Entrepreneurship and Epistemology:The Philosophical Underpinnings of the Study of Entrepreneurial Opportunities
区分了创业机会研究的两种认识论视角:批判现实主义(机会由外部冲击客观形成)和进化现实主义(机会由创业者行动内生创造),并指出这些假设差异对创业研究、实践和教学有重要影响。
Two approaches to studying opportunities have emerged in the entrepreneurship literature. This paper shows that the first of these approaches—which focuses on how alert entrepreneurs discover objective opportunities formed by exogenous shocks in an existing market—adopts a critical realist perspective. The second approach—which focuses on opportunities that are endogenously enacted by the actions of entrepreneurs themselves and do not have an existence independent of those human actions—adopts an evolutionary realist perspective. Differences between these epistemological assumptions have an important impact on opportunity research in the field of entrepreneurship, and thus are likely to have an important impact on the evolution of research, practice, and teaching in the field of entrepreneurship as a whole.