In their edited book Narrative and Discursive Approaches in Entrepreneurship, Daniel Hjorth and Chris Steyaert provide a fascinating glimpse into a perspective on entrepreneurship that will be enlightening for many readers. Entrepreneurship authors typically talk about theory, methods, and data as if a straight forward linear process united them all, and making sense of entrepreneurship was simply a matter of knowing how to interpret one's "findings". By contrast, the authors in this volume propose narrative and discursive approaches in which the contributing authors emphasize rich description, reflexive conceptualization, and interpretations offered as part of the story itself. They draw upon an international set of cases, including Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Venezuela, and North America. The cases themselves make for fascinating reading, quite apart from what we learn about the difficulties of imposing a particular interpretation on a given story. For example, taxi drivers in Caracas, management consultants in Denmark, and women entrepreneurs in northern Norway all make for fascinating narratives from which to understand the entrepreneurial process. Unlike many edited books which have no "plot", the editors have included opening and closing sections that link the chapters, offer alternative readings of them, and propose new and expansive ways of thinking about entrepreneurship.'
Process studies put movement, change and flow first; to study processually is to consider the world as restless, something underway, becoming and perishing, without end. To understand firms processually is to accept but also -and this is harder perhaps -to absorb this fluidity, to treat a variable as just that, a variable. The resonance with entrepreneurship studies is obvious. If any field is alive to, and fully resonant with, a processual understanding of, for example, the creation of firms, it is entrepreneurship studies. This special issue is an attempt to consider the promise and potential of processual approaches to studying, researching and practising entrepreneurship. The articles in the issue attest to an increasing sensitivity to processual thinking. We argue that appreciating entrepreneurial phenomena processually opens up the field to an understanding of entrepreneurship as organizational creation -not simply the creation of new organizations but also experiments in new organizational form.
Despite advances in family business research, the field would benefit from greater methodological rigor. However, rigor does not mean convergence of methodologies. In this article, the authors adopt a novel approach, based on narrative analysis, to address the succession process in a family business. This interpretive perspective is appropriate for family business studies, which address multifaceted and complex social constructs that are performed by different actors in multiple contexts. The analysis highlights five key themes centering on leadership style and succession, trust and communication, balance between agents, history and identity, and fear of losing one’s identity and social standing through the succession process.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.