seeks to develop an intellectual community comprised of both historians and entrepreneurship theorists engaged in multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary research on entrepreneurial history. Some of the questions the broader project will address include:
- What is the relationship between theories of history and theories of entrepreneurship? How have they shaped one another over time and what are the ways in which they do so today?
- In what ways are time and context viewed in history and in entrepreneurship theory? How can more critical views of time and context contribute to our understanding of entrepreneurial behavior and the entrepreneurial process?
- How do differences in methods matter to our understanding of entrepreneurship? Specifically, how should we think about the relationship between historians’ emphasis on deep context and narrative explanation and entrepreneurship researcher’s preference for valuing theoretical propositions from the point of view of advancing intellectual exchange between the two fields? What should we make of the tension between the theoretical inclination to gain insight through abstraction and the historical inclination to gain insight through contextualization? In what ways can the tension be productive or useful?
- How does “history” or “the past” manifest itself in the entrepreneurial process? Is it constraining or enabling, and if “it depends,” then on what conditions does it depend? How is history “used” in the entrepreneurial process?
- What is the relationship between narrative and history within the entrepreneurial process?
- Can historical contextualization of the current moment (1970s-present) in entrepreneurship thought and practice help shed light on the present?
- Can a deeper engagement with entrepreneurship theory allow us to understand the past in new ways and produce new history?
The PDW builds on a workshop of historians and entrepreneurship scholars who came together in a two-day planning session in May 2014 in Copenhagen. Those involved in the initial planning workshop include Per Boje (University of Southern Denmark), Ludovic Cailluet (IAE Toulouse), Stephanie Decker (Aston Business School), Jeffrey Fear (University of Glasgow), Bill Gartner (California Lutheran and CBS), Robin Holt (University of Manchester), David Kirsch (University of Maryland), Hans Landstrom (Lund University), Michael Rowlinson (Queen Mary University-London), Andrew Smith (University of Manchester), and Daniel Wadhwani (University of the Pacific). From within CBS, those involved include Per Hansen, Daniel Hjorth, Christina Lubinski, Dorthe Throning Mejlhede, Ellen Molgaard, Mads Mordhorst, Alfred Reckendrees, and Anders Ravn Sorensen. In addition, a number of scholars have already agreed to be involved with the project moving forward, including Howard Aldrich (University of North Carolina), Andrew Godley (University of Reading), Steven Lippmann (Miami University), Andrew Popp (University of Manchester), Anna Spadavecchia (University of Reading), and Friederike Welter (Siegen/Jönköping Business School).
The PDW in Miami will start a series of events with the intention of supporting individual paper development as well as organizing concrete publication outlets, including the special issue in Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. Authors will receive developmental feedback and can revise and further develop their papers in the second half of 2015. In spring 2016, a conference will be held at Copenhagen Business School ahead of the special issue deadline.
Individual and institutional support
The workshop and broader project is an initiative of the Copenhagen Business School’s Centre for Business History and Department of Management, Politics, and Philosophy in collaboration with scholars and institutions throughout Europe and North America. We are grateful for financial support from the Entrepreneurship Platform and the Rethinking History in Business Schools Initiative at CBS.
References
Baumol, W. J. & Strom, R. J. (2007). Entrepreneurship and economic growth. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 3-4, 233-237.
Bucheli, M. & Wadhwani, D. R. (Eds.) (2014). Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Casson, M., & Godley, A. (2005). Entrepreneurship and historical explanation. In Y. Cassis and I.P. Minoglou (Eds.), Entrepreneurship in theory and history, pp. 25-60. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Davidsson, P., & Wiklund, J. (2001). Levels of analysis in entrepreneurship research: Current research practice and suggestions for the future. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 25, 81-100.
Forbes, D. P., & Kirsch, D. A. (2011). The study of emerging industries: Recognizing and responding to some central problems. Journal of Business Venturing, 26(5), 589-602.
Haveman, H. A., Habinek, J., & Goodman, L. A. (2012). How entrepreneurship evolves: The founders of new magazines in America, 1741–1860. Administrative Science Quarterly, 57(4), 585-624.
Popp, A. & Holt, R. (2013). The presence of entrepreneurial opportunity. Business History, 55(1), 9-28.
Schumpeter, J. A. (1947). The creative response in economic history. The Journal of Economic History, 7(2), 149-159.
Wadhwani, R. D. (2010). Historical reasoning and the development of entrepreneurship theory. In H. Landstrom & F. Lohrke (Eds.) Historical foundations of entrepreneurship research, pp. 343- 362. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Wadhwani, R. D., & Jones, G. (2014). Schumpeter’s Plea: Historical Reasoning in Entrepreneurship Theory and Research. In M. Bucheli & R.D. Wadhwani (Eds.) Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods, pp. 192-216. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zahra, S. A. and Wright, M. (2011) Entrepreneurship's Next Act, Academy of Management Perspectives 25 (4): 67-83.
Zahra, S. A., Wright, M. and Abdelgawad, S. G. (2014) Contextualization and the advancement of entrepreneurship research, International Small Business Journal. DOI: doi: 10.1177/0266242613519807.