Annaleena Parhankangas, Philippe Riot and Hans Landström organized and hosted during the annual meeting in Philadelphia: “Challenging the assumptions and accepted research practice in entrepreneurship research”.
The growth of entrepreneurship research that we have been witnessing over the past few decades carries a double–edged sword. Entrepreneurship as a research field has produced a lot of good research that has increased our knowledge about entrepreneurship, it has created a strong infrastructure within academia, including highly-ranked journals, PhD programs, role models, etc. However, it has been accompanied by an increased institutionalization of the field, and the field has in many ways accepted the norms and standards of more established fields.
In this institutionalization process there is always a risk that individual scholars become embedded in a culture and incentive system that emphasizes more incremental research questions, merely creating nuances of what we already know, and reducing the incentives for scholars to conduct challenging and “interesting” research.
Steffen Korsgaard, Aarhus U., Gry Alsos, Nordland U., Denise Fletcher, U. of Luxembourg, and Matthias Fink, JKU Linz, presented different ways in which mainstream entrepreneurship research is challenged with regards to the theories and methodologies that we are currently using. Their presentations created the basis for a critical and constructive discussion among almost 50 participants during the workshop.
A volume in the book series Routledge Rethinking Entrepreneurship Research, which will be published in 2016, will be dedicated to the outcomes of this PDW.
