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

4.1.1.02 The first interesting preliminary observation I have is more a reaction from
me as a person who has at times been entrepreneurial. This is not a research finding per se
but is something that is part of a discussion. I find by reading the abstracts of these 2,161
articles it is very clear that entrepreneurs, as practitioners, are not the intended audience. It
could be argued that my selection of ‘entrepreneurship’ in the search prejudiced the results
to appear thus; however my be lief is that by eve n using ‘ entrepr eneur’ as the ‘topic search’
(rather than entrepreneurship) would have produced a similar result.
4.1.1.03 Using ‘Foucault’s Triangle’ of Power, Right and Truth Effects, I suggest
that these articles in the episteme are very muc h focused towards the Right apex where
entrepreneurship as a discipline is creating itself. This could be where the difference
between savoir / verstehen / understanding and connaissance / erklaren / explanation as
per Graphic 2c comes into play in that these articles are representational of the later. The
academics are attempting to explain entrepreneurship.
4.1.1.04 Very likely little of this is filtering through to the actual entrepreneurs to aid in
their understanding of entrepreneurship. It is almost as if the academics are saying `we are
talking abo ut you - not to you, directly.’ In section 2.2.1.07 I discussed the bi-directional
flow of power around Foucault’s triangle. The clockwise flow where the Truth Effects of
the practitioner replenishes the power of the discipline and the anti-clockwise flow where
the connaissance knowledge is imparted to the nascent practitioners by way of teaching,
workshops and seminars. As discussed in section 2.2.1 I offer my own savoir op inion that
while such impartation of knowledge assists in explaining entrepreneurship it may not
necessarily lead to a greater understanding of being entrepreneurial. I started, from this
point, to get the awareness that this particular episteme from the Web of Science is very
much a peer to peer type exercise and could best be described as a forum for academics
where they explain e ntrepreneurship to each other.
4.1.1.05 The second preliminary observation that emerges from the analysis to date
is that very few of these 2,161 articles from the Web of Science episteme could be
considered to be significant within the aliran. Assuming that citation analysis is
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