Entrepreneurship in the production of socio-economic futures

1. Lorraine Warren Friederike Welter Ted Fuller Entrepreneurship in the production of socio-economic futures Originally presented at RGS-IBS Annual Conference 2007 Geographies of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship (EGRG 1)

2. The question • Whether and in what ways entrepreneurship ‘theory’ can transcend the multiple ontologies to which it is applied.

3. Emergence • …describing the way that novel structures come into being (Mill 1843) wherein conjunctions of forces can produce an outcome that is more than, or at least behaves differently from, the sum of its constituent parts.

4. Theoretical symmetry • If entrepreneurship produces emergent order, then are processes that produce emergent order synonymous with processes of entrepreneurship?

5. Emergence – conceptual underpinning for entrepreneurship studies … • Explicitly • Descriptions of emergent properties in new venture creation • Gartner, 1985, 1993, 1995; Katz and Gartner, 1988; Gartner, Bird & Starr, 1992; Fischer et al, 1997; Busenitz et al, 2003; Lichtenstein and Mendenhall, 2002; Lichtenstein et al, 2006) • Multiple inter-acting processes • (Fuller,Warren et al 2005,6) • Temporal dynamics • (Lichtenstein et al 2006) • Implicitly – theories about emergence, e.g. • Bricolage • (Baker and Nelson, 2005), • Legitimizing behaviour and trust building • (Delmar and Shane, 2004; O’Connor, 2004; Tornikoski and Newbert, 2006; Welter and Smallbone, 2006) • Identity creation for entrepreneurship • (e.g., Down, 2006; Fletcher, 2003; O’Connor, 2004; Warren, 2004) • Effectuation and causation mechanisms • (e.g., Sarasvathy, 2001) • Opportunity recognition • (e.g., Eckhardt and Shane, 2003; Shane and Eckhardt, 2003; Sarasvathy et al., 2003). Empirical Properties Conditions

6. Constructionist processes: enactment, intention, vision, identity, legitimacy, Op-discovery /Op-recognition, Resources, boundary exchange, Op-exploitation Cash-flow “Multiple outcomes” Growth through entrepreneurship “Entrepreneur” Institutional: embeddedness / structure Opportunity Emergence in the entrepreneurship literature Empirical Properties Temporal dynamics Processes Conditions

7. Entrepreneurial mechanism: interacting processes of emergence • Experiments - small scale models testing for fitness in the landscape, co-evolutionary in nature but involving cross-over • Reflexivity - the continuous reshaping of the meaning of what the owner and the business ‘are’ in relation to others (identity) • Organising Domains - the breaking and reforming of patterns of doing business everyday (new attractor patterns?) • Sensitivity to conditions - the detection and evaluation of environmental change and the motivation to respond (sensing, imperatives) Fuller et al 2004-7

8. Theorising ‘causation’ of emergence… for example… Empirical Properties Adaptive Tension (McKelvey after Prigogine) Morphogenetics (Archer, after Bhaskar) Conditions

9. Broadening… • Not surprisingly, ‘emergence’ in the entrepreneurship literature has focussed on the emergence of the enterprise • However, • The field of entrepreneurship encompasses multiple ontologies • Theory tends to relate to particular ontologies • Why is ‘creation’ just ‘new venture creation’? (Phan 2005) • Can entrepreneurship be studied as a class? (Thornton 1999)

10. Social processes that produce emergence at the local level also impact at the global level. Resonance Ontologies Processes Recursive (repetitive) activities in a network or cluster of firms Experiments Reflexive Identity Organising Domains Sensitivity to conditions Embedded Practice Legitimacy Recursive (repetitive) activities of the entrepreneur’s firm Individual (entrepreneur’s) reflexive self identity and related every-day practice

11. The bigger picture, entrepreneurship and social change • An emergentist approach to societies requires a focus on multiple levels of analysis – individuals, interactions and groups – and a dynamic focus on how social phenomena emerge from communication processes among individual members. Sawyer (2005) • “our capacity to explain the relationship between the constitutive elements of social systems (people) and the emergent phenomena resulting from their interaction (i.e. organisations etc.)” (Goldspink and Kay 2004, p597).

12. Social Emergence • “The analytical dualism of social emergence” (Sawyer 2005, p139) • (Analytical) inseparability (of individual and society) and (therefore) process ontology Cf. Giddens • Interpenetration • Compared to: • Emergentist and morphogenetic account of analytical dualism (Archer 1995) • Interplay • . “to theorize the nature of individuals, the nature of social environments and the nature of their [two-way] causal interaction” (Sawyer 2005, p140)

13. What kind of emergents? • Stable emergents? • Ephemeral emergents? • (Sawyer 2005)

14. Social Structure (Level E) Written texts (procedures, laws, regulations); material systems and infrastructures (architecture, urban design, communication and transport networks) Stable Emergents (Level D) Group sub-cultures, group slang and catchphrases, conversational routines, shared social practices, collective memory) Ephemeral Emergents (Level C) Topic, context, interactional frame, participation structure; relative role and status Interaction (Level B) Discourse patterns, symbolic interaction, collaboration, negotiation Individual (Level A) Intention, agency, personality, cognitive process The Emergence Paradigm (Sawyer 2005, p211), showing the ‘circle of emergence’ (p220), i.e. that area which is subject to social emergence

15. Work in Progress

16. Further work • More case work to investigate the micro-level of emergents and the interplay between process and (temporary) structures • Greater critical analysis of empirical evidence, including from ‘emergentist’ perspective • Further conceptual work in relation to the ‘fractal’ nature of processes of emergence, i.e. operating at multiple levels