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

1.1.1.03 The discipline’s influence has extended into other academic fields: “From the
1980s onwards, the field of entrepreneurship exploded and was assimilated into almost
every soft science discipline” [Filion, 1997].
1.1.1.04 However, despite such growth, the academic discipline of entrepreneurship has
come under some criticism, including from those within the discipline. In 1988, Sexton
raised the question of whether “the field is growing or just getting bigger?” [cited in
Steyaert, 2005, p2]. In the same year, Low and MacMillan [1988], produced a less than
complimentary review. They advised scholars in entrepreneurship that "the field will be
better served in the future if the issue of theoretical perspective is addressed directly and
unstated assumptions avoided" [p146]. Low [2001] later described the discipline as being
in its adolescence.
1.1.1.05 Drawing on the analogy of a group of blind men describing an elephant by the
different bod y parts that they could touch, Gartner [2001 ] comment ing on research he had
conducted in 1990 “found that entrepreneurship scholars held very different beliefs about
the nature of entrepreneurship, and that they had very different views of what
entrepreneurship, as a phenomenon, consisted of” [p2]. In a similar vein to Low and
McMillan, Gartner [1990] also advised "that only by making explicit what we believe can
we begin to understand how all of these different parts make up a whole" [p28]. Reviewing
the situation a decade or more later Gartner [2001] commented “I am not sure that the
entrepreneurship field has reached some sense of theoretical clarity during the past decade”
[p2]. Even the measure of what determines entrepreneurial ‘success’ is unclear as Kearins,
Luke, and Corner [2004] point out in their article ‘What constitutes successful
entrepreneurship? An analysis of recent Australasian awards experiences’, saying that
“there has been little empirical work substantiating these elements or exploring the extent
to which they appear to be considered when judgments are made about entrepreneurial
success” [p1]
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