Capturing action from within: the use of personal diaries

Book chapter, 2020

This chapter discusses methods to study entrepreneurial behavior, practice, and process and advocates the use of personal diaries to capture entrepreneurial action and processes from within. It describes the diary research method, its origins and main references, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. An illustration of a study on networking actions serves to show possibilities but also challenges that come with using diaries in this type of research. We come to the conclusion that personal diaries are ideally suited, but an underexploited data source for investigating entrepreneurial processes, especially in its early phases.