The Past Speaks

Edward Elgar has just published a new collection of essays entitled A Research Agenda for Entrepreneurship and Context. The book’s editors are Friederike Welter, the Director of Institut für Mittelstandsforschung (IfM) Bonn and Bill Gartner, Professor of Entrepreneurship and the Art of Innovation, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark and Professor of Entrepreneurship, California Lutheran University.

I’ve had a chance to leaf through the book, which contains some really interesting papers.  (Full table of contents below). The papers that caught my eye and which I have read are by  Dan Wadhwani and deal with what historical research methods and historical knowledge can offer to entrepreneurship research. “Entrepreneurship in historical context: using history to develop theory and understand process” and “Historical methods for contextualizing entrepreneurship research.”  It is encouraging to me to historical methods being incorporated into the literature on entrepreneurship research methods.

Table of Contents

1. The context of contextualizing contexts
Friederike Welter, William B. Gartner and Mike Wright

2. Understanding entrepreneurial cognitions through the lenses of context
Malin Brännback and Alan L. Carsrud

3. ‘After’ context
Chris Steyaert

4. Let them eat bricolage? Toward a contextualized notion of inequality of entrepreneurial opportunity
Ted Baker and E. Erin Powell

5. The temporal dimension of context
Stephen Lippmann and Howard E. Aldrich

6. Entrepreneurship in historical context: using history to develop theory and understand process
R. Daniel Wadhwani

7. A relational conceptualization of context and the real-time emergence of entrepreneurship processes
Denise Fletcher and Paul Selden

8. Theorizing entrepreneurship in context
Erik Stam

9. Methodological approaches towards context-sensitive entrepreneurship research
Simone Chlosta

10. Advancing understanding of entrepreneurial embeddedness: forms of capital, social contexts and time
Sarah Drakopoulou Dodd, Tobias Pret and Eleanor Shaw

11. Historical methods for contextualizing entrepreneurship research
R. Daniel Wadhwani

12. Narrating context
William B. Gartner

13. Advancing our research agenda for entrepreneurship and contexts
Friederike Welter and William B. Gartner