Jerome A. Katz

The Psychological Basis of Opportunity Identification: Entrepreneurial Alertness

Opportunity identification represents a unique entrepreneurial behavior yet its processes and dynamics remain mysterious. Entrepreneurial alertness, a distinctive set of perceptual and information-processing skills, has been advanced as the cognitive engine driving the opportunity identification process. To date, empirical support has been equivocal; however, these early studies suffer from fundamental mistakes in theory and method. These mistakes are examined and addressed. A research agenda for the systematic and conceptually sound study of entrepreneurial alertness and opportunity identification is outlined.

The chronology and intellectual trajectory of American entrepreneurship education: 1876–1999

Abstract Since the first entrepreneurship class—held in 1947—the academic discipline of entrepreneurships growth is described using a chronology of three domains—courses, supplemental infrastructures and publications. A 100+-item chronology of entrepreneurship education in the USA from 1876 through 1999 is offered and analyzed. The major findings are (1) in the USA, the field has reached maturity and (2) growth is likely outside business schools and outside the USA. The major problems include a glut of journals, a narrowing focus on top-tier publications, potential American stagnation and a shortage of faculty overall exacerbated by a shortage of PhD programs.

Reclaiming the space of entrepreneurship in society: Geographical, discursive and social dimensions

This paper seeks to explore and to reflect upon the implications of how to conceive entrepreneurship when considered as a societal rather than an economic phenomenon. To conceive and reclaim the space in which entrepreneurship is seen at work in society, we point at the geographical, discursive and social dimensions from where we develop three crucial and connected questions that can reconstruct the future research agendas of entrepreneurship studies and that can guide us towards a geopolitics of everyday entrepreneurship: what spaces/discourses/stakeholders have we privileged in the study of entrepreneurship and what other spaces/discourses/stakeholders could we consider?

Modelling entrepreneurial career progressions: concepts and considerations

Studying entrepreneurship longitudinally is in effect a study of entrepreneurial careers, but there is little vocational theory specific to self-employment, much less entrepreneurship. Using Edgar Scheins Career Anchor Theory as a starting point, the existing anchors of autonomy and entrepreneurship are adapted to facilitate secondary analysis using existing longitudinal datasets. A model of career progression or trajectory, which would permit analysis of the self-employed as well as others, is developed using six variables. The first three come from Scheins “career cone” model of vocational movement–-hierarchy, function, and centrality. Three new variables are derived from a diverse literature on entrepreneurship–-employment duration, job multiplicity, and self-employment emergence. One approach to the operationalization of these six variables Is shown using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and implications for future research and theorizing on entrepreneurial career progression are given.

Doctoral Education in the Field of Entrepreneurship

Current perceptions and practices in doctoral education in the field of entrepreneurship are explored. The paper developed from efforts of a Task Force formed by the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management in response to several important observations: growing demand for faculty in entrepreneurship, growing membership in the division, more participants in doctoral and junior faculty consortia, increasing attention to entrepreneurship education at all academic levels, and the implementation of more doctoral seminars and programs in the field. Using a process outlined in Summer et al. [J. Manage. 16 (1990) 361], the Task Force addressed the following questions: (1) What is the current state of doctoral education in entrepreneurship? (2) How should doctoral education in Entrepreneurship be designed? Recommendations are presented.

A psychosocial cognitive model of employment status choice

A model of employment status (self-employed vs. wage-or-salary employed) choice based on psychological, sociological and cognitive variables resolves the traditional shortcomings of occupational tracking models (general applicability, black box treatment of individual processes, and tracking exceptions or “failures”) by using the cognitive heuristics of availability, representativeness and adjustment from an anchor. The model is presented, its components and processes are described, it is partially operationalized in a small example, and implications for future use are briefly considered.

Fully Mature but Not Fully Legitimate: A Different Perspective on the State of Entrepreneurship Education

This article seeks to demonstrate that the field of entrepreneurship/small business can be characterized as fully mature, a view contrasting one proposed by Kuratko. Evidence of the achievement of full maturity and marginal legitimacy is given based on benchmarks in the development of the field. In addition, this article adds additional support to the concept of partial legitimacy on which Katz and Kuratko agree. Building from these analyses, a theoretical life cycle model for the growth of disciplines in general is offered, using entrepreneurship as the example. The major consequence of entrepreneurships full maturity is identified as the growing centrality of the business‐school based discipline of entrepreneurship in relation to the emerging entrepreneurship efforts across campuses, and the implication of this centrality for the discipline of entrepreneurship is discussed.

Idiosyncratic Milieus of Entrepreneurial Research: The Need for Comprehensive Theories

Considers one approach to the selection and adoption of new research tools and theories for topics in entrepreneurship which have proved difficult to study. Eight topics are identified as challenging to study because the person or event is difficult to find. Included in these topics are consistently entrepreneurial firms, habitual entrepreneurs, and emergence of new industries. The difficulty in finding these events or people is a result of their obscurity. This obscurity can be explained through two factors: event history of the entrepreneurial action and event privacy. An examination of other fields of study which must analyze obscure events is used to identify methods that may be useful in the study of entrepreneurship. Focus is on the field of epidemiology, but it is suggested that the fields of criminology, history, archeology, and paleontology might also be helpful. There are two types of ideas that can be adopted from these other fields: theories and methods. The adoption process can be direct, or it can be metaphorical; this analysis supports the metaphorical adoption of ideas. Five lessons from these other fields are presented: (1) need to have hypotheses waiting to be tested; (2) need to become comfortable using models and homomorphs; (3) need to have common measures; (4) need to build competing theories; and (5) need for comprehensiveness. Using the approach identified, the study of entrepreneurship can move toward theory building. (SRD)

COGNITIVE APPROACHES TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP RESEARCH

Cognition has always been central to the popular way of thinking about entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs imagine a different future. They envision or discover new products or services. They perceive or recognize opportunities. They assess risk, and figure out how to profit from it. They identify possible new combinations of resources. Common to all of these is the individual’s use of their perceptual and reasoning skills, what we call cognition, a term borrowed from the psychologists’ lexicon.

How Satisfied Are the Self-Employed: A Secondary Analysis Approach

Researchers from diverse disciplines have come to the conclusion that the self-employed should be more satisfied than the wage-or-salarled, but the samples used In these studies are largely Inadequate for generalizations. Studies using representative samples have disagreed on this important point. Naughtons (1987a & b) results generally supported the higher job satisfaction of the self-employed, but these findings were at odds with the implications of a similar representative sample study by Eden (1975). The idea of secondary analysis In replication research is introduced and applied to entrepreneurship research. The process and problems encountered In replicating the two studies, and the decisions made to resolve conflicts between the studies are discussed as examples of the problems secondary analysts face. Explanations for the divergent findings and implications for fostering secondary analysis approaches in entrepreneurship are discussed.