Interesting piece by Dave Townsend:
Is Entrepreneurship Research Becoming Too Boring?
Harnessing Productive Debate and Disagreement in a Field That Needs It
Is entrepreneurship research becoming too boring? I don't mean boring in the sense that our articles are filled with dry prose or mind-numbingly detailed technical descriptions of obscure empirical methods. I mean boring in a deeper and more troubling sense: for a field that enthusiastically explores new phenomena (e.g., AI, crowdfunding, hybrid social venturing, blockchain, etc.), as an author, reviewer, and editor, I worry a bit about our ability to generate and sustain productive debates on core topics in the field.
The irony here is quite 'thick.' As a phenomenon, entrepreneurship is anything but boring. It involves actors betting on uncertain futures, challenging the status quo, pursuing bold visions that others dismiss as impossible. The entrepreneurs we study embrace creative destruction, pursuing bold bets about future possibilities. And yet, as much as we still enthusiastically explore novel phenomena in our research, field-level risks are growing that our research is becoming boring. By this, I mean that in response to intensifying publish-or-perish pressures, we all face a temptation to 'extend theory' rather than challenge, genuflect rather than question, and carefully sand down any hint of genuine debate until only safe, publishable claims remain.
How do we escape this trap? We need to recover the capacity for genuine intellectual debate -- the kind of productive disagreement that might actually advance our understanding of the phenomena we study rather than merely extend our citation counts.
How Our Processes Make Us Boring
To diagnose the causes of field-level 'boringness,' let's first talk about journal submission and review processes. As an author, frequent reviewer, and editor, it is not difficult for me to see situations where editorial and reviewer 'gatekeeping' is stifling productive debates. Although we all rightfully claim that 'rigorous' reviews are a critical mechanism for quality control, it's clear that the review process often devolves into 'rent seeking behaviors' and paradigm protection. I recognize this is a strong claim, and I want to be careful here. From an editorial perspective, I think most reviewers are acting in good faith, investing enormous amounts of time and energy into unpaid labor to review papers.
The issue here is not that editors and reviewers reject papers -- rejection is essential to enhancing productive debates. The issue is why papers are getting rejected and for what reasons.
|  | PER L BYLUND | Associate Professor Johnny D. Pope Chair School of Entrepreneurship 424 Business Building | Stillwater, OK 74078 405-744-4301 | per.bylund@okstate.edu business.okstate.edu |
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