Towards A Conceptualization of Entrepreneurship

Abstract

In this paper we rethink the conventional ways of explaining the change process of new company formation. We base our analysis on two well established and dominating categories of entrepreneurship models, stages inspired models and interactive contingency models, and we argue that these do not sufficiently conspire to capture the entrepreneurial start-up process as an everyday phenomenon of multi-dimensional individual, social, and environmental interaction. In an effort to address this hypothesized theoretical gap, we apply ideas origination from Symbolic Interactionism to suggest a complementary conceptual model for comprehending the entrepreneurship process as an interactive construct. From here the idea of entrepreneurship as an ongoing “Social Journey of Opportunity Construction” arises. We argue that this idea has a potential impact on the practice of research, since it encourages scholars to step out of predictable zones of positivist research and enter a riskier research zone in which it is everyday interaction that makes the entrepreneurial process emerge.