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

entrepreneurship, even at Fabian’s different paradigmatic options. If the participants in the
various episteme associated with the discipline are more engaged in an internecine struggle
for controlling the future direction of the discipline and less concerned with the epistemic
objectivity, then this could be a reason for the soft epistemic status of the discipline of
entrepreneurship.
2.5.3.11 An example of episteme in action in attempting to create and influence the
course of the discipline can be found in an 2005 editorial article of the Academy of
Management Journal (AMJ). This editorial article reviewed the AMJ’s past history in
publishing articles on entrepreneurship. In their summary, the editors and board members
suggested three avenues of future direction for articles published in the AMJ issue on
entrepreneurship. These are described below:
a) based upon the past publications in the AMJ, the editors determined that scholars
appear to be increasingly interested in studying questions regarding new ventures,
international entrepreneurship, and initial public offerings (IPOs).
b) In addition to these possible topics, entrepreneurship scholars will, of course,
choose to empirically examine other relevant and interesting topics— topics that
AMJ would want to consider for publication purpos es (e.g., the nexus of
entrepreneurs and opportunities [Shane and Venkataraman, 2000]). It also seems
likely that geographic and skill diversity among entrepreneurship scholars will
continue to influence the forming of teams of authors.
c) Consistent with cont inui ng de velop ments in other areas of management
scholarship, we anticipate that in the future, greater attention will be paid to
assessing statistical power (Hitt, Boyd, & Li, 2004), validating how constructs were
measured (Boyd, Gove, & Hitt, 2005), and reporting and interpreting effect sizes
(Ireland et al., 2005), among other issues. Finally, we anticipate that the desire
among entrepreneurship scholars to form longitudinal or panel samples and then to
use appropriate methods for testing purposes will continue to increase (Hitt,
Gimeno & Hoskisson, 1998; Schwartz & Teach, 2000) [Ireland, Reutzel and Webb,
2005, p562].
In (a) above, the authors assume that past articles, that have been through the particular
episteme of the editorial review process of the AMJ, are indicative of future trends in
entrepreneurial research in general. However, it is possible that these are only indicative of
trends in the particular AMJ episteme that has developed. In (c) above, the editors cite
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