The entrepreneurial journey as an emergent hierarchical system of artifact-creating processes
Section snippets
Executive summary
The covering law principle that causal relationships are deducible from timeless and context-free laws is the underlying assumption of ‘variance’ theory — the received view in entrepreneurship inquiry (Van de Ven and Engleman, 2004). In recent years, however, there has been a growing momentum behind the ‘process’ view (Steyaert, 2007, Van de Ven and Engleman, 2004) that variance theory does not adequately account for what entrepreneurs actually do under conditions of genuine uncertainty (
The emergent hierarchical system of entrepreneurial artifact-creating processes
According to Simon, 1962, Simon, 1973/1977, Simon, 1996, a science of the artificial studies the creation of human artifacts, which are those “objects and phenomena in which human purpose as well as natural law are embodied” (Simon, 1981: 6). Human artifacts are emergent outcomes of practical activities, such as engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting, which are purposefully designed for an uncertain future in the context of uncertain contingencies. In other words, a science
Explaining critical events in the entrepreneurial journey
In this section, we operationalize the venture emergence system in order to explain critical events in the emergent path of an entrepreneurial journey. In particular, we focus on the events of phase transitions into new patterns of artifact emergence associated with the transformation of means–end relationships. We understand transformation here to refer to either (1) redefining means–end relationships in the sense of initiating a new pattern of emergence by altering the business idea, or (2)
Research implications
The notion of the entrepreneurial journey as an emergent hierarchical system of artifact-creating processes has important research implications for future directions in process research. Our primary concern in this article is the significance of the emergent hierarchy for our understanding of the entrepreneurial journey as a unit of analysis. In variance theory a unit of analysis is an entity, such as an entrepreneur, network, firm or market, and the causal properties of entities are the focus
Conclusion
In this article, we have taken up Venkataraman et al.'s (2012) proposal that entrepreneurship inquiry should move forward as a science of the artificial by considering the significance of hierarchically organized artifact-creating processes for process theory development. We have argued that the ability to conceptualize the entrepreneurial journey in terms of hierarchically organized patterns of artifact emergence contributes to our understanding of the endogenous, self-causing,
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