Interviews with Pioneers in Entrepreneurship Research: William Gartner.

Magazine article, 2011

Question 1) As a highly influential entrepreneurship scholar with more than 25 years of experience, you have helped launch large-scale empirical research programmes (e.g. PSED), pioneered new theoretical perspectives (e.g. the focus on behaviors rather than character traits), and also -- perhaps as a consequence of this -- actively engaged in debates and discussions of a more paradigmatic nature. In light of this wide-ranging experience, what is your own personal view of the history and current state of entrepreneurship as a field of research? Question 2) Let's focus more narrowly on how to understand and study entrepreneurial action or behavior. As I see it, much of this research can be roughly organized under three headings that reflect broad research programmes in entrepreneurship studies, and also correspond to generic views of human action, viz.: the empiricism of behavioral approaches, the rationalism of cognitive approaches, and the interpretivism of discursive approaches (Berglund 2005). Again accord- ing to my interpretation, behavioral approaches tend to downplay the subjective meanings that actions have to individuals in favor of objective examinations of specific behaviors. Cognitive approaches seek to address intentionality and meaning by showing how different thought styles and knowledge structures, e.g. heuristics and biases, cause different behaviors. Discursive approaches explicitly probe the subjective meanings actions have to individuals by investigating how entrepreneurial actions and decisions are affected by more or less public narratives and discourses. ...