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

2.1.4.05 Conformity to form is a integral part the exclus ions Foucault discussed in 1976.
An effort I made to initially write this dissertation in the form of a Barthesian
deconstructive style was less than well received by my supe rvisors, until I started to
conform with a more acceptable form and the increased use of citations. Barthes, [1983] as
a form, simply did not have sufficient gravitas for acceptability of that particular style.
2.1.4.06 Conformity to good form, as in showing good manners, is a scholastic
requirement to acknowledge sources in an appropriate manner, e.g. APA or Harvard
citation standard. The citation of references is a relatively new aspect of disciplines. A look
at Coase’s 1937 article, ‘The nature of the firm’ shows that references were made but lack
citations, except through footnotes. Similar style scan be seen with the much older texts of
Adam Smith, Jean Baptiste Say and, to a degree, Marshall. Even Schumpeter was
somewhat limited in his referencing style, such that, had proper referencing been done,
could have led to greater gravitas being accorded to Sombart [Loader, 2001]. It would be a
rare case that such articles, with limited citations, no matter the gravitas of the author, were
accepted for publication, within the discipline, nowadays where APA and other citations
standards hold sway. The exception to this lies with the intellectual, whose role is
discussed in 2.2.2.
2.1.4.07 Citations, as a requirement to conform to the exclusivity of the discipline, are a
curious phenomenon that in add ition to actually acknowledging the source can also be
considered to have other functions. Coase described his 1937 article on ‘The nature of the
firm’ as “much cited and little used” [cited in Williamson, 2002, p182] . Apparently the act
of citing Coase’s article provided some ‘gravitas by assoc iation’ to the subs equent articles
that referenced Coase. Le Fevre [2007] in his work on citations of the Yerks Dodson Law
actually found that what the law was supposed to have referred to by the citing articles
actually did not refer to that at all in the original text. Somehow citing the original Yerks
Dodson Law from the referenced article, even in a less than accurate context, provided
gravitas to the referencing article.
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