The Entrepreneurship Dynamic: Origins of Entrepreneurship and the Evolution of Industries - Book Review
The Entrepreneurship Dynamic comprises twelve original chapters, plus introduction and summary chapters by the editors. The book's mission is principally to encourage the development of macro-level entrepreneurship research that is grounded in modern sociology. For organization theorists, it provides a welcome alternative to the overwhelming tendency in the entrepreneurship literature to focus principally on why individual entrepreneurs and organizations succeed or fail.
As is often the case with edited volumes, the individual chapters in this book point in quite different directions, and no single, overarching theme unites them, although each chapter shares a conception of entrepreneurship as a collective process that transcends the individual entrepreneur. The types of issues the authors address include how organizing models are selected, how collective beliefs and institutions supporting entrepreneurship emerge, how niches and new forms are created and sustained, and why rates of founding differ from one time and place to another. This book blazes new trails in thinking about entrepreneurship at a macro level, showing scholars a dozen ways to theorize about and study phenomena that cut across individual founding acts and actors.
As the authors point out in a cogent summary aimed at identifying promising areas for future research, three ideas recur in many of the papers published here. One is the notion that entrepreneurship should be studied as a local process, bounded by the resources and shared cognitions of bounded geographic regions. Another is that the shared mental models of entrepreneurs who share some local identity is an important level of analysis--struggles over meaning, identity, and reputation are as important as struggles over financial or physical assets. A third is that entrepreneurs are deeply affected by the collective strategies that institutional actors pursue. The editors suggest that the core problem of entrepreneurship is how interactions and collective actions create market spaces, not how individual entrepreneurs identify opportunities and organize to exploit them. For example, M. Diane Burton's chapter, based on a panel study of Silicon Valley firms, focuses attention on how founders choose employment models, linking strategy and management team demography to the likelihood that a firm will adopt a model that is atypical for its industry. She finds that innovative models tend to be adopted by more experienced executive teams, not those with scant organizational backgrounds. In a similar vein, Mark Suchman, Daniel Steward, and Clifford Westfall describe the emergence and diffusion of organizing models within Silicon Valley, showing how local institutions--specifically, law firms--mediate the flow of cultural mental maps, organizing models, and legitimating accounts that entrepreneurs must develop and convey to others.
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