Doctoral and Emerging Scholar Colloquium: Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship Theory & Research, 23.5.2016

Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship Theory & Research

May 23, 2016

Copenhagen Business School, Porcelænshaven 16B, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark

“The Studio” (Ground Floor)

Deadline: April 18, 2016 for abstracts

Conveners:

Friederike Welter (Univ. of Siegen and Institut für Mittelstandsforschung)
Bill Gartner (Copenhagen Business School)
R. Daniel Wadhwani (Univ. of the Pacific)
David Kirsch (Univ. of Maryland)
Christina Lubinski (Copenhagen Business School)

In recent years, both entrepreneurship scholars and business historians have grown increasingly interested in the promise of using historical sources, methods and reasoning in entrepreneurship research. History, it has been argued, can be valuable in addressing a number of limitations in traditional approaches to studying entrepreneurship, including in accounting for contexts and institutions, in understanding the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic change, in providing multi-level perspectives on the entrepreneurial process and in situating entrepreneurial behavior and cognition within the flow of time. Support for historical research on entrepreneurship has grown, with both leading entrepreneurship researchers calling for the use of historical perspectives and with Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal announcing a call for papers for a special issue devoted to history and entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this colloquium is to provide interested doctoral students and emerging scholars with an introduction to historical approaches in entrepreneurship research and an opportunity to receive developmental feedback on work-in-progress. Our aim is to support the development of historical research on entrepreneurship and to build a community of scholars interested in the topic.  

The colloquium will take place on the afternoon of May 23rd at Copenhagen Business School, one of the world’s leading environments for historical research at business schools and universities. If you have questions or are interested in participating, please submit an initial abstract and/or statement of interest of max. 300 words and a one-page CV before Monday, April 18, 2016 to David Kirsch (dkirsch@rhsmith.umd.edu), Christina Lubinski (cl.mpp@cbs.dk) or Dan Wadhwani (dwadhwani@pacific.edu). Invitations to the colloquium will be sent out before April 25, 2016. Those attending the doctoral colloquium will also be invited to stay for the workshop on entrepreneurial history on the following day.

The Broader Project

This colloquium is part of a larger project that seeks to examine how analytical attention to history, context, and time may reshape theories of entrepreneurship as well as how these theories in turn allow us to re-consider how we account for agency, time and change in history. It follows on previous workshops in Copenhagen (2014), Miami (2015) and Portland (2016). The project is in the process of developing an intellectual community comprised of both historians and entrepreneurship theorists engaged in multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary research on entrepreneurial history. Some of the questions the broader project will address include:

•         What is the relationship between theories of history and theories of entrepreneurship? How have they shaped one another over time and what are the ways in which they do so today?

•         In what ways are time and context viewed in history and in entrepreneurship theory? How can more critical views of time and context contribute to our understanding of entrepreneurial behavior and the entrepreneurial process?

•         How do differences in methods matter to our understanding of entrepreneurship? Specifically, how should we think about the relationship between historians’ emphasis on deep context and narrative explanation and entrepreneurship researcher’s preference for valuing theoretical propositions from the point of view of advancing intellectual exchange between the two fields? What should we make of the tension between the theoretical inclination to gain insight through abstraction and the historical inclination to gain insight through contextualization? In what ways can the tension be productive or useful?

•         How does “history” or “the past” manifest itself in the entrepreneurial process? Is it constraining or enabling, and if “it depends,” then on what conditions does it depend? How is history “used” in the entrepreneurial process?

•         What is the relationship between narrative and history within the entrepreneurial process?

•         Can historical contextualization of the current moment (1970s-present) in entrepreneurship thought and practice help shed light on the present?

•         Can a deeper engagement with entrepreneurship theory allow us to understand the past in new ways and produce new history?

Individual and institutional support

The workshop and broader project is an initiative of the Copenhagen Business School’s Centre for Business History and Department of Management, Politics, and Philosophy in collaboration with scholars and institutions throughout Europe and North America. We are grateful for financial support from the Entrepreneurship Platform and the Rethinking History in Business Schools Initiative at CBS.