Call for Papers for
Special issue planned for publication in 2012

ENTREPRENEURSHIP: CONTEXTS, OPPORTUNITIES AND PROCESSES

Edited by Colin Mason* and Charles Harvey**

*Professor of Entrepreneurship, Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
**Professor of Business History and Management, Newcastle University, UK

Entrepreneurship has emerged within the past 30 years as a distinctive discipline within the field of Business and Management. Research has shifted from an individual-centric approach which has sought to understand entrepreneurship by focusing on those individuals who exhibit entrepreneurial behaviours towards an environment-centric approach which seeks to locate and understand the situations in which entrepreneurs are found. Neither approach has offered a coherent approach to understanding entrepreneurship. More recently, a consensus has emerged that at the core of entrepreneurship, as a field of study, is the identification and exploitation of opportunities. Shane and Venkataraman define entrepreneurship as “an activity that involves the discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities to introduce new goods and services, ways of organising, markets, processes, and raw materials, through organising efforts that previously had not existed” (Academy of Management Review, 2000). They go on to scope out the field of entrepreneurship as comprising the following: when and how entrepreneurial opportunities exist; the sources of those opportunities and the forms that they take; the processes of opportunity discovery and evaluation; the acquisition of resources to the exploitation of these opportunities; the act of opportunity exploitation; why, when and how some individuals and not others discover evaluate, gather resources to and exploit opportunities; the strategies used to pursue opportunities; and the organising efforts to exploit them. In view of the economic impact of entrepreneurship, in terms of employment and innovation, and its political significance, there is also a strong applied strand of research which examines policies to promote entrepreneurship and the evaluation of related interventions.

However, a major critique of entrepreneurship research is its failure to recognise the significance of time and context and to present its conclusions – at least implicitly – as being timeless and context free: the so-called rush to simplification and generalization. A key aspiration for this special issue is that it should demonstrate that ‘time matters’. We therefore seek papers whose explicit aim is to highlight the interplay between historical context and the operation of entrepreneurial processes. Possible themes include continuity and change in entrepreneurial processes; the emergence and growth of specific industry sectors; the origins, growth and demise of entrepreneurial places; changing organisational forms; and the economic impact of entrepreneurship. In the spirit of academic openness, the editors will consider papers located within any time period, economic sector or geographic area. The main stipulations are that papers should engage critically with current ideas and theoretical perspectives and that they should be securely grounded in original empirical research.

Proposals of not more than 1,000 words should be sent to both editors, and should be copied to the Business History joint editors, John Wilson and Steve Toms:

charles.harvey@ncl.ac.uk
colin.mason@strath.ac.uk
john.wilson@liverpool.ac.uk
st27@york.ac.uk

Proposals should contain the following information: (a) title of the proposed paper; (b) author names, affiliations and contact details; (c) theoretical perspectives and positioning; (d) details of sources and methods of the research project from which the proposal flows; (e) content and outline structure of the proposed article.

The timeline for the Special Issue is as follows:

January 2010 Call for papers
30 April 2010 Deadline for receipt of proposals
31st May 2010 Articles commissioned
31st December 2010 Receipt of first draft of papers
31st March 2011 Completion of review process
31st May 2011 Submission of revised papers
30th June 2011 Deadline for making final revisions
2012 Publication