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

2.2.1.04 Foucault’s definitions of savoir knowledges and connaissance knowledges is
extended by Schmidt [2006], who borrowed from Dilthey the German terms Verstehen and
Erklaren (understanding and explanation). On one side of the triangle, shown in Graphic
2c, I have practitioners, in this case the entrepreneurs who have an understanding (as in
their ‘savvy’ or savoir) of entrepreneurship in their ability to practise it, but who may not
be able to explain it in academic terms. On another side of the triangle, I have the
discipline of entrepreneurship where the academics attempt, within the constraints of
epistemology, to explain entrepreneurship, admittedly without necessarily understanding
the elephant they are describing. Discursively, the practitioners do not need to explain to
the satisfaction of anyone, a concept suffices. However in the discipline the academics
need to offer an explanation, via the contextualisation of epistemic justification, in a
manner acceptable to others in the discipline.
2.2.1.05 The power of right of this discipline of entrepreneurship may have come into
effect when, in 1987, the Academy of Management accorded division status to
entrepreneurship [Shane, 1997], in a similar manner to the establishment of the strategic
management discipline.
It was only after the Academy of Management's establishment of a strategy
division in the early 1970s and t he birth of the Strategic Management Soc iety in the
early 1980s that the strategy field was able to proclaim its independence as a
legitimate academic discipline [Azar and Brock, 2007, p2].
As per Dery and Toulouse [1996], the discipline developed an ‘epistemology specific to
the field of entrepreneurship’. However the discourse on entrepreneurship predated this
event by a few centuries and the practice of entrepreneurship has probably considerably
predated the discourse, even though it may have go ne under other names.
2.2.1.06 Essentially, in my dissertation, I am looking at the power of right side of the
triangle. This is the discipline of entrepreneurship. However the role of the practitioner
should not be under-estimated. As mentioned by Foucault [1980] it is the truth effects
corner of the triangle that replenishes the power from which the right derives its power
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