Mapping the aliran of the academic discipline of entrepreneurship: A ...

compared with overall trends structuring contemporary epistemological reflection. (Piaget,
1967; Whitley, 1984c)”. Similar views by Dery and Toulouse [1996] are previously cited
in section 1.1.1.08. While Dery and Toulouse [1996] acknowledge the wide variety of
disciplines involved with entrepreneurship, they suggest that there is a process of
disciplinary introversion. Entrepreneurship is introvertedly nested within the discipline of
business studies, which in tur n is nested within the soc ial sciences, which in turn is nested
within natural sciences. This nesting, rather than enlargening the scope of access to other
disciplines, has the opposite effect. Instead of being broadened the paradigmatic variety of
knowledge is limited by this introversion and the ‘social relationships’ [Dery and
Toulouse, 1996] and ‘camps’ [Thornton, 1999 ] that have evolved within the emergent
discipline. Dery and Toulouse [1996] see the unity of a common paradigm as the
‘epistemological ide al’. However, they comment on the tensions between the various
individuals, groups, and institut ions involved in entrepreneurial research and their ‘race to
gain control’ over the very ‘definition of validity’ of entrepreneurship. This struggle for
control of entrepreneurship research will be discussed further in section 2.5.3.
2.5.2.3.03 McKelvey [2004] also criticizes current epistemology in entrepreneurship,
promoting instead agent based models utilising complexity science concepts of order
creation. McKelvey [2004] argues;
that the study of entrepreneurial start-ups is off the track without an epistemology
that incorporates all four Aristotelian causes and heterogeneous, agent-based
modeling. Here is another syllogism:
• Entrepreneurial research requires theories drawing on all four Aristotelian
causes: (material, formal, final, and efficient).
• Traditional mode l-centered science draws only on efficient cause.
• Math models and modern empirical methods focus mainly, if not only, on
efficient cause.
• Therefore, current epistemology is ill suited to the study of entrepreneurship.
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McKelvey [2004], and Dery and Toulouse [1996] seem to indicate that common and
current epistemological practices in the emergent discipline may be an inhibiting factor in
the evolution of the discipline. While, Low and McMillan [1988] described the emergent
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