A synthetic overview of the field of entrepreneurship
The table below presents a synthetic overview of the field inspired by the works of Filion and Landstrom. It includes the principal disciplines involved in the study of entrepreneurship and their links with the research objects and questions. It also puts forward the various evolutions and shifts of interest in research topics. It is non-exhaustive, and must therefore be used with caution. In some cases, information has been omitted. For example, some sociologists (Aldrich 1999) have shown interest in the ‘How’, and occasionally quantitative studies have been carried out on the entrepreneurial process. Our approach does not present all the variety and abundance of theoretical and ideological paths that may be found in this field.
What seems to characterise the evolution of research in entrepreneurship in the last few years is, on the one hand, the reorientation of the focus, which shifted from the individual to the process (Bygrave and Hofer 1991), and, on the other hand, the transition from a clearly positivist epistemology to a more nuanced epistemology, sometimes grounded (perhaps increasingly) in constructivist perspectives.