Toward a complexity science of entrepreneurship
Section snippets
Executive summary
Should CEOs pay attention to research findings about entrepreneurship published in mediums such as the Journal of Business Venturing? Apparently, they do not. Pfeffer and Fong (2002) find that executives pay little attention to research by academics, preferring instead to listen to consultants. Does either of these sources offer advice that executives should take seriously enough to put into practice? Is there any truth to what they say?
Many articles in this journal are econometric analyses
Equilibrium-bound evolutionary theory
Nelson and Winter (1982) look to Darwinian evolutionary theory for a dynamic perspective useful for explaining the origin of order in economic systems; so too, do Aldrich, 1979, Aldrich, 1999 and McKelvey, 1982, McKelvey, 1994. Leading writers about biology, such as Salthe (1993), Rosenberg (1994), Depew (1998), Weber (1998), and Kauffman (2000), now argue that Darwinian theory is, itself, equilibrium bound and not adequate for explaining the origin of order. Underlying this change in
The complexity science engines of order creation
The complexity science view of the origin of order in biology is that self-organization—pre first law processes—explains more order in the biosphere than Darwinian selection (Kauffman, 1993, Kauffman, 2000, Salthe, 1993; the many authors in Van de Vijver et al., 1998). Two engines of order creation are apparent in complexity science.
Complexity science legitimates postmodernism
Complexity science does more than simply steer our thinking away from evolutionary theory and toward the zeroth law and coevolutionary dynamics. Pfeffer (1993) correctly documents and laments the miniscule epistemological and other kinds of organization science legitimacy relative to other sciences. McKelvey (2003a) takes the Kuhn (1962) position that organization science is a collection of prescience “fields,” and thus not a science at all—yet. Organizational postpositivists and postmodernists
Aristotelian causes vs. traditional science
Having integrated a modern normal science stemming from complexity science with postmodernist ontology, recognized that both attend to order creation, and having carved out space and legitimacy for models of the heterogeneous agent kind, my next question is: What kind of causal analysis best fits order-creation science—and more specifically, entrepreneurial research? Needless to say, I have argued against whatever causal thinking lies at the heart of evolutionary—selectionist thinking—it
Mohr's process theory joined with agent modeling
One way to talk about the interaction of the Aristotelian causes in organizations is in terms of process theory as it unfolds in a specific, well-told, narrative about entrepreneurship—in this instance, Siggelkow's (2002) Vanguard Group case.
Modeling entrepreneurial dynamics
Suppose we divide entrepreneurial activity into two distinct phases: (1) the initial start-up phase and (2) the BVSR managerial phase (blind variation, selection, and retention; McKelvey and Baum, 1999). This paper is about the first phase. Ideally, the function of the BVSR process is most effective when there is an appropriate amount of random blind variation. On the other hand, much of the advice-giving to entrepreneurs very early in the initial start-up phase is aimed at reducing blind
Conclusion
In entrepreneurial research, especially, the division of research into that explicitly aimed at early order creation in the initial start-up phase, as opposed to that aimed at studying after-the-fact selection processes, seems critical to producing effective knowledge that is useful to start-up entrepreneurs. Since there is the likelihood that advice given to entrepreneurs early on lowers the blind variation rate (possibly changing blind variation into educated guesses, but we cannot be sure),
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