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About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. Entrepreneurship is a young academic field (Low, 2001;Chiles, Bluedorn, & Gupta, 2007), with the first academic book on entrepreneurship appearing in the 1930s and the first academic presentation in the 1950s (Jennings & Brush, 2013). Starting from humble beginnings, entrepreneurship research gradually gained momentum as the field increasingly acquired more legitimacy. Prominent business schools, including Harvard and Wharton, commenced entrepreneurship courses, endowed chairs in entrepreneurship got funded, conferences and journals dedicated to entrepreneurship came into operation and rapidly acquired traction, and the Academy of Management transitioned entrepreneurship from a special interest group to division status (Bygrave, 2007). As a result of these developments, entrepreneurship became a popular field of serious academic inquiry, with a growing community of researchers across a broad spectrum of scholarly disciplines.
*Given the increasing popularity of the academic field of entrepreneurship, the editors of New England Journal of Entrepreneurship thought it was time to identify articles that may be considered classics within the discipline. We defined a classic as a foundational article that was first published before 1980, addressed ideas that are still relevant to the field, and subsequently spawned followup research that still resonates in the field. The editors were motivated in part by Bygrave's (2007: 23) admonition to the field to look back at the articles published in the early days for the "profound" effect they had on subsequent research on entrepreneurial phenomena. Another motivation stemmed from the realization that other social science fields, including disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and economics, readily recognize and appreciate original classics, which have played a critical role in advancement of the respective fields. Entrepreneurship researchers, however, have not yet identified the classics in the field, an issue that the editors at this journal sought to redress.There are many ways to identify classics in a field of research. We decided to adopt a simple, yet elegant procedure to come up with a list of articles that may be considered classic...