Entrepreneurship as Emergence, Entrepreneur as Strange Attractor : A Framework for Entrepreneurship Research and Theory Development

The study of entrepreneurship has been often criticized for lack of sound theoretical foundation and for being a mix of multiple disciplines (Shane 2000). Bull and Willard (1993) state that it will be very difficult to develop entrepreneurship theory. As the field of entrepreneurship attempts to gain credibility as a distinctive academic domain, theory development should become a cornerstone. The purpose of this article is to present a framework for entrepreneurship research and theory development. We use the duality of, and feedback structures and causality between entrepreneurship as a process and a structure, and the entrepreneur the agent, or the attractor who is at the center of the process. We suggest that entrepreneurship theory can be founded on the concept of emergence, 'come into being' and 'arising of coherent structures during the process of self-organization in complex systems', of which the entrepreneur is the strange attractor, unpredictable yet patterned agent at the center of the process who is capable of extracting order and energy (capital, resources) from the environment to fuel the entrepreneurial process and make an entrepreneurial venture 'come into being'. We propose that such a framework can build upon theories and methods from the natural sciences, complex systems and insights from philosophy to result in theory development that can addresses both success and failure of entrepreneurial ventures