The Past Speaks

Workshop  May 24, 2016
Copenhagen Business School
Porcelænshaven 16B, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
“The Studio” (Ground Floor)

Deadline: April 18, 2016 for abstracts

Conveners:
Bill Gartner (Copenhagen Business School)
David Kirsch (Univ. of Maryland)
Christina Lubinski (Copenhagen Business School)
R. Daniel Wadhwani (Univ. of the Pacific)
Friederike Welter (Univ. of Siegen and Institut für
Mittelstandsforschung Bonn)
After previous workshops in Copenhagen (2014), Miami (2015) and Portland
(2016) we are happy to announce the fourth workshop in the series “Historical
Approaches to Entrepreneurship Theory & Research” to be held at Copenhagen
Business School on May 24, 2016.

In recent years, both business historians and entrepreneurship scholars have
grown increasingly interested in the promise of using historical sources, methods
and reasoning in entrepreneurship research. History, it has been argued, can be
valuable in addressing a number of limitations in traditional approaches to
studying entrepreneurship, including in accounting for contexts and institutions,
in understanding the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic
change, in providing multi-level perspectives on the entrepreneurial process and
in situating entrepreneurial behavior and cognition within the flow of time.
Support for historical research on entrepreneurship has grown, with both leading
entrepreneurship researchers and business historians calling for the use of
historical perspectives and with Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal announcing
a call for papers for a special issue devoted to history and entrepreneurship.
The purpose of this workshop is to provide scholars with developmental feedback
on work-in-progress related to historical approaches to entrepreneurship and
strategy, broadly construed. Our aim is to support the development of historical
research on entrepreneurship for publication in leading journals, including for
the special issue of Strategic Entrepreneurship
Journal.

In addition to providing feedback and suggestions for specific topics, the workshop will address the commonly faced challenges of writing for a double-audience of historians and
entrepreneurship/management scholars, engaging entrepreneurship theory and
constructs, and identifying the most valuable historical sources and methods in
studying entrepreneurial phenomena. We welcome work-in-progress at all stages
of development. Interested scholars may submit two types of submissions for
discussion: full research papers (8,000 words) or paper ideas (1,000 to 3,000
words).
The workshop and broader project is an initiative of the Copenhagen Business
School’s Centre for Business History and Department of Management, Politics,
and Philosophy in collaboration with scholars and institutions throughout
Europe and North America. We are also grateful for support from the
Entrepreneurship Platform and the Rethinking History in Business Schools
Initiative at CBS.