JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Academy of Management is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Academy of Management Review.Entrepreneurial intentions, entrepreneurs' states of mind that direct attention, experience, and action toward a business concept, set the form and direction of organizations at their inception. Subsequent organizational outcomes such as survival, development (including written plans), growth, and change are based on these intentions. The study of entrepreneurial intentions provides a way of advancing entrepreneurship research beyond descriptive studies and helps to distinguish entrepreneurial activity from strategic management. Entrepreneurs' ideas and intentions form the initial strategic template of new organizations and are important underpinnings of new venture development. Even though entrepreneurial ideas-for new products, new services, new social movements-beginwith inspiration, sustained attention and intention are needed in order for them to become manifest.Entrepreneurs' intentions guide their goal setting, communication, commitment, organization, and other kinds of work. Although behavior can result from unconscious and unintended antecedents, what is of interest here is a conscious and intended act, the founding of a firm. This article focuses less on the action itself than on the psychological precursors to that action.The study of entrepreneurial intentions opens new arenas to theory-based research. It directs attention toward the complex relationships among entrepreneurial ideas and the consequent outcomes of these ideas, and it directs attention away from previously studied entrepreneurial traits (e.g., personality, motivation, and demographics) and contexts (e.g., displacements, prior experience, markets, and economics). The model presented here is behavioral and not institutional; it does not provide a strategic map of how to start a venture or how to succeed in business. Instead it guides attention to questions about how entrepreneurs create, sustain, and transform organizations, thus helping to distinguish entrepreneurship from strategic management. Nature of Entrepreneurial IntentionsIntentionality is a state of mind directing a person's attention (and therefore experience and action) toward a specific object (goal) or a path in order to achieve something (means). As a psychological process, intention has been examined by a number of theorists and researchers. William James (1890/1950) construed will (a more general term which includes intention) as an independent faculty of the mind, operating through a person's attention (holding the intended image in the mind) and consent (inner dialog or selftalk which says, "Let it be so"). Resea...

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In this article, we take note of advances in the entrepreneurial cognition research stream. In doing so, we bring increasing attention to the usefulness of entrepreneurial cognition research. First, we offer and develop a central research question to further enable entrepreneurial cognition inquiry. Second, we present the conceptual background and some representative approaches to entrepreneurial cognition research that form the context for this question. Third, we introduce the articles in this Special Issue as framed by the central question and approaches to entrepreneurial cognition research, and suggest how they further contribute to this developing stream. Finally, we offer our views concerning the challenges and opportunities that await the next generation of entrepreneurial cognition scholarship. We therefore invite (and seek to enable) the growing community of entrepreneurship researchers from across multiple disciplines to further develop the "thinkingdoing" link in entrepreneurship research. It is our goal to offer colleagues an effective research staging point from which they may embark upon many additional research expeditions and investigations involving entrepreneurial cognition.

Literature on the creation of organizations is often cast within a masculine gender framework. This paper draws from three theoretical perspectives to develop a new perspective that broadens the view of organizational creation by encompassing the relative balance of feminine and masculine perspectives in the entrepreneur's venture start-up process and new venture attributes. We elaborate the relatively less visible feminine and personal perspective and compare this with the traditional or masculine perspective. Important to the discussion is the distinction between biology (sex: male and female, man and woman) and socialized perspectives (gender: masculine and feminine). While research and the general public often use the concept of gender loosely to signify sex, we follow a more precise feminist distinction. The paper advances new concepts of gender-maturity (an individual difference) and gender-balance (an organizational quality).

This paper suggests that entrepreneurship is the process of “emergence.” An organizational behavior perspective on entrepreneurship would focus on the process of organizational emergence. The usefulness of the emergence metaphor is explored through an exploration of two questions that are the focus of much of the research in organizational behavior: “What do persons in organizations do?” (we will explore this question by looking at research and theory on the behaviors of managers), and “Why do they do what they do?” (ditto for motivation). The paper concludes with some implications for using the idea of emergence as a way to connect theories and methodologies from organizational behavior to entrepreneurship.