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Accepting the unknowables of entrepreneurship and overcoming philosophical obstacles to scientific progress

Accepting the unknowables of entrepreneurship and overcoming philosophical obstacles to scientific progress
Accepting the unknowables of entrepreneurship and overcoming philosophical obstacles to scientific progress
In his recent commentary, Per Davidsson questions the potential of the actualization perspective of entrepreneurship to move the field forward. The actualization approach stresses that opportunities do not exist as actualized and empirically undiscovered entities, but as the profit propensities that may actualize when properly exploited. This worldview emphatically acknowledges an impenetrable region of “unknowable”: we cannot know where and when opportunities exist or whether they can be actualized by any given agent. Davidsson is, therefore, justified to doubt that the propensity conceptualization can facilitate the production of predictive knowledge involving the causal interaction between empirically tractable entities with events of “action” and “success”. However, Davidsson is unjustifiably concerned that this limitation hinders the scientific progress of entrepreneurship. This concern only reflects philosophical preoccupations of an empiricist nature, which ought to be uprooted for the study of entrepreneurship to progress along genuinely scientific pathways.
71-77
Ramoglou, Stratos
f3fffbf5-0f1f-46e1-93af-a13e18945610
Tsang, Eric W.K.
cf717d04-e675-469b-9f2d-91724e1055e1
Ramoglou, Stratos
f3fffbf5-0f1f-46e1-93af-a13e18945610
Tsang, Eric W.K.
cf717d04-e675-469b-9f2d-91724e1055e1

Ramoglou, Stratos and Tsang, Eric W.K. (2017) Accepting the unknowables of entrepreneurship and overcoming philosophical obstacles to scientific progress. Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 8, 71-77. (doi:10.1016/j.jbvi.2017.07.001).

Record type: Article

Abstract

In his recent commentary, Per Davidsson questions the potential of the actualization perspective of entrepreneurship to move the field forward. The actualization approach stresses that opportunities do not exist as actualized and empirically undiscovered entities, but as the profit propensities that may actualize when properly exploited. This worldview emphatically acknowledges an impenetrable region of “unknowable”: we cannot know where and when opportunities exist or whether they can be actualized by any given agent. Davidsson is, therefore, justified to doubt that the propensity conceptualization can facilitate the production of predictive knowledge involving the causal interaction between empirically tractable entities with events of “action” and “success”. However, Davidsson is unjustifiably concerned that this limitation hinders the scientific progress of entrepreneurship. This concern only reflects philosophical preoccupations of an empiricist nature, which ought to be uprooted for the study of entrepreneurship to progress along genuinely scientific pathways.

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Accepted/In Press date: 8 July 2017
e-pub ahead of print date: 15 July 2017
Published date: November 2017

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 413989
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/413989
PURE UUID: 509d9917-1b1a-4e99-b3be-51588f702a37
ORCID for Stratos Ramoglou: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0001-5134-5525

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Date deposited: 12 Sep 2017 16:31
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 05:43

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Author: Eric W.K. Tsang

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