Some of you will read Family Business Review but many won't, so I thought I'd draw your attention to two findings about Entrepreneurship in an article of mine that just came out in FBR (21(4): 279-293). This study uses a huge dataset of scholarly journal articles in 14 fields (strategy, entrepreneurship and 12 others within and without the business school) to compare their structure of topical attention; the extent to which attention to one topic is associated with attention to other topics (8 skewed to the "commercial" end, such as profit, and 8 skewed to the familial end, such as affinity (ties through marriage)). Articles are regarded as belonging to a field of study based on the journal that published them. In other words, what I say about Entrepreneurship here refers to what appears in Entrepreneurship journals like ET&P and JBV.
Two findings about Entrepreneurship were rather striking.
One: Entrepreneurship is an outlier field, the most distinct of all 14, largely because it is the most skewed to the commercial as opposed to the familial.
Two, it is the only field with a very large discrepancy between attention in the abstract (the flagged topics) and attention in the full text. The topic is private equity (VC, angel money etc.), which ranks second in centrality in the abstracts but only 10th in the full text. One could interpret this two ways. Perhaps it is a framing device to mention it, so as to position the study as properly belonging in the field of Entrepreneurship. Or it could be that the current state of knowledge on this topic lags far its perceived importance. This second (rather incidental) finding sheds some light on the first one. It may be that Entrepreneurship has a very distinctive profile relative to other fields because it has taken on topics that have not been adequately studied elsewhere. Not surprisingly the most similar field to Entrepreneurship is Strategy. One would expect this given their histories. One would not, however, expect how discrepant Entrepreneurship is from Family Business (which, by the way, has only one scholarly journal in the sample, so the discrepancy is between Entrepreneurship journals and FBR).
Alex Stewart, Ph.D.
Coleman Foundation Chair in Entrepreneurship
Marquette University
Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881
Phone 414 288-7188
Fax 414 288-1965
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