International entrepreneurship as a young field of scholarly inquiry and its relationship with the knowledge network of five related disciplines

Excerpt

The question of whether, or not, International Entrepreneurship (IE) is a field has confronted scholars from the early days of the field’s emergence, sometime in early 1990s, although the very nature of emergence is its early fluidity. The scope of coverage and the wide geographical dispersion of both the scholars in, and practitioners of, the field of International Entrepreneurship may have also contributed to prolonging that fluidity. Furthermore, the very nature of early developments in International Entrepreneurship, in terms of differences in, and the diversities of the various local practice, processes, contexts and embeddedness may have contributed to slower development of the necessary corresponding concepts necessary for closure and consolidation of the core, if not the field, following its early emergence. Consider, for example, the core component in the name of the field—“entrepreneurship” and “international”. …