Opportunities, Time, and Mechanisms in Entrepreneurship: On the Practical Irrelevance of Propensities

Journal article, 2017

We conclude by suggesting that entrepreneurship scholars pay attention to Ramoglou and Tsang’s critique of naïve positivism and their emphasis on mechanisms and causal explanations. However, we see no value in using critical realism as a meta-theoretical crutch to save the realness and independence of entrepreneurial opportunities, and more generally to conceive of entrepreneurial processes and outcomes as caused by complexly interacting and empirically unobservable entities and mechanisms. Instead, we urge scholars to consider explanations that focus on empirically tractable social mechanisms that connect social action and interaction with relevant outcomes in ways that take into account the open-endedness, uncertainty, and transformative character of entrepreneurship.