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with more critical analysis of the literature, and also using data extraction sheets (see
Appendix 1).
Before conducting a study, it was necessary to be aware of what was already discovered in
the discipline’s body of knowledge (Hart, 1998). Initially, the literature review focused on
the two highly ranked management journals that published just literature reviews:
International Journal of Management Reviews (1999-2014) and The Academy of
Management Review (1976-2014). The search terms were used from Ferreira et al. (2015).
Titles and abstracts were analysed and eight articles were examined in detail. Furthermore,
to extract the literature reviews that were not included in the two journals, another search
was performed in Business Source Premier. The analysis was limited to peer-reviewed
journals because of their representation of validated knowledge and the highest impact
(Podsakoff et al. 2005).
Although those analyses of reviews provided understanding about the subject development,
it needed to be updated and modified particularly for this research project. Therefore,
different terms and restriction criteria were formed. The six recognised journals were
selected: Entrepreneurship, Theory and Practice; Journal of Business Venturing;
Entrepreneurship and Regional Development; International Small Business Journal; Journal
of Small Business Management; Small Business Economics. They were chosen because of
their high scores in rankings and relatively high impact factor (ABS, 2015). Given the high
amount of articles (449), the search was restricted to articles published between 2005 and
2015 and terms referring to developing countries from de Kok (2013) were excluded. Having
done that, 45 articles analysing employment were coded. However, the study was not
limited to those materials. By looking at other literature reviews, citations and co-citations,
fourteen key empirical up to date articles from various journals were added to coding.
Definitions
This section aimed to define the most important terms: entrepreneur (3.1.) and firm (3.2.).
To achieve this, the definitions were formed by using the most cited papers identified by
Ferreira et al. (2015). However, other reviews of the field (such as Cornelius et al., 2006;
Luor et al. 2014) were considered and acknowledged where appropriate.
An entrepreneur
Around the end of seventeenth century entrepreneur role in economic development was
highlighted by Cantillon (Cornelius et al. 2006). Cantillon’s view of uncertainty might be
interpreted as the difference in risk between employed and self-employed individuals. Then,
Smith formed economy theory, which did not include entrepreneur role, and was followed
by major economists until the 19 th century. The US increase in industrial power could have
influenced many economists such as Knight (1921) to come back to Cantillon’s ideas. This
was followed by another pioneering paper by Shane and Venkataraman (2000), who
adopted a new definition used by Venkataraman (1997:120-121), where it was highlighted
that it may be misleading to define the entrepreneur, rather they tried to identify the
central issues of the field. Those were changing over time (Luor et al., 2014). The key
themes in articles from this SLR highlighted the interdisciplinary nature of entrepreneurship
(see Figure 2). Given this complex and dynamic nature of the term, Cantillon and Knight’s
definitions were probably the most accurate for today’s entrepreneurs.
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