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

some one decides in a planned manner, as per the assessment approach (Azjen's [1994]
theory of planned behaviour), to start being entrepreneurial and / or is influenced by an
event, as in Shapero's [1975] ‘entrepreneurial event’. Furthermore the process approaches
start to introduce a dynamic perspective of time, which the schools of thought micro and
macro approaches seem to lack, providing a more static perspective. The lack of references
to these process approaches does tend to suggest that they are not in the mainstream of
academic thought regarding entrepreneurship.
4.2.2 Trying Mintzberg’s approach
4.2.2.00 Mintzbe rg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel [1998] developed a ‘schools of thought’
model to strategic management. In this section I discuss my efforts to apply this same
model to entrepreneurship.
4.2.2.01 Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel’s [1998] mode l comprises 10 ‘schools of
thought’ approaches to strategy: Design, Planning, Positioning, Entrepreneurial, Cognitive,
Learning, Power, Culture, Environment and Configuration. It seemed that it could be
pos sible to apply the same approaches to entrepreneurship. Indeed, when it came to
applying this to illustrating sub-aliran it worked well - for a while.
4.2.2.02 For the strategy linked articles in the aliran, it was not a prob lem. There were
obvious links with articles by: Simon and March to cognitive; Potter to positioning;
Schumpeter to environment; Weick, Prahalad and Hamel to learning; and so forth. Then
the lines started to blur, March could be placed in both cognitive and learning; Chandler in
both design and configuration. This is probably logical as their works (or how their works
are perceived) could be said to cover both approaches to strategy.
4.2.2.03 However, for the non-strategy linked articles, applying Mintzberg, Ahlstrand,
and Lampel’s [1998] model for strategy to entrepreneurship did not seem to work. A lot of
the ethnic / race articles could be assigned to Culture or Environment, and quite a few
articles could readily be placed into what was becoming a very over-crowded
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